At last count, there are at least 50-odd musicians and industry figures assembling for Face The Music's tenth anniversary - including living punk legend Marky Ramone. Although not in the first line-up, Marc Bell is the last living Ramone from the band's heyday, replacing original drummer Tommy Erdelyi in '78 and spending a collective 15 years with the outfit - helping create a solid chunk of the Ramones' songbook. Although at the time he wasn’t sure that many people would hear it.
"The first song I recorded was I Wanna Be Sedated. I didn't think at the time, because of the lyrics - 'I wanna be se-dated' - it was gonna be radio friendly. Because of the connotations - the drugs, alcohol - and I don't think DJs wanted to play that because, you know, they didn't want mothers writing in saying, 'It's a bad influence on our youth'. But then, that's why they didn't play Blitzkrieg Bop, because of the lyrics, 'cause, 'Shoot 'em in the back now,' you know what I mean. It was pretty, at the time, a pretty violent song."
Regardless of the mainstream’s reservations at the time, in 2017 The Ramones — hunched over low-slung instruments in torn jeans and leather jackets, unleashing relentless four-time fury — are an unshakeable pillar in the punk pantheon. Undoubtedly there are more people running around wearing shirts stamped with the band’s iconic alt-Presidential Seal than there ever were before they split in ‘96. As Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg, Bell's maintaining the flame - as well as the exhaustive tour schedule. "I try to do at least 75 to 80 shows a year," tells Bell. Just in the last few years he's played stadiums in the States, Asia, just about every country in central Europe and South America. "Rock In Rio was crazy - that was 225,000 people. I played there and you couldn't see the end of the crowd, you couldn't see the end of it. That was very overwhelming. I liked it, but when I got off the stage I was kinda relieved, you know.”
As a Rock And Roll Hall Of Famer with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, Bell's picked up a few accolades here and there. But if there's a real testament to the Ramones' continued appeal it's that four decades on, tracks like Blitzkrieg Bop and Bad Brain can draw a crowd with a vanishing point. "They coulda walked away," laughs the drummer. "There was more room for another 200,000 people. I played in the day. The people that came in the day came to see my band and I think two others, but at night there was about 400-450,000 people."
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It's got to be a rush playing to the population of a small city, but Bell admits it lacks a certain connection, which is why for his Australian tour he's getting back to band rooms. "I been playing these huge, huge places and I wanna get back to venues. I wanna get back to eight, nine-hundred, a thousand, twelve-hundred people. I mean it's nice to play the big places, but after a while, you wanna just," Bell sighs, "how can you say? You wanna have a different contact. You learn different things from different venues, so I already learnt what I had to learn. But in a venue there's more of an intimacy, which I like. The big places, you know, you really just end up staring at one thing because it's so overwhelming. You know you're playing so fast, that you just don't want anything to really break your concentration. So you stare at the clock on the wall and the next thing you know the whole set is over, and then you go back to the hotel but even then you gotta play in front of 30, 40,000 people again. So that's what it was like on that whole European tour and China. And it's great to be playing places like venues again."
On what it is that continues to draw new fans to The Ramones' work through the years, Bell says, "I think the lyrical content and the energy that the band had, and still has on record and video, appeals to youth. So that's why you're always getting a new Ramone generation. And to me, I feel the songs are too good not to be played the proper way, and that's how I'm doing it. I do 36, 37 songs nonstop and that's the way I wanna do it. I don't wanna talk, I don't wanna do anything - I just wanna play the music and then at the end thank the audience.”
