Joey Ramone's passport. (Courtesy of RR Auction)

It’s rare to find a passport for sale by a reputable vendor, but if you can pass for a young man named Jeff Ross Hyman, then the New Hampshire-based RR Auction has an item you might be interested in. Sure, the current bid is $4,840 for the international identification card once owned by Joey Ramone, but it’s worth every penny.

In fact, each of the 81 lots currently up for auction in the Joey Ramone Collection is a priceless piece of punk-pop history, as evidenced by the bevy of fans lined up outside The Bowery Electric on February 7, hoping to catch a glimpse of the artifacts during a special two-hour display. They might have been surprised by the contents.

Though RR deals mostly in signed items such as: letters, photos and books, according to the company’s vice president of marketing and sales, Bobby Livingston, there’s always room for exceptions—especially when it came to Joey Ramone.

“We actually got to know Joey back in the ’80s,” Mr. Livingston told the Transom when we caught up with him at the Midtown Sheraton earlier this week. “He showed up in Amherst one day outside our building looking to buy autographed Rolling Stones cards.” When the frontman couldn’t afford the $500 or so for the card he wanted, Mr. Livingston recalled, he jumped back into the van to bum the cash from his band’s manager.

“He was just such a sweet kid, and so incredibly passionate about collecting autographs,” Mr. Livingston recalled. Ten years after his untimely death, the story came full circle when RR was approached by Joey Ramone’s estate to help with the selling of the punk rocker’s personal collection. (The proceeds from the Bowery viewing went to the Joey Ramone Foundation for Lymphoma Research.)

There are some surprises beyond the usual concert memorabilia and signed posters. Like two electric guitars, an Epiphone with a sunburst finish and a Stratocaster-style Ibanez Roadstar II. Who even knew the Queens-born singer could play?

“He knew how to pluck out songs,” Mr. Livingston said. “But he only used the A and the E strings.” So far, the guitars are a steal, with the highest bids currently at $1,264 and $1,152, respectively.

More prized, apparently, is the artist’s record collection. There are 97 albums in the lot, only a handful of them from the Ramones’ contemporaries. Aside from some T. Rex, Iggy Pop and Cheap Trick records, the itemized lot contains some unusual picks: Ike and Tina Turner (Workin’ Together), The Righteous Brothers (Greatest Hits), The Four Seasons (2nd Vault of Golden Hits), The Allman Brothers Band (At Fillmore East), Canadian tweenyboppers the DeFranco Family band (Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat) and Peter, Paul and Mary (10 Years Together).

If we had to pick one item to bid on, it’d be a toss-up. On one hand, there’s Joey Ramone’s Rolodex—Geffen Records! Lucinda Williams! Wayne Kramer! Sushi restaurants in the city! But really, it’s only valuable if no one has changed phone numbers since 2001, which might explain why it’s only going for $533 at the moment.

On the other hand, there are the front man’s scribbled musings on various scraps, like lyrics to the unreleased “Elevator Operator,” penned on an Alka-Seltzer box; his thoughts on watching Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction for the first time, written on Hotel Buena Vista stationery; and a ripped sheet of notebook paper with the author’s thoughts on capital punishment: “Slowly sinkin drifting off subconsious / You get what you see / Death penalty should be reinstated / A life for a life.”

And yes, that’s the original spelling.

Of course, the sartorial collector won’t be disappointed either, not with the array of ammo-adorned belts and leather pants, the official Simpsons bomber jacket (from when the Ramones lent their voices to the cartoon), the Late Show and Beavis and Butt-head T-shirts and the studded fingerless gloves.

But you’ll want to hurry hurry hurry. With the online auction ending this Thursday at 7 p.m., by the time you read this, you’ll only have about twenty-twenty-twenty-four hours to go before the last bids are tallied.

Joey Ramone, the late, lanky, leather-clad lead singer of the seminal New York punk rock band the Ramones, finally got his just deserts on Thursday afternoon, May 14, at a brief ceremony at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Annex in Soho.

