🏫The Ramones "Rock'n'Roll High School" Turns 45:🎉Front Row & Backstage Parties!🍾🎈

🌟We suddenly care about history, 'cause this is where we wanna be! What almost became Disco High somehow had Van Halen & Todd Rundgren attached! What did Julie London & Joe Dante have to do with it?

FRONT ROW…

Produced by Michael Finnell for New World Pictures, the Allan Arkush-directed Rock’n’Roll High School first hit American theatres for wide release on August 24, 1979.

The film actually had a sneak preview in Hollywood, before showings in Texas and New Mexico in April, 1979. As if on tour, it then went to San Francisco, then to Chicago in July, and it opened in Manhattan on August 3 of that year, before moving on to further markets later in the month.

Sometime in the fall of 1979, I must’ve seen the film well over a dozen times in various Houston area theatres. A 24-year-old me was in my third year of working at Cactus Records, Space City’s leading vinyl retailer at the time.

I not only saw the film because I loved it, but, I seemed to easily make new friends out of some of the regulars at Cactus. I had hoped to turn them on to The Ramones, assuming they had already established themselves as punk or rock fans!

When we find music we love, we’ve noticed, we want to share it, and what favorite recording artists were you aware of that had 90-minute “commercials” masquerading as movies playing in neighborhood theatres? Well, mine did…at least, that year!

…& BACKSTAGE

Liberty Hall, downtown Houston. Long ago razed, it had been the 1970s showroom to the visiting Bruce Springsteen, Genesis, Bonnie Raitt, and many other future arena-fillers early in their careers!

In each of the two years prior to the film’s release, I had spent considerable time with The Ramones when they came through Houston for tour dates. On July 16, 1977, at 22, I saw their Liberty Hall show (video above was made on the same night I saw them…the shirts match above and in pic, below), and dropped by backstage to introduce myself (photo below, taken by pro photog and good friend, the late Larry Lent), and chat a while.

I was either still at KLOL-FM101, the commercial FM rocker I was working part-time at, or I had just started at Cactus Records.

The next year, 1978, after their show, I went back, and they invited me to their hotel room. That story’s here:

Keyless Entry: My Night in The Ramones' Houston Hotel Room, 1978

My Local Source For All Things Sire Promo!

Born in 1951, Rob Sides was four years older than I, and passed away in 2023 at age 73. Little did I know he was living his last years in Austin, my Texas home since 1993! A ‘74 Rice University grad with a BA in Anthropology, he spent a couple years as Music Director/Program Director at the Rice radio station, KTRU. In 1975, I spent a year as Music Director at KUHF, the U of Houston radio station, a handful of miles away!

Rob’s Rice grad pic, circa 1974. This is how I remember him, just with the slightly longer hair he had when I knew him from about 1975 through 1978, as I worked my way from college radio to commercial radio at Houston’s KLOL-FM.

I had also made close friends with Houston’s local Warner Bros. Records promo guy, Rob Sides (shown above), and inasmuch as The Ramones’ Sire Records enjoyed Warner Bros. as a distributor, I managed to score all the promo merch I could hand out (and keep)! Thanks, Rob!

In fact, I saw this promotional standee in the corner of Rob’s office one day, but, sadly….no dice. He also wouldn’t let me have it! Riff Randall had one in her bedroom! The stickers you see on the standee were applied by whoever’s selling this one online.

Go West, Young Punk…and Hang a Left!

In June of 1979, two months after Rock’n’Roll High School made its Texas and New Mexico sneaks, I spent a week in L.A. to “scout the place out” for a possible move there from my Houston hometown.

The Knack’s debut album, Get The Knack, was released on June 11, during that very week I was there. That only becomes relevant when I also mention that I wandered into the famed Tower Records on Sunset Blvd, precisely during the unannounced time that Knack leader, Doug Fieger, had fallen by just to check out the store’s brand new, massive display of the album (their label, Capitol Records was mere blocks away).

What made the display so astounding is that, amid the hundreds of newly-minted Get the Knack albums, was Bruce Gary’s actual drum kit (seen in pic below) smack dab in the middle! Not only was this the most one-of-a-kind display in the country, it’s right in the shadow of the owner’s record label, “should anything happen”! I chatted with Fieger for a few minutes, but came away amazed that this is what happens (or, at least has a chance of happening) when you visit or live in Hollywood!

That same week, I also ran into both Rodney Bingenheimer and Kim Fowley in front of the Roxy, just a few blocks further west from Tower on Sunset! In fact, The Ramones played their first California concert at the Roxy Theatre on August 11, 1976. The concert scenes for Rock’n’Roll High School were filmed at the Roxy in December ‘78.

March 1975 on Hollywood Boulevard: Hollywood rock scenesters, table for two! (l-r) Kim Fowley, five months away from forming The Runaways, and Rodney Bingenheimer, KROQ jock and legendary elbow-rubber to the rock’n’pop stars, hanging out just a few blocks northeast of, and 4 years before, they’d meet me on Sunset Blvd in June 1979!📸Bob Gruen

Having, essentially, a Hit Parader Magazine come to life for me within a week was enough to have me make definite plans to move there as soon as possible…

….Which ended up being seven months later, in January 1980.

😱I Keep Running Into Cast Members!