Review: 'Hey! Ho! Let's Go! The Story of The Ramones'

In 2002, Joey Ramone had died just a year earlier. The rest of The Ramones was still alive and Everett True had just published Hey! Ho! Let's Go! The Story of The Ramones. Dee Dee Ramone would die half way through that year. Johnny Ramone would follow in 2004. A year later, an updated edition of Hey! Ho! Let's Go! acknowledged these two grim milestones. 

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 206

The Date: April 23

The Movie: Rock and Roll High School (1979)

What Is It?: Unlike yesterday’s film, today’s movie limits the apocalypse to a single high school—Vince Lombardi High School to be precise. Naturally, a fatal cocktail of Ramones, truancy, and Clint Howard bring about the destruction. But PJ Soles brings it about with the charismatic warmth of a million suns. She’s great, and so is Mary Woronov as Principal Togar (Booo! Hisss!), but it is Marky Ramone who should have gotten the best supporting actor Oscar for his work in this film. Hand it over, Melvyn Douglas!

Why Today?: On this day in 1976, Ramones is released, triggering the spontaneous combustion of thousands of phonographs.

Review: 'Ramones at 40'

So much about the Ramones Story was flat-out, bug-eyed, pinhead crazy. The inter-band animosity. The mental problems. The drugs. The violence. Dee Dee. However, I contend that the craziest thing about the band that broke through the wall of the punk era like the Kool-Aid guy busting through a wall was the fact that they never considered themselves successful. The thing is The Ramones didn’t want to be a punk band. They wanted to be The Bay City Rollers, with all the hits and record sales that group enjoyed. But what is The Bay City Rollers’ legacy? Sure, “Saturday Night” was a terrific pop song, but the Rollers did not pioneer one of pop’s key genres. They are not instantly recognizable by their faces, their clothing, or the symbols associated with them. The Bay City Rollers are not icons. The Ramones are.

Sadly, none of the four original Ramones are with us anymore. If they were, they might take a great deal of pleasure in knowing that their legacy is still mighty and enduring…so much so that there is a new coffee table book devoted to them. Ramones at 40 is basically what you’d expect from a book of this sort. It tells its subject’s essential biography in a mere 200 pages busting with a multitude of big, color photos that also require especially tight storytelling. Martin Popoff’s book does not replace previous Ramones bios, although the writer’s new interviews with the likes of band members Marky Ramone, the boastful Richie Ramone, and the particularly insightful CJ Ramone (who also handles the foreword), photographer Roberta Bayley, and producers Graham Gouldman and Andy Shernoff add some new colors and details to a story told enough times to dispel the misconception that The Ramones weren’t successful.

Popoff also supplements the main story, which deals with the band’s records more than anything personal, with side-road inserts on topics essential (CBGBs, Ramones house artist and beloved cohort Arturo Vega, Rock ‘n’ Roll High School), interestingly off-the-main-road (a Ramones museum in Berlin, Ramones schwag, the political clashes between Joey and Johnny…with a funny summation of the situation by Marky), and frankly, inessential (I’m not sure what a feature on what a bunch of musicians from metal bands think of The Ramones adds to the story). Certain topics barely get a mention. For example, Ramones roadie Monte Melnick, who also wrote one of the best books on the band, gets little more than a fleeting mention. Dee Dee’s infamously toxic relationship with Connie Gripp doesn’t even get that. But the complete story is not what we expect from a coffee table book. We expect the basic story briskly told, a shitload of great pictures, and a lot of commemorative reverence. The Ramones at 40 delivers all of that. I like to think Joey would have dug it.

Farewell, Tommy Ramone

 Sad news from the punk world. Last Friday, Tommy Erdélyi, better known as Tommy Ramone, died in hospice after a bout with bile duct cancer. Tommy was not supposed to be a member of America's greatest punk group, but the band's manager was drafted behind the drum kit when they recorded their landmark debut LP. Amazing to think Tommy was not always intended to beat the beat for the band considering how incredibly he maintained their super-charged tempos. That cat had stamina. 

Tommy also co-produced the group's first four--and all-time best-- albums, drumming on the first three before Marky Ramone replaced him.

Sadly, Tommy was the last original Ramone. Joey died of lymphoma in 2001, we lost Dee Dee to an overdose the following year, and Johnny died of prostate cancer in 2004.

Track by Track: ‘Ramones’ by The Ramones

In this ongoing feature on Psychobabble, I’ve been taking a close look at albums of the classic, underrated, and flawed variety, and assessing them Track by Track.