"This is a day of kind of not necessarily new beginnings, but a day to really do what we can to right a wrong," said Joel Peresman, president of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Foundation, when a piece of the statue he was holding suddenly came loose and hit the floor with a big clang.

Laughter ensued.

It has been a comedy of errors ever since the Cleveland-based shrine of modern music legends first inducted the Ramones seven years ago, one year after its gangly frontman's death from lymphoma in 2001.

The original award presentation and acceptance for the band's lead singer was "mistakenly omitted from the programme's schedule," according to the singer's official Web site. "As a result, the statue meant for Joey ended up being abandoned at the podium."

More than half a decade later, Mr. Peresman's foundation was trying to set things right.

"Now, I want to introduce Dan Fields, the [Ramones'] first manager, to really come up and say some things about his recollections," Mr. Peresman continued, "and hopefully not break this thing like I did."

Mr. Fields, for his part, attempted to clear up some of the rumors and controversy that resulted from the initial snub.

"There was a blog from a bright and distinguished person this week going out, referring to this as making up for Joey's non-induction—Joey was inducted into the hall of fame," Mr. Fields pointed out. "I worked on those dinners for many years before that one, to which I wasn't invited. But, nevertheless, it said 'non-induction,' so I tried to correct that."

He continued, "I then heard from a reliable source—I'm sorry for jumping into this well of poison—that [guitarist] Johnny Ramone refused to allow any representative of Joey's up on stage. This went out on the Internet. All I could do, knowing a little bit more about it, was to clear the air. It really was a procedural error on the part of the staff of the Rock and Rock Hall of Fame dinner."

He added, "This is what they got when they lost me."

Mr. Fields described the late Joey Ramone as "by far, the most ironic and funniest" of the Ramones, adding, "I think he would have enjoyed the mistake, why it got fucked up, why we're here. I think he's chortling at this minute."

Mr. Fields further commented that the setting of Thursday's event was quite appropriate: "We're on Mercer Street, and to pay credit where it's due, this is the street where the New York Dolls performed where the Ramones first saw them, and said, 'These guys suck! They can't play! Let's start a band'—a mantra that brought us into the punk rock era."

Tommy Ramone, the group's original drummer and sole surviving member, later corrected him: "The Ramones loved the New York Dolls—I don't want anybody to get the wrong impression. In fact, we were crazy about the New York Dolls."

Accepting the long-overdue award, Joey Ramone's brother, Mickey Leigh, dressed in a black blazer and black T-shirt emblazoned with his late brother's visage, tried to put a positive spin on the goof. "If everything went down right at the Waldorf-Astoria, it would have been a beautiful thing. But I never knew what rock and roll had to do with the Waldorf-Astoria to begin with. This seems to be much more fitting."

Mr. Leigh continued, "Joey loved New York City but he loved downtown especially, so having this presentation below 14th Street is something that could not have happened at the Waldorf-Astoria. Having this presentation be a few blocks away from a street named in his honor couldn't have happened at the Waldorf-Astoria. And, because the ticket prices were $2,500 a pop, having all his friends and family here, instead of a bunch of record company executives, is something that could not have happened at the Waldorf-Astoria."

Richard "Handsome Dick" Manitoba, former singer of the punk group the Dictators, described the rock hall's mistake as "ridiculous. The lead singer's the most important guy in the band!"

Legs McNeil, co-author of the forthcoming book I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir, described the late singer as "a huge mess" who was once diagnosed with mental illness. "What this guy does with his life is so heroic," Mr. McNeil said. "He really gave us all hope that we could all, you know, climb out of our shit and, you know, do it."

Mr. McNeil said the late Ramones singer would be "thrilled" with his induction, adding, however, "I also know how upset he'd be with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for not having Alice Cooper in and the Stooges and Kiss and a lot of other people because Joey stood up for rock and roll."

Mr. Ramone, born Jeffrey Ross Hyman in Queens in 1951, would have turned 58 on Tuesday, May 19. Mr. Manitoba will join former MTV talking head Matt Pinfield, among others, at a tribute concert that night in Mr. Ramone's honor at the Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza.

