The Ramones Best Songs

[Billie Kjergaard]

Tothe untrained ear, every Ramones song sounds exactly the same. They're all fast, short, wickedly funny and deceptively simple. But the hardcores know the truth: no two songs are the same. "Wart Hog" sounds nothing like "Judy Is a Punk," and "I Remember You" is about as far away from "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue" as one can imagine. The Ramones worked like maniacs for 22 years, and spent the vast majority of that time toiling in obscurity. Nobody was paying attention to them in the Eighties and early Nineties, but they were out every night putting on amazing shows. Sadly, it wasn't until they started dying off that they suddenly became cool agian. We asked our readers to vote for their favorite songs, and the response was huge. Click through to see the results.

Things got rough for the Ramones in the Eighties. The decade began with the commercially disappointing Phil Spector-produced End of the Century and ended with Dee Dee Ramone leaving the band. Shortly before he left, longtime Ramones fans Stephen King asked if they'd write a new song for the film adaptation of his bestselling horror novel Pet Sematary. It's poppier and less abrasive than many of their songs, and the hook is very strong. It rose high on the Modern Rock chart, but failed to cross over to pop radio and didn't crack the Hot 100. Still, it was their most successful single in years.

A key part of their live show from the band's earliest days, "Judy Is a Punk" is 93 seconds of absolute minimalist brilliance. Joey wrote the song after seeing a bunch of kids hanging around an apartment building in New York. It's about a "punk" and a "runt" who go to Berlin to join the Ice Capades and then to San Francisco to join the SLA. In homage to the 1965 Herman's Hermits classic "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am," Joey yells out "second verse, same as the first" before singing the second verse a second time. He was raised on simple pop songs like that, and had little use for the bloated rock songs that were all over radio when the Ramones formed.

According to Ramones lore, Joey wrote this biting song after Johnny stole away his girlfriend and married her. Joey was a committed liberal and Johnny was a pretty far-right Republican, and Joey supposedly equated him with the KKK. It's a great story, but the song was largely written years before it appeared on 1981's Pleasant Dreams. Joey's brother Mickey Leigh says that Joey wrote the song about his parents disapproving of him dating a black woman. Whatever the truth, it's an amazing song, and it deserved to be a hit. Oddly, radio programmers weren't thrilled about playing a song with the term "KKK" in the title.

How many people who have never spent a day in New York learned all about the geography of the city from Ramones songs? Rockaway Beach is deep into Queens (take the A Train to Broad Channel and then transfer to the S to Rockaway Beach) and it's where Dee Dee Ramone liked to spend time as a child. He wrote it like a Beach Boys song, and it's clearly the lightest song on Rocket to Russia. The single hit number 66 in America. For most bands as famous as the Ramones, that would be a failure. Sadly, "Rockaway Beach" is the most successful song in their entire catalog. They thought it was just the start of a real career as hitmakers. Little did they know it would be their peak.

"Beat on the Brat" was taken right out of Joey's childhood in the Sixties. "I was living in Forest Hills, walking around the neighborhood," he said. "Annoyed by all these rich ladies with their bratty kids." He wrote down a simple song about beating them with a baseball bat, took the chord changes from the 1968 bubblegum hit "Yummy Yummy Yummy," and a Ramones classic was born.

On May 5th, 1985 a political firestorm erupted when President Ronald Reagan laid a wreath at a West German cemetery where 49 Nazis were buried. "What Reagan did was fucked up," said Joey. "Everybody told him not to go, all his people told him not to go, and he went anyway. How can you fuckin' forgive the Holocaust?" Joey and Dee Dee wrote the scathing "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" about the incident, though Johnny was none too pleased with his band bashing the Republican icon. They compromised by calling the song "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg.)" Critics loved the song, but it failed to make much of an impact in the States.

The first song on the first Ramones album is arguably their single most famous work. Although it didn't make much of an impact at the time, "Blitzkreig Bop" is everywhere these days, from video games to commercials to baseball stadiums. Oddly enough, Dee Dee drew inspiration from the Bay City Rollers' mega-hit "Saturday Night." They chanted "S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y," and Dee Dee turned that into "Hey, ho, let's go!" He got help on the track from Tommy Ramone. "I wanted a rallying song," the drummer said. It was played at basically every Ramones concert for 22 straight years, and today its many uses across advertising and movies has generated quite a bit of income, though only Tommy is alive to enjoy it.

