Ramones – Adios Amigos – Review

Ramones

Adios Amigos (Radioactive)
by Chris Adams

Say it ain’t so, Joey. In a recent interview, Ramones lead singer and unfortunate Howard Stern look-alike, confirmed that Adios Amigos is indeed the swansong that its title suggests. After 21 years of intentionally moronic punk classics, the four troglodytes from the deepest caves of Brooklyn have decided to go out with dignity, rather than go through the motions until rigor mortis sets in (see “Stones; Rolling.”)

Nevertheless, it’s still a crushing blow. Life without the Ramones seems unfathomable. The few certainties I grew up with were that the sky is blue, the grass is green, Barry Manilow is Satan, and, when all else fails, there’s always the Ramones. With the Ramones gone, my entire value system is screwed (but keep looking over your shoulder anyway, Manilow.) However, if they gotta split, Adios Amigos is the way to do it. It opens with the classic “1-2-3-4” countoff and buzzsaws into Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up,” a song that possibly encapsulates everything the Ramones stand for. It’s a loud, fast celebration of youth, energy, and simplicity, recorded live-in-studio, with none of the excessive engineering that marred some of their later stuff. (With the Ramones, more than one overdub constitutes massive production.) After that, there’s “The Crusher,” written by former Ramone (if that’s possible) Dee Dee, who penned several song titles for this album.

Continuing in the Ramones tradition of embracing trash culture, “The Crusher” sets its sights on professional wrasslin’: “I’m ready for a match with the Russian Bear/ Gonna Piledrive him, pull his hair/ I might have a foreign object in my trunks/ I might have to use it on that punk.” Several of the songs Joey wrote continue his love affair with ’60s “girl-group” pop signatures. The guy’s so good at it I’m pretty convinced that he’s actually a post-op Shangri-La. “Cretin Family” sounds like it could have been written at the zenith of the punk era, and it proudly makes the Ramones probably the only band who’ve used “cretin” in not one but two of their titles. The CJ-penned “Scattergun” is probably the least “Ramones-like” song on the album, and, ironically, possibly the best.

Other high points include the dark, grinding drone of “She Talks To Rainbows” and the Stooges thrash of “Born To Die In Berlin,” which comes complete with a verse sung in German. At the end of the song, there’s a hidden extra track – a Ramonized version of the theme from the cheesy five-frame-a-minute 1970s “Spiderman” cartoon. (You remember – “Spiderman, Spiderman/ Does whatever a spider can…”) If you like the Ramones, you’ll love this album, and if you don’t like the Ramones, you are, in fact, the aforementioned Mr. Manilow… The Ramones will go down in history as one of the greatest, most important rock bands ever, and I, for one, am gonna miss ’em bad. Gabba-Gabba-Goodbye.