It's the stuff of rock-and-roll mythology: Four misfits from the neighborhood get together and form a band, create a new look and sound, become rich and famous, and live happily ever after!

Actually, that's some other band. As we find out in the excellent End of the Century, the Ramones' story is somewhat more hard-scrabble than that.

While the band looked like a Bronx street gang, they were actually from Forest Hills, Queens, a conservative, middle-class nabe which, as they candidly admit, wasn't a cool place to be in the early 1970s.

Dee-Dee was a one-time hustler who sniffed glue, Johnny was a delinquent who quit college after one week ("I didn't like it"), and Joey was the neighborhood freak who was terribly shy and suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But they all liked Iggy Pop and the Stooges and the MC5 (Note: for more on the latter, see The MC5: A True Testimonial) and for the time and place, that was a powerful cultural bond.

Since Johnny had no use for Joey, there might not have been a Ramones except for the vision of Tommy, the band's long-time producer and, by accident, its first drummer.

Tommy convinced Johnny, the band's de facto leader, that Joey would look good between him and Dee-Dee.

In its own funny way, it worked.

From their first public show on Aug. 16, 1974, before about 10 people at CBGB's in the Bowery, it was clear the band had something.

Michael Gramaglia and Jim Fields do a bang-up job of capturing the excitement of the early Ramones, as well as putting them in cultural context (remember Marie and Donny Osmond, the anti-Ramones, were big on TV back then).

Their first album came out in 1976, the self-titled The Ramones. It's no small irony that while they were welcomed as conquering heroes in England in the summer of 1976, they had problems getting decent gigs Stateside.

It was observed, however, that whereever they played, bands would sprout up afterward. In that sense, they were the Johnny Appleseeds of DIY music.

At one legendary show at the Roundhouse in England, members of nascent bands like the Clash and Sex Pistols who failed to score tickets threw rocks at the Ramones' dressing room window, begging to be let in. The Ramones helped lift them up and in through the window. All concerned describe it as a classic punk rock moment. (For more on this, read: Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk).

In 1977, punk was blaring over the covers of  the international music press as the Sex Pistols burst onto the scene. They eclipsed the trailblazers in notoriety -- and made a pretty damned good record themselves, Never Mind The Bollocks. One could arguably see this as the difference between starting a wave and catching one in the great ocean of pop culture.

The Svengali behind the Pistols, however, was Malcom McLaren. He had also managed the New York Dolls, another band who influenced the Ramones.

While the Ramones continued to put out their best albums (Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, Road to Ruin) through this period, major commercial success just wasn't there for them. While it wasn't directly explored in the film, maybe if they'd had a media-savvy manager like McLaren ... maybe, if, maybe.

They swung for the fence with 1980's End of the Century, produced by the pistol-packing Phil Spector. The brilliant producer they admired turned out to be a madman and perfectionist monster to work with. At one point, Johnny was prepared to walk out and said he dared Spector to shoot him (Spector made them all stay in his house during the record; he liked guns).

But it failed. To me, it was a weak album; it wasn't Ramones fish and it wasn't radio fowl -- it was just foul. In in the film, the Ramones admitted it wasn't a great record. Even worse, however, was the realization that they were never going to make it really big. As a grim-faced Johnny told the camera: "This is your station in life. Get used to it."

Band life, band strife

Towards the end of the film, Dee-Dee has this understated insight: "It's hard to be in a band."

Tommy quit after three years because, as he puts it: "I was losing my mind."

Danny Fields, the band's first manager, recalled how the van would be ready to go. But Joey, who would be about to leave the house, would have to run back in "because he didn't step on every second step or whatever," he said, rolling his eyes.

Johnny stole away Joey's girlfriend -- something which Joey neither forgot nor forgave. Besides that, the two were polar opposites politically: Johnny said he was a conservative from the age of 10 ("God Bless America and God Bless President Bush" were his final words at the Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony in 2002) while Joey was very liberal.

Dee-Dee once lunged at Johnny with a knife for having the temerity to trash-talk his junkie hooker girlfriend.

