[Heeplist] THE LIVES THEY LIVED; The Ratt Trap (nhc)

[Don Malecic]

Don't know much about the Glam rock bands, I hear " Round and Round on the
Rock station, good guitar riff, I like that tune ,
But that's all I know about RATT, I can't remember where I was musically
when the glam rock band era was big. Heep for sure, defeninatley not Def
Leppard, they pissed me off at a concert with Heep as the opener.
We got up and left after Heep were finished, they totally screwed Heep.
Never forget it!!
Don

On Friday, 19 August 2016, Knut Svendsen <knutsvendsen at icloud.com> wrote:

> I always liked Ratt and saw them live at the Lane County fairgrounds in
> Eugene, OR, in 1989. Found this article about the death of Robin Crosby of
> Ratt from the New York Times in 2002. Interesting read.
>
>
>
> http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/29/magazine/the-lives-they-li
> ved-the-ratt-trap.html
> THE LIVES THEY LIVED; The Ratt Trap
>
> By CHUCK KLOSTERMANDEC. 29, 2002
>
> Continue reading the main story Share This Page
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> Dee Dee Ramone and Robbin Crosby were both shaggy-haired musicians who
> wrote aggressive music for teenagers. Both were unabashed heroin addicts.
> Neither was the star of his respective band: Dee Dee played bass for the
> Ramones, a seminal late-70's punk band; Crosby played guitar for Ratt, a
> seminal early-80's heavy-metal band. They died within 24 hours of each
> other last spring, and each had only himself to blame for the way he
> perished. In a macro sense, they were symmetrical, self-destructive clones;
> for anyone who isn't obsessed with rock 'n' roll, they were basically the
> same guy.
>
> Yet anyone who is obsessed with rock 'n' roll would define these two
> humans as diametrically different. To rock aficionados, Dee Dee and the
> Ramones were ''important'' and Crosby and Ratt were not. We are all
> supposed to concede this. We are supposed to know that the Ramones saved
> rock 'n' roll by fabricating their surnames, sniffing glue and playing
> consciously unpolished three-chord songs in the Bowery district of New
> York. We are likewise supposed to acknowledge that Ratt sullied rock 'n'
> roll by abusing hair spray, snorting cocaine and playing highly produced
> six-chord songs on Hollywood's Sunset Strip.
>
> There is no denying that the Ramones were a beautiful idea. It's wrong to
> claim that they invented punk, but they certainly came the closest to
> idealizing what most people agree punk is supposed to sound like. They
> wrote the same two-minute song over and over and over again -- unabashedly,
> for 20 years -- and the relentlessness of their riffing made certain people
> feel like everything about the world had changed forever. And perhaps those
> certain people were right. However, those certain people remain alone in
> their rightness, because the Ramones were never particularly popular.
>
> The Ramones never made a platinum record over the course of their entire
> career. Bands like the Ramones don't make platinum records; that's what
> bands like Ratt do. And Ratt was quite adroit at that task, doing it four
> times in the 1980's. The band's first album, ''Out of the Cellar,'' sold
> more than a million copies in four months. Which is why the deaths of Dee
> Dee Ramone and Robbin Crosby created such a mathematical paradox: the
> demise of Ramone completely overshadowed the demise of Crosby, even though
> Crosby co-wrote a song (''Round and Round'') that has probably been played
> on FM radio and MTV more often than every track in the Ramones' entire
> catalog. And what's weirder is that no one seems to think this imbalance is
> remotely strange.
>
> What the parallel deaths of Ramone and Crosby prove is that it really
> doesn't matter what you do artistically, nor does it matter how many people
> like what you create; what matters is who likes what you do artistically
> and what liking that art is supposed to say about who you are. Ratt was
> profoundly uncool (read: populist) and the Ramones were profoundly
> significant (read: interesting to rock critics). Consequently, it has
> become totally acceptable to say that the Ramones' ''I Wanna Be Sedated''
> changed your life; in fact, saying that would define you as part of a
> generation that became disenfranchised with the soullessness of suburbia,
> only to rediscover salvation through the integrity of simplicity. However,
> it is laughable to admit (without irony) that Ratt's ''I Want a Woman'' was
> your favorite song in 1989; that would mean you were stupid, and that your
> teenage experience meant nothing, and that you probably had a tragic
> haircut.
>
> The reason Crosby's June 6 death was mostly ignored is that his band
> seemed corporate and fake and pedestrian; the reason Ramone's June 5 death
> will be remembered is that his band was seen as representative of a
> counterculture that lacked a voice. But the contradiction is that
> countercultures get endless media attention: the only American perspectives
> thought to have any meaningful impact are those that come from the fringes.
> The voice of the counterculture is, in fact, inexplicably deafening.
> Meanwhile, mainstream culture (i.e., the millions and millions of people
> who bought Ratt albums merely because that music happened to be the
> soundtrack for their lives) is usually portrayed as an army of mindless
> automatons who provide that counterculture with something to rail against.
> The things that matter to normal people are not supposed to matter to smart
> people.
>
> Now, I know what you're thinking; you're thinking I'm overlooking the
> obvious, which is that the Ramones made ''good music'' and Ratt made ''bad
> music,'' and that's the real explanation as to why we care about Dee Dee's
> passing while disregarding Robbin's. And that rebuttal makes sense, I
> suppose, if you're the kind of person who honestly believes the concept of
> ''good taste'' is anything more than a subjective device used to create
> gaps in the intellectual class structure. I would argue that Crosby's death
> was actually a more significant metaphor than Ramone's, because Crosby was
> the first major hair-metal artist from the Reagan years to die from AIDS.
> The genre spent a decade consciously glamorizing (and aggressively
> experiencing) faceless sex and copious drug use. It will be interesting to
> see whether the hesher casualties now start piling up. Meanwhile, I don't
> know if Ramone's death was a metaphor for anything; he's just a good guy
> who died on his couch from shooting junk. But as long as you have the right
> friends, your funeral will always matter a whole lot more.
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