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Weird Tales Of The Ramones Chronicles The Band's Career

© Marianne Moro

The Ramones played their first major gig opening for Johnny Winter in Westbury, Connecticut, in June 1975. The band had been vociferously booed and showered with garbage by a hostile crowd. If you had taken them aside and told them that thirty years later, the band would be a pop culture institution, I wonder how they would react. DeeDee and Joey would be thrilled, though I imagine Johnny would have expected such an outcome.

Nine years after their last gig and despite the passing of three of the four original band members, the Ramones are more popular than ever. Last year the bittersweet documentary End Of The Century was released, as well as various compilations, a tribute concert in Los Angeles featuring X, the Dickies, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Eddie Vedder and other punk peers and musicians influenced by the band. The past two months have brought more homage to the boys from Forest Hills, Queens -- a box set and the opening of a Ramones Museum.

Weird Tales of the Ramones a box set from Rhino Home Entertainment complies 85 Ramones tunes, all their videos and special features such as interviews with Debbie Harry in an attractive set. At $65, it's pricey, but well worth it if you're a diehard Ramones fan or just enjoy dumb, fast, perfectly executed rock 'n' roll occasionally. The colorful comic book packaging features artwork by Carol Lay (Story Minute) Bill Griffith (Zippy The Pinhead), and 23 other artists.

The Ramones certainly were the stuff of cartoon caricature with their scruffy jeans, leather jackets and bowl haircuts. Their real life story rivaled several seasons of As The World Turns. Even the most jaded soap opera scribe would have a hard time coming up with the love triangle that shattered the off-stage relationship between Joey and Johnny. Shy, liberal Joey falls in love with pretty rock 'n' roll girl Linda; sensible Republican Johnny marries her and takes her to L.A. This resulted in the infamous song "The KKK Took My Baby Away." Johnny and Joey shared the concert stage til the band broke up in 1996, but the acrimony they had held for each other remained til the end. Joey died of lymphoma in 2001, Johnny died of cancer last year. Bass player DeeDee, the band's resident free spirit/heroin addict, OD'ed in 2002. Only original drummer Marky Ramone lives to tell the tale.

Once shunned by radio during their heyday, most of the Ramones catalog is now engrained into the American psyche as much as the Beatles or Bob Dylan. Cans of Pepsi in a convenience store fridge danced to Blitzkrieg Bop in a recent Pepsi commercial. Little kids wear Ramones T-shirts lovingly purchased for them by their parents. Even paleontologists named four species of trilobites after band members.

Weird Tales Of The Ramones

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