Word: rockers
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Singer Joey to TIME'S John Buckman. "It's no joke, no novelty act. We're not clowns." The nice thing about the Ramones is that one can take them seriously and have a good laugh at the same time. Tunes like Sheena Is a Punk Rocker and Rockaway Beach are feckless, speedy japes that play fast and loose with rock styles and traditions even as they pay tribute to them. Onstage, the boys look like aging incorrigibles, the bottom four students in the remedial class at vocational high school. They play with headlong, madcap and deliberately...
...Wall is a lavish, four-sided dredge job on the angst of the successful rocker, his flirtations with suicide and losing bouts with self-pity, his assorted betrayals by parents, teachers and wives and his uneasy relationship with his audience, which is alternately exhorted, cajoled and mocked. None of the dynamic exaltation of the Who and their fans for the Pinkies. To Waters, the audience is just another barrier, another obstacle to his exquisitely indelicate communion with his inner being. "So ya/ Thought ya/ Might like to go to the show," he sneers at some hapless...
...SCENARIO is almost too obvious: record executives hear the energy-packed Alive on Arrivaland construct the plastic formula enabling Forbert to become the Barry Manilow of the street-punk-rocker crowd. Alive on Arrival is an uncut gem. Unfortunately the attempted refinement of Jack Rabbit Slimmarred the original stone. Maybe next time Steve Forbert can restore...