Sitting in a waiting room, and there's a November issue of Alternative Press: a magazine I might have been ahead of the curve enough to read in August of 1993, but not since.
Pick it up. Don't know them. Flip. Don't know them. Flip. More heroine junkies, more guys leering at the camera and, I don't know, eating poo or something. Flip. Hey, a picture of Mike Ness! I remember seeing Social Distortion and the Ramones together. Sometime around the aforementioned month. I may not know ess about eff in music anymore, but if anyone asks my best show I can say Social D and the Ramones at the Newport and then what the hell can they do but reckanize? Flip. Don't know him. Don't know Mikey Mascara, don't know Pouty Patricia. Flip. Video game reviews. Every magazine has video game reviews now. Flip. Good Charlotte? Cheese and crackers. Flip.
Page 54: Speak of the HeyHo and the HeyHo appears. Johnny Ramone, "In his final interview." The heck? Johnny Ramone's final interview doesn't get a cover blurb? Crap call by the magazine's editors.
Anyway, The interview lays out this documentary that Johnny was/has put together. About Phil Spector pulling out a gun and threatening to blow him away in the middle of an album. And then Dee Dee threatening to stab him, and Johnny basically mocking both of them while they have their weapons drawn. About how after their Spector album didn't cross over, they realize they'll never transcend cult status. And then they're fighting over the band like board members fighting over a company. (What's going to make them money now and keep the band respectable another ten years?) Girlfriends and wives wedging them apart, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria.
Anyways, by the time of this interview Dee Dee Ramone has od'd and died, Joey Ramone has died of lymphatic cancer, and Johnny is dying of some other cancer. And after relating all this, Johnny says, "I can't believe my career. I've been very blessed."
Really? It sure looked like hell.
Well, whatever the blessing of cred is, it seemed to have bloomed again for Mike Ness. Now that everyone's got high hair again and they're pimping their cars out, Mike seems to be coasting along pretty well on his 80s cred, and he seems a hell of a lot more coherent than he was when I saw him outside the Newport. (I told him my last name was Ness too and kept trying to tell me No, it was his.) Good for Mike. May his life career crest for another few years, may he not kill himself with a drug, may God not kill him with cancer, may he continue to have small pictures in magazines.
I hope there's a safety net for old punks, like pornography industry has developed. May the stupidity of youth be videotaped whenever possible, that it might be edited into a DVD format that can supply royalties to families cursed with stupid fathers. God bless any net, anywhere.
POSTSCRIPT: And no cancer for effete network newscasters either.
