guitar buzz invented a whole new style of rock bohemian cool (Mort Sahl famously defined bohemia as "Jews pretending to be Italians," and you could hardly find a livelier illustration than Joey). They may have started out trying to be a real pop band, writing "Blitzkrieg Bop" as a sincere attempt to copy the Bay City Rollers' "Saturday Night," but since they couldn't play well enough to follow other bands' directions, they were forced to rely on their own overstimulated bodily rhythms and came up with the brand-new beat that changed the world.
Something easily overlooked in the grief over Joey's death was that the Ramones were on a roll musically when they called it quits. They got all the lousy albums out of their system in the Eighties, when they must have felt trapped by the road and their own dashed crossover dreams (Animal Boy, Halfway to Sanity, Brain Drain -- gabba, gabba, ugh). But their last few Nineties albums were crushers: 1992's Mondo Bizarro (especially "Tomorrow She Goes Away," the song Sleater-Kinney revamped into their anthem "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone"), 1993's Acid Eaters (fantastic Sixties trash-rock covers, with Joey howling "Have You Ever Seen the Rain?") and 1995's Adios Amigos (a surprisingly rowdy farewell, with the devastating Johnny Thunders tribute "I Love You"). Don't Worry About Me is every bit as great as those final Ramones records, a loving sayonara from this most quintessential of quintessential rock dudes.
The music on Don't Worry About Me is straight late-Ramones-style guitar blare, eleven songs clocking in at just under thirty-five minutes, with producer-guitarist Daniel Rey letting Joey be Joey. (The band also includes Dictators bassist Andy Shernoff, Del-Lords drummer Frank Funaro and special guest drummer Marky Ramone.) Don't Worry kicks off with a convincingly sentimental "What a Wonderful World" (Louis Armstrong's, not Sam Cooke's, but you can't have everything). The new songs are tough and funny, with Joey using his signature stutter-hiccup vocals and unportentous haiku lyrics to nail adult emotions in convincers such as "Spirit in My House," "Venting" and "Like a Drug I Never Did Before." "Searching for Something" is ruggedly folksy acoustic introspection in the style of the Road to Ruin classic "Questioningly." But even better is "Maria Bartiromo,"
