11.03.06
All Good Cretins Go to Heaven
So yeah. CBGB is gone. Worse, looks like it will be “reconstructed” as some sort of exhibit in Las Vegas. I shit you not. Somehow fitting, it also just really fuckin’ sums it all up. I wonder if they’ll offer speed balls and scabrous blowjobs in the bathroom. Just charge it to room service.
Following is the spontaneous ellegy I wrote and emailed to my friend-spam list the day after Joey Ramone died in April, 2001.
All good cretins go to heaven
Date: Mon, 16 Apr 2001 15:48:05 -0700 (PDT)
From: Spencer Sundell
To: Friends of Spence
Subject: All good cretins go to heaven
The Ramones changed my life. It sounds trite and cliched, but if you laugh you just don’t understand. They taught me that even *I* could rock, that even a putz like me could play guitar, hell that I could even write songs. They taught me that all I needed was the ability to finger 3, maybe 4, chords and the courage to yell some dumb lyrics with gusto. They taught me how a good rock song should be structured, a lesson I followed for many years to come. (…Third verse, different from the first…)
They taught me that it was all about attitude — all of it: music, life, everything. Keep it simple, keep it true to your vision. Keep it loud just let ‘em all know you’re there. Anyone who plays a wanking solo is an egomaniac who should be burned at the stake immediately. And definitely no fucking keyboards!
The Ramones transformed my concept of myself and helped to save me from my grim life of quiet teenaged loneliness and depression. They taught me that being a freak with a dark sense of humor and deep cynicism about, well, everything was not a hideous scar to be hidden but a gloriously gruesome flag to be flown in the face of The Normals who sucked at the insipid tit of life in the early ’80s.
They taught me that obscurity and weirdness was a blessing, a secret club that all the pretty, popular, cruel fuckers and their tight, prissy girlfriends that cursed my existence were too scared to be a part of.
They told me I wasn’t alone. There were other pinheads out there who accepted me as one of them.
To an isolated, weird, dweeby teenaged boy trapped in early-’80s Indianapolis, these were revelations of unimaginable proportions. Now that “alternative rock” is a massive corporate industry that tags and devours its devotees, now that an entire generation has been weaned on predigested, shrink-wrapped angst strained from the primordial witches’ brew of punk, now that there is the Internet and MP3s, it’s hard to imagine or even convey the enormity of it. It’s hard to describe the sheer quivering sense of liberation that coursed through one’s veins when you listened to those early Ramones albums — the sense that you really were one of the first, that you were part of something truly and completely new, something that sent The Normals squealing in confused disgust.
I wasn’t the only one, of course. In fact by 1982, when I discovered the mighty alchemical secret of The Ramones, I was pretty late to the game. Their first album had been released in 1976, when I was ten. Their first tour of the UK shortly after had completely changed the music scene there, and led directly to the formation of The Sex Pistols, The Clash, Sham 69, X-Ray Specs, and dozens of other bands made up of lonely fucked-up geeks who had been transformed just like I was later. This in turn produced a feedback loop as loud and resonant as Johnny Ramone’s Marshall amp. The music returned to America, launched a thousand howls, and the world was never the same again. Iggy and the Stooges may have paved the way in 1969, and the New York Dolls may have built the first rest stop, but it was The Ramones who built the interstate in the late ’70s. Because of them, an entire generation could rocket down the road to ruin, laughing spitefully the entire way.
But I was in Indiana, a dark kingdom so backwards and isolated it had taken 5 years for the punk rock meme to leak in and infect us. Even Cleveland got it before we did. In those Cold War years, it was like being behind an impenetrable corn curtain, and punk was like a distorted midnight broadcast over illicit shortwave. Those few of us who knew the frequency would cluster in our bunkers to listen and trade clandestine tapes of these exciting new sounds, to whisper the exotic names of ever-elusive bands of freedom fighters, to groan with jealousy when one of us managed to somehow procure a precious new album. With reverence normally reserved for rare sacred texts, we memorized every word, note and squeal of feedback that emanated from vinyl as black (and as doomed) as our times.
Ronald Reagan had just become president, and the world seemed to have transformed overnight. As if someone had flipped an evil switch in the cosmos, everything had suddenly become tight, restrictive, oppressive. The last lingering ghosts of rebellious hippydom were finally sucked down a black hole of rampant conservatism. Haircuts became strange, blocky immitations of ’50s pompadours. Cars lost their graceful lines and became ugly boxes with squared corners. Lunatic christian fascists poured shrill intolerance from every TV, proclaiming a new era of rigid rules and strict punishment for even the slightest infraction of a mysterious but inviolable “sacred law”. Meanwhile, brutal secret armies were sent to impoverished nations to torture and destroy all in their path in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” although this fact was hidden to all except those few of us who had some miraculous access to forbidden newspapers like The Guardian (the NY Marxist one, not the London one). Anyone who dared to speak of such things in Indiana literally risked a beating at the hands of inbred “patriotic” goons.
