Ramones

Background

Ramones began playing gigs in mid-1974, with their first show at Performance Studios in New York City. The band, performing in a style similar to the one used on their debut album, typically performed at clubs in downtown Manhattan, specifically CBGB and Max's Kansas City. In early 1975, Lisa Robinson, an editor of Hit Parader and Rock Scene, saw the fledgling Ramones performing at CBGB and subsequently wrote about the band in several magazine issues. The group's vocalist Joey Ramone related that "Lisa came down to see us, she was blown away by us. She said that we changed her life; she started writing about us in Rock Scene, and then Lenny Kaye would write about us and we started getting more press like The Village Voice. Word was getting out, and people starting coming down." Convinced that the band needed a recording contract, Robinson contacted Danny Fields, former manager of the Stooges, and argued that he needed to manage the band. Fields agreed because the band "had everything I ever liked" and became the manager in November 1975.

On September 19, 1975, Ramones recorded a demo at 914 Sound Studios, which was produced by Marty Thau. Featuring the songs "Judy Is a Punk" and "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend", the band used the demo to showcase their style to prospective labels. Producer Craig Leon, who had seen the Ramones perform in the summer of 1975, brought the demo to the attention of Sire Records' president Seymour Stein. After being persuaded by Craig Leon and his ex-wife Linda Stein, Ramones auditioned at Sire and were offered a contract, although the label had previously signed only European progressive rock bands. Drummer Tommy Ramone recalled: "Craig Leon is the one who got us signed, single handed. He brought down the vice president and all these people—he's the only hip one in the company. He risked his career to get us on the label." The label offered to release "You're Gonna Kill That Girl" as a single, but the band declined, insisting on recording an entire album. Sire accepted their request and agreed to release a studio album instead.

Recording and production

In January 1976 the band took a break from their live performances to prepare for recording at Plaza Sound studio. Sessions began later that month and were completed within a week for $6,400; the instruments took three days and the vocal parts were recorded in four days. In 2004, Leon admitted that they recorded Ramones quickly due to budget restrictions, but also that it was all the time they needed.

The band applied microphone placement techniques similar to those which many orchestras used. The recording process was a deliberate exaggeration of the techniques used by the Beatles in the early 1960s, with a four-track representation of the devices. The guitars can be heard separately on the stereo channels—electric bass on the left channel, rhythm guitar on the right—drums and vocals are mixed in the middle of the stereo mix. The mixing of the production also used more modern techniques such as overdubbing, a technique used by studios to add a supplementary recorded sound to the material. The band also used a technique known as doubling, where the vocal line used is sung twice.

Recording for the album was expanded by Mickey Leigh (Joey's brother) and Leon with percussion effects, which went unmentioned in the liner notes to the album's release. Author Nicholas Rombes said that the production's quality sounded like "the ultimate do-it-yourself, amateur, reckless ethic that is associated with punk", but concluded that they approached the recording process with a "high degree of preparedness and professionalism".

Lyrics and composition

The songs on Ramones addressed several lyrical themes including violence, male prostitution, drug use, and Nazism. While the moods displayed in the album were often dark, Johnny said that when writing the lyrics they were not "trying to be offensive". Many songs from the album have backing vocals from different guests. Leigh sang backing vocals on "Judy Is a Punk", "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend", and in the bridge of "Blitzkrieg Bop". Tommy sang backing vocals on "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You", "Judy Is a Punk", and during the bridge of "Chain Saw". The album's engineer, Rob Freeman, sang backing vocals for the final refrain of "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". Leon wrote in the booklet for the album's 2016 reissue that when layered background vocals appear on the album, they are primarily Freeman's contributions combined with some of Leon and Dee Dee's, and a great deal by Leigh, "all compiled and compressed to create an effective cyborg backing vocal creature." The album's length is 29 minutes and four seconds and it contains 14 tracks. On the original issue of the album, all the original songs were credited to "the Ramones" collectively.

The opening "Blitzkrieg Bop" was written by Tommy, and originally named "Animal Hop". Once Dee Dee reviewed the lyrics, the band changed the wording, the name, and partially the theme. According to Tommy, the song's original concept was about "kids going to a show and having a good time", but the theme became more Nazi-related after its revision. The piece begins with an instrumental interval which lasts about 20 seconds. At the 20th second, the guitar and bass cease, marking Joey's first line, "Hey ho, let's go!" The bass and guitar gradually rebuild and become "full–force" once all the instruments play together in ensemble. The piece resolves by repeating what is played from 0:22–0:33. Stephen Thomas Erlewine from AllMusic described "Blitzkrieg Bop" as a "three-chord assault".

