No Road To Ruin

40° 35' North; 72° 35' West

Stupid, brainless, eye candy-assisted television shows to the contrary, coming of age in the 1970's was not all it's recently been cracked up to be.

For one thing the first half of the 'me-decade' suffered from the weight of all things Nixon.

There was also the constant dull ache caused by the realization that you had missed experiencing the age of enlightenment simply you'd been born a few years too late.

Then there was the music, which was bloated, turgid and very, very bad.

And that was before disco.

Luckily for me I sat behind a kid in Mr. Huggett's grade 12 math class that made the effort and took the time to turn me on to the Ramones.

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They were four scruffy kids in leather jackets and they wore stove-pipe jeans and Chuck Taylor basketball sneakers in the era of extra wide bell bottoms and platform shoes.

More importantly, at two minutes or less of do-it-yourself ripcorded gusto, an early Ramones tune was the antithesis of bloat.

And for a small circle of my friends and me that was all it took.

Then Dee Dee, Joey, Johnny and Tommy went to England and threw the cherry bomb into the musical mix that would become the second British Invasion.

So when the Sex Pistols, and especially the Clash, came to town a couple of years later we had already been innoculated against the safety pins, the razor blades and all the other fashion trappings of the Punk ethos.

Instead, it was the DIY attitude of the music itself that we decided to emulate.

And we did.

And boy did we suck.

But the fact that we couldn't play didn't matter one whit because I have never had as much fun, before or since, crashing around in a doomed-for-the-dust-bin garage/almost punk band.

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Sadly, three of the four original Ramones will never feel the rush of the DIY ethic ever again...

The first to go was bass player Dee Dee who died of a drug overdose some time ago.

Then singer Joey succumbed to lymphoma. I remember exactly where I was when I heard about it. We were in the line-up at Tswassen waiting to get on the Schwartz Bay ferry when the news came over the car radio. In an instant, I thought it might be appropo of all things Joey to change our newborn baby's name to Sheena in honor of one of the band's greatest anthems.

Eva is five years old now, and while she is no Sheena she just might be a punk rocker some day.

And my other kid, Emily, who is older knows precisely who Johnny Ramone is. She also knows that he passed away last week after a long battle with prostate cancer.

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At about the same time that my friends and I packed it in and gave up our musical aspirations for good another kid our age was just starting out on a very different, much more ambitious, project that he too would never finish.

And like all true DIYers Terry Fox didn't give a hoot in hell that nobody took him seriously in the beginning. In fact, I distinctly remember a smirking TV anchorman passing it off as the whimsy of youth when they flashed up pictures on the local station showing him dipping his artificial leg in the Atlantic.

But the time he got Ontario Fox had inspired the entire country with his steadfast resolution to complete the task he had started on his own, alone.

It's something that is almost impossible to contemplate now in an age where nothing can be successful unless it is fake (ie. see 'That 70's Show' referred to above) or it has a huge corporate backing to force the corporate media to stand-up and take notice (see 'The CIBC Run for the Cure').

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Amazingly, Terry Fox had no corporate money behind him during his own run way back in 1980. And even more amazingly the run that millions of folks will be participating in this week still has no major sponsors to suck the life out of it.

That's what I call staying a DIY project for the ages.

To find out more go here and give generously.

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Update: Sept 19/04 11:37pm

Had to add this from 'Not-So-Jersey' James Walcott:

"First Joey, then Dee Dee, and now Johnny Ramone, who wielded his guitar like a scythe, dead at the age of 55 from prostate cancer. Johnny, like Dee Dee, generated a lot of sore feelings in punk circles, but I prefer to remember them the way they were as black leather foundlings at CBGB's, blasting through a 20 minute set of songs that sounded like gluehead cartoons marching to victory. If there's an afterlife, Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny are probably doing their best to get on God's nerves, and succeeding."