Marky Ramone replaced Tommy as drummer, but was fired in 1983 over his drinking. He rejoined in 1987 after drummer Richie Ramone quit in a snit over being cut out of t-shirt revenue. Upon his return, Marky was pissed to find Joey was still pissed at Johnny over the girlfriend thing.

Dee-Dee, the band's main songwriter, left in 1989 to reinvent himself as rapper Dee-Dee King -- and in the process made one of the most excreable albums in history, along with one of the most hilariously bad videos.

"I don't know how to rap ... I'm not a negro!" he admits in the film.*

* Addendum: Here's a YouTube clip with that quote and some of his rapping.

He was replaced on bass by CJ Ramone, a young ex-Marine. But he still wrote some songs for the band.

At one point in a road trip, CJ asked Joey why he didn't give himself some time off, as he was obviously very ill. Johnny told him to shut up and stay the f*** out of it.

CJ observed the way the Ramones kept doing it was by keeping doing it; just put one foot ahead of the other, get on stage and let those instincts take over. One of their 1980s albums is entitled Too Tough To Die -- recorded after Johnny got his skull broken in a street fight (something not mentioned in the film).

In some ways, that would have been an even better title for this film.

Denouement

The Ramones thought the grunge movement of the early 1990s might revitalize interest in them in the U.S. No such luck.

They stayed true to their original image and sound. Rob Zombie said in the film when you went to see them, "you'd wonder what fuckin' year it was."

While they would play small clubs in the U.S., they'd be playing 30,000-seat stadiums in South America. The fate of prophets in their own land, I suppose.

They played a final show in Hollywood in 1996. You can tell a lot by closely watching the concert footage over the course of the film -- you can see the energy level drop as the band aged and it became more of a job and less of a dream. But for one glorious final starburst, it was there for the Hollywood show. For Johnny, however, when it was over, it was over. Asked if he shook hands with everyone, he said no.

The band members started dying off a few years ago, proving that 1984 album title wrong. Joey died in 2001 of lymphoma. Dee-Dee died of a heroin overdose a few months after the band's 2002 induction into the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame. Johnny died in September of prostate cancer.

As a long-time fan of the band, I found it to be a fascinating and largely complete look at them. For me, as an Edmonton teenager, the mid-1970s were a dead period in pop culture. When I heard my first Ramones song (Cretin Hop, from Rocket to Russia), it exploded in my head like a bomb.

This movie reminds me why I loved their early music but also makes me understand why I drifted away from them. And it gives me an insightful glimpse into the human beings behind the personas.

Go see it.

Additional notes:

For a cinematic version of a punk band on the verge of imploding, I can highly recommend Bruce MacDonald's Hardcore Logo -- although some might not. :)

A related film is 24 Hour Party People, a look at the life and times of impressario Tony Wilson, Factory Records and the "Madchester" scene (Joy Division, New Order, Happy Mondays), stretching from the birth of punk through to the death of acid. This is one of my favourite movies from 2002.

For documentaries, check out The Filth and the Fury, which looks at the Sex Pistols, or The Decline of Western Civilization, which primarily looks at the L.A. punk scene circa 1980.

The Mayor of the Sunset Strip is about LA deejay Rodney Bingenheimer, a scenester and influential arbiter of taste who could be likened to a California John Peel. The film captures Rodney in the twilight of his hipness and is bittersweet for that reason. It also teaches some sad lessons about family dynamics. Personally, I thought it was a terrific film. Some have billed it as a study of celebrity; I think it's more about how one man found his tribe, and it was among creative people -- often from lousy family backgrounds similar to his -- who went on to become famous. As a note, Bingenheimer makes an appearance in End of the Century to add some background on the Spector ordeal.

It's more of a new wave concert documentary than a punk one, but check out Urgh, a Music War. It's out of print now, but I know Queen City Video in Toronto has a copy. X, one of my favourite bands from that period, does an absolutely smoking version of their Beyond and Back.

If you know of any interesting films/books/websites/whatever/ that relates to this subject matter, please leave a note below.