‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk’ Review

Flushing, N.Y.

Visitors unfamiliar with the Ramones may want to start the new “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk” exhibit at the Queens Museum in the last room. There, in the darkened space, is a 26-minute film projected on a wall of the band performing on New Year’s Eve in 1977 at the Rainbow Theatre in London. The hard-charging music and high-strung stage performance serve as the perfect prelude to understanding what made the band special.

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Cover for Punk #3 (1976), by John Holmstrom. Photo: Courtesy Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

Shrewdly curated by guest consultant Marc H. Miller, an expert on New York’s punk music scene, and Grammy Museum executive director Bob Santelli, the four-room exhibit is jammed with multimedia surprises. For instance, among the 400 objects on display is a small Sony demo tape reel sent out in early 1975 that failed to garner interest among record labels. Surprising, since the accompanying music is dynamic and enterprisingly belligerent.

The Ramones’ inventiveness began with their shared last name, which was a pseudonym. None of the band members were related. The idea was inspired by Paul McCartney’s use of “ Paul Ramon” as a stage name in 1960 and ’69. For the Ramones, the name quietly acknowledged the Beatles while allowing them to swap their provincial Queens backgrounds for new downtown Manhattan identities.

What makes the Ramones exhibit particularly compelling is that it rises above being just a nostalgia trip for fans. Rather, the exhibit provides a valuable introduction to punk rock’s most influential group and its impact on music and fashion. It’s also likely to surprise many visitors who have long mischaracterized their music as noise.

Despite the exhibit’s title, the Ramones didn’t start the punk rock movement. The music’s stripped-down sound dates back to the raw, low-tech surf and garage bands of the 1960s and the contemptuous minimalism of the Velvet Underground in the late 1960s. By the early 1970s, the New York Dolls, the Neon Boys, Iggy and the Stooges and Television were among those pioneering punk’s raw sound and trashy fashion sensibility.

When the Ramones formed in early 1974, their jackhammer rock and geek-chic looks resonated with antisocial nonconformists. Nerdy outcasts, the band commuted to work, traveling the subway’s F line from Queens’s Forest Hills to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where they played at CBGB.

The Ramones’ early sound was both a rage against mainstream rock and an embrace of ’60s pop-rock traditions. Though they wore leather and performed in a biker bar, they were hardly ominous or threatening. Once they began releasing albums in 1976, their gritty songs became mood music for urban decay and the implosion of the American Dream following an oil shortage and recession.

Moving forward from the exhibit’s fourth room, the third room features the band’s legacy and includes a range of tribute silk-screens and paintings as well as six black TV monitors playing Ramones videos. Perhaps the most gripping objects are the little-known neo-expressionist acrylic artworks of Dee Dee Ramone ( Douglas Colvin), which further expose the bassist’s primal side.

The second room showcases the Ramones’ career and includes tour documents, guitars, leather motorcycle jackets, a pair of ripped gray jeans, amps, punk magazines in which they appeared, and a wall of concert posters. In the first room, wall pieces and display cabinets are filled with items from the Ramones’ childhoods and high-school years, including report cards and passport photos.

Most intriguing are two black-and-white group portraits by Roberta Bayley. The dour image for Punk magazine at eye level wound up gracing the cover of the band’s first album in 1976. The second print positioned above was snapped a few seconds earlier and features the four Ramones smiling.

The latter image provides a rare glimpse of the group’s lighter side. Band members Joey ( Jeffrey Hyman), Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy nearly always posed emotionless in photos, thanks to a no-smiling directive by Johnny Ramone ( John Cummings). Johnny thought that any hint of cheeriness would compromise the Ramones’ down-and-out persona.

What the Ramones lacked in polish and personality they made up for in tireless energy and sardonic humor. The band’s first news release by Tommy Ramone ( Thomas Erdelyi) makes the point: “The Ramones all originate from Forest Hills, and kids who grew up there either became musicians, degenerates or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each.”

So what caused the band to grin in that second photo by Ms. Bayley? “Those of us who were at the shoot in the playground on East Second Street off the Bowery in ’76 were saying funny things to relax them,” she said during a phone interview. “I had just started clicking when they grinned on my fifth and sixth frames. Then their faces returned to their more familiar expressions.”

Forty years to the month after the release of the Ramones’ eponymous first album, the band remains punk’s Drab Four, a long-faced quartet that made being miserable a fine art. Though all of the original Ramones have since died, the new exhibit revives the drama and impact of their music, helping us understand who they were and why we should care.

Mr. Myers, a frequent contributor to the Journal, writes daily about music and the arts at JazzWax.com.