Confessions of a Fanboy

I used to watch The Arsenio Hall Show when I was a teenager living out in Seattle. There were a few years he was funny. What happened to that guy? He seemed to lose the funny over night. Do you think he was on steroids or something? Anyway, they used to have this skit where the bass player in his band – a man called John B. Williams – would do his poetry moment. I don’t remember many of them, but I do remember the one entitled “I Got Nothing But Crap For My Birthday, Don’t Bother To Get Me Nothing Next Year.”

My birthday was just over a week ago and unlike Mr. Williams, I got some good shit. In a rare moment, my favorite present came from my brother (with apologies to TheWifeToWhomI’mMarried, Sir Mary, and Sir Saleski). Why is that rare? At the risk of boring you and annoying him with a story he will never live down as long as he lives, gift giving has never been his strong suit. Let’s just say the greed gene plagues the men in my family and leave it at that. Anyway, this year my favorite present came from my brother and I’ve pledged to write about it this week; a pledge that if I don’t honor I will never hear the end of it and he will know. It’s weird. In some ways, he’s the least likely person to read my site. It’s not that he doesn’t like music, it’s just that… well, this is getting entirely too insular and I’m not going to exorcise my family’s demons here when we could be talking about a very cool gift.

The gift? The Ramones Anthology. Until now, I had no Ramones on my iPod or in my CD collection. It was an odd omission and one I can’t explain. I never boycotted The Ramones, they just never conveniently crossed my path. I never went out of my way to listen to them nor to avoid them. When you get down to it, everything is related to everything else depending on how far you want to take it. I’m sure if you looked at my iPod, you could six degrees to The Ramones and wonder how it took me so long to get there. I prefer direct flights and just never saw one between where I was and where The Ramones were. It’s not so strange that I knew so little of The Ramones, but I don’t know what took my brother so long. He had a huge punk phase – among the many phases – during his teenage years, but never checked them out, either. We talked about it awhile back and I thought the conversation had been forgotten. I was wrong.

The Ramones Anthology slaps 58 tracks on 2 CDs and I like more of them than I don’t. I’ve always known contemporary pop-punk was awful. Now I know why. Joey Ramone and company found that special place where punk attitudes and pop songs live. I thought smart and stupid were as far as the east is from the west. I might have been wrong. Bowie, The Beatles, and Radiohead took rock music to unbelievable places and made brilliant, sophisticated records and God bless them for doing it because I love those albums. The Ramones made brilliant records by sounding defiantly unsophisticated and reminding us rock and roll is about more than marketing and technology.

Filed under: Tags: Musical Musings and Random Ramblings