Fifty years. Half a century since four guys from Queens entered a recording studio with a six-thousand-dollar budget, recorded fourteen songs in just over a week, and walked out with something that technically shouldn’t have worked. The Ramones‘ debut album—released on April 23, 1976—sounds exactly like what it is: raw, dry, almost entirely devoid of production, with a total duration of less than thirty minutes and an audio fidelity that any first-year sound engineering student would fail without hesitation. There is no reverb, there are no layers, no string arrangements, no guitar solos, nor any of the artifices that in 1976 were considered signs of musical seriousness. If I were to tell you today that this record is as influential as anything The Beatles or The Rolling Stones ever did, I perfectly understand why you might raise an eyebrow. I’ll allow it. But before making that gesture, I ask you to observe the cartography: trace the lines that connect that record to every punk band that mattered in the last five decades—in England, in Japan, in Germany, in Mexico. And then trace those that reach Latin America. And then, please, pinpoint those that reach Argentina. Oh, believe me. The map is immense. I am not exaggerating. And because of that, books about the Ramones are innumerable, yet they are never enough to cover the feeling they still awaken; that is why today I have to recommend one made by a fan, in conjunction with fans from all over the world, which manages to encapsulate what they mean to humanity.
All Good Cretins Go to Heaven, written by Jenn L. Beckwith with research by Gary Lynn Clevenger, is technically a fan retrospective for the Ramones‘ fiftieth anniversary. But calling it a “retrospective“ does it about as much justice as calling The Who’s Tommy “an album about a deaf boy.“ What Beckwith has achieved here is something far more valuable: she has captured exactly why certain music turns you into a different person, and why that conversion is never fully reversed. And she has done so from a position that is neither that of the critic nor the historian, but that of the fan who one day stood against the wooden barrier of a concert in a university parking lot and looked up to see Joey Ramone’s filthy sneakers.
Because that is what Beckwith was. Literally. In 1993, she saw her only Ramones show at Southern Connecticut State University; she elbowed her way to the front barrier, and from there—with bruises on her calves that took a week to disappear—she contemplated them with that same mixture of terror and ecstasy felt when you are standing at the exact point where life marks a “before and after.” The anecdote is told with a disarming honesty. There is no glamour, no manufactured nostalgia. There is a parking lot, a generator truck, a Ford Econoline van with New York license plates, and the certainty that some things are never forgotten.
The book’s premise is simple yet moving. Beckwith, a children’s librarian by day and a community radio DJ on weekends, responded to a Facebook post where someone asked if anyone was writing a book about the Ramones for the fiftieth anniversary. From that algorithmic spark, this was born. And it works because the book does not pretend to be something it is not. It does not attempt to rival the great authorized biographies or the academic essays that explain why “Blitzkrieg Bop” is actually a deconstruction of post-war American pop. What Beckwith does is compile testimonies from people who love this band and explain, in the most direct way possible, why that matters and why 50 years later we continue to celebrate them.
There is a chapter that reviews the year 1974—the year the Ramones began—with all the precision of an encyclopedia: Nixon resigns, the oil embargo, the average price of a gallon of gas at 43 cents. It is the kind of context that normally makes me yawn in rock books, that rush to situate the music within Great History as if the musicians had been watching the news before plugging in their amplifiers. But here it works, because Beckwith uses it to remind us of something fundamental: Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974 was a specific, concrete place without glamour. New York was on the brink of bankruptcy, Times Square was a den of squalor and porn, and four weird kids from a broken neighborhood changed the way people absorb music.
Individual biographies of each Ramone perfectly explain why all four stories are important to understanding their legacy. Joey’s story—tall, thin, with OCD, having spent a month in a hospital psychiatric unit before becoming one of the most recognizable voices of the 20th century—is one of those that sticks with you. He died on April 15, 2001, listening to a U2 song, less than a month away from turning fifty. His mother and his brother Mickey, faithful to their promise, organized the birthday party anyway. It is one of the anecdotes that moves me most every time I read it.
And then there is Dee Dee, which is perhaps the rawest story on one hand and the most “Argentine“ on the other, without anyone having planned it that way. Dee Dee Ramone—Douglas Colvin, to the bureaucracy—ended up married to Barbara Zampini, a young Argentine fan he met in the nineties. Barbara was not only his companion until his death in 2002, but she also played bass with him in The Ramainz, the band they formed with Marky and CJ after the Ramones disbanded. There is something in that image—a woman from here who crossed the Atlantic of fandom and ended up on stage alongside the musicians she adored—that strangely condenses everything this book wants to say about the power of this band.
And they reached further than one might imagine. Jari-Pekka Laitio-Ramone, a Finnish fan born on the same day as Joey Ramone who created one of the band’s most comprehensive websites in 1995, details in the book the countries that most frequently visit his page. He also recounts how that archive helped him with his own books and relates the honor of his work leading him to contact his idols—meeting, for example, Richie Ramone at his shows in Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, and having Marky show a willingness to write the opening texts for one of his books.
Then there are the fan stories proper. And here, honestly, I expected things to slip through my fingers. Fans talking about how much they love their favorite band is normally the book equivalent of other people’s vacation photos: perfectly legitimate for the participants, slow as molasses for anyone else. But Beckwith selects well. There is a woman named Shirah who saw the Ramones‘ first show at CBGB in August 1974 as a teenager escaping a violent home, and who ended up having long conversations with Joey after he saw her crying in the front row and approached her to ask if she was okay. There is a Russian fan who traveled from Moscow to Saint Petersburg—600 kilometers—to see Marky Ramone because he won tickets in a T-shirt contest. But what matters is that in the book, the stories of the band members and those of their fans coexist perfectly; there is no moral or emotional distance, no cultural or class difference. There is only a musical cloak that unites them in brotherhood. And that is where you find the justification for every thesis in every book and every paper that attempts to explain why the Ramones mean so much to so many people.
I think of this and I think of the usual debate: whether people don’t become a certain way because of the music they listen to, but rather listen to certain music because they are already that way. There might be some truth to that. But this book silently argues the opposite case: that music can find you before you know who you are, and give you a vocabulary for that person you haven’t met yet. And that is as true in Forest Hills as it is in Buenos Aires, as true in 1976 as it is today.
Beckwith didn’t arrive at this book because she is an academic or because she is well-paid. She arrived because one night in 1993 she stood in a New Haven parking lot with bruises on her legs and the certainty of having witnessed something that was not going to be repeated. She is right on both counts.
1-2-3-4. That’s all it takes.
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Thanks for reading.
I never missed a chance to see the Ramones in the ‘80s and early ‘90s. They were magnificent.
https://www.amazon.com/All-Good-Cretins-Go-Heaven/dp/1916864945/