When the Ramones released their first album in 1976, corporate American radio reacted as if someone had belched at a board meeting. In a way, this response was entirely appropriate: after all, it was the Ramones' utter contempt for mid-Seventies superstar-saturated radio that had compelled these self-styled oddballs from Queens to pick up their instruments in the first place. Armed with simple sentiments ("I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You"), modest technical goals (faster! louder!) and a singer who never dropped his New York squonk except when affecting a Liverpudlian accent straight off Meet the Beatles, the Ramones aimed their rude sonic blatz directly at the dark heart of
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all that was bloated, decrepit and boring in big-time rock. They've been firing at this lumbering, sclerotic target ever since.
That the no-frills musical message the Ramones helped carry out of New York City's CBGB's and other punk clubs has finally hit home is evidenced all around us, though not necessarily in ways the group may have wished. With punk rock popularly discredited following the flameout of the Sex Pistols in 1978, radio finally acceded to the more acceptable New Wave bands – a mixed blessing probably, but better than no change at all. True, one is hard pressed to work up much of a sweat over such glib and stylistic crypt robbers as the Knack, or even so innocuous an entertainer as Joe Jackson. On the other hand, one is cravenly grateful not to have Emerson, Lake and Palmer to kick around anymore.
The official demise of punk left the Ramones in an artistic bind, however. Surely they were aware, as Neil Young once noted, that rust never sleeps. But just as certainly, they saw no point in simply burning out (à la Johnny Rotten & Company) either. And so, after releasing three of the more wonderful records of the Seventies–LPs whose strict stylistic concision was an integral part of their charm–the group began, on Road to Ruin (1978), to experiment with its sound, building it up from ground zero with the cautious addition of acoustic twelve-strings and even guitar solos.
Such refinements, however tentative, would have been unthinkable in the heyday of punk. That the Ramones were able to subtly broaden their horizons without sinking into the studio-bred sterility against which they had originally reacted was a tribute both to their commitment to their chosen form (short and sweet) and to their generally unheralded abilities as perhaps the most prolific and adept trash-rock tunesmiths since the golden years of Broadway's Brill Building (when songwriting teams like Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich cranked out hits-to-order for everyone from Eydie Gorme to Little Eva). Ramones songs may sometimes seem like little more than melodic blueprints, but the best of them partake as wholeheartedly and convincingly of the teen tradition as did any of
