My first introduction to The Ramones came, fittingly enough for a film critic, in a cinema . . . but, hey, they were never a band you heard on the radio anyway. It was early 1980 at a midnight screening in Harvard Square, the air -- as was customary in that more laid-back era -- was thick with pot smoke, but it couldn't have rendered any more alien and bizarre what was going down on screen.
"Rock 'n' Roll High School" was, like everything about The Ramones, an attempt to be "normal," to make a band movie like "Help" or a high-school comedy like "Grease," but ending up with something that was just, well, off. Here were four guys, well into their late 20s, cavorting around a high school dressed like '50s bikers (the leather-jacket icon of the day was The Fonz on "Happy Days") but with mutant bowl haircuts, and singing songs about pinheads and sniffing glue. It was trying to be a regular rock-as-rebellion riff for teen audiences, but it totally ignored the aesthetic that "regular" teenagers would go for.
This was a time when rock meant love songs and long guitar solos, and The Ramones had neither. They were misclassified as "new wave," as if artists such as Television, Patti Smith, Devo, Elvis Costello and Pere Ubu could be seen as indicative of anything. Like all these bands, The Ramones stood out, they were different, they didn't care about whether you wanted to shag them or not.
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