The kitchen boombox moves to the living room

This was supposed to be a photograph of a quick, delicious salmon dish. But Sunday Marion and I started painting the living room. We’re moving this spring and had to return the living room to a more landlord-friendly off-white [see the wall behind the boombox] from its lovely deep coral [see the wall behind the brandy bottle from an earlier post]. So instead of salmon, today I’m going to serve up some music as the main course, with a side of painting antics.

Let’s start with the antics. Sunday is normally the day I cook and photograph the week’s upcoming post. Instead, we spent the morning moving a couch and a loveseat, three side tables, an old flea market find kitchen table that is our computer desk, various lamps, three paintings [one of them 6′ x 8′ and another 5′ x 7′], a rug and a mountain of family photos, tschotskes and vintage cameras. Oh, and about a bazillion little jingly cat toys discovered under the couch and loveseat. Oh, and a beautiful but monstrously heavy piece of decorative terra cotta from some long ago demolished St. Louis building.

Sunday afternoon, Marion took on the umpteen other things that needed accomplishing around the apartment and out in the world, and I started painting. With the first few brush strokes, I could see this was going to be a two-coat job. Two coats in our 12′ x 19′ living room. With two built-in shelving nooks. And five windows, one door and miles of baseboard to tape around. And a radiator to work around. Yep, this was going to be fun.

The right tools. I actually don’t mind painting. It’s sometimes tedious, but it’s brainlessly easy—and you can see the progress as it unfolds. The room changes, sometimes dramatically, right before your eyes. But you need the right tools. A decent brush and roller can make your life easier, but the essential tool for me to make the job go well is good music. Enter the kitchen boombox.

First, a word about the boombox. The paint job isn’t mine—I inherited it this way from my younger daughter. She might say appropriated, but let’s not quibble. The paint job was probably the result of one or more rainy Saturdays a few years ago.

Now, then, what was on the boombox? I started with some Mozart, symphonies 21 and 23, recorded by the Vienna Philharmonic, with James Levine conducting. Music like this makes me feel all domestic and homey and eases me into a big undertaking like this. Then I eased into some Dexter Gordon, his “Take the A Train” disk. More jazz followed, getting progressively more avant garde to keep me motivated. But finally, the jazz wasn’t working. I was bored and facing hours of painting. It was time for the big guns: The Ramones.

I mentioned a few posts back that I came to punk rock late. As a result, the Ramones were just one more band whose music I vaguely knew from the radio. I didn’t know they were the punk band—the one that started it all. That changed last year, when the movie “End of the Century—The Story of the Ramones” came out. Here were members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols saying that the music of the Ramones was why they could even exist. When the Ramones exploded on the New York music scene in the mid-seventies, they changed everything. The music was fast and loud and raw. The two and a half hour documentary is not always easy to watch—their struggles with drugs, jealousy and even Joey Ramone’s obsessive compulsive behavior make it all the more amazing that they kept up a rigorous touring schedule for more than 20 years. And sadly, as with so many revolutionary new ideas, they barely eked out a living doing so, even as they paved the way for success for later bands. In Europe, they would fill huge music halls. In South America, they would sell out soccer stadiums. But here at home, they could barely fill CBGB’s. And they constantly struggled to sell albums.

But the concert footage in the film immediately shows why they were so shockingly different, so important. The energy, intensity and speed sweep you away. The final chord of one song is still echoing as the drummer screams out, “ONETWOTHREEFOUR!” and launches them into the next. It was that raw power that sent me looking for a live recording—precisely because that raw power was missing from the meticulously recorded studio albums with their carefully articulated lyrics.

I found it in “It’s Alive.” Recorded live in London on New Year’s Eve 1977, it blasts through 28 songs in under 54 minutes. In the film, a band member actually brags to another band about shaving several minutes off their set. It’s not that they were trying to get it over with, but that breakneck speed was a vital element of what they were doing.

Also as happens with revolutionary ideas, others adopt, adapt and appropriate those ideas. Which means they end up no longer sounding so revolutionary. Oh, but they were. The Ramones were as important to the shape of rock music as Elvis. As important as the British invasion. This album proves it.

The living room is now done, by the way, and it looks great. I painted ’til midnight Sunday and then three more hours Monday night. The boombox kept me company the whole time, with more jazz, Willie Dixon’s “I Am The Blues” and other wonderful CDs. But when a disk would end, the boombox in my head kept coming back to the Ramones.