By 1976, Rock & Roll was in dire shape. The best work of the genre’s old guard—The Who, The Stones, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Dylan, The ex-Beatles—was behind them. Pretentious prog rockers clogged arenas with their endless bluster. Crushingly dull soft poppers polluted the top twenty with “Dream Weaver” and “Let Your Love Flow”. Then up from the underground swooped a quartet of troglodyte supermen from Queens, wearing matching rags, sporting matching mop tops and matching names. Like John, Paul, George, and Ringo 15 years before them, and Kurt, Krist, and Dave 15 years after, Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy did not set out to rescue Rock & Roll. They were just righteously fed up with the noodling, pomp, and wimpiness pervading the scene and decided to play the kind of Spartan garage rock they dug.


As bassist, chief composer, and chief wack-a-doo Dee Dee Ramone was heard to crow, “I think Rock & Roll should be three words and a chorus, and the three words should be good enough to say it all.” This was barely exaggeration. The Ramones stripped away all of Rock & Roll’s pretenses that had accumulated since Sgt. Pepper’s. No guitar solos; just fun. All tracks kick off in simultaneous fury (“1, 2, 3, 4!”), all have sing-songy choruses. Some are nothing but choruses.

Although The Ramones are famous— and were initially criticized— for their simplicity, Johnny Ramones’s neck-breaking down strokes require tremendous stamina and precision, as does the drumming of Tommy Ramone, who learned the instrument simply because the group he helped assemble needed a drummer. Speed, simplicity, catchiness, thunder. This music The Ramones invented wasn’t called punk yet, but it would be soon enough.

The Ramones didn’t just sound like the psychedelic era had never happened; they looked it too. Their jeans, leather jackets, Converse One Stars, and T-shirts could have been stripped off a ‘50s greaser. Johnny and Dee Dee's bowl cuts were strictly pre-psych Beatles.

Like John Waters, The Ramones collected the raw refuse of trash culture and defiant bad taste and molded it all into a monumental new art form. Horror movies, junk food, comic books, amusement parks, makeshift drugs, turning tricks, boneheaded agit prop, and sleazy violence all became pop fodder. Also like Waters, The Ramones paid tribute to a crime ridden, scuzzy city. What Baltimore was to the filthiest man alive, New York City was to the scuzziest band on the planet. Their debut album simply stinks of the city. Aside from the infamous “53rd and 3rd”, specific references are sparer here than they would be on subsequent records on which they’d praise Coney Island, Rockaway Beach, and the like. But Ramones sounds like New York. The grinding gears of a subway train. The quick snick of a switchblade. The expletive shout of a passing cabby. The wicked giggle of a purse snatcher. These sounds fester between the lines of all 14 tracks that comprise the only record that mattered in 1976. And it couldn’t have been cut in a more appropriate place: Plaza Sound studio in Manhattan’s landmark Radio City Music Hall. The track line up was merely transposed from their set list at CBGB’s, the Bowery scum pit that spawned all of the American bands that would rearrange Rock & Roll’s face over the next few years. But without Television’s pretty flourishes, Talking Heads’ art school angularity, Blondie’s radio-ready polish, Suicide’s electro freakiness, The Dead Boy’s cock-rock strut, or Patti Smith and Richard Hell’s Bowery poetry, The Ramones embodied New York Punk’s essence the best.

The group cut Ramones for just $6,400 over the course of 17 days. Johnny spent fifty bucks on the Mosrite guitar he played on it. It all sounded equally cheap. On subsequent albums, The Ramones sound opened up a bit, becoming less murky, less compressed… and losing some of its otherworldly magic in the process. Produced by novices Tommy Ramone and Craig Leon of Sire Records, Ramones sounds like it was belched up from Rock & Roll’s primordial muck.

Brace yourself.


Ramones by The Ramones
Originally released April 1976 on Sire Records
Produced by Craig Leon and Tommy Ramone
All songs credited to The Ramones.

Track 1: Blitzkrieg Bop

No opening guitar lick. No opening drum beat to ease the listener into the onslaught. Everything pounding out in simultaneous, militaristic fury. The first track on the first real punk LP defines the genre as well as anything that would follow. No New York Dolls swagger. No Stooges windiness. No Modern Lovers cleverness. It’s grooveless, it’s short, and it is dumb. “Blitzkrieg Bop” is also