[Marxism] Two rock-and-roll band documentaries

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

Besides being about famous rock-and-roll bands, the subjects of the Ramones
documentary "End of the Century" and "Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" have
much else in common. Both bands were torn by personality conflicts. Both
were paradigms of rock genres, punk in the first case and metal in the
second. Both bands also underwent wrenching personnel changes driven by the
need to stay consistent with the founder's creative vision or to protect
themselves from disruptions caused by drug or alcohol abuse.

The differences were also revealing. The Ramones never enjoyed the
commercial success of Metallica, but a case can be made that they were far
more important as innovators. The Ramones were the quintessential New York
band, but Metallica is echt-California. The films are also stylistically
divergent. In the Ramones documentary, the narrative moves forward through
penetrating interviews. In "Monster," the film-maker adopts the passive but
highly revealing perspective of a fly on the wall.

Leaving aside questions of how the groups differ with each other, both
films implicitly address the question of how capitalism casts its dark
shadow across just about every human enterprise--even something as
rebellious as rock-and-roll.

Since three of the four Ramones died within the last three years, including
founder Johnny Ramone who succumbed to prostate cancer last September, the
film has added poignancy. Although the group's most recognizable figure was
the tall, homely lead singer Joey Ramone, who died after a long battle with
lymphoma 3 years ago, Johnny Ramone was the leader. Born John Cummings, he
was working in construction in 1974 when he thought up the idea for the band.

In the documentary, he explains that he was unhappy with the state of
rock-and-roll back then, even though he hungered to make it as a musician.
He rejected groups like Emerson, Lake and Palmer because their technically
demanding but bloated compositions were boring to him. And even if he spent
twenty years trying to learn to play a guitar in that style, he could never
succeed. So he came up with the idea of playing a stripped-down kind of
rock-and-roll based on a few chords that also avoided the kind of arty
pretentiousness on display in the mid-1970s.

Although Johnny Ramone was musically adventurous, he was politically
conservative. When the remaining Ramones (Joey had died) are shown
accepting their inauguration into the rock-and-roll hall of fame, Johnny
tells the audience that he wants to thank George W. Bush and America! Punk
magazine reports that Cummings used to enjoy beating up hippies when he
worked in construction.

Joey Ramone was Jewish. His real name was Jeff Hyman and he grew up in
Forest Hills along with other members of the band, who knew each other from
the neighborhood. Like many rock-and-roll musicians, he yearned for the
acceptance on stage that he could never enjoy in high school. Not only was
he physically unsightly, he also suffered from Obsessive Compulsive
Disorder to the extent that he checked himself into a mental asylum when
the symptoms became unbearable. Even after he became a popular artist, he
was never able to shake OCD. As the film about Howard Hughes "The Aviator"
demonstrates, this is a disease that strikes the lowly and the powerful
without discrimination.

Joey Ramone was on the left politically. The film shows him speaking at a
rally for Jerry Brown, who ran for president on a platform similar to
Nader's. Although most Ramones songs are drenched in irony, there are more
than a few that reflect Joey Ramone's politics, including Planet Earth 1988:

the solution to peace isn't clear
the terrorist threat is a modern fear
there are no jobs for the young
they turn to crime and turn to drugs
battle ships crowd the sea
16 year olds in the army
our jails are filled to the max
discrimination against the blacks

Two months after they were accepted into the hall of fame, bassist Dee Dee
Ramone (Doug Colvin), who in addition to Joey wrote most of the band's
songs, died of a heroin overdose. Colvin had little in common
temperamentally with the other band members. The film reveals this ex-male
prostitute as having much more in common with glam rock figures such as
David Bowie than with the image put forward by the band. Indeed, he felt
constricted by the strictly regimented image of the band that included a
virtual uniform of black leather motorcycle jacket, torn jeans and long
hair. Although Dee Dee denies that the song was about him, "53rd and 3rd"
(a street corner that used to be frequented by male hustlers), it certainly
describes an experience that was close to his own:

If you think you can, well come on man
I was a Green Beret in Vietnam
No more of your fairy stories
'Cause I got my other worries

53rd and 3rd Standing on the street
53rd and 3rd I'm tryin' to turn a trick
53rd and 3rd You're the one they never pick
53rd and 3rd Don't it make you feel sick?

