GoKawiilIt’s been 50 years since the debut album of the group that invented punk, although their legacy in style and merchandising eclipsed their actual success on stage
On April 23, 1976, the Ramones’ first, self‑titled album was released. It was recorded over seven days on the eighth floor of New York’s Radio City Music Hall and cost $6,400 at the time — an almost laughably small amount compared with the big budgets common in the record industry then. Their label, Sire, decided to release two singles, Blitzkrieg Bop and I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, but neither made it onto the sales charts, nor did the LP itself. Even so, it is considered one of the most influential albums in the history of popular music. The cultural weight attributed to it far exceeds the 29 minutes and four seconds it takes to listen to what is widely regarded as the album that invented punk.
Jeffrey Hyman, John Cummings, Douglas Colvin, and Tom Erdelyi were between 24 and 25 years old at the time. They had met at Forest Hills High School, a middle-class neighborhood in New York City, where they felt like outcasts, out of place. For them, the band was a way to forge a new identity, something they did quite literally. They adopted the surname Ramone, as if they were all brothers, and the first names Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy, respectively. They also adopted a uniform, like superheroes of the underclass: shaggy hair, black leather jackets over worn-out T-shirts that were too small, ripped blue jeans, and sneakers.
They posed against a wall, unknowingly creating one of the most iconic images in rock history. Today, that portrait — which appeared on the album cover and was shot by Roberta Bayley, a photographer for Punk magazine, in an alley in the Bowery — hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).
A Ramones fan photographed wearing a Ramones T-shirt at a concert in 1976. Roberta Bayley (Redferns)
The Ramones wore the perfect street uniform for unleashing loud, dirty, fast, infectiously melodic, and silly songs that never reached the three‑minute mark. At the time, it was a revolution — one that marked a before and after in the history of rock. As sociologist Donna Gaines wrote in the text accompanying their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, “The Ramones democratized rock and roll — you didn’t need a fat contract, great looks, expensive clothes or the skills of Clapton. You just had to follow Joey’s credo: ‘Do it from the heart and follow your instincts.’"
In reality, it was more of a revolt than a revolution, as the quartet sought to recapture the spirit of the most primitive rock of the 1950s and 1960s. A world that, according to them, had been lost, buried beneath the virtuosity and pretentiousness of symphonic rock. “We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard,” Johnny Ramone once declared. “Everything was tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos… We missed music like it used to be.”
The band’s songs celebrated trash culture: television, hamburgers and pizzas, World War II movies or B-movies, comic books, surfing, vending machines, baseball… But they also reflected a street culture more associated with crime and social deviance. This was especially evident in Dee Dee’s lyrics. For example, the song 53rd & 3rd was based on the bassist’s own experience as a hustler on the Manhattan street corner where the song is set, and ended with the protagonist murdering a client. Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue was about his habit of sniffing glue, and Beat on the Brat was rumored to have come to Joey after seeing a mother chasing an obnoxious child with a baseball bat.
The Ramones could be highly controversial when they used Nazi iconography in Blitzkrieg Bop and Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World, but it came more from cluelessness than from provocation: both Joey and Tommy were Jewish, and Tommy’s parents had barely survived the Holocaust in their native Hungary.
Iggy Pop and Joey Ramone wearing a Ramones T-shirt in Chicago in 1988. Paul Natkin (Getty Images)
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