Ramones-It's Alive 1974-1996
One band, two discs, 123 songs...1-2-3=4!
2004's shocking yet compelling End Of The Century told the Ramones' story, rock-doc-style, as one of failure, despondency and lovetriangle bitterness. It's Alive... serves up а happier narrative: five straight hours of chronologically ordered, unremittingly асе live footage. Debuting at CBGB in September '74, they're nohopers, with Joey mincing around in leathers like а codDoll, and ultimately falling off the stage. By June '77, they're blowing the same place apart, and pretty much everywhere else they visit, including London's Rainbow (14 cuts from New Year's Eve '77 - the It's Alive double-album show).
It's testament to their ability to generate electricity that the sparks fly highest in а German N studio (11 tunes from Musikladen). Performances from the mid-'80s onwards are stony-faced, but, internal friction notwithstanding, given а partisan crowd, as at Argentina's River Plate Stadium in '96, they remain unstoppably powerful. The tragedy sinks in only after you've switched off: had heroin and cancer not intervened, the Ramones would've ruled supreme in these reunion-friendly days.
Andrew Perry
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