Ramones Best

[Tyler Bannowsky]

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.

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For the greatest American band debate on Seed Sing, I'm going to nominate another band that I'm not really a fan of, but to be reputable, we have to acknowledge these bands that most of the music listening population recognizes as an all time great. The band I'm going to talk about today, I actually dislike almost as much as I dislike the Beach Boys. That band is The Ramones.

The Ramones are widely considered the founders of punk rock music, a genre of music I'm not that into, but I recognize how important and influential it is and has been. For my punk rock, I go to Iggy and the Stooges, who I will write about at another date, or more prog type punk rock like King Crimson or Mars Volta, I'll also be writing about Mars Volta at a later date. King Crimson is from England, so they don't make the cut in our debate. Those three bands, in my opinion, are way, way better than The Ramones, but they aren't recognized like The Ramones. The Ramones are credited with starting punk rock because every single one of their songs is a tight 2 minutes and they only play three chords and the lyrics are sung muffled. That, for all intents and purposes, is the definition of punk rock. When it comes to my personal definition, punk rock is anarchy and disestablishment and great, complicated guitar work, especially solos.

When it comes to front men, Iggy Pop is a much better punk rock singer than Joey Ramone. You can understand most of what Iggy Pop is saying and as far as on stage theatrics, there is no one that comes close to Iggy Pop, especially not Joey Ramone. But, Joey Ramone is widely looked at as the essential punk rock front man, much to my shock. He just kind of stood on stage and garbled his way through each song. People will call that punk rock, I say, he was hiding the fact that he was not that good of a singer and he had some form of stage fright.

Then, when you look at the musicians in King Crimson or Mars Volta, they are so much better and so much more proficient than Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone. Robert Fripp, of King Crimson, is ten thousand times the guitar player that Johnny Ramone ever wished he could be. And oh my god, Omar Rodriguez-Lopez is one of the greatest, most innovative and weirdest guitar players I've ever listened to in my entire life. I think he's an alien that was put on Earth to show us humans what a real guitar god looks and plays like. He is the Millenial's Jimmy Page. He's a guitar wizard that people will call legendary in about 20 years. I guarantee I will be telling my son about him when he's in his twenties and asks me about music from my generation. He's the man. Do people really say the same thing about Johnny Ramone? Is he a legendary, all time great guitar player? I don't think so. He doesn't have any memorable solos and he basically plays three chords on every song. Anyone that takes one guitar lesson can pretty much learn the entire Ramones song book. It is literally that easy. Just learn a G chord, a C chord and an F chord and you are good to go.

Let's get back to why some believe they are so influential. I will bend and say that without The Ramones, we would have never gotten The Sex Pistols, another band I'm not so fond of, but people love, Jello Biafra, who is a genius musician, there'd be no Black Flag, who is a much better band and Bad Brains, who are a great, great punk rock/reggae band. They did influence these bands and musicians and countless others, but the people I just mentioned took that influence, ran with it and made much, much better music than The Ramones. I know that people love the "simplicity" of their songs. Critics love the fact that they got their message out in 2 minutes or less. In my opinion, they could only handle that small amount of music because they were not that skilled. They needed to get everything done in a short amount of time because, if their songs lasted longer, they would be seen as subpar musicians and songwriters. They wouldn't be as highly regarded as they are now. Big time magazines and publications like "Billboard" or "Rolling Stone" even went as far to name them the second greatest rock group of all time, behind only The Beatles. That's down right insane. No way are they better than The Rolling Stones, Bob Marley and the Wailers, The Kinks, Public Enemy, The Beastie Boys, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, Janis Joplin and the Holding Company, the Flying Burrito Brothers, I could literally go on and on with bands that are far superior to The Ramones.

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