When Joey Ramone wrote the lyrics for "I Wanna Be Sedated," he was not joking. The band was on tour in New Jersey in 1977 when the singer badly burned his face and chest with scalding water from a vaporizer he was using soothe his throat. He somehow finished the show, then went to the hospital with second and third degree burns. They pulled a bunch of shows while he recovered, and when they returned to the road in Europe he was still in constant pain. "I Wanna Be Sedated" was scribbled down in London around Christmas, and the band cut it for their 1978 LP Road to Ruin. Needless to say, it didn't make any sort of impact on the charts, but today it's one of their most played songs on the radio. Joey often cited it as his single favorite Ramones song, and many fans feel the same way.

The Ramones[a] were an American punk rock band formed in the New York City neighborhood Forest Hills, Queens in 1974. Known for helping establish the punk movement in the United States and elsewhere, the Ramones are often cited as the first true punk rock band. Although they never achieved significant commercial success, the band is seen today as highly influential in punk culture.

All members adopted pseudonyms ending with the surname Ramone, although none were biologically related: they were inspired by Paul McCartney, who would check into hotels under the alias Paul Ramon. The Ramones performed 2,263 concerts, touring virtually nonstop for 22 years.[1] In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, they played a farewell concert in Los Angeles and disbanded.[2]

Recognition of the band's importance has built over the years.[7] The Ramones ranked number 26 in Rolling Stone magazine's 2004 list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time"[8] and number 17 in VH1's 2012 television series 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock.[9] In 2002, the Ramones were ranked the second-greatest band of all time by Spin, trailing only the Beatles.[10] On March 18, 2002, the original four members and Tommy's replacement on drums, Marky Ramone, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in their first year of eligibility.[1][11] In 2011, the group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.[12][13]

The original members of the band met in and around the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills in the New York City borough of Queens. John Cummings and Thomas Erdelyi had both been in a high-school garage band from 1965 to 1967 known as the Tangerine Puppets.[14] They became friends with Douglas Colvin, who had recently moved to the area from Germany,[15] and Jeff Hyman, who was the singer for the glam rock band Sniper, founded in 1972.[16][17][18]

The Ramones began taking shape in early 1974 when Cummings and Colvin invited Hyman to join them in a band. Colvin wanted to play guitar and sing, Cummings would also play guitar and Hyman would play drums. The lineup was to be completed with their friend Richie Stern on bass. However, after only a few rehearsals it became clear that Richie Stern could not play bass, so the group parted ways with him and became a trio, with Colvin switching from guitar to bass in addition to singing while Cummings became the only guitarist.[19] Colvin was the first to adopt the name "Ramone", calling himself Dee Dee Ramone. He was inspired by Paul McCartney's use of the pseudonym Paul Ramon during his Silver Beetles days.[20][21] Dee Dee convinced the other members to take on the name and came up with the idea of calling the band the Ramones.[22] Hyman and Cummings became Joey and Johnny Ramone, respectively.[22]

A friend of the band, Monte A. Melnick (later their tour manager), helped to arrange rehearsal time for them at Manhattan's Performance Studios, where he worked. Johnny's former bandmate Erdelyi was set to become their manager. Soon after the band was formed, Dee Dee realized that he could not sing and play his bass guitar simultaneously; with Erdelyi's encouragement, Joey became the band's new lead singer.[20] Dee Dee would continue, however, to count off each song's tempo with his signature rapid-fire shout of "1-2-3-4!" Joey soon similarly realized that he could not sing and play drums simultaneously and left the position of drummer. While auditioning prospective replacements, Erdelyi would often take to the drums and demonstrate how to play the songs. It became apparent that he was able to perform the group's music better than anyone else, and he joined the band as Tommy Ramone.[23]

The Ramones recorded their debut album, Ramones, in February 1976. Of the fourteen songs on the album, the longest, "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement", barely surpassed two and a half minutes. While the songwriting credits were shared by the entire band, and each member did contribute some writing, much of the writing was done by Dee Dee.[34][35] The Ramones album was produced by Sire's Craig Leon, with Tommy as associate producer, on an extremely low budget of about $6,400 and released in April.[36] The now iconic front cover photograph of the band was taken by Roberta Bayley, a photographer for Punk magazine.[37] Punk, which was largely responsible for codifying the term for the scene emerging around CBGB, ran a cover story on the Ramones in its third issue, the same month as the album's release.[32][38]

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