Re: A Half-Century Of Punk

Exactly 50 years ago, the Ramones debut album was released, kicking off punk rock, and the whole alternative rock scene that followed in its wake.. The world would be a very, very different place if that never happened. My life would certainly be unthinkably different.

In kid Congo powers’ memoirs, “some new kind of kick,“ he talks about reading and seeing pictures of the Ramones in “rock scene” magazine before the album was released. When he found out what day it would be coming out,
He lined up outside the door figuring there would be a mad rush to get into the record shop. He was the only one! But he instantly loved it, and started the Ramones fan club.

Anyone else here get it when it came out? I was just a wee lad, wouldn’t be till later in the 80s that I finally bought it. I’m sure I have every second of it memorized.

Thanks to Da Bruddahs. For a bunch of glue-sniffing knuckleheads from Queens, you truly changed the world.

My brothers discovered them when they appeared on Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, which I see online was in September '77. Which is actually a bit behind the curve for those two inexplicably hip farm boys - they'd leapt on the Dictators Go Girl Crazy immediately when it was released in 1975, so I have no idea how/why it took them over a year to catch up with the Ramones. Fucking slackers.

> I have no idea how/why it took them over a year
> to catch up with the Ramones. Fucking slackers.

Hey, they got there as quickly as they could!

Actually, September 1977 makes your brothers out to be paragons of timeliness. I didn't clue in to the Ramones until 1980, with End of the Century and "Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio?" That song really grabbed me, though ... enough, in fact, to make me search and find out about Hullaballoo, Upbeat, Shindig, Murray the K and Alan Freed. (And I was curious, too, about who "High Ener-Jay" was, until I bought the album and read the lyrics on the sleeve.) My parents were able to tell me about the TV shows, but having never lived in the Northeast, they weren't familiar with the two radio DJs.

Fab is spot on: without the Ramones' influence -- on me directly, and on the music of so many others -- my life would be considerably poorer. Rest in peace, guys, and thanks.

Like probably everyone here, I wish I coulda seen them in their early CBGB’s appearances… or heard the debut on initial impact.

But like Delvin, due to age constraints, my entryway was ‘end of the century’. Probably one of the first 20 lp’s I owned…and as such it holds a special place in my heart.

I eventually picked up the predecessors, but only got to ‘pleasant dreams’ after that. I’m sure there’s great songs on subsequent releases, but tight money and the lure of mid-80s (replacements, husker du, new order, Jesus Mary chain, etc) kept me from further exploring.

STILL find it fascinating that the US and UK came up with such different versions of “punk rock”

Surprising update—— TP magazine never reviewed the Ramones debut!

I believe earliest mention of the band was TP15 when there was a brief review of ‘blitzkreig bop’ on Green Circles

I found a 1976 issue of Creem at a flea market a few year ago, and on one page they reviewed the debuts by the Ramones, the Runaways and the Modern Lovers. That was a significant piece of newsprint.

I think Creem was okay with all three of them. I don't recall feeling vitriolic when reading the reviews, anyhow. Maybe they were lukewarm on the Runaways, but if so, that's not a hill I'd die on.

That is surprising! Kid Congo way out in East LA picked it up on day one, but not The Bible of Alt Rock? Of course, TP must have started covering them at some point, there's the birthday cover with Joey.

[checks the TP index:]
"Leave Home" and "Rocket To Russia" were also not reviewed. Looks like "road To Ruin" was their first album to get a full review.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2026 12:09PM by MrFab.

Happy to see that it was no less than Gene Sculatti who wrote the review for CREEM. Longtime L.A. DJ, and author of the classic "The Catalog of Cool." Cool is right - the rest of the world might have been baffled, but he was right on it:

The Ramones: Ramones
Gene Sculatti, Creem, August 1976

"I don't wanna walk around with you
I don't wanna walk around with you
I don't wanna walk around with you
So why you wanna walk around with me?
I don't wanna walk around with you." *

The most radical album of the past six years isn't Bowie's, isn't Ferry's, isn't Eno's or Reed's. Kraftwerk couldn't have conceived of such Teutonic conquest in a dozen light years and it's doubtful Bob Marley could've ingested enough ganja to perceive its decidedly non-Rasta dimensions. Oddest of all, it's an album that probably would have stood a 99% chance of being dismissed as archaic, or at best an anachronism, had it been released four or even three years ago. Even if it turns out not to be the clarion squawk of a raw new age, the Ramones' Ramones is so strikingly different, so brazenly out of touch with prevailing modes as to constitute a bold swipe at the status quo.

