Explain the Ramones to me [edited title]

Cafe Society
21

Good post.

What you left out is that the Ramones have also been a huge influence on every later generation of rock music as well.

The basic fact of the Ramones is that they managed to reduce rock music down to its very essence. It is easy to play 3 chord songs, any idiot can do it… however, it’s practically impossible to be great at it. We remember the Ramones’ songs because they’re great melodies and great performances. They’re inspired.

There have been a million groups that tried to capture the Ramones’ spirit, and every single one of them has failed. (Artistically, that is; plenty of groups have made a lot of money by prettifying the Ramones’ style.)

22

The Ramones were founded in 1974.

Here are some of the top hits of 1974:

“Annie’s Song” by John Denver
“Beach Baby” by The First Class
“Billy Don’t Be a Hero” by Paper Lace
“The Entertainer” by Marvin Hamlisch
“Get Dancin’” by Disco-Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes
“Haven’t Got Time for the Pain” by Carly Simon
“Hooked on a Feeling” by Blue Swede
“I Honestly Love You” by Olivia Newton-John
“I’m Leaving It All Up to You” by Donny and Marie Osmond
“Jungle Boogie” by Kool & the Gang
“Kung Fu Fighting” by Carl Douglas
“Midnight at the Oasis” by Maria Muldaur
“The Night Chicago Died” by Paper Lace
“Please Come to Boston” by Dave Loggins
“Rock Me Gently” by Andy Kim
“Rock the Boat” by Hues Corporation
“Rock Your Baby” by George McCrae
“Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks
“The Show Must Go On” by Leo Sayer
“Stop and Smell the Roses” by Mac Davis
“The Streak” by Ray Stevens
“Tell Me Something Good” by Rufus
“Waterloo” by Abba
“(You’re) Having My Baby” by Paul Anka & Odia Coates

Now some of these were catchy tunes. But the overall feeling was that Rock, which had been exciting in the sixties, had settled down and become Pop in the seventies. Music had lost its edge and become safe.

The Ramones basically brought the don’t-give-a-fuck attitude back to Rock.

23

Thanks!

Well, I figured that went without saying. I mean, they were (without a doubt in my mind) the first punk rock band. Without them, there is no Sex Pistols, no Clash, no Damned, possibly even no Motörhead :eek:! There’s a whole huge avalanche effect that wouldn’t have taken place, and punk and metal might not have ever quite come about. That’s how important they are to rock music.

But I just kind of figgered everyone already knew that. :smiley:

I don’t know that I’d go so far as to say that every single one of them failed (I think it’s a fun discussion that could be had, with no real conclusion either way), but I think it’s fair to say that the Ramones were the base that everyone else built on, not because they necessarily wanted to but simply because it’s almost impossible to distill rock down any further than the Ramones already had.

24

I believe Billy, Don’t Be a Hero was by Bo Donaldson and the Heywoods

25

Sweet Jumping Jebus, I remember that summer soundtrack … I was 13 and that fall sent off to school in France. :smack:

I can remember seeing the Ramones in NY in 78/79 and again in um… 83. I liked the music of the original punk movement in the US because as was posted it was hard and fast, fun to bop around to in a crowd of other people who wanted to be there having fun bopping around. I remember gimping in to school or work the next day covered with bruises and an occasional black eye. There were a lot of people that were like me that were not into heavy drug use - unfortunately punk got associated with heavy drug use and violence and mainstream rock ended up being the huge success.

26

Apart from the Buzzcocks, I can’t think of another punk-pop band that has lasting value in the way the Ramones do.

Plenty of music that owes something to the influence of the Ramones is great, but in the specific subgenre they defined, there’s the Ramones, the Buzzcocks, and a horde of uninspired imitators.

27

Something that always gets left out of these discussions . . .
. . . they were good.

Not “good” as in “I like them, so they’re good” but good as in they were really good musicians.

The simple song structure is held up both to celebrate them as well as to criticize them: “They were awesome! Sure the songs are simple but the rawness is what makes it appealing!” “They suck! They just repetitively pound their way through the same few chords!” Both this kind of praise and this kind of criticism are misplaced.

The genre could be said to be simple, but what all the punk bands that rise above the pack have in common is that they were tight. When everyone in the band is pounding down on eighth notes you will notice when someone is off. “Close enough for jazz” does not apply to punk rock. Compare a good punk band with a crappy punk band- this is the difference.

Ever hear a crappy punk band? They suck. I mean they really suck. It’s unlistenable.

