The Ramones (with Social Distortion) - Greek Theatre, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA - October 10, 1992

When you’re in your teens and twenties, you go to shows and tend to look around at those over 40 in wonder that they would still consider spending an evening hanging around with a bunch of “kids” listening to loud music, dancing, drinking and smoking pot. In the case of the Ramones, while there were a lot of college kids and younger, probably at least half of the crowd were former hippies (or wanna be former hippies) who now had good jobs, kids, fancy cars and more disposable income to spend on such things. This made for an interesting evening for us twenty-somethings.

The Ramones were on tour supporting their youth revival generated primarily from their song for the soundtrack of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary. While they’ve never been known for their brilliant lyrics, Pet Sematary was not their most seminal work. Like most self respecting alternative types at the time, we had been listening to the Ramones since high school, but I suppose we were not nearly as offended by Pet Sematary as the Baby Boomers who surrounded us.

I believe this time it was myself, CF, PCH, DA and I think his girlfriend at the time, K. I don’t remember a lot about K other than where they lived together in Reno and that she was the first person I ever met who bought an all black computer, which I thought was the coolest.

The show was outside at Greek Theatre and it was a beautiful fall night to see a show. Social Distortion, one of my favorite punk(ish) bands anyway, opened up the show and were pretty fabulous as I remember. A lot of the older crowd came filing in late, during and after Social D played.

The thing I remember most about the show were the group standing behind us. I think there were two or three couples together (5 or 6 people, similar to our little crowd) and they must have worked hard to score some pot before the evening. I imagine 10-20 years earlier they wouldn’t have thought twice about it – but during this show they were kind of nervous and awkward, which made it pretty funny to watch. You could tell they felt really cool once the Ramones started and they were all stoned, probably just like the old days. While it was funny to me, probably the only annoying thing about it was that they were so nervous that I thought that they were attracting more attention to themselves than necessary, and because my friends and I didn’t smoke pot, the last thing we wanted was to get busted for some idiots who didn’t know how to get away with it anymore. ‘course it’s not like that ever happens at a concert…you can get reprimanded for smoking cigarettes but you can always smell the pot.

On a grim note, you know you’re getting older when people from bands you’ve seen start to die. While Joey Ramone was probably not the first of the rock stars who has passed since I’ve seen him perform (Ricky Nelson and that guy from Blind Melon come to mind) he was certainly the most famous and one I admired. When I look back more than a dozen years to how indestructible my friends and I all felt in our early 20s, it makes me realize how quickly life moves on. Now I’m one of those oldsters going to shows and getting ogled by all of the young folks in the audience.