Heather wrote:

Dylan, Dylan, Dylan embrace the rock. Let go of the process.

Now you listen here, Heather, I just recently got into the Rolling Stones, man! How ya like me now? I really love AC/DC. Led Zeppelin amazes me every time I hear them. "Sonic Reducer", awesome song. I like classic rock radio. I'm sure you remember my homage to "Radar Love"?

I like the rock. I like it to be exciting. The Ramones are not that.

I started listening to them when I was 9 and if I make it to 90 I still will. Their first couple albums never get old to me. There are bits and pieces of their later stuff that I enjoy and some that is kinda weak.

BUT THEY ARE THE FUCKING RAMONES AND THEY ARE NOT CRAP.

The Ramones are a band I don't listen to very often. When I do listen to them, there is nothing else that will do the job. After twenty minutes I'm usually Ramoned out for another six months or so.

They're just one of those bands that aren't crap. It would be too sad, this already sad world, if The Ramones were crap. So they just can't be.

Europe, now there's a crap band.

Rocket to Russia is my personal fav.

I really love the whole all downstroked, intense barre chord attack.

Not Crap.

Didn't they invent punk rock or something? Not crap.

In a very real (if often indirect) way, the Ramones made most of the bands discussed on this board possible. And if you can't enjoy those first four albums (and/or the first live album, It's Alive), I really don't trust you ... or at very least I think you don't really understand this whole rock and roll thing.

Not Crap, which should go without saying.

Mark Lansing wrote:In a very real (if often indirect) way, the Ramones made most of the bands discussed on this board possible. And if you can't enjoy those first four albums (and/or the first live album, It's Alive), I really don't trust you ... or at very least I think you don't really understand this whole rock and roll thing.

Not Crap, which should go without saying.

Couldn't have said it better myself. If someone can't see how the Ramones are brutally NOT CRAP, they should have their instruments taken from them and disposed of.

If you think that The Ramones are crap then you do not understand rock & roll and are more likely aligned with the music punk was supposed to supplant, which is what I've suspected of most so called "post-rock" from the beginning--that it's closer to Pink Floyd than punk. What makes The Ramones so great--one of the things--is that they were aware of their "dumbness" without being self-conscious about it, which allowed them to seem "pure" even as they recycled so much pop culture detritus. They are one of the world's few truly ironic bands, as opposed to the evasive sarcasm that passes for irony these days; they were capable of passionately meaning it and seeing its absurdity (whatever it was) simultaneously. They were brilliant, and I love them, and Dee Dee Ramone is the punkest motherfucker who ever lived.

Thank you.

Brett Eugene Ralph wrote:...and Dee Dee Ramone is the punkest motherfucker who ever lived.

No, that would be Johnny.

I am 43 years old. I can think of everything I've done and experienced of significance in the last 27 of those 43 years. I can look around myself in a circle, run up and down the stairs and into every room in the building, pointing to anything I find there. I can think of almost everyone I know or have known since I was a teenager -- certainly all my close friends.

I owe all of that to the Ramones.