As such, Ramones threatens hard rock's current ruling caste (Bad Co., Zep, Frampton, et al.) with a razor sharp E-string to the throat. (Most ‘progressive’ programmers will assuredly turn away from this album, toke up and thumb-cue that new StillsStonesQueenWakeman onto turntable A.)

Ramones: four guys, 14 great two-minute songs, three great chords. Proficiency, poetry, taste, Art have nothing to do with the Ramones. Nor do blues, improvisatory solos or pedal steel. White, American rock 'n' roll is what they practice and in this sense the Ramones are the latest speed-crazed cruisers to drive chicken down that white line that extends straight from Eddie Cochran to Iggy to their own Bowery loft.

Ramones reads like a rock 'n' roll reactionary's manifesto. The kind of driven, primal, mindblasting r&r that fueled Stooges fanclubs and formed the editorial backbone of fanzines from Who Put The Bomp to Punk comes alive in ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’ and ‘Chain Saw’. The infusion of the Kinks, Herman's Hermits, fake Mersey accents, DC5, MC5 and BCR into the Ramones' music is all the more crucial, vital to the survival of rock 'n' roll. Once the whole ballgame, r&r has been reduced to a less than flourishing subgenre whose 70's mutation from ‘hard’ to ‘heavy’ has crowned ponderous middle-aged labor unions like Zep, Bad Co. and Foghat giants in the field. Serving its radical function, the Ramones' debut drives a sharp wedge between the stale ends of a contemporary music scene bloated with graying superstars and overripe for takeover. Right now, the Ramones have their hands on the wheel.

Can the first ‘New York band’ to record survive? Should we expect Joey, Dee Dee, Tommy and Johnny Ramone to ‘grow musically’; to do their first sensitive ballad backed by the London Festival Orch on Album # Five, or collaborate with Ken Russell on their tenth anniversary? Who cares? The rambunctious speed & noise equation outlined by ‘Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World’ or ‘Loudmouth’ will do just fine for right now. If their successors are one third as good as the Ramones, we'll be fixed for life. Right fucking on."


Right fucking on, Scullati! One mid-'70s critic who saw the future of rock and roll, and did NOT think its' name was Bruce.

Yep, Jim Green did give it a brief mention:

Ramones "Blitzkrieg Bop":
“Now not everyone can take an album of this stuff, but a single slice is just right, and this’n (with its “AY-OH, Let’s go!” chant over drumbeats n handclaps) is great for jukebox play.”

And that's it.
Later in the column he says “the flip is good.” Doesn't say what the B-side was, but "Havana Affair" methinks?

I remember seeing (just once, apparently) an advert for Leave Home. It was a big selection of quotes from reviews of the first album, cherry-picked from the most favorable ("Greatest album in years!" "True genius!") and the most damning ("Total garbage." "Anyone who likes this album must be an asshole.") Anyone else remember this ad? Or did I dream the whole thing up?

Say friends, are you bored with life? Seen it all? The thrill is gone? Well, consider this: there is recently-unearthed video footage of a young Joey Ramone singing a song called "Cocksucker" whilst waving a giant dildo - proof that life is always full of surprises.

Gadzooks, footage of Joey's pre-Ramones band, a rather Dolls-y group called Sniper, apparently appeared on-line few years ago. Behold, Jeffrey Starship!
A pre-Blondie Frank Infante was also in this band at some point.

[www.youtube.com]

I've probably asked about this on the TP board before, but then, maybe not. A search isn't turning it up in any past posting. So, here goes ...

I remember seeing an advertisement for Leave Home, years ago. It's hazy to me whether I saw it in the form of a record store poster, or simply as a full-page ad in a magazine. It touted the new album with a long list of blurbs from reviews of the debut album. And all of those quotes were either excitedly positive ("This band reinvents rock 'n' roll!" "Best album by any rock band in years!" "A true classic. Don't miss it!") or intensely negative ("This record stinks!" "Whoever told these guys they could play?" "Worst record in rock history.")

