During the last few years of Joey Ramone’s life, most of his fans were unaware that he was down with lymphoma. But if they’d gotten to hear the songs he was recording, they would have known that something was up. Almost every track on Don’t Worry About Me (Sanctuary), the solo album that Joey worked on intermittently before his death last year, drops some reference to the illness he was battling and the life he wanted to hold onto. He’s not the first rocker to make an album under such circumstances: Freddie Mercury was deathly ill for the last couple of Queen records. And both singers’ swan songs are entirely in character: Mercury was a drama queen to the end and Joey was, well, Joey. Spotty and unfinished though it is, Don’t Worry About Me represents a rock-and-roll first: a fun record about the least fun topic in the world.
The disc leaves no doubt as to what Joey would have done if he’d lived: he would’ve kept right on making Ramones records under his own name. In recent years, original bassist Dee Dee has gotten most of the credit for the Ramones’ songwriting — not least because he flat-out gave himself the credit during this year’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony — but that wasn’t quite the case. When they first started listing individual credits, on the 1981 album Pleasant Dreams, the songwriting was split down the middle; and both of that album’s standouts, "We Want the Airwaves" and "The KKK Took My Baby Away," were Joey’s. Dee Dee got credit for a greater share of the material in later years, even after leaving the band, but Joey’s contributions remained the ballads, the Phil Spector/Beach Boys homages, and the songs with the pop hooks.
In that respect, Don’t Worry About Me is exactly what you expect — a little slower and poppier, but otherwise it’s the Ramones. Long-time associate Daniel Rey, who produced a couple of the band’s later albums and probably played a lot of the guitar, performs the same duties here. The other players (drummer Marky Ramone, Dictators bassist Adny Shernoff, Dictators/Del-Lords drummer Frank Funaro) are all familiar faces. And the album has more of an old-school Ramones sound than most of the band’s ’90s albums, lacking the distractions on those discs (synthesizers, dodgy cover songs, latter-day bassist CJ’s vocals). Joey sounds better than he had in years, singing in his old midrange instead of the low-register growl he’d fallen into more recently. If he’d lived to finish the album, he would likely have fixed some of the shakier vocal parts (like the falsetto chorus on "Maria Bartiromo," which sounds like an overdub by someone else), and it probably wouldn’t be so heavy on mid-tempo songs. In fact, to get a fast punk number (and to pad the disc to 11 songs), they had to pull a just-passable cover of "1969" off a five-year-old Iggy Pop tribute.
A stronger punk anthem comes from an unlikely source: Louis Armstrong. The opening cover of "What a Wonderful World" works better than you’d think possible, grafting on the rhythm groove and the guitar lick from the Sex Pistols’ "Pretty Vacant." Joey doesn’t demolish the song, he just personalizes it, replacing the sweetness of Satchmo’s version with a more dogged joie de vivre. That’s the prevailing mood on the rest of the disc, which treats terminal illness with the same irreverence once reserved for shock treatment, lobotomies, and beating on brats with a baseball bat.
It’s Joey’s refusal to whine that makes the album so touching. On "Venting" he advises, "Live your life to the fullest and fuck everything"; it’s the first use of the f-word in any Ramones lyric. His discovery of the world of stocks and bonds — which he touted as his new passion when I last interviewed him — yields one major revelation: CNN financial reporter Maria Bartiromo is really cute. "I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up Again)" is the song most informed by his illness (and by Chumbawamba’s "Tubthumping"), and the lyrics aren’t exactly ambiguous: "Sitting in a hospital bed, I want my life, it really sucks." But it comes out sounding oddly celebratory, as did the various Ramones songs about violence, drug addiction, and other fun topics.
Those who want to get teary can do so with the closing title track, a farewell disguised as a break-up song. It’s the catchiest thing here, and it maintains the album’s "damn the torpedoes" feel as Joey berates his girl for being too depressed, then signs off with a "Bye-bye baby, bye-bye." (In the producer’s one memorial touch, the final chord lingers just a little longer than you expect). It’s the ultimate proof that Joey Ramone lived for rock and roll and that rock and roll has lost a good friend.