The punk bands that are held up as the best are made up of great musicians. The Ramones, The Clash, The Damned, The Dead Kennedys, X, The Sex Pistols (yes, Sid Vicious sucked- he was window dressing: think of the power trio of Matlock, Jones, and Cook). These bands didn’t accidentally rise to the top. They didn’t rise to the top based on image. They rose to the top because they were the best of the genre, they were good musicians.

I defy you to find a great guitarist who doesn’t hold Johnny Ramone and Steve Jones in high esteem.

The style was raw and simple, but the execution was deft, precise, and transcendent.

28

Glorious hard garage rock. Time to dance with your tribe.

At the beginning of every song, Joey would yell 1, 2, 3, 4! And the band would explode :smiley:

29

Just coming to this thread - wow, great stuff covered - no surprise to see **Bo **and **Shakester **leading the way.

a few thoughts:

  • what **bienville **said - Johnny Ramone, as a guitarist, is FAR more influential than pretty much every other rock guitarists other than Chuck Berry, Clapton, Hendrix, Page and Eddie Van Halen.

  • His “all downstrokes, all the time” rhythm style was NOT just simple shit - it was part of the Ramones master plan. To hear Tommy, their drummer and co-producer of their first record, they loved the catchy pop songs of Motown, girl groups and the bubble gum, but wanted them grittier and also, they couldn’t afford the costs to use all of the instruments of a Phil Spector/Wall of Sound type of production (youtube link to the Ronette’s Be My Baby). So The Ramones used that thick, relentless, downstroke-driven guitar sound to be ALL of the instruments you would hear in a Phil Spector production. That approach to the guitar “took up all the harmonic space” filled by horns, marimbas, string arrangements - all the stuff in a Spector Wall of Sound.

  • The songs are excellent and the hooks memorable. Once exposed, we all know the hooks from Rockaway Beachand Sheena is a Punk Rockerwithout thinking about it. That’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Per Shakester, if they aren’t for you, totally cool - but there is a whole lot there if you take the time to look. The book **Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk **has some great stuff on the. Per Bo, the documentary **End of the Century **is an excellent history of the band.

Here’s my story about that documentary: My band was setting up at a restaurant-that-becomes-a-club just above NYC in Westchester County. I was wearing my Ramones t-shirt. As I am setting up, a few folks walk by, including a very nice old lady. After they sit down, she gets up to do something and then wanders over to us.

In a delightful old-Jewish-grandma sort of voice, she says “So? You like this band?” gesturing to my t-shirt. “The Ramones?” I say “sure! They are one of my favorites.” “And you know this movie that just came out?” Now, the documentary had come out, and gotten great reviews, but it wasn’t like it got much press, but sure, I had heard of it and went out of my way to see it.

So I reply “Oh, you mean End of the Century? Yes, I just saw it - it was great.”

She stands up a bit straighter looks me in the eye and says “my son directed it - I’ll go get him!” and walks away. I happened to recall that the director was listed as Jim Fields. Jim Fields was here?! Sure enough, the lady comes back dragging a mid-40’s, kinda shlumpy guy with a beard over my direction, saying “come on, Jimmy, he knows the movie!” and Jim muttering “aw, ma - don’t do this!”

Classic.

Fields must get this from his mother regularly, only to realize that the people she set him in front of barely know The Ramones, let alone the movie. But I went up, shook his hand, told him the documentary was great and cited a few things about it I really liked. He brightened up - “hey, you actually know it?”

We talked for a few minutes and he went back to his meal. Hilarious.

Although they got some hype, especially when punk got “dangerous” with UK scene, The Ramones were far more influential than they ever were famous. With Joey’s mental condition (very aggressive OCD and other stuff - as his brother states in the documentary, they didn’t know if he could even live a normal life. My bassist played the same bill with them a few times - loaned Dee Dee his bass when Dee Dee didn’t show up with his :wink: a couple of times - and describes the band having to wait while Joey counted the stairs backstage and went through all of his rituals) - I am surprised they got as far as they did.

But The Ramones were the second coming of Chuck Berry - they took the popular music of the day, stripped it down to its melodic essence and used the electric guitar to completely change the arrangements, yielding a big, full sound.

30

That’s not fair: Before album-oriented rock stations appeared in the 70’s, it was only worse. Go look back at the late 60’s and you’ll find that the airwaves were and empire of Bubblegum and the Cowsills and bullshit “Jazz-Rock Fusion”* etc. Top 40 was always LCD, it is now, and it always will be. In 1974, Karen Carpenter was a constant noise, but you’d have to be told about the Ramones, or Iggy Pop, or even old-timers like Zappa, and then go hunt around for their music.