"Beat on the Brat" was said by Joey to have origins relating to the upper class of New York City. Dee Dee, however, explained that the song was about how Joey saw a mother "going after a kid with a bat in his [apartment building's] lobby and wrote a song about it". "Judy Is a Punk" – written around the same time as "Beat on the Brat" — was written by Joey after he walked by Thorny Croft, an apartment building "where all the kids in the neighborhood hung out on the rooftop and drank." The song's lyrics are fictional and refer to two juvenile offenders in Berlin and San Francisco and their possible deaths at the conclusion of the song. "Judy Is a Punk" is the original album's shortest track at 1:32; it is partially derived from the Burl Ives 1953 folk song “There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly".

Artwork and packaging

Initially, the Ramones wanted an album cover similar to Meet the Beatles! (1964) and subsequently had pictures taken in that style by Danny Fields but Sire was dissatisfied with the results. The art direction was by Toni Wadler and, according to cartoonist John Holmstrom, the Meet The Beatles cover idea came out "horribly". Wadler later chose a photo by Roberta Bayley, a photographer for Punk magazine, for the cover. The black and white photograph on the front of the album was originally in an issue of Punk.

The cover photo features (from left to right) Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee Ramone, staring at the camera with blank faces. They are all wearing ripped and faded blue jeans and leather jackets, standing upright against the brick wall of a private community garden called Albert's Garden, located in the Bowery neighborhood of New York City between the Bowery and Second Street. The stance of the group members in the photograph would influence their future cover designs as well, with the majority of their succeeding albums using a picture of the band on the front cover. Music historian Legs McNeil states that "Tommy [is] standing on his tip-toes and Joey [is] hunched over a bit." The back cover art, which depicts a belt buckle with a bald eagle and the band's logo, was designed by Arturo Vega. Liner notes on the back cover fail to acknowledge backing vocalists and additional instrument players. Leigh, who performed backing vocals on several tracks, asked guitarist Johnny why he was not mentioned on the record's credits. Johnny replied: "We didn't want people to get confused with who's in the band or who's not. It's our first album, you know, and we didn't want people to get confused."

The artwork became one of the most imitated album covers in music. The image of a band in front of a brick wall dressed in ripped jeans and leather jackets was copied by Alvin and the Chipmunks in Chipmunk Punk. Ramones's artwork was ranked number 58 on Rolling Stone's 1991 list of 100 Greatest Album Covers.

The album sleeve and a poster of the same design are in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Promotion

Singles

There were two singles released from the album: "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend". The first was released in February 1976, originally as a 7" split single with "Havana Affair" as its B-side. The release, along with the Ramones 2001 Expanded Edition, featured "Blitzkrieg Bop" remixed as a single version, although it maintains a time of two minutes and twelve seconds. On January 6, 2004, Rhino Entertainment re-released "Blitzkrieg Bop" as a CD single, using "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" as its B-side. "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" was released in September 1976 as a 7" single. It included live versions of "California Sun" and "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You" as B-sides, recorded at the Roxy Theater in West Hollywood in August 1976. "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" was also released in the UK, giving the band a presence in the European marketplace. Even though the song saw some success in the UK and Europe, it failed to chart in the top 50.

Touring

In 1974 the band played 30 performances, nearly all at the New York-based club CBGB. All but one of the band's 1975 gigs were booked for New York City, with Waterbury, Connecticut as the exception. After the album's recording, the Ramones headlined for very few shows, usually opening for an identified cover band which played Aerosmith and Boston. When they opened at Brockton, Massachusetts, the audience appeared extremely uninterested in the Ramones so Johnny swore off playing as an introduction for other bands. Following this, Fields booked several headlining shows around the Tri-state area, and they began playing frequently at gigs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City. After performing with Blondie in New Jersey, they continued their tour to Boston, Massachusetts for three shows. Leigh later said of the tour:

Travelling was difficult. Most of the time, it was just Danny Fields, me, and the members of the band. We'd get two rooms in the hotel, three of us in each. They couldn't afford any more help at that point, so the band had to pitch in unloading the equipment. I'd play the drums during sound checks, while Tommy went out to the board and mixed the sound—and instructed the soundman not to fuck with the settings. We would enlist the aid of any fan willing to help us load out at the end of the night.

At the time, Leigh was road manager, stage manager, chauffeur, and head of security. Vega, who contributed to the album's packaging, helped out with the road crew as much as possible. Tommy's friend Monte Melnick occasionally helped with the audio output, but this was typically done by Leigh.

Following their debut album's release, the band performed at over 60 concerts for its promotion. While most of the gigs were booked in North America, two dates—July 4 and 5—were in London's Roundhouse venue and Dingwalls, respectively. Linda Stein pushed to make these events happen, setting up the band performances in the UK during the United States Bicentennial. Fields relates: "On the two-hundredth anniversary of our freedom, we were bringing Great Britain a gift that was forever going to disrupt their sensibilities." The band sold out for their first London performance, with an audience of roughly 3,000. Leigh described the Dingwalls gig as very similar to performances at CBGB. Likewise, these venues in future were headlined by other punk bands like the Clash and Sex Pistols. The band performed over 100 concerts the following year.

