New-Wavers ‘Escape,’ Land in San Diego

It was bound to happen, sooner or later. We’ve already had a touring “British Invasion” and “Summer of Love” revival packages, in which several key groups from the same era got together, some two decades later, and returned to the road for a last hurrah.

Now, perhaps a little prematurely, comes “Escape From New York,” a traveling road show starring pioneering American new-wavers who burst out of New York’s fabled CBGB punk-rock club 15 years ago and shocked the music industry out of its mid-1970s slumber.

They are the Ramones, ex-Blondie singer Deborah Harry and three-fourths of the Talking Heads: Jerry Harrison, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz (the latter two appearing with their side group, the Tom Tom Club).

But this does not mean that “Escape From New York” performers--whose two-month U.S. tour brings them to San Diego tonight for a concert at San Diego State University’s Open Air Theater--are just another bunch of has-beens hoping to relive their glory days.

They are all still making records and enjoying as much commercial success as they ever did, if not more. The Ramones’ last album, 1989’s “Brain Drain,” was their all-time best-seller. Harry recently returned to the charts for the first time since 1982 with her first two solo albums. And the Talking Heads have yet to put out an album that doesn’t go either gold or platinum.

“In our cases, at least, age doesn’t matter,” said Ramones drummer Marky Ramone (nee Marc Bell), 37, who joined the band in 1978. “We still have more energy, more vitality, than any of these younger guys.

“We’ve been around for a long time, but we haven’t self-destructed, as so many bands have done. We don’t feel we have to party every night just to prove a point. We’re party people, but we save our energy for the studio--and the stage.”

A clean lifestyle has kept the Ramones, and the rest of the CBGB alumni, young. A common mission, a shared sense of purpose, has kept their music relevant, Ramone said.

“When the whole CBGB scene began, it was in reaction to where rock ‘n’ roll was going,” said Ramone, who at the time played in another pioneering American punk-rock band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

“Rock was getting too complicated, too fused--everything was jazz-rock, country-rock, progressive-rock, this-rock and that-rock, and it was all so bland, so predictable.

“But then bands like us and the Ramones and Blondie came along and stripped everything back down to simple, basic rock ‘n’ roll--short, sweet, and to the point.”

Today, 15 years later, rock ‘n’ roll has once again become “bland and predictable,” Ramone said. Only this time, he said, the culprits aren’t passionless fusionists, but passionless heavy-metal bands and techno-pop dance groups.

“That stuff is whitewashed garbage--it’s what my mother listens to,” Ramone said. On the one hand, he said, “you’ve got these really lame, sound-alike, heavy-metal bands, like Bon Jovi and Whitesnake. I liked Eddie Van Halen, when he first came out, because he was doing something original. But now all those other bands are trying to sound like him, like David Lee Roth, like Robert Plant, and it’s sickening. They’ve all got the same look, the same makeup; it’s so boring, already.”

And, on the other hand, Ramone added, “you’ve got these dance bands that, when you see them live, everything’s on tape. It might not even be them singing, and that’s the lowest you can go. All those silly looking guys who have this gym-toned look about them, thinking it goes over. I get more (mad about) that than seeing a fourth-generation Led Zeppelin band.”

Even so, Ramone’s charge that today’s rock ‘n’ roll is “bland and predictable” could also be leveled against the Ramones. Over the last 15 years, the Ramones’ trademark sound hasn’t changed a bit.

They’re still playing simple, fast songs with deadpan lyrics, no solos, and three-chord guitar walls, prompting more than one rock critic to accuse them of telling the same joke, over and over and over.

Ramone’s response: “So what?”

“The people who criticize us probably listen to disco and Madonna and stuff like that,” he said. “We’ve been together for 15 years, and our last album sold more than any of our other albums, so we must be doing something right.

“We have a unique sound--straight-ahead, chopped-down rock ‘n’ roll--and people either like us, or they don’t. We haven’t changed because we don’t want to change, and we don’t have to change. We’re not pressured by our record company to have a hit, to sound mainstream.

“And, even though we’ve followed the same formula for such a long time, more people are coming to our shows than ever. It’s amazing. Our audiences are mostly 16- to 22-year-olds, and, although a lot of the older people who have been with us from the beginning are there too, it’s good to see a whole new generation of fans.”