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23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Ultimate Live Scrapbook on the Titans of Punk. , October 2, 2007
It's indeed a shame that this will never happen again. We'll never see these guys take the stage, never hear Dee Dee count in that first tune. We won't get slammed by the sheer volume and power of it all. We won't get to hear Joey's between-song banter and think, "didn't he say exactly the same thing before this song the last time they were here?"
But even with three Ramones gone for good, THE RAMONES live on, larger and more famous than they were in life, their tunes in a million movies and TV ads, their T-shirts now worn by, well, pretty much everybody. Which brings us to this big, reasonably priced 2-DVD set of Ramones live footage from damn near the very beginning of their career to damn near the very end. Over the course of about four hours (!!!), we see the band's evolution from scrappy up and comers at CBGB to consummate pros filling a stadium somewhere in South America. But take heart: whether they were playing to 60,000 people in 1996 or a few dozen in 1974, these guys - save for the early stage screwups - BARELY CHANGED AT ALL. In other words, they got it right early on and knew better than to ruin a good thing.
The sheer volume of material makes this set a solid winner, but it's those little moments and details that diehard fans will love most. The chance to see Johnny play a guitar other than his white or blue Mosrite. Getting to hear/see such seldom-performed-live classics as "Needles & Pins," "Don't Come Close" and "I Want You Around." Watching the evolution of Dee Dee's hair. The cornerstone of the whole thing, though, is the multi-song segment of the band's performance in London on New Year's Eve, 1977 - the concert during which the 2-LP "It's Alive" was recorded. Thirty years after the fact, we get the visuals to go along with one of the greatest live albums ever recorded, and they represent the Ramones at perhaps their very peak. Footage of dozens of other concerts and TV appearances varies in quality, but there's a treasure trove of good stuff to be found.
And as for the lower-quality footage? That shot-on-video, black & white stuff with the crappy sound? Hey, it's still the Ramones! Which, of course, makes it cooler than pretty much anything else out there right now.
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7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Four Horsemen of the Apunkalypse, October 8, 2007
Waiting for the kids to be released from catechism purgatory the other day, I was daydreaming about ice-cold rivers of Labatt's, eating hot dogs and watching ballgames from the right-field overhang at Tiger Stadium, and the fishnet stockings and Opium perfume of an early-80's ex-girlfriend from the east side when it hit me: Whatever happened to The Ramones? I don't mean literally. Unless you've recently awoken from a 15-year coma, chances are what happened to Dee Dee, Joey, and Johnny - perhaps the greatest front line ever - have left a hole in your soul large enough to wheel an SUV through, but the only noise coming from their camp lately has been the deafening sound of dust settling on their legacy. Can you tell I don't have much on my plate these days?
Seemingly from out of nowhere then comes this double-disc set packed with four hours worth of gig clips dating back 33 (gulp!) years, Christmas, New Year's, the Fourth of July, and Halloween rolled into one. Let's face it: as great as most Ramones albums are, they're a pale substitute for a sweaty, throbbing, tumultuous club date, fortified by enough cheap beer to stagger a rhino, and if you never grabbed the opportunity to experience one while it was still available, then shame on you.
The earliest snippet here exposes a definite work in progress: Joey in leather pants rolling around the stage at CBGB and hitting his best rock star poses and a feather-cut Johnny clad head to toe in black satin, songs from the yet-to-be-released first album played at a velocity slightly slower than the Mach 1 speed they would appear on vinyl. A little less than three years later, back at CBGB in the Summer of Sam, the juxtaposition is stunning; the band suddenly big fish in a little pond, although it's debatable whether they even knew they were star material. The template is fully in place; black leather jackets, t-shirts, torn jeans, tennis shoes, low-slung guitars, and Joey's trademark praying mantis stance at the mic, their love of volume, melody and momentum and endearing lack of technical prowess combined into one workable formula.
No slam on Marky or Richie, but the Holy Grail here for most will probably be Disc 1, all of it with original drummer Tommy, the architect of the Ramones back beat, deceptively simple but the ruin of many a poor man. Just ask Clem Burke. Much of it's in black and white, shot at various stops across the land of milk and honey, the band's van eventually landing in the City of Angels for "Don Kirshner's Rock Concert," Disco Don's monotone intro filled with buzz words like "wave" and "punk," the band obliging with a short set which moots any and all labels.
