About halfway through “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones,” journalist Legs McNeil asks why the Ramones didn’t have big hits. The achievement of the film is that it makes you wonder the same thing and provides an answer.
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Drugs and sex are part of the story, sure. Aren’t they always? But how many bands have coped with the rancor that developed when one member swiped another member’s girlfriend and both had to take the stage nightly to perform a song about it all. On top of that, as one-time manager Danny Fields succinctly puts it, “They were all trouble.”
Unlike the recent “Metallica: Some Kind of Monster,” which viewed the band from the perspective of an outsider, “End of the Century” takes a fan-based approach, one that assumes you’re only watching if you already like the Ramones. This approach works fine in the band’s early years, when the Clash and Sex Pistols idolized them, before “they screwed things up for us,” as Joey Ramone puts it, by surpassing the Ramones in popularity.
The fan’s approach doesn’t work as well when the cast of characters gets huge. Several Ramones quit, to be replaced by new members, and these Ramoney-come-latelys aren’t as interesting or integral to the band’s story.
And, because the filmmakers are fans, they let troubled Dee Dee Ramone, for instance, get away with vagaries and evasions that blunt the impact of his sad story. (He died of an overdose two months after shooting interviews for the film.) Johnny Ramone died earlier this month.
There is a sense that, despite their catchy, poppy songs, the Ramones did not hit it big because internal issues made them come off as unprofessional and because they were always around.
For years, the Ramones seemed like the band that would take off after the press and the public were finished raving about another band (Blondie, the Clash, Nirvana, even), but then a new act would always show up to drop the Ramones down a notch, and, eventually, they seemed retro, even though they were making vital new music.
That, it seems, was their undoing: They were punk before punk was cool, but also after it was.