Well, that day has arrived, or at least it will on Nov. 24 when Christie's holds it's first major punk auction in New York City. Up for sale are "more than 120 records, photos and promotional pieces for such punk, garage rock and new wave legends as the Velvet Underground, Patti Smith, the Ramones, David Bowie, Blondie, the Cure and the Smiths." The Associated Press reports: "We understand that tastes change, tastes mature," said Christie's pop-culture chief Simeon Lipman. "Ten years ago, punk memorabilia probably wouldn't be something we'd be auctioning here. But now, people of a certain age have a certain ability to splurge on this material."

The timing couldn't be better given that it was just the 30th anniversary of the night when Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious probably/maybe murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, in a drug-induced haze in the Chelsea Hotel, as Karen Schoemer wrote about in her fantastic New York magazine piece last week. While there's no memorabilia up for sale from that gruesome affair, there is a bunch of Sex Pistols stuff, including a copy of the band's first press release, as well as "a rare poster for a 1976 Ramones concert in London widely credited with helping inspire such British punk titans as the Clash and the Sex Pistols and a flier for a show later that year featuring the latter two bands and the Buzzcocks...and a 1966 promotional packet in which an up-and-comer called David Jones promulgated his new last name: Bowie." Also: Late '70s Los Angeles punk flyers, Seattle punk flyers, stuff from the Germs, Black Flag, The Dead Boys, The Damned, The Misfits, DEVO, Nirvana and lots more.

The various punk items are expected to fetch between $300 and $6,000 apiece.

The items generally weren't designed to last for decades, making the few that have survived all the more tantalizing, Lipman said.

Even when the global financial meltdown is sapping a once-raging art market, "with pop-culture items, there's sort of a nostalgia that drives it. It's not necessarily a need to invest — it's 'that's cool,'" he said.

We couldn't agree more. Too bad we're broke! But if we weren't, we'd be all over one of those Smiths promo posters. The full list of items up for grabs can be found here.

Stein: Real estate. Firstly, if you manage a band, every time you hear an encore, every time the audience increases, every time your radio increases, it’s an upper. With real estate, the only upper is how much you don’t owe to Uncle Sam on the check you’re getting. There is no high except the money, which is extremely taxable.

You have Sting’s apartment at 88 Central Park West on the market for $24 million. When that sells, will that be a kind of high?

Only because it would be the third time that I sold the apartment—because I originally sold it as two apartments, to Billy Joel and Christy Brinkley. They put it together, then Billy had those sad liquid problems, and he asked me to sell it, and I sold it to Sting. And Sting has lived there for 17 years.

Selling this for Sting would be an upper—and a very nice check. I’m extremely grateful to Sting and Trudie [Styler, his wife] for being so loyal to me for 18 years.

However, I have to say I’m loyal to my friends, too. I have supported the rain forest every year; I would never skip a year. I was the one that brought Elton John into the rain forest—that’s Trudie’s passion, and Sting’s passion.

Do you think his co-op will go for $24 million?

I hope so. I don’t think it’s an insane price; I think there might be some room there …. Sting, I have him crazy now! I have him looking for very wealthy Orthodox Jews that are Sephardic, so they can walk to the synagogue on the Sabbath—and walk up to the second and third floor. So now Sting is running all around the world, saying: “I’m looking for a rich Sephardic Jew to buy my apartment.”

The phrase “celebrity broker” essentially originated to describe you. Now that lots of brokers have become celebrities and get P.R. people, how do you feel about that?

The press has been extremely detrimental to my career. Basically, people of great wealth do not want it discussed by anybody. Discretion, discretion, discretion!

Some broker was on TV saying she sold something I sold. And someone in about seven publications said that he handled the deal [when] I had the listing and the buyer. I’d rather give up too much publicity than the credibility with my clients.

Was the 80’s a better time?

No. Maybe the music was better, but no. The 80’s was so full of nightlife, no one went to the gym …. Life has changed completely.