The above quotes are simply projections, trying to show what sort of reviews Sire chose to put together such an ad. I certainly don't remember the content word for word. But there's one that I do remember, for sure: "Anyone who likes this record is an asshole."

But I haven't been able to unearth an image of this ad since. Web searches have consistently let me down.

Did anyone else see this? Or did I dream it up?

Not sure if you dreamt it or not, but you remember posting about it previously because you did so about two comments earlier on this very thread. Glad I'm not the only one feeling my years.

Yeah, I just saw that I've posted redundantly. My apologies for clogging the thread.

Since you were nice and asked twice

[www.etsy.com]

This here

Is this it?

Yes, that's it! Okay, I had the quote wrong ... it's actually, "Anybody who hates this album is an asshole." But yeah, I'm glad to see this again. Thanks Bip!

Haha, that ad quoted Morrisey.

Delvin said:

I remember seeing (just once, apparently) an advert for Leave Home. It was a big selection of quotes from reviews of the first album, cherry-picked from the most favorable ("Greatest album in years!" "True genius!") and the most damning ("Total garbage." "Anyone who likes this album must be an asshole.")

This reminds me of IRS Records' These People Are Nuts: 10 Anniversary compilation: in the sleeve, they only used snippets from the most negative reviews of the label's acts (only a tactic that Miles Copeland could conceive).

Examples are:

1) The Police: "Yawn. Don Not Apprehend."

2) R.E.M. - " Somehow, R.E.M. has found a way to record the same song 5 times (in reference to the Chronic Town EP)....

3) FYC - "These guys will never be played on the radio"

4) Wall Of Voodoo - "...compounded by the inability to take enthralling musical ideas anywhere beyond mere suggestion"

5) Go Go's - " a weak -kneed LA new wave (band), about as tough as the Cars. Being girls is not enough."

There are several more examples, but it highlights just how bad music criticism can be. Hindsight is always 20/20, and perhaps I should
take into account that many of these critics were probably weaned on 60's and 70's rock, but it's why i have always been arbitrary towards
music reviews; There were quite a few blurbs from Melody Maker, which isn't surprising since the magazine seemed to be more about shock-effect than actual academic criticism. Having thought about this, perhaps I understand, to a certain extent why Tommy Iommi punched journalist Allan Jones from MM (legal notice: I am hardly a proponent of violence).

One of the things that I really appreciate about TP is that the content is at least somewhat constructive, there is a certain amount of
scholasticsm within the reviews to which I can make a judgement based on the style and consistency of the artist/album being critiqued...there is good music journalism out there to be sure, but it's truly an exercise in separating the wheat from the chaffe.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/02/2026 12:51AM by Fleeingbandit.

I was in Home Depot a couple days ago and the in-store muzak was playing "Grand Illusion," which I hadn't heard in years, and I was once again mystified how my generation could have preferred that turgid, pseudo-intellectual codswallop to "Blitzkrieg Bop." It's so ridiculous to recall the majority of my hayseed schoolmates at my high school that was literally in the middle of a fucking cornfield nodding sagely along to "Dust in the Wind" and the cornball melodramatics of Dennis DeYoung and yes, Neal Peart (although we like him now) like they were deep thinking philosophy majors while not only ignoring but actively disdaining the most exciting musical development that would happen their lifetimes.

And yeah, I know that teenagers are always prey to thinking they're deeper than they are, and hell, I was just as bad, though I got my existential kicks elsewhere, driving around in my Ford Maverick bellowing "THIS MEANS NOTHING TO ME! OHHHHHHH, VIENNA!!!!" and being all smug knowing that "Killing an Arab" was based on Camus (or Kaymuss, as I'm sure I would've pronounced it had I had any sort of an audience in my school that had any clue that a song called "Killing an Arab" existed that I could pontificate to). But my pretensions were European pretensions, of course, and thus much more valid than that of such poets of the plains as Dennis DeYoung and Kerry Livgren. I pondered Vienna and Europe and shit like that, motherfuckers. I had an artistic soul and wore a metaphorical beret, though not a physical one because I've always understood how dorky I look with any sort of headwear (without, also. I couldn't win). This all becomes even goofier in light of Midge Ure's later assertion that the chorus of "Vienna" was literal and that he really couldn't have given less of a shit about the city of Vienna, but his manager's wife was adamant that he write a song about the joint for some reason and any deeper meanings attributed to the song were put there by over-earnest listeners. No explanation as to why Ultravox then proceeded to name the entire damn album after the city Ure was expressly expressing no opinion on, but that's the sort of inscrutability that makes them deeeeeeep.