Then I took out my razor blade
Then I did what God forbade
Now the cops are after me
But I proved that I'm no sissy

The other founding member of the band was drummer Thomas Erdelyi, who was
born in Budapest but grew up in Forest Hills. When Erdelyi was a classmate
of Johnny Ramone in high school, they formed a band called The Tangerine
Puppets that incorporated a lot of the elements that would surface later in
the Ramones. Erdelyi eventually left the band in 1977 to become a record
producer. In the film, he comes across as the most interesting and
dispassionate commentator on the band's history.

The documentary focuses on two essential conflicts that are at the center
of the band's unhappy life story. The first involved the contradiction
between their critical acclaim as innovators and their failure to sell
records. Although virtually every punk band of any note from the Clash to
the Sex Pistols is on record as saying that without the Ramones, they never
would have been born, the band never was a commercial success. By the 1980s
they were already on the downward spiral. In a kind of scaled down version
of Grateful Dead concerts, they traveled around the country for most of the
last 20 years performing the same songs to diehard fans at smaller clubs
and auditoriums. With their middle-aged jowls, the band members seem
slightly pathetic striking punk rocker poses at the end of their career.

The other major conflict involved Johnny and Joey Ramone, who hated each
other. Although they relied on Johnny's business acumen to keep their
careers going, they resented his authoritarian methods, especially Joey who
had exactly the kind of hippy sensibility that Johnny detested. Even though
this set them apart early on, what really drove a wedge between the two men
was the fact that Johnny stole Joey's girl-friend. Ever the romantic, Joey
felt that he was forever robbed of true love. In the hermetically sealed
world of the rock-and-roll band, such triangles can have a powerfully
corrosive effect. Since Joey Ramone was never up to the task of making it
on his own, he was forced to stick with a band whose leader he reviled.

Although the band never enjoyed commercial success, their tunes are part of
our cultural legacy and can even be heard in the commercials of some of
America's most powerful corporations. An ad for AT&T's wireless service
features the opening to the Ramone's "Blitzkreig Bop": "Hey-ho, let's go."
Needless to say, it does not include the next lyric: "Shoot 'em in the
back, now."

"Metallica: Some Kind of Monster" also details a bitter personality
conflict between two members of a rock-and-roll band. Unlike the Ramones
who learned to play together despite acrimony, Metallica was on the verge
of breaking up until a psychotherapist by the name of Phil Towle came into
help them manage (if not overcome) conflict to the tune of $40,000 per
month. Towle had been employed by professional sports teams in the same
capacity in the past. The film consists of him conducting therapy sessions
with the band during the course of their uphill battle to come up with a
groundbreaking new record.

Like the Ramones, Metallica was held in thrall to their own rigidly defined
artistic self-image. During one particularly nasty confrontation between
Jim Hetfield, the lead singer, and drummer and co-founder Lars Ulrich,
Ulrich kept referring to Hetfield's guitar riffs as "stock." Since the band
operated within metal's strict conventions, this tendency toward stale
repetition would appear ineluctable.

During this period, Hetfield checked himself into rehab for more than six
months to overcome alcoholism. Early clips of Metallica in performance show
Hetfield toasting cheering fans with a glass of beer and inviting them to
get drunk like him. Twenty years of maintaining this kind of public image
on stage takes its toll. Although Hetfield manages (at least temporarily)
to go on the wagon, there are other forms of rebelliousness that he cannot
or will not overcome. He is addicted to fast cars, motorcycles and tattoos.
Now in his middle age and a family man with a young daughter, he struggles
to balance the need to develop and mature as a human being while catering
to the male, adolescent fantasies of his fans.

Lars Ulrich is a much more sophisticated and urbane personality than
Hetfield. Born in Denmark to a professional tennis player who once owned a
jazz club, he collects modern art. A scene in the film depicts him putting
the work up for auction at Sotheby's, including an enormous Basquiat
painting. The sale netted him millions of dollars.

As a careful investor (he explains that the paintings were a kind of
savings account that allowed him to have his cake and eat it too) and
successful entrepreneur (Metallica has sold over 80 million records), one
can easily imagine why he would get into a fight over Napster. Ulrich was
one of the highest profile opponents of free, downloaded music. In
testimony to Congress, Ulrich said, "My band authored the music which is
Napster's lifeblood. We should decide what happens to it, not Napster -- a
company with no rights in our recordings, which never invested a penny in
Metallica's music or had anything to do with its creation. The choice has
been taken away from us."