There were book burnings, though few remember that now. Something called “AIDS” was creeping up as an allegedly divine vengeance on the unholy. As thousands of workers were being laid off, evicted, and joining the longest bread lines since the Great Depression, we were indoctrinated to believe that it was an era of new prosperity, a lie even today enshrined as eternal truth and grounds for beatification. Meanwhile, our president told us with straight face that trees were the cause of most pollution. It was an era of unspeakable lies and hatred.
In those days, full-scale nuclear war literally felt like it could happen any minute. The global sabres were in full rattle, and our president and his bund uttered absurdities about continuing mail delivery after the apocalypse. Reagan even openly said he fully believed that apocalypse would come in our lifetime, and thought saying “we begin bombing in five minutes” was a big joke. And yet the entire country was in such denial of the horror that when ABC produced a TV movie about The Day After, it was toned down at the last moment on the surreal grounds that it had somehow overplayed what complete nuclear devastation would really be like. As a compromise to the orchestrated campaign against the film, the network broadcast a roundtable discussion led by reactionaries and government flunkies who tried to “debunk” the entire thing. Lies and hatred.
The early ’80s, the spring of my youth, were times when a sense of complete and utter doom permeated all of us who cowered in the shadows. All we could do was await our turn with the alien pods that lurked everywhere around us. There was, quite literally, no hope.
Not even music provided an escape, though it was nevertheless an ironically accurate mirror of the time. My first years in high school were the height of AOR and metal’s tyranny over the airwaves in Indiana. Black funk and R&B had long since been castrated and pureed into disco, the pinnacle of which were consummate honkies like the BeeGees and Abba.
The only “alternative” to be found was pasteurized “rock” in the form of bland, predictable, misogynist garbage by groups whose names I’ve long since forgotten. For the “adventurous”, bands like Rush packed the local stadium, which echoed with limp 15 minute guitar solos that lulled a stupefied audience who debated about whether the drummer had 18 or 20 different tom-toms in his kit. The “really cool” bands had a gong. And then there was Billy Joel.
There was no soul in music. It had become as heartless and back-stabbing as the record executives who ran the show, as hollow as an empty pod tucked beneath its victim’s bed.
As I dwelled in this unspeakable well of loneliness, The Ramones came to me like ill-mannered angels of mercy. Their loud, pounding music was unlike anything I’d ever heard. Better still, not even the few metal heads I actually knew could stand it. Joey Ramone’s consciously stupid, completely irreverent, and utterly hilarious lyrics were a tonic. Their world was populated with misunderstood pinheads, cretins, and glue-sniffers cutting class and sneaking smokes in the bathroom. Yep, it really was all hopeless and we all really are freaks and mutants. But so what? If that’s the case, then fuck it — howl at the stupidity, mock the pretty by loving your ugliness, distill the nonsense to its simplest form then blast it so loud it will deafen and block it all out. Rock hard enough, and it will crush that which would crush you. It’s all a stupid game, so fuck the rules, fuck school, fuck ‘em all. But if you laugh at it, then it loses all its power. It was Dada reborn — art disguised as anti-art while outside everyone burned worthless Deutschmarks for warmth.
Even though it was smart (sort of, in a subliminal kind of way), it was the ultimate anti-elitism. It was the music of the poor and downtrodden, something I could really appreciate as a son raised in the ’70s by a single lesbian mother. It was *so* not about flashy costumes, giant drum kits and gongs, and massive sound systems. It wasn’t just unpretentious, it was *anti* pretentious. This was music born of the back alley, and played on stolen equipment. It was the bare essentials. And lordy, how it rocked!
Thanks to The Ramones, I discovered the only record store in town that dared to sell such contraband — an oasis in the Hoosier wasteland called Second Time Around. Before long, I was cutting class and spending hours flipping through every album and single in the joint — day after day, week after week. Tony, the owner, would play strange new things over the stereo and patiently teach me about it all — when I had the courage to ask. And Tony, god bless him, never did turn me in to the truant officer. He seemed to understand that this shy young geek was seeking a new home. The Dead Kennedys (”Hey they said ‘fuck’!!”), Devo, Gang of 4, Butthole Surfers, Wire, The Cramps, the truly fearsome sound of The Birthday Party, The Contortions, X, The Clash, and dozens of others became a sonic gateway to freedom and new vistas. In those halcyon days, punk was a big tent that encompassed all kinds of different sounds. It was even sort of okay to like New Wave. It was only later that the “punker-than-thou” debates would fragment the music. But I suppose that should have been expected — no one wanted to be limited by pre-existing labels, even if they were only a year or two old. Ironically, the battle over self-definition would ultimately become a stylistic straight jacket. But in those days, for a brief shining moment, anything was possible and everything was permitted. And the more fucked up, the better.