Reception

Ramones was released on April 23, 1976, by Sire Records and received glowing reviews. In May, John Rockwell of The New York Times published a rave review, saying: "What the Ramones do is deliver a nonstop set of short, brisk, monochromatically intense songs. ... conventional considerations of pace and variety are thrown calculatedly to the winds. The ingredients are simplicity itself." Rockwell noted: "the effect in the end amounts to an abstraction of rock so pure that other associations get left behind." Nick Kent favourably commented in the NME: "This record poses a direct threat to any vaguely sensitive woofer and/or tweeter lodged in your hi-fi ...". Reviewing that same month in The Village Voice, Robert Christgau said that, while the power of the band's music draws from "fairly ominous sources" like Nazi imagery and brutality, he cannot deny the "sheer pleasure" of the music: "For me, it blows everything else off the radio: it's clean the way the Dolls never were, sprightly the way the Velvets never were, and just plain listenable the way Black Sabbath never was." In July, Paul Nelson of Rolling Stone wrote that the album was similar to early rock and roll, and was constructed using rhythm tracks of great intensity.

In August, Creem dubbed The Ramones as "The most radical album of the past six years", saying: "[it] is so strikingly different, so brazenly out of touch with prevailing modes as to constitute a bold swipe at the status quo." Reviewer Gene Sculatti saw it as "a rock 'n' roll reactionary's manifesto" ... "a sharp wedge between the stale ends of a contemporary music scene bloated with graying superstars and overripe for takeover." Critic Joe S. Harrington declared that the album was a huge landmark for music history, proclaiming that "[it] split the history of rock 'n' roll in half." Theunis Bates, a writer for Time, summed the album up with: "Ramones stripped rock back to its basic elements ... lyrics are very simple, boiled-down declarations of teen lust and need." Bates also said that it "is the ultimate punk statement." Kris Needs of ZigZag declared that the album's "mutant vocals and ultra-simplicity of the music and lyrics do take some getting used to, but once you get past the curiosity stage, the effect can be shattering, especially at high volume" and that it was "impossible to mention highlights, 'cos the whole album's a highlight, geared and stripped down for maximum energy and effect." In 1977 Charles M. Young of Rolling Stone regarded Ramones as "one of the funniest rock records ever made and, if punk continues to gain momentum, a historic turning point."

Later reviews of Ramones tended to praise the album's influence on rock music. In 1995, Jeff Tamarkin of The AllMusic Guide to Rock said that the album ignited the punk rock era, writing: "rock's mainstream didn't know what hit it." In 2001, April Long of NME rewarded the album with a perfect score, remarking that the Ramones were "arguably the most influential band ever", despite their lack of mainstream acceptance. Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic also deemed the album influential, saying "In comparison to some of the music the album inspired, The Ramones sounds a little tame—it's a little too clean, and compared to their insanely fast live albums, it even sounds a little slow." The album's sound was considered by Erlewine to be "all about speed, hooks, stupidity, and simplicity".

Legacy and influence

Ramones is considered to have established the musical genre of punk rock, as well as popularizing it years afterward. Rombes wrote that it offered "alienated future rock", and that it "disconnected from tradition". The album was the start of the Ramones' influence on popular music, with examples being genres such as heavy metal, thrash metal, indie pop, grunge, post-punk, and most notably, punk rock. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame said of their influence on rock in general:

When the [Ramones] hit the street in 1976 with their self-titled first album, the rock scene, in general, had become somewhat bloated and narcissistic. The Ramones got back to basics: simple, speedy, stripped-down rock and roll songs. Voice, guitar, bass, drums. No makeup, no egos, no light shows, no nonsense. And though the subject matter was sometimes dark, emanating from a sullen adolescent basement of the mind, the group also brought cartoonish fun and high-energy excitement back to rock and roll.

Despite the lack of popularity in its era, the significance of the album in the development of the punk rock genre was immense, influencing many of the most well-known names in punk rock, including the Damned, the Clash, Black Flag, Misfits, and Green Day. Billie Joe Armstrong, singer for Green Day, explained his reasoning for listening to the band: "they had songs that just stuck in your head, just like a hammer they banged right into your brain." The album also had a great impact on the English punk scene as well, with the bassist for Generation X, Tony James, saying that the album caused English bands to change their style. "When their album came out," commented James, "all the English groups tripled speed overnight. Two-minute-long songs, very fast." In another interview, James stated that "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." In 1999, Classic Albums by Collins GEM recognized Ramones as the start of English punk rock and called it the fastest and hardest music that could possibly be concocted, stating: "The songs within were a short, sharp exercise in vicious speed-thrash, driven by ferocious guitars and yet halting in an instant. It was the simple pop dream taken to its minimalist extreme." In 2012 the album was preserved by the National Recording Registry, deeming it "culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant".

