Flashback: Ramones Perform With Eddie Vedder at Their Final Show
The Ramones are perhaps the most iconic New York rock band in history, but when it came time for their final show, they opted for Los Angeles. It was the summer of 1996, and the Ramones had been on the “farewell” trail for about a year. They called their 1995 LP Adios Amigos! and said they’d break up if it wasn’t a big hit. It failed to go higher than 148 on the Billboard album chart, and that summer they launched their goodbye tour.
During the outing they got big offers to tour South America and play dates on the Lollapalooza festival the following year. The money was too big to turn down, so the farewell tour resumed in 1996. After honoring their commitments, the band decided to film an all-star farewell show on August 6th at the Palace in Los Angeles. They filmed it for a VHS release and invited Lemmy Kilmister, Chris Cornell, Eddie Vedder, Rancid’s Tim Armstrong and former bassist Dee Dee Ramone to guest with them. The 32-song set wrapped up with a cover of the Dave Clark Five’s “Any Way You Want It” featuring Eddie Vedder. They never played together again.
“Doing it in L.A. was ludicrous,” bassist C.J. Ramone says in Everett True’s book Hey Ho Let’s Go: The Story of the Ramones. “A real slap in the face for New York.”