Written by In 1975, music business legend Danny Fields, the man who signed The Stooges and MC5 to Elektra Records, was writing a weekly music column for New York arts paper Soho Weekly News, covering emerging artists such as Television, Suicide and Patti Smith.
Each and every week, after the publication of his latest column shining a light on one of the city’s bright new talents, Fields would receive a phone call from a band from Forest Hills, Queens, telling him, “We’re better than them! We’re great!” Eventually, in November ’75, in a bid to shut up these mouthy upstarts, Fields agreed to go see the band at East Village dive bar CBGB. Which was the night that he discovered that the Ramones were every bit as fabulous as they claimed to be.
“They sounded great, they looked great, and it was like the sound was inhabiting your body from top to bottom,” Fields told me in 2016. “And of course, I loved them.”
“They were loud and swift and really smart and ambitious and their songs were perfect,” he told Classic Rock‘s Mark Ellen the following year. “We met up outside CBGB afterwards that night and they said, ‘Are you going to write about us?’ And I said, I want to manage you. You’re the future!”
In January 1976, Fields got the band signed to major label Sire Records. That same month, the quartet – vocalist Joey Ramone, guitarist Johnny Ramone, bassist Dee Dee Ramone, and drummer Tommy Ramone – began recording their debut album at Plaza Sound studio. They finished within a week, and the record – 14 songs in 29 minutes – was released on April 23, 1976.
“They originally thought that their songs were so good that they’d sell five million copies of their first album, and then be able to retire rich, and never have to bother with one another again,” Fields told me. “But it didn’t happen that way.”
Article continues below
Rock music at the time had a lot of pageantry and pomp attached, and a lot of it struck me as affected nonsense. Then the Ramones appeared
Steve Albini
In its first year on sale, Ramones sold just just 6,000 copies. To this day, it has yet to pass one million sales in America. But for generations of music fans, including some of the most influential musicians in punk rock history, the record changed everything.
“I didn’t know anything about music except what leaked out of the popular consciousness, so when this band appeared, fully-formed, that played directly into the obsessions of me and my dorky friends – horror films and trash culture, general adolescent misbehaviour and transgressive thoughts – I took to them like a fish to water,” Big Black / Shellac frontman Steve Albini told me in 2021. “It was inescapable that this would be the band and the scene for me. Rock music at the time had a lot of pageantry and pomp attached, and a lot of it struck me as affected nonsense. Then the Ramones appeared, dressed like me and my friends, with no robes or smoke machines, and that seemed so much more powerful.”
For future Hüsker Dü / Sugar frontman Bob Mould, the album was equally revelatory.
“I was 15 going on 16, listening to music with my friends: Kiss, Aerosmith, Foghat, Rush, Silver Convention, Fleetwood Mac, all that stuff,” Mould told Classic Rock in 2014. “But there had to be something more, and I didn’t know what it was. Then on my 16th birthday I get the Ramones album and I’m like, OK, I can do this now.
“All of a sudden, forget full-page pictures of Aerosmith getting on a private plane, the drugs, the groupies – it looked much more fun to be the kids in the leather jackets hauling a PA down some steps in the Bowery. There was nothing more interesting. The music was transparent, you could see and hear everything that was going on. And it was so easy to copy. It was brilliant.
“Ramones is when I went from being a fan-slash-aspiring musician to being this guy that I am now.”
“The Ramones rescued and recharged rock & roll,” former Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins wrote in his LA Weekly column in 2014. “For countless young, pissed-off, alienated outsiders-for-life, Ramones spoke the language of missed dances, bad dates and no friends. They were a perfect concept, like Devo; all the brilliance without the studied self-awareness.
For countless young, pissed-off, alienated outsiders-for-life, Ramones spoke the language of missed dances, bad dates and no friends
Henry Rollins
“The cover of their first album, the classic Roberta Bayley image, is a study in cool, unease and insolence. It is one of the greatest band lineup shots ever and looks exactly like the record sounds.
“The Ramones were a band that, in my opinion, didn’t get enough credit for their musicianship and songwriting. Their stripped-down, almost purist approach showed how bloated and unnecessary rock music had become. They were the perfect reset… are one of the greatest bands ever.”
“People are still talking about the Ramones,” Rollins’ best friend, Minor Threat / Fugazi Ian MacKaye commented in 2004, citing Ramones as one of his favourite records. “I mean think about New Kids on the Block. How many records did they sell? Millions and millions. What cultural impact did they have? Zero. But the Ramones? Those first two or three albums live on and on and on.
“The Ramones, even if they wanted to get rich, they obviously just loved their music. In fact Johnny Ramone saw Fugazi play once, and I had met him once or twice, and he said, ‘Eh. Good energy but no shtick.’ Now obviously, that’s kind of a pan, but it felt like an incredible compliment. The fact that he even saw the band made me happy.”
“I was at college when an advance copy of Ramones came into one of the local record stores,” Nirvana producer / Garbage drummer Butch Vig told us in 2016. “I remember being in there when the guy put it on, and just being floored by how amazing it sounded. So I went back a week later and was first in line when it went on sale.
“At the time, I was living in a party house on the University of Wisconsin campus. It was sorta like [screwball campus comedy] Animal House – there were basically parties every night. I had a kick-ass sound system – it didn’t sound particularly good, but it was really loud – and I swear to God I listened to that record five times a day. I’d get up in the morning and blast it before I went to class. We’d get back in the afternoon and I’d blast it again. Then we’d go to the clubs and everyone would come back around midnight, we’d play it another three times, and everybody was just bouncing off the walls. We’d sing it at the top of our lungs all the way through, after numerous pints of beer.
“It really was a startling sound for that time. There were all these bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer that would do these extended muso solos. The Ramones were the exact opposite of that, they were so stripped-down and bare-boned and so fast. It was a breath of fresh air, an adrenaline shot. In some ways I look at it as an analogy to when I produced Nevermind. It’s the same kind of thing, where the music sounded fresh and vital and really shook up the music scene. The difference being that Nirvana sold out about 25 million records and the Ramones never sold jack-shit.”
Happy 50th birthday Ramones.
