- Guitarist Gord Lewis Gets a Favor From The Ramones

Ramones Judy is a punk

(Read more About the Ramones) — If you’re going to go through the trouble of staging a late-career renaissance, you might as well bring one of your musical idols along for the ride.

At least, that’s the tack taken by Canadian punk-rock stalwarts Teenage Head, whose most recent album finds them paired with genre icon Marky Ramone, longtime drummer for The Ramones.

The Heads — guitarist Gord Lewis and bassist Steve Mahon, anyway — first encountered Ramone in 2003, after being recruited to accompany the drummer on a spoken-word date in Hamilton, Ont.

Lewis admits he was slightly nervous about asking, but couldn’t pass up the opportunity to float the idea of a future collaboration.

“In the back of my mind, even long before that, had always been the thought that I’d like to work with this man,” says Lewis, 51, from his home in Hamilton. “I’d met him briefly before, our paths had crossed the dozen or so times we’d opened for the Ramones, but this was the first time I was able to sit in a room and chat with him. I knew I was going to do it, and I knew we only had two days together. So within 48 hours I had to present him with an idea — which is what I did.”

Ramone took some convincing, but eventually agreed to re-record a handful of old Teenage Head tracks with the band, who haven’t had a new album since 1996’s Head Disorder. The first two songs were cut in Toronto, and the sessions went so well that Ramone returned to Hamilton a month later to record 10 more.

Oh, and for the second instalment, he brought a friend — producer Daniel Rey, who worked extensively with The Ramones over the years.

“I was like, ‘This is perfect, because he’s the other guy I really wanted to work with,’ ” Lewis says of Rey. “I knew he was entrenched with the band, and I said, ‘Here’s a guy who really gets it, who knows how to produce this kind of music.’ “

But while the project sounds like a match made in heaven, there was a hurdle to clear: Hard-living Head frontman Frankie Venom.

“Frankie leads a very different life from most of us — he’s got a lot of ups and downs, so it’s a bit unpredictable,” Lewis says of Venom, who’ll turn 52 when the band plays at the Royal Albert this Monday. “Daniel just said, ‘Don’t worry — I’ve worked with Johnny Thunders and I’ve worked with Dee Dee Ramone. I know how to work with these people and still get the best out of them.’ “

Those abilities might help explain why Lewis prefers the new recordings — released last month as Teenage Head With Marky Ramone — over the originals, most of which first came out following the band’s inception in the mid-’70s.

“I don’t know why that is, because I really like the originals and I really appreciate what we did as kids,” he says. “What it told me was these were classic songs, and just because I liked these better, it wasn’t that one was superior. It was that we really cared about these songs when we were writing them.”

Not surprisingly, the new/old songs have sparked a resurgence of interest. The band is back on the road — with drummer Jack Peddler — and Lewis is considering a new CD. He’s also hoping to tour outside Canada for the first time.

“It’s kind of unusual,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know what was going on in the industry when we were younger — why we never went to Europe then. But that would have been a label thing, and those guys are all long gone. We’re still here, though, so it’s a very fresh feeling. Very fresh and very exciting.”

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