Pitchfork

The tale of the Ramones is as sad as it is weird. Four guys from down-and-out Queens adopted a common surname and the same juvenile delinquent uniforms as they blasted short, simple, sublime pop songs from cramped stages. Eventually some of the brothers-in-arms became bitter enemies. When Johnny stole his girl, Joey didn't fight him at the lockers, but wrote "The KKK Took My Baby Away". Therein lies a large part of the Ramones' charm: they made rock music with bored kids in mind, with short-attention-span song lengths, blunt guitar riffs, and unsophisticated lyrics. The band was self-aware, sure, but the Ramones always seemed genuinely invested in what might seem like the shallowest eddies of pop culture. In the process, they tapped the essence of rock music in its purest form.

Unfortunately, the movement the Ramones helped to jumpstart quickly got away from them, turning their practiced naivete into impractical nihilism. Their desperate hopes for mainstream popularity, which showed through in their professionalism and dogged work ethic, were dashed when the Sex Pistols made the new style a four-letter word. Instead of taking over the airwaves, they became a cult band, but always seemed too big for such a diminutive label. As their contemporaries imploded or exploded, the Ramones maintained a surprisingly consistent pace, continuously putting out albums but refusing to expand their sound too far beyond the template they established on their self-titled debut. The Ramones were the anti-Beatles: they resisted musical growth and maturation, and we're all the better for it.

Collecting 85 songs from 20 years, Weird Tales of the Ramones, which Johnny helped to curate, reveals just how little the Ramones' sound changed and just how little that mattered. Every song, from the first track ("Blitzkrieg Bop") through the last ("R.A.M.O.N.E.S."), shares the same basic elements: sharp, fast guitar riffs; punchy momentum; driving tempos; and handclaps or sha-la-las or some other nod to pre-album rock pop music. The Ramones' aesthetic has become such common currency, though, that it's easy to forget how raw they could sound, how tough and tender, how just a handful of elements could be recast in infinite variations.

If they were reluctant to evolve their sound, the Ramones constantly tested its flexibility. Phil Spector gives "Do You Remember Rock and Roll Radio?" the wall-of-sound treatment, and "Rock and Roll High School" is basically a revved-up Beach Boys song. In the 1990s, they covered Tom Waits ("I Don't Want to Grow Up"), the Who ("Substitute"), the Amboy Dukes ("Journey to the Center of the Mind"), and Love ("7 and 7 Is"), but best of all is their webslingin' version of the original "Spider-Man" theme, which originally appeared on the 1995 compilation Saturday Morning: Cartoons' Greatest Hits.

Like most box sets these days, Weird Tales is a multimedia package. A DVD contains all of their videos, most of them embedded in a 1990 program that includes short interviews with contemporaries (Debbie Harry, Tina Weymouth) and fans (former New York Yankees pitcher Dave Righetti, who doesn't seem to get the band). Most of the videos are just silly enough to fit with the Ramones' particular aesthetic, although "Something to Believe In" is a hilarious parody of stuffy mid-80s USA for Africa

self-seriousness.

But this box set's real attraction, aside from the music, is the packaging, which includes a thick comic book inked by several artists including Mary Fleener (Life of the Party), Bill Griffith (Zippy the Pinhead), John Holmstrom (two Ramones album covers), and Sergio Aragones, whose work in Mad magazine was influential to the Ramones specifically and to early New York punk in general. Despite the reliance on the questionable narrative that the Ramones destroyed synthetic disco and bloated arena rock (which is truer as a personal listener reaction than as rock history), the comics avoid self-serving remembrances by fawning devotees and fussy rock-critic exegeses that often sanitize subversive artists. These strips are informative, imaginative, and-- oh yeah-- pretty damn funny. Moreover, this art form is the inky equivalent of the Ramones' music and image-- their scuffed Chucks, ripped jeans, Mickey Mouse t-shirts, and outlandish haircuts-- and reinforces their aura of permanent adolescence.

This sort of inspired cleverness keeps Weird Tales from eulogizing the Ramones or, worse, explaining away their mighty mysteries. And perhaps their lack of mainstream success during their lifetimes ensured a larger and posthumous triumph: in the thirty years since their debut, several generations of listeners have connected with their music in a very personal way without the interference of institutionalized nostalgia. Weird Tales makes it possible for future generations of pinheads, dropouts, glue-sniffers, brats, cretins, mama's boys, and punk-punk-punk rockers to discover the Ramones as if for the very first time. Gabba gabba hey!