If today's Rolling Stone were the Cahiers du Cinema of the late Fifties, a band of outsiders as deliberately crude and basic as the Ramones would be granted instant auteur status as fast as one could say "Edgar G. Ulmer." Their musique maudite -- 14 rock & roll songs exploding like time bombs in the space of 29 breathless minutes and produced on a Republic-Monogram budget of $6400 -- would be compared with the mise en scene of, say, Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly or, better yet, Samuel Fuller's delirious Underworld U.S.A.

And such comparisons would not be specious. The next paragraph is almost literal transcription of something the American auteurist, Andrew Sarris, wrote about Fuller in The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968. I've just changed the names and a few terms.

The Ramones are authentic American primitives whose work has to be heard to be understood. Heard, not read about or synopsized. Their first album, Ramones, is constructed almost entirely of rhythm tracks of an exhilarating intensity rock & roll has not experienced since its earliest days. The Ramones' lyrics are so compressed that there is no room for even one establishing atmosphere verse or one dramatically irrelevant guitar solo in which the musicians could suggest an everyday existence... The Ramones' ideas are undoubtedly too broad and oversimplified for any serious analysis, but it is the artistic force with which their ideas are expressed that makes their music so fascinating to critics who can rise above their aesthetic prejudices... The Ramones' perversity and peculiarly Old Testament view of retribution carry the day... It is time popular music followed the other arts in honoring its primitives. The Ramones belong to rock & roll, and not to rock and avant-garde musical trends.

How the present will treat the Ramones, proponents of the same Manhattan musical minimalism as the New York Dolls who preceded them, remains to be seen. Thus far, punk rock's archetypal concept of an idealized Top 40 music -- the songs stripped down like old Fords, then souped up for speed -- has unintentionally provoked more primal anger from than precipitant access to the nation's teenagers, and the godheads of AM radio don't seem to be listening at all. Why? Do you have to be over 21 to like this stuff? Doesn't "Blitzkrieg Bop" or the absolutely wonderful "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" mean anything to anyone but an analytical intellectual? Until now, apparently not.

Where's your sense of humor and adventure, America? In rock & roll and matters of the heart, we should all hang on to a little amateurism. Let's hope these guys sell more records than Elton John has pennies. If not, shoot the piano player. And throw in Paul McCartney to boot.

- Paul Nelson, Rolling Stone, 7/29/76.

Bonus Reviews!

I love this record -- love it -- even though I know these boys flirt with images of brutality (Nazi especially) in much the same way "Midnight Rambler" flirts with rape. You couldn't say they condone any nasties, natch -- they merely suggest that the power of their music has some fairly ominous sources and tap those sources even as they offer the suggestion. This makes me uneasy. But my theory has always been that good rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy, and the sheer pleasure of this stuff -- which of course elicits howls of pain from the good old rock and roll crowd -- is undeniable. For me, it blows everything else off the radio; it's clean the way the Dolls never were, and just plain listenable the way Black Sabbath never was. And I hear it cost $6400 to put on plastic. A

- Robert Christgau, Christgau's Record Guide, 1981.

Punk rock begins here. The cartoon kings of Queens at their most primitive and threatening. Rock's mainstream didn't know what hit it. * * * *

- Jeff Tamarkin, The All-Music Guide to Rock, 1995.

The mutation of glam into punk was instigated in the tiny, mid-70s' downbeat rock scene of New York. The New York Dolls, Wayne County, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Television all started their bizarre careers in clubs like CBGBs down on The Bowery. The Ramones were the grubby oiks from the darkest corners of just such dark clubs. They stared from the cover of this magnificent debut album with dumb defiance written all over them. The songs within were a short, sharp exercise in vicious speed-thrash, driven by ferocious guitars and yet halting in an instant. It was the simple pop dream taken to its minimalist extreme. There just couldn't be anything faster or harder than this. The Ramones was the starting gun for English punk -- everyone learned to play listening to it. Discovering that album during the hot volatile summer of 1976 was like entering a new age. All your other albums seemed archaic.

- Collins Gem Classic Albums, 1999.

The standard-bearers for punk, the unassuming mop-haired guys from Forest Hills brought pop sensibilities to their hard-nosed street attitude and, with buzzsaw guitars, produced perfect three-chord, two-and-a-half minute blitzes that were stupid, simplistic and inspired. You can almost smell the Bowery as they whip through 30 minutes or so of unrelenting, humorous and catchy tunes about the Ice Capades, shock troopers, chainsaw massacres and more. * * * * *

- Zagat Survey Music Guide - 1,000 Top Albums of All Time, 2003.

Further reading on Super Seventies RockSite!: Ramones Lyrics

Here it is -- the album that split the history of rock 'n' roll in half, New Testament, Old Testament. Those who heard -- I mean, really heard -- the fourteen bracing numbers that makeup Ramones upon its release in 1976 knew that rock would never be the same again. The sounds on the album all had their antecedents. The lunging chord structure and fuzzed-out attack of Johnny Ramone's guitar was clearly influenced by seventies heavy-metal bands like Black Sabbath, as well as proto-punk precursors like the Stooges. Meanwhile, the melodic simplicity of songs like "Blitzkrieg Bop" as well as the throbbing beat, came straight from late-sixties bubblegum, the Beach Boys, and other rock 'n' roll oldies. What the Ramones were doing was reestablishing the precedent of the original rock pioneers like Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed, who utilized simplistic and sometimes repetitious formulas to create profound changes in the fabric of American music. In this sense, Ramones is one of the most groundbreaking albums of all time.

Ramones was voted the 54th greatest album of all time in a VH1 poll of over 700 musicians, songwriters, disc jockeys, radio programmers, and critics in 2003.

- Joe S. Harrington, VH1's 100 Greatest Albums, 2003.

"Our early songs came out of our real feelings of alienation, isolation, frustration -- the feelings everybody feels between seventeen and seventy-five," said singer Joey Ramone. Clocking in at just under twenty-nine minutes, Ramones is an intense blast of guitar power, rhythmic simplicity and ferocious brevity, a complete rejection of the spangled artifice and hollow, artsy pretensions of 1970s rock. The songs were fast and anti-social, just like the band: "Beat on the Brat," "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." Guitarist Johnny Ramone refused to play solos -- his jackhammer chords became the lingua franca of punk -- and the whole record cost just over $6000 to make. But Joey's leather-tender plea "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" showed that even punks need love.

Ramones was chosen as the 33rd greatest album of all time by the editors of Rolling Stone magazine in Dec. 2003.

- Rolling Stone, 12/11/03.

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