Music: Going After the Real Nuts

The Ramones join with Phil Spector to top off the new wave

Two things may help, at least initially. First, while considering the new Ramones album, End of the Century, a kind of LP Hellzapoppin, grab a scorecard. A pencil would help too.

The Ramones is a wonderfully zany new-wave band from the nether suburbs of Manhattan. (Now, pencils up.) The moniker shared by Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky gives the group its cozy familial name, although—pencils ready—none of the Ramones is related. In fact—start writing! —none of the Ramones is a Ramone. Joey is Jeffrey, scion of the Hyman family of Forest Hills, Queens, but he has no brother named Johnny, whose true surname is Cummings and who is,in no way related to either Dee Dee, who started life as Douglas Colvin, or Marky, born Bell, who joined the Ramones family after Tommy Ramone, whose real name is Erdelyi, dropped out of the group, pleading road fatigue and work pressure. Got that? There will be a quiz tomorrow morning.

Confronted with the cold biographical facts, Lead Guitarist Johnny Ramone clams up like a good JD facing his first joyride rap. “We never say our real names,” he allows with teasing stubbornness that combines the flirtatiousness of a starlet who has just been asked her age and the sacred silence of a button man pleading the Fifth. If pressed, Johnny will elaborate: “We can’t subject our parents to this. I never told them in the beginning about the band. They’d have said, ‘Stop this, you can’t even play a song.’ I waited until we had an album before I told them. Now they’re happy.” “Yeah,” adds Joey, with the half-speed weariness of a shell-shocked veteran of the star wars. “But now they say, ‘Why aren’t you as big as Kiss?’ ”

The folks should relax. The Ramones may never sell records like Kiss, but their inspired, self-parodying lunacy and sideways sophistication have given an antic and raucous heartbeat to the often sober-sided American new wave. “I like people to take us seriously,” insisted Lead Singer Joey to TIME’S John Buckman. “It’s no joke, no novelty act. We’re not clowns.” The nice thing about the Ramones is that one can take them seriously and have a good laugh at the same time. Tunes like Sheena Is a Punk Rocker and Rockaway Beach are feckless, speedy japes that play fast and loose with rock styles and traditions even as they pay tribute to them. Onstage, the boys look like aging incorrigibles, the bottom four students in the remedial class at vocational high school. They play with headlong, madcap and deliberately amateurish intensity punctuated with agog appraisals of the audience. Gazing out at the roistering hordes, the Ramones look like a quartet of glue sniffers who have just crashed a model-plane convention. Adoring audiences respond in kind; they cheer when Joey brandishes a black and yellow sign that reads GABBA ABBA HEY!, the Ramones’ own e pluribus unum.

Ridiculed in some quarters for their tattered musical talents, the Ramones in fact let fly with a very basic but very winning instrumental intensity and write songs of underhanded subtlety. Their melodies, which deliberately evoke memories of the Top 40 circa 1960, fall somewhere between American Bandstand and a rent party. Slow sales, slight chart action, intermittent air play and a sense of being trapped by their own well-rounded limitations drew them to Phil Spector. A producer responsible for some of the greatest vintage rock, Spector put the band through his often intricate, sometimes tortuous studio paces, came up with an album that smooths the Ramones out without cutting them down.

End of the Century is a neat and boisterous meeting of the traditional and the vanguard, with no quarter asked or given on either side. The album begins with a bit of pyrotechnical nostalgia, Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?, then rockets on through some tough short stories (Chinese Rock, a scary dope song, and Let’s Go, a tidy account of mercenary activity) and some wistful sentiment (Danny Says). There are rest stops for punk satire (The Return of Jackie and Judy) and mean strutting (High Risk Insurance).

There’s even time for the unofficial class anthem, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School, the title tune of a rambunctious B picture that brought the Ramones to the drive-in circuit. The whole album is the kind of virtuoso feat one expects from Spector, but it is livelier and more intense than anything he’s done since his work with John Lennon. For the Ramones, it’s both a consolidation and a subtle change-up; a record that proves professionalism does not have to dull the gleaming amateur edge the Ramones like to affect. End of the Century might even help avert the grim destiny that Johnny Ramone, during dark days, can see looming ahead. “It’d be terrible to spend ten years being a rock-‘n’-roll star,” he frets, “and then go out and have to get a job.”

Pass Phil Specter’s wrought-iron gates above Sunset Strip, and you’re on posted ground. To get to the 40-room Spanish mansion at the end of the road, one must negotiate four speed bumps, pass through an electrified fence and heed the warnings about burglar services, armed guards and watchdogs, then reconsider the owner’s written notice that YOU ARE HERE AT YOUR OWN RISK AND ARE HEREBY ADVISED TO LEAVEIMMEDIATELY. Not even Charles Foster Kane required such baronial fortification; it would have been easier to crash Xanadu.

