Johnny Ramone died soon after Ronald Reagon. Many people find it odd, even ironic, that a punk musician like Ramone looked up to Reagan and shared his conservative politics. From A year’s end goodbye: Johnny and the Gipper:
Yet it wasn’t only political beliefs that Johnny Ramone had in common with Reagan. Each played a central role in a major movement once considered on the fringe.
Every movement needs a founding myth — not myth as in a belief in fantastical stories, but as in an easily retold narrative that tells us how we got where we are today, helping us make sense of the current situation. Interestingly, the oft-retold narratives of punk rock and the modern conservative movement follow a somewhat parallel story line. They go like this.
First, there is the Fall from Grace.
The Old Republic, choked by FDR’s odious New Deal, gives way to a decades-long left-liberal dominance in politics. Conservatives who advocate limited government are derided as anachronistic survivors of a time that we’re better to have left behind.
Rock ‘n’ roll, the first art form centered on youth, grows old and sclerotic by the 1970s. The chaotic excitement of The Blackboard Jungle gives way to the self-destructive decadence of Woodstock and Altamont; where there was once Buddy Holly, there was now Emerson, Lake, and Palmer.
Though darkness descends, a remnant of true believers thrives.
Amidst a hostile political atmosphere and an ascendant welfare state, a small reduct of conservative intellectuals and activists keep the flame of freedom alive. But they’re few and dismissed by “respectable” opinion; Barry Goldwater was written off as a dangerous warmonger.
In an area marked by rock-opera excess and singer-songwriter smarminess, a few groups — the Stooges, New York Dolls, and Dictators — quixotically cling to the idea that rock is supposed to be about fun and danger and not about some higher purpose. Yet they remain confined to a few dingy clubs.
Redemption. The remnant finds a champion and finally fights back against the forces of darkness.
In 1976, conservatives, smarting from the Nixon years of wage and price controls and government expansion — Amtrak, EPA — unite behind a new champion, a California governor willing to challenge his own party’s sitting president. Ronald Reagan’s efforts fails that year, but four years later, he realizes the goal that was so out of reach for Barry Goldwater — the White House.
That same year, the Ramones release their eponymous first album, giving the back-to-basics rock ‘n’ roll revival — dubbed “punk” around this time, thanks to Punk, the magazine that chronicled it — a new flag to rally around. Ramones was unlike any else that had come before it. No one played as fast or wrote (complete!) songs as short. And no album since has inspired so many people to start their own bands, launching an entire movement.
And, finally, a look back in appreciation.
Once derided as a right-wing nut, Ronald Reagan lived to see the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union — two things his detractors said couldn’t happen. He received a hero’s goodbye from the country he loved, and even old adversaries paid him tribute.
After a career of incessant touring, commercial frustration, and various indignities — an early gig opening for Johnny Winter resulted in the band being pelted with garbage — the Ramones went out on top of the world, with a guest star-studded final concert, induction into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame, and a critically acclaimed film documentary of their career.