What else in the realm of the living or dead really matters? Nearly 30 years after that first album baffled so many clueless radio programmers and hippies who refused to believe the sun had finally set on the summer of love, with nothing more than a brace of songs gestated in suburbia about diversions like television, huffing model airplane cement, and adolescent attitude adjustment with Louisville Sluggers, the Ramones canon still tastes as fresh as a just-cracked bottle of Yoo Hoo, almost magical in its power to remedy whatever may be laying you low, capable of blasting you outside of yourself, making you feel super-alive and able to pretend this moment/hour/day/night is the rest of your life. If the band's high-speed crack-up of three chords and blissful bubblegum aesthetic doesn't leave you inspired and grinning like an idiot, you've got a hole in your soul. In all fairness to Rhino, however, the Ramones are an easy sell and those likely to buy this four-disc box (three CD's and one DVD) probably won't need to be strongarmed. The ability to separate schmoes like myself from hard-earned greenbacks for music we already own in a different wrapper is what makes the souls of companies like Rhino, Castle, Sanctuary, and my personal favorite - Captain Oi! - so dark. I'd be the last to suggest they don't deserve it, but "Weird Tales Of The Ramones" appears to be nothing more than an attempt to pad the coffers of the estates of the three deceased members of the band and the three yet to check into the wooden Waldorf. All those takes of "Rock 'N' Roll High School's" opening power chord he forced Johnny to endure would fill a few box sets of their own, a la the Stooges' "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions." If recent photos are any indication, however, that's not to say there's no surprises concealed in Phil Spector's hair. Other than remastered, expanded editions of "Acid Eaters," "Adios Amigos," "Animal Boy," "Halfway To Sanity," "Mondo Bizarro," and "Brain Drain," it's strictly "been there, done that" on the repackaging front, the band's notoriously spartan way of conducting business not inspiring any search and recovery missions for dusty, eroding analog tapes. That hollow sound you're hearing is Sire and Rhino scraping the bottom of the Ramones barrel and coming up empty.
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