Acid Eaters

You can knock the Ramones for a number of things (lying about being brothers, letting Dee Dee quit, inspiring Rancid), but what you can’t deny punk rock’s most revered foursome is their ability to execute excellent covers. Da Bruddahs, as no one has liked to call them since 1992, were pretty sharp when it came to picking other artist’s songs to feed into their giant, leather-jacketed meat grinder. They transformed dippy beach anthem “California Sun” into a crushing wave of rock, made “Palisades Park” a moshable delight, and re-imagined “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” as the leanest slice of alienation this side of Paul Westerberg. Oh, and that version of the “Spider-Man” theme at the end of ¡Adios Amigos! is without question humankind’s greatest accomplishment of the 1990s. So the question remains: Why is Acid Eaters, the all-covers album the Ramones released in 1993, so bleh, for lack of a better term?

Well, for starters, Johnny Ramone decided to pay homage to the period covered on Acid Eaters (1966-1968, roughly) by swapping out his trademark overdriven guitar-to-amp roar for a thinner, Mudhoney-style fuzz tone. I’m not sure exactly what type of pedal Johnny was playing through—a Super Wild Muff Driver, a Fat Back Fuzz Bitch, or a Sweaty Ape Nut Screamer—but that Long Island-born motherfucker was playing through something, and it significantly weakened the sonic structure of America’s favorite Queens-bred freak quartet. On top of that, then-still-relatively-new bassist C.J. was handed lead vocal reigns on an unprecedented three cuts. He even helms the album’s opener, a rollicking take of that Nugey classic “Journey to the Center of the Mind” (Ted must have suggested that one to Johnny when they crossed paths at the NRA meeting). Look, I think C.J. was a great Ramone, but busting out of the gate with him on vox is both disorienting and confusing. Is this a Ramones album or the debut from C.J. Ward and His Funkified Forest Hills Punk Rocker Crew? Come on, Ramones. You confusa da people.

These elements have sullied Acid Eaters in many a true fan’s mind, but if you can look past these goofs, you’ll find a pretty solid offering. I’d like to single out Joey Ramone as the MVP of this record—the gooey, yelping vocalist elevates a number of otherwise pedestrian tracks here with his impassioned and unforgettable presence. The way Joey’s voice careens through the Jefferson Airplane classic “Somebody to Love” is delightful from any angle. The boy’s pain is ever so palpable on that Seeds hit “Can’t Seem to Make You Mine”, dripping out of your speakers and enveloping your feet in a warm, lovesick rubber byproduct. Of course, we all know now that when it came to heartache, Joey Jo Jo Junior Shabadoo was singing from experience (I don’t know if I’m going to slap Johnny or kiss ’em when I get to Heaven, which is obviously where all the dead Ramones are). Despite his reputation for sounding like a vomiting bullfrog live and in concert around this time, Joey Ramone could generally be counted on to make magic in the studio until the (extremely) bitter end. Modern science will be working for years to unlock the secret of that gold-hearted six-foot monster’s Aunt Jemima-approved voice.

Per the sum being greater than the individual parts, there are moments on Acid Eaters where the ’Mones (another nickname I bought wholesale from Mark Prindle) are firing on all cylinders like Doc Gooden in his prime. Their smiling musical mock on the Rolling Stones tune “Out of Time” is a flawless victory; “7 and 7 Is”, originally by Love, speeds dangerously down an ongoing drum roll (+10 for Marky) until it literally smashes into a wonderful lo-fi, hi-snot version of the Dylan classic “My Back Pages.” Only in the latter do you really hear the piss and vinegar that propelled this group of Noo Yawk miscreants to stop sniffing glue for five minutes and kick off a musical revolution. Ironically, the melodic guitar solo in “My Back Pages” (undoubtedly played by a Ramone-for-hire like Ed Stasium or Daniel Rey or Walter Lure or Johnny Thunders, even though he died about two years before Acid Eaters was made) is probably the best part. A guitar solo the best part of a Ramones song? That’s like a graphic sex scene being the best part of The Golden Girls!

Acid Eaters closes with something that was a hallmark of glory years Ramones: A surf song. Unfortunately, Jan and Dean’s “Surf City” isn’t quite the rousing hodad anthem Joey, Johnny, Marky, C.J., Grumpy, Blitzen, and Giggles needed to go out with a bang. Bootlegs/reissues have proven the band recorded a much more satisfying longboard anthem for this album: The Beach Boys’ “Surfin’ Safari.” I guess, in the end, they couldn’t afford to use that one (at least not here in America; in Japan, “Surfin’ Safari” was an Acid Eaters bonus track). There’s nothing like hearing a bunch of ghostly pale former construction workers extol in Joe Ross accents the virtues of hanging 10 “from Hawaii to the shores of Peru.” Had I been elected President in 1992, I would have enacted a federal law that would have forced the Ramones to record the entire Beach Boys catalog. Who wouldn’t want to hear Joey busting out “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” with all the enthusiasm he could muster as Johnny hammered away with a blank look on his face, undoubtedly dreaming of the minute he could exit stage left to get away from his damn band mates to go watch those bums the Yankees lose another game? That scenario happens every night in the theater of my mind. Tickets cost only two wooden nickels and a rabbit’s foot.

Despite being uneven and weird arrangement-wise, it seems kind of unfair to utterly malign Acid Eaters when you look at a few of the completely original Ramones albums the unrelated brohams were churning out post-Jimmy Carter. Animal Boy, for my money, is the most horrifying recording outside the final sermon of the People’s Temple. What the hell did that guy from the Plasmatics use to make that one? Two tin cans and a piece of string? And the songs—“Apeman Hop"? “Eat That Rat"? “She Belongs to Me"? You can almost taste the cocaine clogging the Ramones’ sinuses. Mondo Bizarro is no picnic, either. It’s like they had a giant rock song subject wheel in the studio featuring generic-ass topics like CENSORSHIP and HOMELESSNESS and SHITTY JOBS and THIS ONE’S FOR THE FANS, and they just kept spinning the friggin’ thing until they ran out of money. Really, Joey, you should have waited until your solo album to trade Dee Dee a fifth of whiskey for “Poison Heart.” “Cabbies on Crack” was more forced than Michael Jackson and Lisa Marie’s marriage.

But I digress. The Ramones did eventually recover from the “tragedy” that was Acid Eaters, turning in a handful of great covers during their final three years together. In addition to the aforementioned “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” and “Spider-Man”, the Pride of Co-Op 423 gave us a blistering version of Motorhead’s “R.A.M.O.N.E.S.”, a cutesy romp through Dave Clark Five’s “Any Way You Want It”, and a few hilarious re-workings of some of their own hallmark tunes for a series of Steel Reserve beer ads. At the very least, you Acid Eaters haters out there have to credit this album for creating one of TV’s funniest moments: After explaining to Space Ghost on an episode of the cartoon hero’s absurdist mid-’90s Cartoon Network talk show that Acid Eaters was an album of songs originally recorded in the 1960s, the dim-witted superhero remarked, “And it’s just now coming out?” This caused all the Ramones to chuckle pretty hard. It was almost like they were subliminally saying, “Yeah, our career’s sorta been a joke. We’re getting razzed by the dumbest superhero in existence.” Give the Ramones that, you rapscallions, at the very least, and we can finally call the whole thing even.

Track List...

1. Journey To The Center Of The Mind
2. Substitute
3. Out Of Time
4. Shape Of Things To Come
5. Somebody To Love
6. When I Was Young
7. 7 And 7 Is
8. My Back Pages
9. Can't Seem To Make You Mine
10. Have You Ever Seen The Rain
11. I Can't Control Myself
12. Surf City