Cover versions and tributes

Each song on Ramones has been covered by various bands. Sonic Youth covered "Beat on the Brat" on their 1987 EP Master-Dik, as did Weird Al Yankovic on the Dr. Demento Covered in Punk LP (2018). In 1991, German punk band Die Toten Hosen played "Blitzkrieg Bop" on their cover album Learning English, Lesson One. A tribute album titled Gabba Gabba Hey: A Tribute to the Ramones was released on August 30, 1991. It contained the songs "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", "53rd & 3rd", "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement", "Loudmouth", and "Beat on the Brat". Screeching Weasel released Ramones (1992), which consisted of the band performing the entire album track list. 1998's Blitzkrieg Over You!: A Tribute to the Ramones featured a cover "Judy Is a Punk" in German, and in 2000, both "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Beat on the Brat" appeared on Dee Dee Ramone's solo release Greatest & Latest. The compilation album Ramones Maniacs included Youth Gone Mad's version of "Blitzkrieg Bop" (featuring a guest appearance by Dee Dee Ramone) and Yogurt's rendition of "Beat on the Brat". "Blitzkrieg Bop", "Havana Affair", "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend", and "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" were all covered on The Song Ramones the Same. We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to Ramones (2003) featured several of the album's songs covered by bands like Red Hot Chili Peppers ("Havana Affair"), Rob Zombie ("Blitzkrieg Bop"), Metallica ("53rd & 3rd"), U2 ("Beat on the Brat"), Pete Yorn ("I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend"), and John Frusciante ("Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World"). In 2006, "Blitzkrieg Bop" was reworked into a children's song on the album Brats on the Beat: Ramones for Kids.

Track listing

All tracks originally credited to the Ramones (except "Let's Dance"). Actual writers are listed alongside the tracks.

2001 expanded edition CD

Notes

Tracks 15 and 16 produced by Marty Thau at 914 Sound Studios, Blauvelt, New York, September 1975. First issued on The Groups of Wrath: Songs of the Naked City (1991).

Tracks 17–21 produced by T. Erdelyi and engineered by Jack Malken at Dick Charles Studios, New York, 1975. Tracks 18 and 20 first issued on All the Stuff (And More!) Volume 1 (1990), Sire #26220. Tracks 17, 19 and 21 previously unissued.

Track 22 produced by Craig Leon. First issued on "Blitzkrieg Bop" single, February 1976.

2016 40th anniversary deluxe edition

CD 1

Original album

Remastered original stereo version (tracks 1–14). Source: original stereo master from Plaza Sound, 1976.

40th anniversary mono mix (tracks 15–28). Source: original multi-track tapes transferred to 192/24 digital and original mix notes. Mixed at Abbey Road Studios, London, 2016 by Sam Okell and Craig Leon, assisted by John Bartlett.

Track listings as per original album.

CD 2

Notes

Tracks 1 and 2 mixed by Rob Freeman and Craig Leon at Plaza Sound, Radio City Music Hall, New York, 1976.

Tracks 3 and 4 mixed by Shelly Yakus and Craig Leon at the Record Plant, New York, 1976.

Track 5 mixed by Sam Okell and Craig Leon at Abbey Road Studios, London, 2016.

Tracks 6–18 recorded at Dick Charles Studios, New York, 1975. Produced by T. Erdelyi and engineered by Jack Malken. Source: 2-track masters transferred to 192/24 digital.

Tracks 5, 7–9, 11, 13, 14 and 17 are previously unissued.

CD 3

Live at the Roxy, Hollywood, CA, August 12, 1976

Contains two full live sets recorded the same evening.

Set 2

Track listing for set 2 (tracks 17–32) as per set 1.

Personnel

Credits taken from Ramones CD booklet, except otherwise noted.

Ramones

Joey Ramone – lead vocals

Johnny Ramone – guitar

Dee Dee Ramone – bass, backing vocals, co-lead vocals on "53rd & 3rd"

Tommy Ramone – drums, backing vocals, hand claps

Additional musicians

Craig Leon – pipe organ on "Let's Dance", additional guitar, backing vocals

Mickey Leigh – backing vocals, hand claps

Rob Freeman – backing vocals

Arturo Vega – hand claps

Danny Fields – hand claps

Technical

Craig Leon – producer, mixing

Tommy Ramone – associate producer (credited as T. Erdelyi)

Rob Freeman – engineer, mixing

Don Hünerberg – assistant engineer

Greg Calbi – mastering

Roberta Bayley – photography, cover photo

Arturo Vega – photography, back cover