{"id":3622,"date":"2011-12-19T17:19:43","date_gmt":"2011-12-20T01:19:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/?p=3622"},"modified":"2011-12-19T17:47:57","modified_gmt":"2011-12-20T01:47:57","slug":"journals-1994-my-last-ramones-concert","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/2011\/12\/19\/journals-1994-my-last-ramones-concert\/","title":{"rendered":"Journals: My Last Ramones Concert."},"content":{"rendered":"

All this fall, here in 2011, I\u2019ve been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I\u2019m planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 \u201d\u201c 2011<\/em>, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 \u201d\u201c 2011<\/em>, will weigh in at about half a million words, really too long to appear as a print book. It\u2019s maybe five times as long as my new autobiography, Nested Scrolls<\/a><\/em>. Certainly the autobio is more of a shapely book, but I am finding some interesting stuff in the old journals.<\/p>\n

At this point I have rather a lot of unused photos that I wanted to post anyway, so I\u2019m going to mix a couple of them in with journal excerpts from time to time. Today we have an excerpt written in 1994. My last Ramones concert. Even though you\u2019re dead, you\u2019re still my friends.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"
\n\u201cOn My Home Planet,\u201d\u009d by Rudy Rucker, 20 x 24 inches, November, 2011, Oil on canvas. Click for a larger version of the picture.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

It was the Ramones final tour, and on March 9, 1994, I went with my wife and children to see them at the Warfield on Market Street in San Francisco. My son, Rudy, Jr. got thrown out during the first song for stage-diving, which seemed quite unfair, as he\u2019d often stagedived at punk concerts before and everyone had thought it was fine.<\/p>\n

I managed to stay in the pit till almost the end of the main set. Thanks to my fitness I could hang in there pretty long. Although today I like can\u2019t lift my arms, they\u2019re so tired from fending people off. Whenever it would be relatively quiet and I\u2019d be near Joey, I\u2019d yell \u201cMy Back Pages.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The newest Ramone, C.J. the bass-player, is the one who sings that song, though I didn\u2019t actually realize that when I was yelling to Joey. They were off key almost the whole time, but then Joey said, \u201cCheap acid, cheap show,\u201d\u009d and, perhaps in reaction, their playing got better. They did about five more songs and left the stage and people are clapping, and C.J. and Johnny and Marky come out without Joey, and tear into yes \u201cMy Back Pages\u201d\u009d.<\/p>\n

I love the wall-of-sound quality to it. They\u2019re like crucifying this old Dylan-folkie song on the wall of sound. And the words to the song are so great. \u201cBut I was so much older then,\/ I\u2019m younger than that now.\u201d\u009d Too true!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

For this encore, C.J. and Johnny had put on fresh dry t-shirts. C.J.\u2019s T-shirt is like a circle with a picture of the Manhattan skyline. And over that is a big red SS in that lighting-stroke kind of jagged S. And Johnny is wearing a Charlie Manson T-shirt, and draped on either side of Charlie are his crazy woman followers, like Sadie Glutz, and Squeaky Fromme, and the t-shirt says \u201cCharlie\u2019s Angels.\u201d\u009d Squeaky once tried to shoot Jerry Ford with a .45 automatic pistol, she\u2019s still locked up. Charlie Manson and SS, ripping the sweet thoughtful sixties folksong \u201cMy Back Pages\u201d\u009d to frikkin’ shreds.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

It was one of the most awesome multimedia presentations I\u2019ve ever grokked. I went back in the pit, and the wave threw me up near C.J. I had my glasses off so they wouldn\u2019t get clawed off, but then I wanted to put them on to be able to see him, and there was a crowd-surfer over my head, and I was thinking, \u201cI\u2019m busy with my glasses, so just this once I\u2019m not going to reach up and push the guy,\u201d\u009d so of course he falls on my head. But I don\u2019t think it did any lasting damage.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

[You can’t really find a good video of the Ramones doing \u201cMy Back Pages,\u201d\u009d although there is what looks to be an amateur video <\/a>of it, with fairly weak sound, shot in Buenos Aires in 1996. Note again that Joey isn’t on stage for this number and C.J. is singing. But you have to imagine it about ten thousand times louder.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

All this fall, here in 2011, I\u2019ve been busy editing some twenty years of electronic journal files which I\u2019m planning to publish as an ebook called Journals, 1990 \u201d\u201c 2011, from my emerging Transreal Press in the early months of 2012. This book, Journals, 1990 \u201d\u201c 2011, will weigh in at about half a million […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3622"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3635,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3622\/revisions\/3635"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rudyrucker.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}