Joe King made a pretty good point the one time I met him. We conversed for about 20 minutes in May of 1998, I believe, outside the Sapphire Supper Club in beautiful, balmy downtown Orlando, FL. I can’t remember what the road-weary, cap-wearing, everyman punk rocker said verbatim, but it was something along these lines:

“Man, that last Ramones show was kind of a joke. Eddie Vedder and Chris Cornell… those guys aren’t punk. Where was Screeching Weasel or Green Day? Fuck, where were we?”

I couldn’t argue with this snippet of logic from the New Hampshire-bred ne’er-do-well. Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, and their ilk may have taken heavy influence from the Ramones, but no band did more to further Da Bruddahs’ solitary vision of leather jackets, bubble gum melodies, ear-splitting distortion, and general social awkwardness than King’s band the Queers.

No disrespect is meant to Misters Vedder or Cornell, of course. In fact, I hear they’re both pretty cool guys. My friend Michael met Vedder once in 2004 and they talked about the dreary state of American politics. Michael gave Eddie his phone number and the dude actually called him about a week later to chat it up. Now that’s keeping it fairly real (for a multi-platinum, Grammy Award-winning, certified Rock Star, anyway).

But I digress. The glory years of the Ramones occurred between 1974 and 1982. The Queers came together at the tail end of that period, forming in scenic Portsmouth, NH. King, the band’s original singer/guitarist, and his pals (drummer Wimpy Rutherford, who would memorably take over vocal duties, and bassist Tulu) adopted the dark themes that hung over the earliest ‘Mones material and twisted them into absolutely sick, speedy hardcore blasts. The Ramones wanted to sniff glue; the Queers announced “We’d Have a Riot Doing Heroin.” The Ramones wanted to whack kids with a bat; the Queers complained their fathers abused them with garden hoses. The Ramones slyly mocked the vapid outsider protagonists of “Judy Is a Punk”; the Queers turned the lyrical sword on each other (“Tulu Is a Wimp”). Hell, even “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” mutated into the more direct “I Want Cunt.”

The original Queers imploded at about the same time hardcore punk ran its initial course. Joe King, however, was not about to give up the ship. Much like six-string slasher Johnny Ramone, who kept his band going after several seminal members quit (in the end, ‘twas only he and songbird Joey from the original line-up), King forged ahead. He resurrected the Queers in 1990 with a few new guys and a considerably slower, poppier sound. The bouncy riffs and sugary melodies of 1977’s Rocket to Russia were clearly the template for this neo-Queers; they would actually cover that classic album in its entirety a few years later during that insane “Hey, let’s remake a Ramones record” craze. It was the second Ramones album, though, whose title the boys would ape for 1990’s The Queers Grow Up. That chirpy bastard, which boasted aw-shucks anthems like “Love Love Love” and “Goodbye California”, marked the unexpected arrival of pop punk’s most unlikely war horse.