Jewy Ramone

by David Gordon


RIP Jeff Hyman

Believe it or not, it wasn’t always cool to be a skinny, nerdy Jewish kid from Queens. Williamsburg was where my mom took me to buy cheap school clothes from the Hasidic shopkeepers. Long Island City was a wasteland where we went to wreck shit as kids or later on, as young artsy types, to make Super 8 films of ourselves wrecking shit. Those were the days when cool downtown people loathed Brooklyn and one could, literally, go for weeks without crossing above Fourteenth Street or going west of Broadway. In that Old World atmosphere, I had Manhattanite friends who had barely ever set foot in Brooklyn, (a trip to BAM maybe or the Botanical Gardens) but who never, ever touched Queens. Nowadays, just being a native makes me one of the last Mohicans, but back then I was definitely second-class. I was also 125 pounds, allergic and bronchial, sniffly and pasty, bookish and and pathologically shy. I hung in the back of jazz clubs, haunted used record stores, kung-fu triple features, midnight gore films and dusty book and comic shops, but it never crossed my mind that anyone like me could actually do anything cool like that. All those heroes were from a different tribe: cooler, older, richer, poorer, blacker or whiter.

Then, one spring evening, I was sitting in the passenger seat of my parents’ car, parked on the Upper East Side, waiting for them to finish getting their hair cut and twirling the radio dial. I don’t know what year it was, but I was young enough that my family all still got our hair cut together. Somewhere in the air, I stumbled across a tune that changed my life, (for the second time –– the first was hearing what I learned was Bitch’s Brew). I didn’t know the name of the band or the song, but from the minimal lyrics it was easy to guess: "I Just Wanna Have Something To Do."

Coming into consciousness as I did around 1980, in the second wave of punk, or post punk or whatever, and having been drawn first to blues and jazz, and loving the old Stones and Who but finding their shows and recent albums appalling, I would not, at the time, have described myself as a rock fan at all, finding the whole concept embarrassing and overblown, commercial mush for the meathead masses. Nor did the loudness and speed of the Ramones shock me. But it made me re-connect to rock and roll as something that mattered, that was not made for waving a lighter in Giants Stadium, but for prowling the streets, riding the subway, sitting on the stoop waiting for something to come by, writing bad poems, stealing books and doing whippets. It was alive, in all the best and worst senses of the word.

Much of that incredible vitality came from anger, aggression and hopeless energy, the amazing power they unleashed. But there was something else, something that wasn’t there, for me, with The Sex Pistols or The Clash. A note of longing, of yearning, of loss. A bittersweet tone, a beauty, that I think came from Joey’s singing, from his voice. I recognized it immediately in that song, in the choked off last word to the line “I just want to be with you…” and the haunting sweep of the repeated “tonight,” that opens up to take in the world of everything we love and can’t touch. It shows up in many other places too, in “I Want to Live,” in “I Wanna Be Sedated,” even in the dark majesty of “Don’t Bust My Chops” or the strange sob in the immortal “Somebody Put Something in My Drink.”

I connect this note, this tone, both deep and soaring, to blues, to doo-wop, to Sinatra, to Iggy, to something ancient and poetic but also completely modern American urban: the heart in the beast in the jungle. That feeling always grabs me by the throat. I know it’s anathema to say this, but I love those songs as much as the Beatles. Maybe more. Once, when I was in the fashion business (another story) we recruited the cheerleaders from the local, mainly Hispanic high school to perform, and as they leapt and yelled and waved their pom-poms, and formed a pyramid, I had them blast, “I Just Wanna Have Something To Do.” It gave me chills. I think the DJ and I hugged.

In the recent Ramones documentaries, there were two bits I found especially moving: the map that showed where the Ramones played across the country and the world and which bands sprang up in those cities, as if, seeing the guys from Queens triumphant, kids everywhere suddenly realized they could do it too. And I love the footage from Latin America, where crowds of fanatical teens filled stadiums and chased the limo, chanting for Los Ramones.

CBGB is gone, my hearing is going, and Jeff Hyman, in the foreshortened perspective of time seems like what he always was: another great Jewish songwriter and New York pop-singer. But for the angry, lonely, hungry, horny, dorky and lame, for young people all over the world who know they are fucked, that they have nothing but their lives to bet, Joey Ramone will always be a hero. This, to me, is the message behind every Ramones tune: You are a star, and your life, today, is a song.

Download:

"I Just Want To Have Something To Do" mp3
by the Ramones,
available on Road to Ruin

"Listen To My Heart" mp3
by the Ramones, 1976.
available on Ramones

"Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World" mp3
by the Ramones, 1976.
available on Ramones

"It's A Long Way Back To Germany (U.K. B-Side)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Slug" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Commando" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Leave Home

"The KKK Took My Baby Away" mp3
by the Ramones, 1981.
available on Pleasant Dreams

"My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes To Bitburg)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1986.
available on Animal Boy

"We're A Happy Family" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"Rockaway Beach" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on Rocket to Russia

"I Want You Around (Original Version)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1977.
available on All The Stuff (And More), Vol. 2

"Questioningly" mp3
by the Ramones,
available on Road to Ruin

"Danny Says (demo)" mp3
by the Ramones, 1980.
available on End of the Century

"What A Wonderful World" mp3
by Joey Ramone, 2004
available on Don't Worry About Me

"Bye Bye Baby" mp3
by Ronnie Spector and Joey Ramone, 1999.
available on She Talks to Rainbows

top photo: © Roberta Bayley, 1977.

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This is the fourth of eight posts at the Boogie Woogie Flu, in which eight Jewish writers will discuss the works of other Jewish artists for eight consecutive days in celebration of Hanukkah.

