Hello you there! I’m back on Steemit after a long period of self-doubt and trouble, but hey now everything is fine!
Today I want to talk about one of the most influential albums of my life: the first LP by The Ramones! I still remember: just a 12 year-old learn how to play the guitar, still discovering music when I heard my uncle (who lived with me at the time) singing Sheena Is A Punk Rocker. I froze and was like:
“hey, what’s that bro?”
“dude, that’s Ramones, have you ever heard it?”
“nah, but I will search it”
BOOM! Fast forward two days and I was SOLD man, I heard this album for two days straight, no pauses and learned all the songs on the guitar in a similar time (that must be the easiest album to play on guitar, no jk), now here’s the story of it:
The Ramones were an american band formed in 1974 by John Cummings, Thomas Erdelyi, Douglas Colvin and Jeffrey Hyman… what, don’t recognize them by their names? They’ve become Johnny, Tommy, Dee Dee and Joey Ramone respectively, the name Ramones was inspired by Paul Ramon, a nickname Paul McCartney used on the period of the Silver Beetles (pre-Beatles) to cover his hotel reservations. They’ve played a lot on the NYC joint CBGB’s, where the rock journalist Lisa Robinson caught a show of them and was mesmerized by their new simple and inventive sound and did everything to get their a manager and a record deal. They got a contract with Sire Records for the recording of an LP.
To understand how The Ramones broke the establishment of rock music, we need to take a look at some of the contemporary albums, let’s check it out:
Presence - Led Zeppelin
Hotel California - Eagles
Desire - Bob Dylan
Songs in the Key of Life - Stevie Wonder and of course
Frampton Comes Alive! - Peter Frampton
What they have in common? Advanced production techniques, crystal clear arrangements, long songs and lots of concepts… Ramones threw all of this through the window with this first album.
The longest song in the album is “I Don’t Wanna Go Down The Basement” with TWO and a half minutes and the whole LP has 29 minute of pure punk gold. But LET’S GO with brief summary of this wonder:
Blitzkrieg Bop is the summary of the album, the band and all the punk aesthetic in two minutes and four chords. Everyone knows the chantic HEY HO, LET’S GO! from this song. The lyrics are a critic and satire of nazism, and from here I want to talk about the themes of the album, they’re really dark. They’re about nazism (B. Bop), prostitution (53rd & 3rd), drugs (Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue), girls (Judy is a Punk), spies in cuba (Havana Affair) and psychopaths (Chain Saw), it’s teenager-y in a wrap.
The sound is so crude! The album was recorded in a week (3 days for instrumentals and 4 days for vocals), with a budget of only $6,400 and was recorded just like The Beatles’ early albums. The biggest influences on them were the 50’s rock and 60’s motown girl groups and you can hear this fingerprints all over the album.
Needless to say, this is one of the most influential albums ever made, gave birth to a whole new genre, ideology and approach to rock music like few other albums did before, and after. The Ramones shook the world with will and truth and brought to life this wonderful mindset of “Do It Yourself”.
VIVA RAMONES!
My other texts from the Magnificent Albums series:
@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-02-maggot-brain-funkadelic-1971
@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-03-head-hunters-herbie-hancock-1973
@themusiclover/magnificent-albums-04-what-s-going-on-marvin-gaye-1971