How has the world of elite real-
estate brokers changed? Is it more competitive now?

Competitive? Always. Ethical? Less and less by the five-minute period. They lie, the brokers—they lie to brokers, they lie to clients. There’s lying. Lying!

How much longer do you imagine being in real estate for?

It’s been bringing the money in for 20 years. The economy, as it is, I don’t know how job-desirable I am. So I guess I’ll do it as long as I can walk up and down the steps of a townhouse. Actually, that’s not my dream, but it is my vision.

What would you do if you could do anything? Go back to music?

I would live in Paris or Rome—and not New York.

Why not go into real estate there?

That’s always a fantasy, but you know they have their tests and their brokers—it’s not like you pop in. You don’t, at a certain age, just pop into a town like, ‘Yo! I’m here,’ when there are 15-year-old gorgeous children taking the jobs of brilliant people.

… I obviously have some kind of personality or sales acumen that’s been working for a while, so I’m not willing to surrender that, as I am not willing to surrender telephones as opposed to e-mails. Because I like to see the reaction when I say, ‘Well, sir, the truth is, you do have to come up another million dollars.’ I want to hear a gasp, a breath, a curse—whatever. I want a reaction as I say it, and to the way that I say it. I find that a lot of the forte of a salesperson is taken away when there’s no voice and personality.

You first left Edward Lee Cave’s boutique brokerage for Prudential Douglas Elliman in 1990, though you later went back and forth. How do you describe Mr. Cave?

He is a true gentleman; it’s almost a rare species. All I can tell you is that if you chew gum at Edward Lee Cave, you don’t work there for more than five minutes.

How do you find new clients?

I try and go out where interesting wealthy people are. It depends on the restaurant; it depends upon the event. You know, you don’t find poor people at [Estiatorio] Milos, where you’re paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of fish. You don’t find paupers in the Grill Room at the Four Seasons at lunchtime.

But the expense accounts have been cut, and certain restaurants have been eliminated. I know that for a fact! Corporately, some restaurants have been eliminated.

How many grandchildren do you have?

One. But [my daughter] crawled out of her crib when she was 2 years old and found Iggy Pop rolling a joint on the living-room floor with Paul Simon and Elton John sitting there. So for my daughter to be wrapped up in a white picket fence is the most extraordinary thing.

What’s your ex-husband, music mogul Seymour Stein, like? Is he crazy?

Of course he’s crazy. If you’re not crazy, you’re boring. Seymour’s crazy. I’m crazy. Bob [Dylan] is crazy. In a good way!

But the spindly singer’s death was not marked by any grisly tributes. In fact, his memorial service was almost strangely PG-13--further proof that while the days of guys in tight black jeans, Converse high tops and motorcycle jackets may almost be a memory, punk will always play with pissed-off kids. Outside the club were piles of cheap bouquets and notes to Joey signed by fans like “Kerry, age 11.” Waiting in line to get in, a 13-year-old with dyed-black hair said, “The Ramones are, like, cool. It sucks that that guy Joey’s dead. I was smoking up the other day with this guy I know named Vader, and he was like, ‘Dude, we totally need to get sedated for Joey.’ So we took this stuff--um, I don’t think I should be telling you about this.”

And then there was Charlotte Lesher, Joey’s mother and a picture of grace, who was schmoozing with her sixtysomething friends and Forest Hills neighbors at a table in the back. “Jeffrey was a good kid,” said one (Ms. Lesher and her friends still use her son’s real name). “Jeff was never a shnorrer, he never kvetched--what more could you ask?” said an elderly man who didn’t want his name used. “So what if he was a little bizarre?”

In the cavalcade of celebrity mourners was Joan Jett, who spoke about a tour she did with the Ramones back in the days of three-chord glory: “We played Bellville, Ill.,” she said. “You can just imagine how he said it: ‘HELLO, BELLVILLE!’ For some reason, that sticks in my mind. Joey, I love you and I’m going to miss you.” She later told The Transom that she hadn’t had the chance to give him a proper goodbye. “I just saw him out and about,” she said. “It’s really sad.”

