Got room for a Marty Ramone in the band?
Billboard reported yesterday that Oscar-winning director Martin Scorsese is attached to a Ramones biopic. It’s still in the early stages, but we have high hopes for a flick about the iconic New York City punk band that defined a generation of CBGB-going, safety-pin wearing music fans.
We have faith the man behind “The Departed” and “Raging Bull” will do justice to the story, but just in case the auteur’s memory has been blitzkrieged, here are five things we want to see in the Ramones movie.
The Ramones play their first gig at CBGB (1974)
Leaving this out of the movie would be like leaving out the part when Dorothy opens the doors to a full-color world in “The Wizard of Oz.” It’s often considered the moment when punk kicked open the doors of the music world and started shredding three-chord riffs all over an unsuspecting public.
Remember that just five years (to the day) earlier, half a million people gyrated in the mud to the groovy sounds of bands like the Grateful Dead at Woodstock. Suddenly, here come leather jacket-clad kids from Queens, screaming a new sound into a world that was sick of the ’60s.
We also need this in the movie since no one apparently saw, liked or cared about that CBGB movie that came out last year.
The heroin use
Scorsese doesn’t shy away from showing drug use, addiction and death in any of his movies — and a film about the Ramones would be remiss without chronicling bassist Dee Dee Ramone’s struggles with heroin and other substances for 14 years before leaving the band (which led to Rolling Stone calling him “the Ramones’ truest punk”) in 1989.
Friends thought he was clean, but he died in 2002 of a heroin overdose, just three months after the band was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. It’s a dark side of the story but illuminates what punk was in the ’70s: dirty, raw, dangerous and costly — not exactly what passes for “punk” today.
Final show in Los Angeles (1996)
For a band so associated with ’70s punk, lots of people might not remember that the long tail of their band dragged into the mid-’90s — and it ended on a bit of a sad note, making them seem like dudes desperate to hang onto their former glory: They said the 1995 album “¡Adios Amigos!” would be their last, unless it sold well. The band never was a big commercial hit, and this one was no exception.
So the band gathered for one final show in LA. Although they still rocked, they showed signs of age. At the very least, it’ll make for good wistful cinema.
The weird conservatism
When you think punk, you think rowdiness, you think anarchy, you think … Republicanism?
We hope Scorsese finds a way to tackle the politics of founding guitarist Johnny Ramone, who shocked fans in 2002 when he came out as a Republican at the Hall of Fame induction ceremony, saying, “God bless President Bush, and God bless America.”
In interviews later, he praised Ronald Reagan and claimed punk was a right-wing movement.
The ‘Punk’ exhibit at The Met
This one is a simple CGI scene: Cut to 2013. It’s the opening of the much-lauded “Punk: Chaos to Couture” exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Celebrities such as Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and Anna Wintour enter wearing their version of “punk” clothing.
They walk through the exhibit that looks ripped from a dystopian future, showing a trapped-in-time replica of the CBGB bathroom and faceless mannequins donning safety-pin fashions and faux-edgy mohawk wigs, while a sanitized version of punk videos plays overhead.
Cut to the corner, where we see the ghosts of Joey and Dee Dee Ramone apparate, like Anakin and Yoda at the end of “Return of the Jedi.” Except instead of looking on approvingly, they’re crying, deeply and thoroughly, into their leather jackets, sobbing that this is what punk had become. Fin.