Saturday, February 9, 2019

Missing Joey More than Ever Now

A major news story in these here United States is Chief Justice Roberts' surprise vote blocking a Louisiana law that would restrict abortion clinics. Predictably, Susan Collins was wrong about Barty the Boofer, proving how useless she is.

Anyway, that's not what I was going to post about... poking around the t00bz, I found a reference to a performance by Joey Ramone at a 1993 pro-choice benefit, fronting a pickup supergroup called The Resistance (Joan Jett put in an appearance playing guitar). The band played mainly covers,
from John Lennon to Sam Cooke to, in a case of foreshadowing, Louis Armstrong. I found an audio recording of the performance, which is wonderful:





Longtime readers will know that I have been a huge Ramones fan since I was a child, and it's nice to know that, while he played a cartoon lunatic delinquent in his band persona, Joey Ramone was a sensitive, articulate liberal. His monologue at the beginning of this performance is a testimony to his values, to his humane nature. We lost Joey to lymphoma on 4/15/2001, a loss which I took pretty hard (my brother Sweetums and I were returning to NYC from Easter at mom's house in Virginia, and when we heard the news on the radio, we blasted All the Stuff and More all the way home, singing along with tears in our eyes). Looking back, it was a loss for all of America. We could use more voices like Joey's, and I'm not just talking about his Queens-accented sorta-bleat/kinda-croon.

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