Debbie Harry, looking harried, made an attempt at a roast: “Once a cretin, always a cretin,” she said. Later, Ms. Harry told The Transom that she was too upset to talk. “I just can’t do it,” she said. “We had a hard enough time getting her here,” her assistant confided.

Meanwhile, Ms. Lesher and her friends were growing impatient with M.C. “Furious” George Tabb’s stream of profanity. “Every other word out of his mouth!” Ms. Lesher said of the man who threatened to fight “any pussy” who spoke ill of his favorite band. “It’s terrible,” her friend replied. “There’s a lady in the house!” Ms. Lesher--still the faithful punk mom--was trying to rationalize it: “I guess that’s just his style.” But when one of the show’s organizers told her he was going to get Mr. Tabb off the stage, she looked relieved.

Mr. Tabb was replaced by Dick Manitoba of the Dictators, who introduced Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh, who played a short set of Ramones songs. “Let’s hear it for George Tabb,” Mr. Leigh said. “He may have gotten my mom a little pissed off, but hey, Ma, it’s CBGB!”

It was just a little street sign, of course-white type on that peculiar, fantastic chalk-board green of officialdom. But holy shit. Joey Ramone, born Jeffrey Hyman, the shy, outgoing, funny, nutty, long-haired punk rocker from Forest Hills, Queens, has a Manhattan street named after him. It's hysterical, surreal, gorgeous.

Maybe Joey Ramone Place is a little promise that not everything that was the East Village will be forgotten. The assembled punks here are not young; many of them have young children, and some of them even live in Jersey now -defined by one attendee as "west of Fifth Avenue." As they've grown up, their East Village has disappeared; now suburban 30-year-olds snack on fries in the Third Avenue McDonald's on Thanksgiving afternoon, and punk is a section in Virgin Megastore. Brownie's on Avenue A, the rock-show successor to CBGB's, is a hangout bar called Hi Fi, with a digital jukebox. There is sushi on Avenue C. (Insult to injury, it's not terrible sushi, either.)

Just a few dozen feet down the Bowery and inside the ancient punk club CBGB's, everyone was looking pale and squinty, but no one was shooting any dope. Mostly what everyone said was: "God, when was the last time you were actually here?" Oh yeah, "that guy from American Fine Arts died and they did some memorial thing here," offered one fellow at the bar. Hey, see you next memorial service!

Outside, "Jerry" was having an unsuccessful time getting in until Mickey Leigh, Joey's brother, showed up and hugged him. "Is Arty in there?" people name-dropped to the list-guy.

Arty, of course, is the gray-chopped Arturo Vega, who has attended 2,261 of the Ramones' 2,263 rock shows. At various times roommate, lighting guy, promoter and creative director to the Ramones, Mr. Vega is underappreciated in particular for his graphic design. For the band's look, he took the trappings of republicanism and fascism-eagles, state seals, monuments-and fused them into bold masonic punk icons. The man's probably 50 years old-and he still has a great rack.

Mr. Vega was soon to show off said rack. By 2 p.m., the crowd was 15 deep out into the Bowery, and on the low platform around Joey's street sign, Mr. Vega peeled off his shirt to reveal his tattoo: the great circular seal of the Ramones, more than a foot high, on his back. The names surrounding the eagle are Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee and Arty, a memorial to a life almost in a band.

There was a giant papier-mâché head of Joey Ramone bopping about the crowd. It was not very good. "It looks like … Howard Stern," the fake-fur-behatted East Village painter Nina Bovasso said. A crazed man in a cut-off T-shirt held aloft a "RAMONES" license plate- Blender magazine got the shot. A leering wasted guy in cords and a fake Carhartt jacket staggered up and took Ms. Bovasso's picture. "How are you?" I asked him with real concern. "In and out of focus," he cackled.