The Rootless Cosmopolites

by David Gordon

I first discovered Leonard Cohen in the garbage. I was dumpster diving with some friends in San Francisco, and we found (along with a Nakamichi tape deck I still have) a CD player that was jammed shut. We popped it open with a knife, and The Best of Leonard Cohen was inside. Since it was the only CD we had, we played it over and over. Then I went out and bought everything I could find with his name on it. No doubt I registered that Cohen was a Jewish name – is there a name more Jewish? – but at the time other things intrigued me more: the poetry, the pain, the grown up sex and wisdom. It was adult entertainment, in every sense of those words.

I became a Serge Gainsbourg fan later, after hearing “Bonnie and Clyde,” becoming utterly haunted by it, and realizing he was the same guy who sang those smart, sleazy, slick songs “Je t’aime…moi non plus” and “69 année érotique.” His legend fascinated me too: the louche ladies’ man always looking as though he’d been up all night at the orgy while secretly producing great art. Later I had a girlfriend in Paris who was obsessed with Serge, his grave, the graffiti-covered house. Recommending other singers I thought she’d like, I suggested Cohen. Why? The similar, gravelly voices. The talk-singing. The witty, dark, perverse lyrics. And, I suddenly realized, both were Jews, Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent, a concept that barely made sense to a Japanese Parisian girl who barely knew any Jews besides me. My other suggestion, the CD I made her in NY, only confirmed this hunch: Lou Reed, another lone voice in another wilderness, a Jewish boy from Long Island who’d gone off the reservation into a life of crime, drugs, sex and art. Did every culture have one of these underground Jews? And did someone who loved one love them all?

When my current girlfriend told me on our first date that Lou Reed and The Velvet Underground were her favorites, I knew she was not only beautiful but a woman of rare taste for her generation, and I also realized, without a moment’s hesitation, what else to play for her: Cohen and Gainsbourg, of course, (and of course she loved them, and me for playing them) as well as that other Jewish star: Randy Newman, the strangest creature of all…A Jew with a Southern accent!

In the end, as with so many things, it all leads back to Dylan.

I never registered that Bob Dylan was Jewish until he got born again. As a profoundly secular, atheistic Jew living in the Jewish heartland of NY/NJ, I never gave Mr. Zimmerman’s ethnic or religious background a second thought, since, in my mind, it couldn’t have anything to do with his genius: by definition, nothing that reminded me of middle-class Jewish-American life could be of any interest.

Then he became a Christian, which was much worse. It seemed, frankly, ridiculous. (Although the show I saw during this period was terrific.) It made me realize that the best thing about being a smart, urban Jew was that we didn’t take it all so seriously. It also led me to think about how very Jewish his music had actually always been. There are the myriad Biblical references, too numerous to tally here, with the Old Testament far out-weighing the New. There is the voice itself, closer in some ways to a high, wailing cantor than to Elvis. Just like the other (sort-of) singing, wandering Jews, who are his secret brethren.

There are many other characteristics this group shares: They are intellectual, poetic, high-minded yet low-down, wicked and a little sleazy, portrayed sometimes as sexually depraved or ambiguous and morally or politically suspect. Their singing skills are, let’s say, unconventional, yet their voices became famous. They are seen as prophetic commentators, doom callers with obsessive fans, and as leaders and originators of forms, yet they remain always apart, more like each other than their supposed peers in folk, rock, punk, whatever. Eventually adopted as national or cultural heroes by their home-states, they nevertheless remain uneasy figureheads, critical and in a way forever foreign. They even, as they age, seem to look alike: the sharp noses, the slashed lines around the mouth, the deep-set eyes, open foreheads and thick kinky hair. They look…well they look kind of like some of my relatives…and it suddenly becomes possible to imagine that these guys, Midwesterner, Long Islander, Louisianian, Frenchman, Canadian, all have ancestors from the same shtetl in Russia, or a territory once conquered by Russia.

Weirdly, this profile is almost exactly in keeping with one of the classic anti-Semite stereotypes: the rootless cosmopolitan, the wanderer, the hustler, the intellectual, anti-patriotic, amoral seducer of Christian girls and boys, who insinuates himself into the culture, infecting it with his subversive ideas, his degenerate songs and decadent art, but nevertheless remaining eternally alien.

It turns out that they were right to be afraid, for the little sneaky Jews have triumphed. It is, I would argue, a counter-lineage, a line of Jewish development just as noble as, if less frequently acknowledged than, the rabbinical one, and among its great figures I would include Philip Roth, Larry David, Woody Allen, Lenny Bruce, Walter Benjamin, Kafka and Freud. The dirty-minded, dark-hearted, deep-souled and golden-voiced Jewboys, who carried their weird little light all over this dark globe. I’m proud to be their humble descendant. Happy Hanukkah and YWHW bless us all!

Download:

"Tower of Song" mp3
by Leonard Cohen, 1988
available on I'm Your Man

"God's Song (That's Why I Love Mankind)" mp3
by Randy Newman, 1972.
available on Sail Away

"I'm Set Free (Closet Mix)" mp3
by The Velvet Underground, 1969.
available on Peel Slowly and See

"Ring Them Bells" mp3
by Bob Dylan, 1988.
available on Tell Tale Signs: the Bootleg Series Vol. 8

"Je T'aime... Moi Non Plus" mp3
by Serge Gainsbourg and Jane Birkin
available on Jane Birkin et Serge Gainsbourg

**********

David Gordon's first novel, The Serialist, will be published by Simon & Schuster in March 2010.