“Ramones” by the Ramones

An essential punk rock turning point turns 50.

This album review breaks down the backstory and enduring influences of an essential punk rock document

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Genre: Punk, Rock

Label: Sire

Release Date: April 23, 1976

Vibe: 🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

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In February 1976, four guys from Forest Hills, Queens, went into Plaza Sound Studios above Radio City Music Hall and recorded 14 songs in 7 days for $6,400. They’d only been playing together for a little over a year before that session took place. The resulting record only sold about 6,000 copies in its first year and didn’t crack the Top 100 of the Billboard 200 album chart. Both singles, the ubiquitous “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” failed to chart. That’s the commercial story. Pretty straightforward and, at least in the beginning, straightforwardly unremarkable. But the other side of this LP’s story is how it irreversibly changed the course of rock and roll, influencing an untold number of musicians who wanted to break the mold with a sonic sledgehammer. Like the Velvet Underground and Roxy Music before them, it took the band a while to make their mark commercially. Plenty of studio efforts that matter culturally follow a similar path.

To understand why Ramones hit the way it did, it’s important to acknowledge what rock music sounded like in the spring of 1976. Titles like Hotel California, 2112, Frampton Comes Alive!, and Boston (the latter wasn’t released yet but was around the corner), were all of a piece of a broader, suffocating aesthetic: rock that was (or aspired to be) big, expensive to make, technically demanding, and, more often than not, designed to be played in arenas. Joey made the contrast himself several times. Those records that cost half a million dollars (or more) and sometimes took two-plus years to make. That was the norm, which is maybe why something like Hotel California feels, in large part, at the other end of the excitement spectrum from the Ramones. I’m not trying to slander the Eagles by saying that, either, but there’s a marked difference between a languid AOR that moves at a deliberate pace and this album, which hits you with track after track that, 50 years later (!), still sounds so alive and vital. To know that those two LPs coexisted in the same calendar year is fascinating.

Back to Queens for a second. The four members of the Ramones—Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy—had grown up in a middle-class neighborhood that didn’t exactly lend itself to rock mythologizing. They were outcasts who, after meeting as teenagers, threw a band together and figured everything out as they went. Tommy was managing the band before he ever climbed behind the kit to step in when they couldn’t find a suitable drummer. Joey, born Jeffrey Hyman, had also had a go-round on drums before Dee Dee decided he couldn’t sing and play bass at the same time. Joey decided he couldn’t sing and play drums, so he moved himself to the frontman position. In those early days, the whole operation had the dizzying logic of a falling-forward sprint. The four men would do anything just to keep the momentum going.

By the time Craig Leon saw them at CBGB in 1975, the Ramones had already made the rounds of the New York club circuit pretty extensively. Their live shows were marvels of economy and power, averaging around 17 minutes. They would play the same setlist multiple times in a night to fill their allotted stage time, but for their rapidly increasing fan base, it hardly mattered. It was Leon who brought the band’s demo to Sire president Seymour Stein during a period when the exec was more focused on signing as many European prog rock bands as he could. As Tommy later recalled, “Craig Leon is the one who got us signed, single-handed. He brought down [all these people]. He’s the only hip one in the company. He risked his career to get us on the label.” Sire offered to release a single, but the Ramones insisted on a full album. After some back-and-forth, the label agreed, which was a massive gamble. Had the partnership resulted in a one-and-done single, would we be talking about the band in the same way a half-century later?

One of the first aspects of Ramones that jumped out at me on a fresh listen was apparently deliberate as a recording technique: the odd separation in the stereo mix. According to Tommy, they’d been listening to early Beatles records and wanted to recreate the strange (and strangely charming) techniques used in those sessions. Craig Leon ran with it. Guitar and bass swerve left and right while drums and vocals ssit at in the middle. Overdubs add these slight echo effects that become integral to the Ramones’ sound. In a way, I’m sure it sounded kind of ancient and wrong in 1976, like a ‘60s pop record that got fed through the wood chipper from Fargo. But those anachronisms are a feature, not a bug. They’re a big part of what drives “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Dee Dee counts in, Johnny’s guitar drops, and the whole thing is more or less past you before you can even get your bearings. During the chorus, the thumping groove takes over one channel, while the iconic “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!” chant swells in the other. The chords are barely varied. It asks almost nothing of the listener, and its peculiar brands of thrills are basically perfect.

Darkness and comedy on this record coexist in a way that’s unique from that era of rock. I don’t think the Ramones were as self-serious as punk later became, both politically and sonically, but they were also not kidding around. It’s the delivery that obfuscates the meaning behind some of their songs. “Beat on the Brat” describes the urge to take a baseball bat to a spoiled middle-class kid with the meter and tone of a song that child might’ve sung in elementary school. “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” is thirty-nine seconds long and barely exists as a musical composition in the first place. “53rd & 3rd” is a supposedly biographical account of Dee Dee hustling a Times Square corner in the early 1970s, and, because it’s played at the same velocity as the jokier songs, comes across as much more disturbing. In 1976, the Ramones’ music was viewed skeptically for its length and allegedly unserious tone. But, like a lot of other music I cover in this newsletter, there’s plenty of substance lurking under the surface grime if you’re willing to look for it.

US audiences met Ramones with lukewarm indifference commercially. In the UK, it was a different story. The British music press had been paying closer attention to the CBGB scene than many of their American counterparts, so when Sire’s co-manager Linda Stein booked two London shows in July, there was genuine buzz. The first of those shows was July 4, the United States Bicentennial, at the Roundhouse in Camden, supporting the Flamin’ Groovies. Two thousand people came. The resulting show was later described as turning the venue into “the hottest, sleaziest garage ever.” Marc Bolan was in the audience and got invited onstage. There are varying (and disputed) accounts of the Clash and the Sex Pistols being at the second show, alongside the Damned, Chrissie Hynde, and most of the London punk scene. Tony James of Generation X put the impact plainly: “Everybody went up three gears the day they got that first Ramones album. Punk rock, that rama-lama super fast stuff, is totally down to the Ramones. Bands were just playing in an MC5 groove until then.”

Maybe what gets lost in the discussion of the Ramones is how much they loved pop music, not necessarily punk. They loved the Beach Boys, the Ronettes, and the Crystals. Tommy even cited Herman’s Hermits (lol) as a major influence. You can hear their knack for earworm construction in something like “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” where Joey’s vocal channels Ronnie Spector’s cadence and the guitars dig their heels in on either side of the soundstage, culminating in a three-minute bop with an aching, guileless center. At first blush, it doesn’t have as much in common with “Blitzkreig Bop” or some of the angrier cuts off this LP, but that cohabitation is one of the reasons I’ve returned to Ramones again and again over the years. It also makes me sad that the band never had a Top 40 hit in the US. The closest they ever got was “Rockaway Beach,” which peaked at No. 66. I know they were a product of the underground, but they were also so ahead of their time that they missed out on much greater success when they were all still alive. Tommy, the last surviving original member, left us in 2014.

Think about this: Green Day played at their 2002 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Imagine those two bands switching places historically. Which are we talking about as leaving a greater cultural footprint for the average music listener? Apples to oranges, sure, but fun to ponder.

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What’s the best Ramones song ever? Let me know in the comments.