The film shows Metallica fans smashing their CD's on the ground and vowing
never to buy another.

Perhaps it is just a function of my musical tastes, but I never felt as
engaged with the personalities in the Metallica film as I did with the
Ramones. The psychobabble that dominates the scenes with the
psychotherapist put me off as well, as perhaps they were intended to. The
general picture that emerges is that of a typical bunch of California
narcissist superstars seeking "personal growth" in a narrow careerist vein.
For these rock stars, psychotherapy would fill the same need that
Scientology fills in the lives of Tom Cruise or John Travolta. By contrast,
the Ramones were operating on a deeper level of introspection and
self-awareness. They are also more complex personalities.

In either case, the films yield deeper insights into the rock and roll
business and are well worth watching. In keeping with their respective
commercial fates, the Ramones film is not available in DVD while the
Metallica film is.

Although it is beyond the purview of either film to address the deeper
questions of the social role of punk and metal, they do deserve some
comment. Punk has really had a major impact on American society. In a
profile on Jay Bakker (the son of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker) in
today's NY Times Magazine titled "The Punk-Christian Son of a Preacher
Man," we learn that he has formed something called Revolution Ministries
that caters to troubled youth who feel alienated by traditional churches.
The Times reports:

"Revolution is one of several thousand alternative ministries that have
emerged in the last decade, meeting in warehouses, bars, skate parks, punk
clubs, private homes or other spaces, in a generational rumble to rebrand
the faith outside of what we think of as church. To travel among them is to
feel returned to the alternative-rock scene of 15 years ago, just before
Nirvana and Lollapalooza put it on the map. Instead of criticizing major
record labels, these ministries criticize megachurches; instead of
flattening the status of the rock star, they flatten the status of the
pastor. They cluster in cells rather than in denominations or arenas, and
connect through D.I.Y. zines online. They are a counterculture on two
fronts: at odds with both their secular peers and conventional churches."

So one might ask how punk rock can be deployed on behalf of such a
conservative mission, namely convincing the young drug user or alcoholic
that heaven is their salvation. The answer perhaps can be found partially
in Johnny Ramone's conservative politics and his appetite for beating up
hippies. In a very real sense, the decision to take a radically different
direction from mid-1970s progressive rock implicitly involved a rejection
of the counter-culture that spawned it. The groovy "peace and love"
zeitgeist of the 1970s was replaced by "Blitzkreig Bop" irony and political
nihilism. Despite the obvious political commitment of groups like The
Clash, it would seem that the overwhelming drift of punk rock is against
idealism and against collective action. In this light, the convergence
between the punk rock lifestyle and the skinhead scene is no accident.

Metal would appear to be even one step removed from politics beyond punk.
Groups such as Metallica, Megadeath (started by somebody drummed out of
Metallica), AC-DC et al seem to exist mainly to provide a raw testosterone
injection to their youthful male fans.

This does not prevent its message from being deployed, however, in a
context that is highly political. When the US Marines went into Fallujah,
they played heavy metal music, including AC/DC's "Shoot to Thrill" to
energize themselves:

I'm gonna take you down - down, down, down
So don't you fool around
I'm gonna pull it, pull it, pull the trigger

Shoot to thrill, play to kill
Too many women with too many pills
Shoot to thrill, play to kill
I got my gun at the ready, gonna fire at will

In addition, Iraqi prisoners are forced to listen to heavy metal for hours
on end at high volume as a kind of torture. Apparently Metallica's "Enter
Sandman" is a favorite of the torturers.

The November 21, 2004 St. Petersburg Times Floridian reports:

>>James Hetfield, who co-founded Metallica, said the military hadn't asked
his permission or paid him royalties to blast his band's music in Iraq. But
he's proud, he said, that his tunes are culturally offensive to the Iraqis.
"For me, the lyrics are a form of expression, a freedom to express my
insanity," Hetfield told radio host Terry Gross last week. "If the Iraqis
aren't used to freedom, then I'm glad to be part of their exposure."<<


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org


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