Motörhead and the Ramones

Joey called me on the phone

The other day I was in a meeting, which meant I was bored, so I tried to figure out what was the greatest tribute song of all time. There are a whole hell of a lot of tribute songs, so I set my limitations: it had to be a tribute to a musician, a work of honest and sincere love. For the next hour, while I contributed absolutely nothing to the conversation, I came down to two final contenders: “You Can’t Do That” by Harry Nilsson, and “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.” by Motörhead.

“You Can’t Do That” is a technical marvel, Harry Nilsson showboating his songwriting skills and impossible singing voice by snatching bits of Beatles song after Beatles song, flipping lyrics and melodies, basically tapdancing across a tightrope between worshipping his masters and proving he could do it just as well as they could. It’s an incredible feat, but as a tribute, it rings a bit hollow. You can’t tell someone you love them and then hand them a business card. But Nilsson’s gambit worked—he was let into the Beatles’ inner circle. And everybody knows how that turned out (Pussycats is an all-timer, but no one can ever say whether any work of art is worth the human cost. It’s an absurd question to ask, and an impossible one to answer. It’s heartbreaking to hear those pristine vocal cords rupture, and absolutely beautiful too.)

So yeah, “R.A.M.O.N.E.S” it is. And my God, that song is a beast. It’s a tribute song in the truest sense, a pure work of honest and sincere fanboy gushing. Lemmy and company take everything great about the Ramones and deliver in the way only Motörhead can, not so much aping the Ramones’ style as embodying it, without shedding any of their own identity. It absolutely rips from beginning to end, the lyrics are perfect, and their enthusiasm is so real and genuine you can’t help but scream along. If the Ramones had a cartoon superhero tv show, this would be the theme song.

And the Ramones deserve it. Of all the bands I loved growing up, the Ramones are the only ones that haven’t aged at all for me. I mean that. From the first moment I heard them, I loved them, and I loved them even more when I realized, after three guitar lessons, I could play every song they ever wrote. The freedom of this was shocking. It was like I’d been given the secret key to Everything, walking into the great lucid garden of art and beauty and goodness and all the joy there ever was to find. It was the first time I understood I could actually do this stuff. Just, you know, put your fingers like this and strum. Doesn’t matter if you have any talent. Practice like a psycho, but yeah, you got it.

I guess it’s that freedom that makes “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.” such a blast. The freedom to play as simply as possible, to write lyrics about The Twilight Zone, about your city, about how awesome it is to be alive for all this great music, even if being alive sucks about half the time. And it’s a song only Motörhead, a god-like band of brutal simplicity and monstrous hooks, could write. A band that found their zone and stuck to it, much like the Ramones, even dabbling in drum machines (as the Ramones did on Subterranean Jungle three years earlier) for the antiauthoritarian ripper Orgasmatron, in which Lemmy posits music as the only worthwhile religion. True believers and true doubters are the only ones capable of great art anyway. And I have a deep love and respect for artists that do one thing perfectly, and do that one thing over and over again. Like Patrick Modiano, or Jim Thompson or early Jean Rhys. To find infinite variations in the formula, hitting the repetitions in theme and style so hard any change feels monumental, chasmic, a rupture. Explode yourself right into the sublime.

As Lemmy himself once said, “Rock and roll is supposed to bring you crazed joy and rebellion for no apparent reason.” That’s about as clear an ethos as you can get. In Charles Portis’ novel Gringos, a character defines art as “spiritualized artifacts.” That’ how I feel about “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.” This is sacred stuff. As the song says, “Good music save your soul.” The holy is always hollering somewhere, even in the brash ugliness of the guitar, the snarl, the drums at nine hundred miles an hour. Or even if that doesn’t matter and I’m completely wrong about everything, it’s still a hell of a tune. Misfits, twilight zone. R.A.M.O.N.E.S. the RAMONES.

P.S. It would be a mistake not to mention that the Ramones regularly covered their own tribute song. Here are two versions, first one with Joey singing, and the second with DeeDee’s replacement C.J. on lead, with Lemmy coming in on backing vocals, from the Ramones’ final concert.

They both rule.