  • “Jazz-Rock?” notice how when Miles Davis (whom himself you never heard in the 50’s for all the clandelabra music being played) became interested in Rock, he didn’t invite Chigaco or Blood Sweat & Tears into the studio.
31

Slithy, I hear what you are saying, but go easy on Karen Carpenter - that poor girl had one of the best voices in pop, alongside Dusty Springfield.

32

One thing about them is they seem to have been a favorite of critics, or at least many of them, from the beginning. I remember in the early 1980s Creem magazine reprinted their reviews of the first few albums and the first one was greeted with “If the next four Ramones albums are half as good, we are set for life”. New York disc jockey Vin scelsa tells of playing their first record on air, hating it and throwing it across the room, only to listen to it overnight and the next day telling his listeners that he was wrong, it was great.
As others have said, they came out when popular music was drab, many people (critics especially) felt groups like Emerson, lake and Palmer were too bloated. Paul was writing silly love songs, John Ono Lennon was in the middle of a five year period of not making music. The Rolling Stones, once the epitome of dangerous youth, were jet setters. Disco was very popular and seemed too mechanical. Rock likes the have the myth of youthful rebellion. the Rolling Stone Music Guide of 1980 said “the Ramones know only one pace-accelerated, their material is puerile and inane and the singer isn’t very tuneful. The result is they are great, the embodiment of the passion and soul of rock and roll when it has nearly died out”. I think the original “Nuggets” album of 1960s garage bands that was compiled by Patti Smith guitarist/rock critic Lenny Kaye may have set the stage in making critics feel this kind of amateurish music was great.

Whether any group of critics can make a group successful is debatable. But I think they can help at times.

It may not hurt that lots of sporting events feel it is necessary to be pumping out music when the action is stopped and “Blitzkrieg Pop” can get audiences going.

In their own way the Ramones may be like the Three Stooges of the 1930s and 1940s. They didn’t sell many records at the time (The Stooges were stuck making shorts) but their influence and fame kept growing slowly.

33

Don’t want to hijack the thread, so let’s not get into a discussion, but if you could point me in the right direction: On what Miles Davis projects did he collaborate with Rock musicians? Which Rock musicians? I’d like to learn more.

34

I’m not a big fan, think they’re closer to 1960s Mad Magazine than to Nirvana, and don’t think their relentless primitivism was a virture – but they put out some songs I like.

Their sorta hit was Sheena Is a Punk Rocker and it’s a fine rock song with good lyrics. If you don’t care for it, you probably won’t like the Ramones much.

Other good songs with fun lyrics:
I Wanna Be Sedated which frequently plays in my head when I’m waiting for some big event, like a playoff game.

Rock and Roll High School

35

You say this like it’s a bad thing - it’s not! That’s them exactly, if you toss in a bit of girl group pop :wink:

(sorry to nit, Jim’s Son, but it’s Blitzkrieg Bop - they wrote the “Hey, ho - let’s go!” chant after seeing the hit that the **Bay City Rollers **had with their chant-driven song Saturday Night…)

ETA: what’s kinda funny about this, is that they were a NY band that was never huge but hugely influential - similar to The Velvet Underground. But whereas the VU wanted to be all edgy and obscure, writing about herion and S&M and with different sounds and styles, the Ramones were steeped in pop and pop-culture and wanted to write hummable, famous songs.

Remember, Cobain ripped the Teen Spirit riff off of Boston’s More Than a Feeling. There is something to be said for having a great pop sensibility…

36

Yeah, no one really likes that punk rock sound anymore. I mean other than a few exceptions like Green Day, Blink 182, Fall Out Boy, My Chemical Romance, Sum 41, Weezer, Good Charlotte, 30 Seconds to Mars, maybe a couple of others.

It’s not like anyone listens to The Beatles anymore.

37

There you go, now you’re getting silly, how could you compare Karen Carpenter to Dusty Springfield? KC could sing OK but Dusty Springfield was in an entirely different league.

38

Glad you love Dusty - she clearly deserves it. But so does Karen Carpenter. Worthy of another thread…

…and here I was afraid you were going to invoke Aretha or something and really spin these comparisons out of control :wink:

39

Well see I think you are wrong there too. Ella sits at the head of all female vocals.

Maybe you’re right - this needs a thread of its own. Lead on!

40

Hmm, lemme ponder the thread concept. I will say that Ella is to her category as Aretha is to hers, Mahalia Jackson to hers, Bessie Smith to hers, etc…no need to scrap one in support of the other…