The Tommy era's emphatic coda comes via the New Year's Eve 1977 show at London's Rainbow that was recorded and released as one of the best live albums ever in, uh, "It's Alive." For those of you hopeless no-lifers who took it for granted the band would be around forever - and for much of their career it did indeed appear they were too tough to die - this is as close as you'll ever get to the breathless roar of a Ramones gig. It's some of the best live footage shot of any gig - anywhere, anytime - Forest Hills' finest flattening everything in their path; the limeys, the bouncers, the venue, and ceremony. How Tommy, Johnny, and Dee Dee managed to duck raging cases of carpal tunnel syndrome is one of life's great imponderables.
After a quick tutorial from Tommy, Marky hits the drum kit running, er, pounding, in 1978, where he would remain for the next 20 years (and most of Disc 2), save for a brief respite drying out, when he was spelled by Richie. Besides a white-hot Musikladen performance in Germany - back before the wall came down - the sound of Hitler spinning in his grave nearly audible as the band bulldoze through "Blitzkrieg Bop," highlights (some actually not so high) on the second half of this compendium include:
* The nearly-incomprehensible sight of the band playing in broad daylight in San Francisco (1981) and to a bunch of Valley kids at the 1982 US Festival, proving they never met a stage or audience they didn't like.
* What amounts to a combination of public humiliation, cruel and unusual punishment, and rite of passage: lip synching "Rock `n' Roll High School" on a "Sha Na Na" soundstage while members of that band, some in drag, dance and make general idiots of themselves in the background. Probably just another payday in Johnny's mind.
* A soporific performance of "Baby I Love You" on "Top of the Pops," sharing the stage with a string quartet, Joey in all his glory, finally cozying up to some pure pop.
* An "Old Grey Whistle Test" test appearance with Marky, storming through "Rock `n' Roll High School" and "Do You Remember Rock `n' Roll Radio?" as if their plane back to New York is taxiing the runway, and another with Richie, schooling the hardcore kids on "Wart Hog" and flexing their songwriting chops with "Chasing the Night.
From about 1987 on, however, the full-tilt lockstep of The Ramones' live performances had clearly worn down Joey - never the most robust guy healthwise to begin with - reducing him to slurring lyrics and in some cases flat-out omitting them in order to keep pace. And who can blame him? Although this sadly brought them perilously close to the precipice of being just another punk band, like most of the Epitaph roster fer starters, they continued to pack them in in soccer-mad countries like Argentina, Finland, and Italy, their adoring public barking mad for the redemptive powers of three chords and a cloud of ozone.
There's no more poignant moment or fitting epitaph in "It's Alive" than the band's 1995 "Top of the Pops" performance, where they grab Tom Waits' "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" by the scruff of its neck and make it their own. For all of their influence, The Ramones' true legacy must be their ability to transport just about anyone with a soul, even for the quick two-minute span of a simple pop song, into a perpetually-adolescent world where pinheads, sniffing glue, slugs, snails, and girls named Sheena can put things like mortgage payments, lower back pain, raising kids in a my space world, and plummeting headlong toward death in the rearview.
Get your wallet out.
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Incredible and also a little frustrating, October 9, 2007
The greatest band of all time after The Beatles, The Ramones, gets the two-DVD treatment with almost nothing but live concert clips. Considering that I paid $11.99 for this brand new at Best Buy (J&R in NYC also had it at 11.99 when I got it) there's just no way one can possible "lose" in buying this, no way.
The concert clips are amazing, and I am surprised that I have never seen so many of these clips, with hardly any of them being available on the "bootleg" market. The one I have been looking forward to the most, the US Festival show, is just amazing and the quality superb.
So where does the "frustrating" part come in? Well, pretty much nothing is complete. Sorry, but for a completeist as myself, I dislike being teased with "clips" when an entire show could have been made available and is sitting somewhere. I really would have loved to have seen the entire US performance, as well as the whole show of pretty much everything I haven't seen yet. I would have paid a lot more money for complete shows.
Even their Don Kirshner's Rock Concert TV performance - which I do have on bootleg - that's probably their greatest 70's TV appearance, and to not have that in its entirety, is a crime.
So that's really the only gripe I have about this set. It's great, fantastic, but a big tease for the most part for hardcore Ramones fans such as myself. I will say that watching the very rare two actual promo videos for "It's Not My Place In the 9 To 5 World" and "The KKK Took My Baby Away" was simply unbelievable. I never even knew these existed! Both are super-cheesy, on the very-simple side even for videos made in 1981, and a blast to watch. The "KKK" one I can see where that would have ruffled a few feathers.
Al in all even with just concert "clips," between the clips and the other stuff, you really can't go wrong especially for the price.
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