Loco Live Oregon

Loco Live

The Ramones

Sire / Warner Brothers Records, 1991

REVIEW BY: Christopher Thelen

ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED: 04/17/2001

With the death of Joey Ramone this past Sunday, I got tothinking about how my interest in The Ramones began. I wish I couldsay that I had been into them since they first burst onto the scene- but I was only five years old when their self-titled debut albumhit the streets.

Instead, my first full-length Ramones experience came in 1992,when I was sent Loco Live to review as a college journalist. Granted, I hadheard a few Ramones songs by then, but I was hardly an expert intheir genre. (I'm still not, to be quite honest.) Oh, I liked punk- I had developed a healthy appetite for Black Flag, Husker Du andthe Sex Pistols. But I didn't realize that without the Ramones,these bands might never have made it as far as they did.

In all fairness, Loco Live is not the ideal place for a Ramones newbie tostart. It's not that the disc is bad by any means, but what youhear from this show recorded in Barcelona, Spain, is a band whohave had some 15 years to polish and tighten up their material.It's not quite as raw as one might expect.

At times, the boys - Joey, Johnny, C.J. and Marky - sound likethey are so comfortable with this material that they could performit in their sleep. This is not meant to be a criticism of the band,but the way they plow through such classics as "Blitzkrieg Bop,""Beat On The Brat" and "Psycho Therapy," it sometimes feels likethe band wanted to move past the older stuff to get to their morerecent albums at that time. (In a sense, this isn't a fairstatement, since of the 31 tracks - not including the sample of"The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly" that opens the show - eight ofthem come from Ramones.)