Anyhow, to get back on track after taking time out to torpedo my own thesis, sure, I was a pretentious little twat who liked to pretend I had some clue as to whatever the fuck "Marquee Moon" is about, but at least I also still understood how to teenage. I could listen to "The Whole Wide World" and "What Do I Get?" and "Teenage Kicks" and understand that these were infinitely more applicable to life as a 17-year-old than "Blue Collar Man" and "Tom Sawyer." And of course, my schoolmates did take time away from the intellectual pursuits of Styx and Supertramp to indulge in some rawk & roll, but it was all the music of the previous half-generation. We were all considered Boomers, but the first half of the Boomers had already drawn a line between themselves and what is now being referred to as Generation Jones and told us Jonesers that "You'll NEVER be as special as US so don't even try" and the overwhelming majority of my half-generation said "Oh thank you, wise ones, for thy Stones and thy Zeppelin, these are sufficient and we will not let ourselves be troubled by anything exciting our own contemporaries might attempt to create. Put whatever gruel you think we deserve on the radio and we shall consume it without complaint. But could you maybe let us have that one song about a grown-ass man going down on that underage Sharona girl? Thanks!"

Anyhow, happy 50th birthday to Punk. Everybody loves the Ramones now and Hot Topic is in every mall that still exists and tattooed little shits born in the 21st century feel entitled to lecture my friend on Facebook that Talking Heads were never considered to be part of the punk movement. Hurrah.

Did any of this make sense? It doesn't to me, so if it does to you, please enlighten me as to what my original point was because I honestly don't know. This is what happens when you're subjected to "Grand Illusion" when you just want to buy a pair of wire cutters.

I experienced this conflict as generational. I didn't care that most of my fellow high school students didn't like punk or "college rock." It bothered me that "hippies" - a concept I didn't really understand at the time, but I was angry at a lot of my teachers - thought Dylan and the Beatles created the greatest music ever made and that anything which came afterwards could only be a pale shadow. At the time, I loved a lot of classic rock, but I also thought Black Flag, Husker Du, Sonic Youth or the Jesus & Mary Chain were just as good. It also seemed that the "hippies" were ignoring much of the best music made during the '60s and early '70s in favor of the classic rock canon.

Of course your post made sense, Reno. You know you're always in good hands with us.

I definitely could feel what you were talking about, with your personal tastes running counter to the boomer-fed preferences of your high school peers. My own awakening to that vast, wonderful shift in the world of music has been the subject of more than one post by me, so I won't repeat it here ... save to say that it was born more out of resentment and smugness. Pretensions would've been a step in the right direction. It could be summed up as, "My classmates don't like this stuff ... but my classmates are assholes, so I need to check this out."

Currently, I'm reading Chuck Klosterman's book The Nineties. I know that he's a writer who doesn't get a lot of love on this board, but he makes an interesting point about the rise of country music in that decade. He points out that the generation of rockers that came to be lumped together under the term "grunge" shared a certain contempt for the careerism of the rock bands of the '80s. From the videos they made (especially the hair-metal bands, with their sexist attitudes) to their willingness to do whatever it took to make it big, those bands came to be seen as embarrassing.

But just because the grunge rockers wanted to eliminate those approaches to rock popularity and stardom, it didn't mean that the mainstream music fans of the Nineties were fully on board with that agenda. Even as the grunge scene was happening, it became clear that there was still a big market for that sort of vibe to the music ... and since rock wasn't supplying that market so much anymore, country music rose to fill the gap. Artists like Garth Brooks, Shania Twain and all the rest from the world of country music came out with more slickly produced records, with an attitude that fit well with the same mostly conservative tone that Eighties mainstream rock had done. (Heck, Mutt Lange had produced big-selling albums for AC/DC, Def Leppard and The Cars; in the Nineties, he was producing mega-platinum albums for his wife Shania Twain.)

Of course, Chuck's point can be applied to the way that mainstream rock fans of the late '70s and early '80s responded to a lot of the punk and new wave artists. The punks may have wanted to sweep away all the old corporate careerist bloat of the old guard; they saw it as cutting away the dead wood. But that didn't mean that the mainstream fans would be on board with the effort ... as you and I, and most of the others on this board, saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears.