Once past all the obstacles, alarms and early-warning systems, there is a final notification for visitors right inside the front door. Just underfoot, in fact. One welcome mat carries the injunction GET LOST! A second simply demands WIPE YOUR FEET, STUPID. Spector would have everyone believe that he dwells in the outer darkness, but all the barriers, threats and entreaties are really just billboards erected for the incidental glorification of rock’s most baroque imagination. They are, in fact, like many of the records he has produced over the past two decades, brazen, grandiose and wittily orchestrated for maximum impact.

Spector, 39, has been called a genius, often by himself. In a recording studio, he throws tantrums as easily as other producers turn dials, and hurls invective like a rock-‘n’-roll redraft of Erich von Stroheim. His excesses of style and manner are legend, and some call him mad. He has waved loaded guns at musicians, made off with the master tapes of completed albums and held them, like booty, against the pleas of artists and record companies alike. He has been mythologized, parodied (in Brian De Palma’s film Phantom of the Paradise, as the satanic superproducer) and eulogized by musicians, rock critics and Tom Wolfe (in one of his best pieces of razzmatazz, The First Tycoon of Teen). The vaulting arrangements and majestic delirium of songs such as Be My Baby and He’s a Rebel and River Deep-Mountain High and You ‘ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling have been endlessly imitated. They have never been equaled, except by Spector himself. Outside attempts to duplicate “the Spector wall of sound” only ring hollow, like a Salvation Army rock band playing in a subway tunnel. What is clear, past all the self-perpetuating mythology, is that Phil Spector has been responsible for some of rock’s greatest records. End of the Century proves that greatness is not necessarily past history.

It hasn’t always seemed so. Joey Ramone’s avowed ambition—”We’re after the real fanatics. We want the loyal, dedicated kids, the real nuts”—pointed him in Specter’s direction. Phil, presumably, would know plenty about reaching the real nuts. All those vintage Spector-produced hits by the Ronettes, Crystals, Darlene Love and the Righteous Brothers were just the sort of sound the Ramones were shooting for. “Little symphonies for the kids,” Spector once called these songs.

But for a while he seemed to have lost his touch. His early ’70s work with the Beatles, especially Lennon, was big-spirited and lavish, but brought him an unaccustomed critical drubbing. His marriage to Ronnie, lead singer of the Ronettes, broke up in 1973. He was in at least one serious auto accident and underwent extensive surgery and facial restoration. His records after that—albums by Dion and Leonard Cohen, singles by Cher and Darlene Love—were as black as the vinyl they were pressed on. Even the upbeat numbers sounded funereal. The little symphonies became requiems celebrated inside a Wurlitzer.

“Over a period of years,” says a songwriter who has worked closely with him, “Phil developed certain characteristics —reclusiveness, craziness in the studio —and after a while he let them take over.” Adds a young record producer who spent a long and disenchanting night watching Spector thrash around with the Dion album: “His records were great, but he’s a mean mother.” Spector himself admits to a certain amount of struggling during this time. “Working with Leonard Cohen was more of a writing experience,” he told TIME’S Robert Goldstein. “He’s not a Lennon or McCartney, and I couldn’t do the things with him that I could with the Ramones. It’s like adopted kids. It’s tough to make them look like you.” The Ramones had not only raised themselves in Specter’s image, but played something he recognized: “Basic, honest, good rock ‘n’ roll. They get the feeling across.” This set them apart from the pop mainstream for Spector, whose opinions about much of today’s sound tend to be a tad prickly (“The Bee Gees produce porpoise music. It’s interspecies communication”).

The End of the Century collaboration brought out the best in band and producer. “You can’t expect Phil Spector to go into the studio with Leonard Cohen or Cher and make a great album,” says Joey Ramone. “You know, it’s ridiculous. But the music we play is kind of like back in the early ’60s with the Ronettes.” Spector, for his part, was looking for “a marriage that could last. Most of mine don’t.” Spector challenged the Ramones immediately—”Do you want to make a great album or a good album?” —then spent six months working in the studio, layering and miking guitars so they sound at times almost like chimes, overdubbing the vocals until they glisten like a sonic Simonize.

As for the producer’s studio conduct, Johnny Ramone concedes that Spector is “eccentric,” but deflects specific questions by saying, “I mean, Phil’s going to read this article.” At home, Phil’s sons Gary and Louis, 13, and Donte, 10, are treated to notes from Dad left on the kitchen table that demand a scrupulous accounting of how they spend their allowances. Says Phil: “They can con me, but put it in writing. Then when the police call about pills or dope, then I’ll know. I just want to know.” Whatever the disposition of the kids’ stipends, Spector can draw comfort from the knowledge that he has tapped back into the true rock spirit. End of the Century is a head start on a new decade, for Spector and the Ramones, a negotiable franchise on the future. —Jay Cocks