At Second Time Around, I also learned the astounding fact that there were bands right there in shit-ass Indianapolis that played punk and this new stuff people were calling “hardcore”. They even had “shows” (never “concerts”! too pretentious!) in places other than bars, so stupid high school kids like me could go. Eventually, with great trepidation, I summoned the courage to go my first show, dragging my friend Joe along with me for support. Since all we knew about punk was filtered through the occasional story in a tabloid or, more rarely, some sensationalistic piece of tripe on a TV news broadcast, we showed up in ridiculously gaudy polyester shirts and wearing even sillier makeup. I had plastered a giant white cross over my face. As the California band Legal Weapon played, Joe invented a dance he called The Kick in which you, well, kicked while you pumped your arms up and down. I’m sure the other 40 or 50 people there laughed their asses off at these bizarre geeks from nowhere — but we didn’t care. That was the whole point, wasn’t it: fuck you, this is me. You think I’m funny? Take a look at yourself, asshole. Meanwhile, I’m gonna have me some fun.
Soon after, thanks again to Tony and his record store, I discovered a raggedy, poorly printed magazine called “Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll” — and my head nearly exploded. Crammed into those pages of cheap newsprint were first-person missives and Q&A interviews from thriving punk “scenes” (they were called scenes, I learned) not just from all over the country but all over the world. My god, there were hundreds even *thousands* of people just like me. I bought every issue and read every single word. I still have a big stack of those precious early issues of “MRR”, as we cogniscenti called it — I still can’t bring myself to throw them out nearly 20 years later.
In no time at all, I was wearing t-shirts with the sleeves ripped off, jeans with tattered holes in the knees. I could only dream of a leather jacket. Sure, I was aping my punk rock heroes — but to me I was also mirroring the shabby state of the world around me. Reaganite America expected everyone to be buttoned-down and tidy, but beneath the extruded sheen were the wretched like me. I intended to be the fly in the ointment, the grim (albeit puckish) reminder of the denied grim reality. Later, I took to wearing a dog collar to school. The other kids thought I was a lunatic and were scared of me (which was refreshing in its own right). Some of the more sophisticated kids thought I was into S&M. But to me the dog collar was simply my badge that said, “We’re all dogs here. The difference between you and me is I *know* it, and have the strength to mock it.”
I had always been the geek, the loner that was mocked and beaten up by my “peers”. I was the kind of quietly abused kid that suffered under the jocks and bullies who think cruelty and abuse is right and proper, and nothing but “harmless” fun. To my eyes, today’s horrific school shootings are the ultimate legacy of the intolerance and greed that took root in society during the early ’80s.
But during the tilling of those fields, punk gave me a way to take that ostracization, turn it around, and rub it in the face of the Normals. It allowed me to transform my injury into a weapon of redemption — without fatalities or suicide. It gave me both a voice and the courage of my own convictions.
I even began to publish my own underground newspaper-slash-fanzine. By doing so, I was intuitively joining what would only later be recognized as a complete revolution in the published word. Countless other zines were appearing everywhere, like weeds in an abandoned toxic dump. Like mine, they were usually laboriously typed by hand (this was long before the Apple computer) and photocopied with hoarded allowance money. They were consummately personal expressions, poorly but earnestly written, and full of the resolute conviction of true pioneers. These zines provided not only a means of being heard, but of connecting with others even if only through tattered pages passed hand to hand. It was far more than vanity — it was a mission to spread the word, to prove that there were some not going quietly into that dark night. These zines taught my entire generation that what we had to say had value, and it didn’t take glossy paper and expensive offset printing to be a publisher. It was the exact same spirit that made the World Wide Web a beautifully chaotic wonderland of freedom a decade later. It should come as no surprise then that so many young punk rockers just like me went on to work in that industry — for our better or worse…
In time, I became friends with other alienated young punks. We were easy to spot in Indianapolis, and the funny hair cuts and band names written in marker on our clothes were a secret code that said “You may not know me, but I’m your friend.” There was no fear in introducing yourself to another punk — on the contrary, in those days it was like a homecoming.