"The guy from the Misfits"-presumably Jerry Only-was also there. "You sell your book yet?" people asked each other. "Everyone else is cashing in," someone laughed. Someone gestured at the rather pomo-Miami new building across the street and said something about "$8 million lofts," certainly a wildly inaccurate if metaphorically apt description. (Reportedly, the condos in the space-age building at the corner of Bowery and Bond top out at a paltry $2 million.) And if it's aesthetics one cares about, of course, the majority of the south side of Joey Ramone Place is punished with the giant sweeping face of 1 East Second Street, a complex of N.Y.U. single-resident dorms that looks as if it arrived from a city of the future-a really shitty beige future.

Under the signpost in the very center of the bored, chilled crowd, Mr. Vega and a swingin' sort of guy reportedly named Kevin James did a little M.C. job. Mr. Vega read a letter to Joey aloud. We waited for five more minutes in quiet. Cameras, mohawks, people getting old. The event was as unchoreographed as a Ramones show, but without the smoke, drugs or sexual tension. Surely the network cameras were peeved; Eyewitness News wants its money shot delivered on demand. Arturo shed his shirt from a different angle. "Quick, stick a dollar in his pants," said Kevin peevishly. Then the energy changed.

"Get off the sidewalk," yelled a passing S.U.V. driver. "Hey ho! Let's go!" the cold crowd chanted. "The politicians are never on time," said Kevin. "Screw the politicians!" someone shouted. "Margarita, where are you?" asked Kevin through the P.A. system. Everyone turned to his neighbor and made a joke about wanting a drink.

At 2:19 p.m., someone yelled "Dee Dee's not coming, you idiot!" Which is kind of rude, given that dead Dee Dee Ramone O.D.'d last year. There was a fresh round of "Hey ho, let's go's."

The corner of Bowery and Second has the distinction of being the very intersection of two City Council districts. We doubled our pleasure with the joint appearance of District 2's Margarita Lopez and District 1's Alan Gerson. Ms. Lopez, Mr. Gerson, Joey's mother and brother, Morris Faitelewicz from Community Board 3, and a guy from the borough president's office took over the tiny platform.

The pols and family speechifed very quickly and inaudibly. "Take it off!" people shouted during Ms. Lopez's speech, which is surely a first for her. She is a handsome woman, but they were referring, of course, to the T-shirt covering Joey's street sign.

The last speaker said that this honor celebrates the city: "New York is about the freedom and the fun," he said, without irony. And then, at 2:27 p.m., Arturo pulled a cord, removing the black Ramones T-shirt and exposing the street sign.

It was not anticlimactic at all. It was amazing.

"Let's go party at CB's," yelled Kevin as he dismounted the ministage, but of course the good after-party was at Arturo Vega's loft. At 2:45 p.m., the orange coffee-serving Mud Truck and its promise of hot beverages pulled off. "Hey little girl, I wanna be your boyfriend," blasted the Ramones on the stereo from Arturo's second-floor loft, on Joey Ramone Place just a few feet east of the Bowery. On the ground floor of Arturo's building, the John Derian Company was doing brisk business. There are some really cute pillows on a chaise lounge in the front window, and an adorable metal garden table which is priced at $2,290.

There was a bouncer of sorts downstairs. "What do you say? Can you love me, babe?" sang Joey. A young and very pretty girl with purple hair sailed right into the party with a dreamy smile.

Older, wiser, possibly detoxified, S.T.P. have at least widened their appropriative horizons. Kicking dope and expanding your record collection doesn't guarantee your band longevity, but Shangri-LA DEE DA is a promising start. Though some of the songs, including "Dumb Love," are, as Mr. Weiland has put it, vintage S.T.P. (meaning, maybe, vintage Alice in Chains), the band has clearly benefited from a Virgin Megastore binge. The list of influences–from the Beatles to Zeppelin to Todd Rundgren to, according to the album's press release, bossa-nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim–illustrates once again the fine line between eclecticism and hedging one's bets.

