Subterranean Jungle...

I can honestly say that Subterranean Jungle bothers me more than any Ramones album prior and after it.

I know that as a fan of any band or musician, there may be times when the artist attempts a new sound or a complete reinvention, and it may have crushing consequences to certain members of the fan base. For example, I enjoy Motorhead's Another Perfect Day despite the melodic guitar playing that would never make another appearance after that album. On the other hand, I can't stand the sound of Bob Dylan's Empire Burlesque at all. For the Ramones, I can count a few albums where I questioned the sanity of the band when I listened to one of their notoriously uneven albums, and this album is the one where I skipped the questioning and automatically assume that they lost their mind.

Subterranean Jungle is the third and final Ramones album from the Pop-Ramones era, a time when the band dreamed of reaching the top of pop charts, only to be marred by rotating album producers, inner bickering and substance abuse. This album is culmination of the band's failed experiment, an effort that can only be considered as Pleasant Dreams pt.2 - It Gets Worse.

As a testament to the "strength" of this album, Subterranean Jungle is the first and only album to open with no original songs from the band. The reason for no Ramones track as the album's opening probably has to do with the lack of strong tracks on this album. I never fail to mention the importance songwriting was to this group as it was their best and memorable skill, but the lyrics on this album range from strange ("Highest Trails Above") to mundane ("My-My-Kind of Girl"). While songs such as "In The Park" and "Psycho Therapy" provide a few moments of enjoyment, they are not representative of the strength of their earlier songwriting. The hooks are few and far between, and flashes of their earlier humor are now absent and filled with a sense of forced work. This is not the album that marked them as mediocre or anything, but when "Everytime I Eat Vegetables It Makes Me Think of You" is the closest song to classics such as "We're a Happy Family", it represents a low point that was evident in Pleasant Dreams and a sign of bad things to come in future albums.

As I wrote above, this album was the first to open with no original songs, as two covers were chosen for the start. There are three covers on this album, the most covers on any album (minus the cover-based Acid Eaters) and certainly the biggest departure genre-wise for a group whose earlier covers were mainly surf-rock based. The problem I have with the covers is that they give the album a horribly dated feel. A few tracks from Pleasant Dreams had that feel, but the covers really sound as they came from 1983. As I mentioned in my End of the Century article, the feel on that album was sweet and nostalgic, as evident on that album's opening track. The opening tracks on this album give the impression of a band trying to get the attention of the general audience with a few bells and whistles that they might have been familiar with. No chord-ripping, fast playing minimalism to be found. These songs are played straight and are as slow and boring today as they probably were in 1989, 1997, and 2004 (Note: random dates). Nothing comes of as greatly offensive as" Time Has Come Today", a four minute, 25 seconds long song with the worst singing Joey Ramone had ever done at that time. At this point, not even Pleasant Dreams had this level of long and awful.

The musicianship on this album is okay when it has to be (a la the covers), but it's just there for its own sake. Sadly, there's not much effort put into this musically from the boys themselves. Joey sings his pieces as best as he can. Whoever thought Dee Dee could sing a whole song by himself should be beaten, as "Time Bomb" blows chunks. There's no memorable playing here except for the LEAD GUITAR PLAYING ON MOST SONGS. The greatest departure from the Ramone sound is the added lead guitar, which is fine on the songs, but this is the band that had been known as being a band with no solos, leads, and above all else, NO NONSENSE, STRAIGHT TO THE POINT PLAYING. There will be more solos and lead playing in future albums, but it hits it's low point here and it's blatantly unnecessary  for the most part. As for the drumming, Marky was released from the band and replaced for this session with someone else, so there isn't anything else noteworthy to speak of. One more thing: "Somebody Like Me" is the laziest attempt at recycling a melody, as the opening is just "Blitzkrieg Bop" without any changes. No, not even the lead guitar will fool anyone into believing this song is anything but the worst rehash before "Eat The Rat" and "Learn to Listen" came into existence.

Final Words

There's a few things I learned from listening to recorded Ramones concerts (post-Jungle) that apply to Subterranean Jungle. Out of all the songs on this album, the only one that survived the years of frequent concert playing is "Psycho Therapy", the song considered a Ramones classic by fan majority. It was also a song that didn't require Johnny Ramone to play any lead guitar, something that he rarely did live except for the parts in "California Sun" that he preformed regularly. Subterranean Jungle is an album with many songs that require more than just Johnny at the guitar, as ex-Heartbreaker Walter Lure was called in to perform lead guitar with the boys for a couple of songs. Walter Lure nor any extra guitar player performed live on-stage with the band except for the guests in We're Outta Here, their final concert. Future songs that required lead playing would result in Johnny deconstructing them to their very essence, or someone else may have played the parts backstage. In the end, there were no other songs from Subterranean Jungle that would be played live after 1985. ("Highest Trails Above" was the only other song that stayed on their set-list up to '85).

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