Hard Questions for Pinheads
by Charles CarreonHard Questions for Pinheads
Some Ramones fans ask themselves the hard questions. Why do rodents explode when they hear The Ramones played at high volume? Is it true there's no stopping a Cretin from hopping? Are we friends with the President, friends with the Pope? Are we making a fortune selling daddy's dope? Are we A Happy Family?
Intimations of Punk
I never asked myself these questions until my late twenties, because in those days, I had never heard The Ramones. In 1983, I was twenty-seven, and the airwaves were filled with noxious sounds of bands such as Earth, Wind & Fire and The Village People. Lynyrd Skynyrd was making smart remarks about Southern Man not wantin' Neil Young around, and I had been listening to the same old hippie tunes so long that I felt like I was married to the Grateful Dead. Years had passed and my boredom and unease had grown deeper. Perhaps, without knowing it, I simply longed to live on A Chinese Rock.
Something in my heart was questing for a harder, more raucous sound that would jar me out of my lost condition, but there was little I, personally, could do. I was living in a tiny town in Oregon, finishing up an English degree after years of hiding out in the woods. I had no time to explore new music. For young people, the college radio station was a pathetic desert dominated by jazz, folk and classical zombies that allowed one four-hour alternative rock show every week.
Through that four-hour window, I heard a new world, a way out of the tedious rhythm of tired contemporary music. One night, the college boys played the whole Talking Heads album, “Stop Making Sense.” I heard David Byrne singing Psycho Killer, stuttering over the f-word and warning us to RUN RUN AWAY, I knew that my prayers for release from boredom had ended. I fortunately taped the whole album, and blissfully began to live in knew dissonant realms previously unknown to my musical senses.
Law & Disorder
Soon thereafter, I moved from Oregon to LA to go to UCLA law school. I rode a shitty beatup Vespa scooter to class that was so ugly the Westwood posers would jeer at me as I went by, like I was making their plastic paradise look crappy. On the music front, the world started opening up. I was on top of the world. I discovered KXLU radio from Loyola Marymount, and started listening to great DJs like Agent Eva, who once did an on-the -air strip-a-thon that left her widely fantasized as being down to a pair of crotchless panties, raised $2,000 from a bunch of beach scum in a couple of hours. While washing the dishes after school, I could listen to Tex & The Horseheads, REM, X, offbeat characters like John Cale, Lou Reed, etcetera. But still I did not discover the Ramones.
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