After several listens, this album has a strange effect. Revulsion may recede slightly, and a certain appreciation for its adept manipulation of familiar sounds may occur. Pregnant women may even safely handle "A Song for Sleeping," Weiland's ode to his newborn son, and "Vasoline"-era diehards might find midlife-crisis relief in the hatchet job performed on rock-boy whipping-girl Courtney Love in "Too Cool Queenie " ("She got real famous/And made lots of money/And some of his, too"). Disingenuous Kurt Cobain hagiography ("He wasn't half-bad/At saving the world") isn't the only false move in this song. "Days of the Week , " a sort of Friends -theme reject, is catchy only in the manner of a nail poking out of a door frame. But Shangri-LA DEE DA, sappy and grating as it can be, possesses some genuine pop-rock moments, best evinced in "Wonderful" and "Bi-Polar Bear." S.T.P. never had integrity, but perhaps they've gained some dignity by still trying to make a go of it at all, now that even the poseurs have stopped whining about all the poseurs out there.

– Sam Lipsyte

Nuggets II : Garage Sale

First, some facts regarding Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts From the British Empire and Beyond (Rhino). Like its predecessor–itself an expanded version of the epochal 1972 double album of early American psychedelia compiled by Lenny Kaye–it's a four-disc excavation of scores of rare singles from what are ostensibly known as garage-rock bands from 1964-69. The task here is to highlight international analogues to the likes of the Standells. The only tunes included on these discs that hit the charts here are Status Quo's "Pictures of Matchstick Men" and the Easybeats' "Friday on My Mind." The opening tune, the Creation's "Making Time," is best known as the keynote of Rushmore . And that's about it for stateside recognition.

Even more than the nascent punk rock collected on Nuggets I (which was expanded in 1998), singles from British, European, South American and Asian garage-rock bands are fetishized by the type of malcontents you see hanging around at the WFMU Record Fair. I suspect that this has to do with how the corpus of Nuggets I is no longer wholly theirs: The unwashed (or, with respect to the hygienic habits of this species of record collectors, the washed) can know what's up with L.A.'s Music Machine, so it's on to Auckland's La De Da's and Amsterdam's the Zipps. Now, with the release of Nuggets II , they'll have to start hitting the swap meets in Micronesia.

The odd thing about Nuggets II is how similar the songs sound. It's de rigueur to bemoan how countries' cultural differences are being flattened by capitalism. But the evidence presented here suggests that, in the never-to-be-besmirched 1960's, the immediate musical legacy of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Who, Kinks and Yardbirds was largely not one that encouraged heterogeneity, but homogeneity.

There are a ton of great tunes within, including the Syndicats' "Crawdaddy Simone" and "I Am Just a Mops" from Japan's the Mops–two of the more demented songs of the age. The Move's "I Can Hear the Grass Grow," the Small Faces' "My Mind's Eye" and the Jury's "Who Dat" are sure-footed. Any one of these four discs of pure, nasty rock action would sound terrific at a roof party: Garage rock is more fun to drink to than, say, intelligent dance music.

But it makes one wonder why more of these bands didn't incorporate local influences, like Brazil's Os Mutantes did via "Bat Macuma." Believe me, four discs of wall-to-wall Neanderthal R&B and psychedelia is a fine thing. But only a nearly certifiable60's-musicsupremacist wouldn't find Nuggets II slightly numbing.

– Rob Kemp

Thelonious Monk: Straight, With Chaser

Because they rarely have the rights to a jazz immortal's entire recorded oeuvre , record labels like to repackage what they've got and claim, even if only implicitly, that this is the essential epoch of the artist's career. In the case of the new three-CD Thelonious Monk box set, The Columbia Years: 1962-1968 , that would be some claim. The earlier Monk boxes–the four-CD Blue Note , which includes his first recordings from 1947-1952, and the 15-CD Riverside box, which covers 1955 to 1962–are the mother lode of his formally ingenious compositions, showcases for his prickly, percussive and utterly sui generis approach to the piano. (Those who aren't familiar with his music might try to imagine something between Erik Satie and the folk blues.)

