I Don't Wanna Grow Up

Johnny Ramone, who spent his life dressed as a snot-nosed kid in a black leather jacket, has died of an old man's disease, prostate cancer. He was 55.


This is the third Ramone to drop dead in the past three years. Joey's death from lymphoma was Grandly Tragic; everyone who loved the Ramones was sad, and everyone paid tribute to him, and kids rode the albeit brief nostalgia wave to rediscover one of the great American bands. Dee Dee's overdose and death in 2002 was gratuitous and offensive, an act of nihilism that a man his age should have learned to grow beyond.


Today, I just feel empty and sad, for a fellow man's struggle against the grind that wears and wears and beats you down. I can't help feeling like maybe the struggle was doomed. The Ramones were gloriously, obstinately Rock n'Roll, a purity of three-chord-three-minute mojo that many have imitated but few have loved as truly. They battled for twenty years to conquer the Rock world, and could not do it. They inspired thousands, became underground icons, but moved the mainstream hardly at all.


I don't know where I'm going with this, except to say that something sucks about the fact that John Cummings slaved for years and years so that Kurt Cobain could feel bad about himself and become a sacrifice to an ideal ill-defined and breathtakingly juvenile. Somehow the simplicity that the Ramones cherished got turned into a scream at a wall. Maybe that was inevitable, given the times, maybe it's even a healthy forum for the venting of frustrations that otherwise cause the streets to bleed.


I can't tell you, other than I'm utterly frustrated with people's foolishness, and with my own. The longing of the soul for freedom and power, demonstrated so aptly in any Ramones song, seems at once necessary and laughably futile. All that we have, all that we build, one way or another, we eventually lose.


What do we gain?