The Ramones Tribute Concert

Last night I went to a Ramones tribute concert at Mojo 13 in Wilmington, DE. Frank's brother Larry was playing bass guitar in The Havana Affair (that's a band, silly!). It was really good! The waiting for two hours for it to start drove me nuts (even in the small-time, musicians are not punctual), but the actually playing was good.

Larry had the best part. Some background: Larry never has a mike, never sings. He had a mike last night, which made me ask, "Mike, why do you have that ... I mean, Larry, why do you have that mike?" (Yeah, I'm not always smooth.) Larry said into the mike, "It's purely for decoration. But, after the band started, I found out why: Larry had Dee Dee's role of saying "1-2-3-4" in the very brief interlude between songs. It was great! The funny part was that he told us, in practice, the drummer got screwed up because he thought that was the actual tempo. Nope, it's a countoff that has nothing to do with the tempo. (Kind of like Dad's bandmate in Destiny Bill's countoff--I didn't realize one of his influences was the Ramones.)

I thought I knew Ramones songs, but they didn't play any I knew. Originally, the tribute concert was supposed to be 10 bands, so I think no one wanted to play the huge hits because everyone would play them. Since it ended up being only two bands, I didn't get to sing along with "I wanna be sedated", "Rock'n' Roll High School", "Blitzkrieg Bop", and others. The two bands played 14 songs total, so total playing time was maybe 20 minutes. The audience included a wide age range--from early 20s to late 50s. There were two Ramones shirts and one CBGB shirt in the crowd.

While we waited nearly 2 hours for the bands to start playing (at least we arrived before the cover was imposed), I saw someone walk past and I thought, why is that guy wearing a horrible wig? Then, I realized it was Joey Ramone! Mighty Joe Castro (the lead guitarist in the Havana Affair) said, "It's not every day you get to see Joey Ramone." "Joey Ramone" was in the first band, which played the four Ramones songs they knew.

There was a third band last night too. They had an acoustic guitar and a Little Tykes xylophone. It was approaching midnight, so we didn't stick around to hear what they were playing. I can't imagine that they would be playing Ramones songs.