Owing to the lag between genius and recognition, Monk worked in relative obscurity on the early masterpieces. The contract with Columbia signaled his arrival to the big time and, conversely, his imminent fall from critical grace. He was still playing wonderfully, but, in contrast to the varied musical settings of past years, he had settled into a comfortable and occasionally predictable quartet groove with his tenor saxophonist, Charlie Rouse. He was, we appreciate in retrospect, headed for a complete withdrawal from musical life, the silent 70's that preceded his death in 1982. In an arty touch, the reissue's first disc begins with a four-second fragment of Monk mumbling, "I'm famous. Isn't that a bitch?"

What makes the set so surprisingly satisfying–as both a work of historical revisionism and a collection of brilliant music–is what's been subtracted, not added. By compressing Monk's sprawling Columbia output into three discs, Orrin Keepnews, the reissue producer and Monk's original producer at Riverside, has elided the repetitions and longueurs that made 60's-era Monk so problematic. Variety has been successfully retrofit. Monk sounds wily and beguiling on the quartet cuts on disc 1 (try "Ugly Beauty"); burning on "Blue Monk," one of the big-band pieces on disc 2; and relaxed and expansive with clarinetist Pee Wee Russell on a concert performance of "Nutty," from the final "live" disc.

Still, the Columbia reissue seems destined to live in the shadow of the Blue Note and Riverside boxes. But that, for a jazz album, is a very honorable place to be.

– Joseph Hooper

The Ramones: Jive Talkin'

Some bands take an entire career to round out a sound, but not the Ramones. Like Neu!, they had it down by the first couple of drumbeats in 1976. As shown by Rhino Records' recent reissue of their first four LP's ( Ramones , Leave Home , Rocket to Russia and Road to Ruin , which include sundry demos, singles and, in one instance, an entire concert), the rest of their career was all about finesse–not a term oft-associated with punk. That they were tolerated for another 25 years is evidence of the goodwill the cartoon-like band engendered, despite the infighting and Nazi iconography.

Much has been written of the band's buffoonish persona, but one has to consider what it was born of: a lovingly ironic acceptance of the American Graffiti culture of their youths, which had been reduced to the kiddie Kustom Kar Kommando that was the Fonz. So all their talk of sedation and shock treatments had little to do with the anger of the punk culture they engendered; rather, it was their nostalgia for "Creature Double Features" and Phil Spector. The briefness of the songs, the Searchers covers, the movie-monster-wrestling images on their album covers: all pointed to a curmudgeonly belief that not only had the hippies screwed up the greatest period of music, they also got to write the official history–one that would treat all that the Ramones valued as mere prelude to a 14-minute Richie Blackmore guitar solo.

In the early 70's, rock had embraced the blues as a form of authenticity, transforming the field holler into a soundtrack for decadent white boys slithering in Stevie Nicks' fringe. But the Ramones were early anti-wiggers, born of the New York City art-band tradition of denigrating what might be considered a Caucasian genuflection toward "soul music" (to which Nelly Furtado responds, "Meep meep!"). In fact, with their leather jackets, bowl haircuts and Joey Ramone's glue-sniffing enunciation, the Ramones were really minstrels of whiteness. When he sings, "Sitting here in Queens/Eating refried beans/We're in all the magazines/Gulpin' down Thorazines" in "We're a Happy Family," from Rocket to Russia (their strongest album), they're a pale-faced Coasters for the Lower East Side, choosing mook bravado over monkey suits.

The Coasters were the Bamboozled of their day–African-Americans fronting the lyrics of a couple of white wise-asses. But not only were the Ramones playing the joke on themselves; the punk rock they invented was the only musical genre to have been born ironic, which is why their fan base remained equal parts cretins who didn't get the joke and critics who thought they made it up. While the punk community showed its closeness following Joey Ramone's death in May, I suspect that anyone who saw the world as a bunch of lobotomized pinheads would feel somewhat separate from any faction that celebrated him. And so "1-2-3-4!" remain the loneliest numbers that we'll ever know.

– D. Strauss