It was fun that time I saw the Ramones. Well, maybe fun doesn’t quite describe it. It was during the World Music Festival at the CNE, on the Old Ex grounds in Toronto. Ted Nugent played in a loincloth, although it was maybe more of a loin pelt. Aerosmith was there. Goddo, too.

This was 1979. It was a hard rock festival and the Ramones were wrong-booked the way they were wrong-booked lots in their career because they were so singular. Nobody really knew what to do with them. Nobody except their hardcore fans, but you could count them on two hands, at least in Toronto.

I’d never heard of the Ramones before. They were just a name on a bill beside Johnny Winter and Moxy and Nazareth, who also played. The Ramones went on fourth, maybe fifth, just as the crowd was getting pretty stoned and hammered, although not me.

I was fifteen.

They played and people hated them. Pretty soon, the skies filled with stuff: shoes, plastic flasks, transistor radios, cookies, other food. It was raining garbage. The Ramones played five or six songs and then gave the crowd the finger and unplugged— brrzzzzzz—and left. Later, Joey Ramone told me that someone threw a bag of sandwiches on stage, and they ended up eating them for lunch.

To my left were maybe ten or twelve kids—punks, the kind I’d seen on the news. In front of me, and everywhere else, were stoners, and they surrounded the punks, who were telling the long, greasy-haired heads to fuck off. The heads went at them and the punks took them on. They took them on and they didn’t care. I’d never seen anything like it in my life.

The whole crazy, primeval scene made me ask a very fundamental question of myself: Who would I want to be part of? Would I wanna be with the stoners who’d thrown shit at musicians the way drunks had thrown shit at Daniel Lanois opening for the Hip on Canada Day at Molson Park in 1994? (“This song’s for assholes who throw shit at musicians,” Gord had said.)

Or would I wanna be with the punks, who cared so much about this band that they were willing to take on dozens of meatheads who hated them for what they looked like and for the band they loved? There was shouting, then cops on horseback, who came in through a gate near the back of the field.

That day, I knew what direction my life would take, and why. I was pointed like a vector against all I’d been taught: be like everyone else, fit in, make art that sounds like other art, don’t worry people, don’t alarm them, don’t make strong flavours, play the game. Instead, I took my advice from something Johnny Ramone told the Village Voice a few years later when asked about the simplicity of the band’s music (even though it isn’t simple): “Just being yourself is being intelligent.”

I winnowed it down, and tattooed it on my heart.

Be yourself. Be you.

You’re beautiful.

Dave Bidini sang and played guitar for the Rheostatics for twenty-seven years, releasing eleven albums. He has also written two plays and twelve books, including the classic On a Cold Road, shortlisted for 2011 CBC Canada Reads. He now performs with Bidiniband.