Anyway! Happy anniversary to the Ramones' debut. I may not have embraced the album or the band in their time, but I got there as quickly as I could.

Really? I was under the impressions that the hair-metal fans mostly just got off that bus and boarded the grunge bus. We've talked here about how Nirvana went from playing to a few hundred indie-heads to thousands of newly minted "alternative" fans.

Guess I figured fans of Garth Brooks, Shania, etc, were the same ones who had always like crappy commercial country - the ones who'd been into Kenny Rogers, Alabama, "9 To 5"-era Dolly, etc in the '70s and '80s.

It’s been my experience that the hair metal hordes loathed grunge. (They liked Nirvana, but so did everyone.) Veterans of the spandex wars have bitched about their displacement for decades, and complained that grunge is too depressing, too unsexy, and made by musicians who can’t play (because they weren’t ostentatious to their ears). A lot of them eventually came around to Soundgarden, primarily because of Cornell being a traditional hard rock singer.

Nirvana had the hooks, and of course grunge had heavy influences from 70s classic rock. You’d think the pop metal folks would have been on board.

But I think they moved to country music. Klosterman isn’t the first one to point out that fans of classic rock and seventies singer/songwriters didn’t get the alternative/grunge/post punk thing, and heard familiar sounds in nineties country. I’ve always felt that Bon Jovi, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Foreigner, James Taylor, and Billy Joel were as big an influence on Garth Brooks, etc. as Merle Haggard. Ol’ Garth has acknowledged Kiss, Taylor, and Joel as particularly impactful. And Bon Jovi made a country(ish) record that was a hit for him.

Having heard several modern country bands in the last few years due to the TV show, it sounds to me like the genre skipped over grunge and went straight to bands like Creed and Nickelback for inspiration. It’s pretty appalling.

Garth Brooks jumped at the opportunity to record a cover of "Hard Luck Woman," provided that the members of Kiss would agree to perform the song with him in the studio. Gene said that he appreciated Garth's fandom and support, but didn't get it when Garth cited Kiss as a big influence. Of course, that was before he saw Garth on the stage, with a show full of lights, pyrotechnics, and even the singer riding a trapeze-like contraption across the stadium, over the heads of the fans. Gene came right out and said it: "It was country Kiss."

If not from hair-metal, where did all those grunge fans come from? The '80s college-rock crowd was pretty dinky in comparison to the huge '90s crowds.

I'm still friends with plenty of those "veterans of the spandex wars," as Michael so eloquently put it. They grabbed copies of Nevermind, drawn in by "Smells Like Teen Spirit." But most of them ended up regarding it as an album with two or three good songs, at most, along with a lot of filler. And they all agreed with what Michael described: the grunge bands were too depressing, didn't put enough fun and sex into their music, looked and dressed as if they rolled out of bed and put whatever dirty laundry they could find on the floor back on ... and as far as they were concerned, they were second-rate musicians.

Where those veterans went next — at least the veterans I know — covers a lot of ground. Some of them did turn to country music, responding to the fun and singalong good times it offers. Others turned to different rock bands, including post-grunge rockers like Nickelback or Creed ... or maybe even stuck with Eighties-style metal, since a lot of those bands never really went away. A few of them, as they got older, turned to classic jazz, discovering musicians who definitely can play, and whose music can be quite sexy. And of course, as we all get older, many of us start to prefer mellower sounds to soothe their nerves at the end of the workday.

I saw Rock'n'Roll High School in September 1979 and walked out at the end feeling like I'd just seen Athena pop out of Zeus's forehead.

I have the DVD! Has some nice extras. Should pop it in again.

I was surprised to see Joseph McBride credited on the script - I knew him primarily for his great scholarly work on Howard Hawks, John Ford and Orson Welles, even appearing in Welles's final completed (albeit belatedly completed) film, The Other Side of the Wind. He posts frequently on Facebook and talks about Rock n' Roll High School every now and then.

He has a brief appearance in High School, too.

Watched a 30-minute spot of the Ramones in London in 1977 over the weekend and it was a ton of fun. I'd kinda forgotten how integral Dee Dee is to the live show, both in terms of just sheer onstage energy and of course the inimitable "1-2-3-4!" to start every song.