It was originally going to be a thing called Disco High because Saturday Night Fever and Grease were pulling in money, and that was reason enough for Roger Corman. But the legendary Paul Bartel, who was already cast in the film, suggested the Ramones instead, and thank ye gads he did. Allan Arkush put the whole thing together in 23 days and for about $300,000 and my man, the legend, Joe Dante co-wrote the story. Dante even stepped in to direct the gym class musical number on the last day after Arkush collapsed from exhaustion. Corman never struck more than 150 prints, so the film toured the country one market at a time for about a year before ending up on home video in 1983.
I’m not sure at what point I found out that Roger Corman had made a Ramones movie back in ‘79, but I had to track it down. I probably didn’t get my hands on it until ’88 when I found it while looking back through deep time at sun bleached and salt stained bottom shelves of the Musical section.
See, the Ramones are one of my favourite bands.
They’re one of the core sounds I have rattling around in my head. I discovered them when I was about 13 going on 14, and they were exactly what I needed. That sped-up wall-of-sound punk, the weirdo beatnik aesthetic, the B-movie obsession… They were geek rock before it got cool. Wait, did it ever get cool? Live long enough and it gets hard to tell. Anyway, they got the oddballs, the kids in the margins who never quite fit the mould, and I’d spent enough time in High School to know I was going to be one of those kids too. My taste in music hadn’t yet evolved out of whatever Casey Kasem was playing, and all the cool kids were into hair metal, this was the era of Def Leppard and Bon Jovi.
I remember my first real exposure was the Something to Believe In video, where they beautifully skewered the pop-cause event. By ’86 we were absolutely drowning in those, the Live Aids, The Band Aids, the Hands Across Americas, the USA for Africas, and I had absolutely nothing against any of it. I bought the We Are The World single and felt pretty damn good about it. But there was a fatigue creeping in, and the Ramones seemed to feel it too. The thing about the Something to Believe In video, beyond the Weird Al cameo, is that the song itself is genuinely touching, there’s no real parody in the music, and yet the overwrought stylings, the chime bells, make you feel like there’s a mick being taken somewhere. I’ve listened to it for forty years and I still can’t tell. Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, though, that one I can tell. That song will get me fist pumping and drunk-ranting about politics faster than anything U2 ever put out, and it hasn’t lost a step since the Reagan years.
Anyhoo, The Ramones video got my attention, something about the juxtaposing of the satire to a song that kinda grabbed me by the emotionals, it was both exciting and confusing. And that gave my teen years a voice as being both excited and confused was my MO. That 3-chord wall of sound, those snarling high-speed rambles, you could barely tell where one song ended and the other began, occasionally you might get a “1.2.3.4!” yelled out to accommodate the untrained ear. They kind of became my whole vibe for a year, outside I might have been wearing cosby sweaters, but inside I was screaming, screaming in a leather jacket. No one at my lunch table knew or cared who they were. They were just that band I liked that held zero currency for the cool kids. I might as well have been talking about Captain Beefheart.
So, I mostly kept them to myself. That video was making a bit of a splash when it came out, but it wasn’t long before The Ramones were taken out of heavy rotation and sent back into the alternative section. But I was tracking down whatever piece of back catalog I could find, and they stayed on my radar. Sometime a couple of years later, I was watching YTV Hits, a Canadian teen music video show that aired later at night, I usually had it on while waiting for the syndicated horror shows like War of the Worlds or Freddy’s Nightmares to come on after the news. It was hosted by Ron Oliver, who exuded the kind of cool you only get from your best friend’s older brother. He knew stuff. He was plugged into it. When he reviewed a movie, it felt like zeitgeist speaking. He had also written Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night 2, and that’s some serious cred in my book. One random episode, before playing “I Wanna Be Sedated”, he called them one of his favourite bands. He talked them up like I’d never heard before, and I felt a little more legitimate after. Thanks Ron.
Oh yeah, the movie. Of course I loved it! PJ Soles as Riff Randell, the bubbly, obsessive 29 year-old teen fan stand-in, was perfect to me because by that point I got that loyalty completely, that compulsion to press your favourite band into the hands of anyone who’d listen. Especially if they didn’t.
The whole film is a throwback to those old teenybopper rock and roll movies of the 50s and 60s, where producers figured out how to bottle what the kids were into and sell it back to them. Long before Cool as Ice. Very few of my favourite bands ever got their own movies. Depeche Mode got a documentary, Prince got Purple Rain, the Talking Heads got Stop Making Sense, Kiss met The Phantom of the Park and the Thriller video absolutely counts. But The Ramones got one on the cheap because Roger Corman saw dollar signs, and I’m ok with that.
Because the Ramones were the band that gatewayed me into punk and alternative, or at least what I could access from the middle of nowhere suburbia at the time. Their whole attitude, everything about them, taught me how to see through this exact kind of product. The cash-in, the exploitation angle, the producer packaging a subculture and selling it back at a markup. I’d already seen it up close and personnal with Breakdancing, so I was hip. My whole no-sellouts attitude, I learned that from them just seemingly never giving a fuck.
And yet here I am, many decades later, still perfectly happy to have this piece of Ramonesploitation in my collection, because sometimes you just want to go to a party with great tunes and great people like Paul Bartel and PJ Soles. Maybe even blow up something.
Joey, here’s the five bucks I owe you. -Pop
Rock ‘n’ Roll High School arrived on home video this week in 1983, after an August 24th, 1979 theatrical release.