For the first time in my life, I not only had more than two friends at a time but I was part of an entire community that understood and accepted each other for what we were. Imagine: an entire community! These were much more than familiar faces — they were soul brothers and sisters in every possible sense. Some of them became my tribe. We were family to each other at a time in our lives when we felt “family” was merely a cruel illusion that left us hopeless and abandoned. We shared our deepest secrets, helped each other through the darkest days and, sometimes, the attempted suicides. We also celebrated the smallest triumph — sometimes just the fact that we’d lived to see another Tuesday. I learned to laugh; I learned that happiness and acceptance was possible even in the worst of times. I learned that anger could be transformed.
We were co-conspirators in a sacred war against smothering normality. And we were winning. Punk was far more to us than some musical fad. It was a total revolution that redefined *everything*.
For my sixteenth birthday, I mercilessly browbeat my father until he finally relented and bought the shitty plywood guitar I’d seen hanging on the wall of a mall music store. For months I had made regular visits to that store, pretending to browse the shitty records they sold while stealing furtive, nearly erotic glances at the guitar. It was more than an instrument — it was a magic talisman that would cleanse my wretched soul. It cost a whopping $35, the strings laid almost a half inch above the fret board, and it sounded like shit. And I loved it more than life itself. It would be another 5 years until I actually owned my own amp (a gift no less), but by borrowing, begging and sometimes resorting to using the 1/4-inch mic jack that used to be built into those all-in-one turntables I managed to get loud. I couldn’t afford a distortion box, so the only solution was to turn the crappy borrowed 35-watt amp all the way up to 10 and dream of someday owning a Marshall stack just like my hero, Johnny Ramone.
The first songs I taught myself were Ramones songs — “Suzy is a Headbanger” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” (The third song I learned was “Mongoloid” by Devo.) Before long, I formed my first real band and began to write my own punk songs — songs that often sounded suspiciously like The Ramones’, even if my lyrics tended to be more political in tone. I managed to convince Tom Knapp to join because he actually had a real drum kit. My buddy Joe was also along for the ride on bass. He couldn’t afford to buy a real bass, but had somehow managed to obtain a bass neck. Always the tinkerer (he later joined military intelligence), Joe fashioned a body for it out of a couple 2×4s and built the strange thing to resemble the Steinberger guitar that one of the members of Devo could be seen holding in album photos. It was the pure essence of DIY. Like legions of others across the country and around the world that summer, we set up our shabby gear in my dad’s garage and proceeded to torment the neighbors with a glorious din.
I was born again in that humid August garage. There would be other (much better) bands, I would enjoy a brief season as a punk “star” in Indianapolis, and eventually I would discover other musics that provided a similar sense of strange liberation — like avant-garde jazz and industrial noise. But nothing would ever came close to the shattering revelation of punk rock that summer.
For me, those first awful rehearsals of the Barking Toasters were the starting point of an incredible life-long adventure of creative freedom and expression. They were the first lessons in a graduate degree in living life on my own terms. Without an iota of exaggeration, my life was never the same ever again.
Deep down we knew we sucked, but that wasn’t the point. The point was we could do it and, more importantly, we *were* doing it. And we were doing it ourselves in our own way, no matter what anybody else thought. A decade before Nirvana, there was no *hope* of a record deal, although we dreamt that someday we could pay to press our own 7-inch EP like those that found their way to us from Ohio, Illinois, and even far-distant California. And that just made it better — mainstream society had abandoned us, so we would just do it *all* ourselves. Far from being a failure, this was a liberation that meant we could realize our dreams on our own terms. “Success” had nothing to do with how popular you were, or how many records your band might sell — true success meant being true to yourself no matter what and, most important, find a way — *any* way — to do it yourself. In a popular phrase uttered in countless band interviews of the day, if you reach just one person that was all that truly mattered.
That, more than anything, is what punk rock taught me.
That is what The Ramones taught me.
And so it seems strangely fitting that Joey Ramone — the bug-eyed geek with funny lips who fronted a band that epitomized punk cool and saved rock from itself — should die on Easter, the holiday of the resurrection and ascention, in 2001, the year of Kubrick and Asimov’s mysterious Monolith — the dark device from beyond that triggers humanity’s next step in the evolutionary ladder.
Good-bye, Joey. Thank you. Thank you from the depths of my heart for saving me. Think of us when you’re sneaking a joint in Heaven’s bathroom. And save the roach for me.
4,5,6,7 — all good cretins go to heaven
R.I.P. Joey Ramone
May 19, 1951 - April 15, 2001
