Jim Fields & Michael Gramaglia - End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2003)

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"It`s a very dark movie. It`s accurate. It left me disturbed." - Joey Ramone

"A Punk Last Waltz." - Variety

from the NYTimez
You Wanna Be Sedated? Not With These Tunes

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: August 20, 2004, Friday

To lead the rock 'n' roll life may be to drink deeply from the fountain of youth, but the rigors and temptations of that life often point to an early death. Take the Ramones, the seminal punk rock band whose history is traced in exhaustive detail in Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields's absorbing documentary, ''End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones.''

The band's geeky, rubber-lipped lead singer, Joey Ramone, a k a Jeffrey Hyman, and its skinny, heavily tattooed bassist, Dee Dee Ramone, a k a Douglas Colvin, died a year apart. Joey died of lymphatic cancer at 49 in 2001, and Dee Dee of a heroin overdose at 50 in 2002. In between those deaths, the band was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame. At the ceremony, Dee Dee cheekily thanked himself and nobody else.

As ''End of the Century'' reveals even more starkly than the recent Metallica documentary, ''Some Kind of Monster,'' harmony among band members becomes harder to sustain as the years gather, youthful enthusiasm wanes, and personalities define themselves. The Ramones' defiant, often funny bubblegum punk and the group's uniform image of leather-clad high school hoods and its adoption of a common last name, Ramone, camouflaged its members' serious personality disorders and conflicts.

The movie traces the Ramones' history back to Forest Hills, Queens, where the group formed in 1974, united by a common love of Iggy and the Stooges and the New York Dolls. In those days, the band's loud, no-frills, machine-gun style bucked the trend for instrumental virtuosity and musical ornamentation. It was at the seedy East Village bar CBGB that the band gained a foothold after a shaky start. When Danny Fields, a rock publicist who had worked with the Doors, Iggy and the Stooges, and MC5, offered to manage the Ramones, they accepted on condition that he pay for a new drum set, and the band was quickly signed to Sire Records.

Throughout their career the Ramones endured the frustration of being more admired overseas than at home. After galvanizing the English punk rock scene in the summer of 1976, the band returned to the United States to find itself still begging for gigs and airplay. It seemed a cruel joke of fate when the Sex Pistols, the Clash and other British bands reaped the publicity and much of the credit for creating a style that the Ramones, as much as anyone, had pioneered.

The movie, which opens today in New York, delves deeply into the band's internal strife. Its practical, business-minded drummer and producer, Tommy Ramone (a k a Tom Erdelyi), and its conservative guitarist, Johnny Ramone (a k a John Cummings), were the diametrical opposites of the bohemian, left-wing, drug-taking Dee Dee, the band member truest to the Ramones' punk image.

In 1980, still hopeful for a commercial breakout, the band recorded its album ''End of the Century'' in Los Angeles with the legendary producer Phil Spector. During the grueling sessions, Mr. Spector wielded a gun and kept the band imprisoned in his home while he worked with an obsessive meticulousness that one musician compares to Chinese water torture. The album's failure was the final blow to the group's dreams of superstardom. Later a permanent rift developed when Joey's girlfriend left him for Johnny, and the two continued to perform together but never spoke.

Even after Dee Dee and the group's second drummer, Marky Ramone (a k a Marc Bell), left the band, the Ramones soldiered on with replacements for eight more years. Hopes that the nascent grunge movement might give the band a second wind never materialized, although the Ramones found themselves mobbed by fans during a South American tour.

But the music has lasted. As Mr. Fields points out, behind the band's accelerated, stripped-down punk, the creators of ''Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,'' ''Blitzkrieg Bop,'' ''I Wanna Be Sedated'' and dozens of other minimalist blasts were gifted songwriters. The hyperbolic claim of the punk-rock historian Legs McNeil that the Ramones ''saved rock 'n' roll'' may finally not be far off the mark.

from the Village Voiz
The most vivid figure in Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields's End of the Century was the least articulate and most archetypal of the Ramones: Johnny, the right-wing prole whose hard-ass sense of style the others nutballed and softened and accelerated and above all imitated. We felt we knew Joey the singer, Dee Dee the hophead, Tommy the conceptualizer. Taciturn Johnny was far less distinct, whether beating out his chords or glowering at assholes. But throughout this thorough, moving, long-awaited documentary he talks more than Legs McNeil himself, in an accent outlanders will oversimplify as New York and connoisseurs of Queens English will pin down as Ridgewood or Middle Village. It's an accent steeped in working-class repression?the accent of white men who think being in touch with your feelings is for fags.

from Salon
While "End of the Century" feels a bit straggly toward the end (the rise of the Ramones is exhilarating; their slow, unfair demise is a downer), and its chronology is sometimes a little vague, the movie captures the spirit of both the band and the era they helped shape. In the '70s, the Ramones were hugely influential in the U.K. (they inspired outfits like the Clash and the Sex Pistols), but Stateside, they were forced to scrabble to get gigs in crummy New Jersey clubs. They made terrific records that didn't sell; they toured, hard, through the '80s and half of the '90s just to make a living. They have always been revered in South America (the movie includes footage of elated Brazilan kids swarming around the Ramones' car). Toward the end of their career, they'd play huge stadiums there -- only to return home to the States to play tiny clubs in New Hampshire.

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Saturday, May 8, 2010

Jim Fields & Michael Gramaglia - End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones (2003)

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