Day 49: The Ramones – Rocket to Russia
Album cover courtesy of Sire Records
It’s been a good, long while since I listened to The Ramones. It’s one of those bands I liked in my teens but haven’t really listened to since, so it’s more a case of rediscovering rather than discovering music. I was never really a huge fan but I do remember listening to them quite a lot, but that was probably a good 15 years ago, so let’s see what I think as an adult.
I chose the third album released by the band, Rocket to Russia. It was released in 1977, and it was the last album released with the original line up, as Tommy Ramone left the band a year later to focus on music production. The album wasn’t the commercial success that they had hoped, which the band blamed the Sex Pistol for, saying that they gave punk a bad name and associated the genre with something they didn’t stand for.
The first thing that really strikes me is how much you can hear the doo-wop, ‘60s pop and surf rock influences in their music, especially on songs like “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker” and “Rockaway Beach”. That’s something I either didn’t remember or didn’t have the ear for as a teen. Johnny Ramone said that the band had started off trying to be a bubblegum group but ended up something different:
“We looked at the Bay City Rollers as our competition. But we were so weird. Singing about ’53rd and 3rd,’ about some guy coming back from Vietnam and becoming a male prostitute and killing people? This is what we thought was normal.”
Despite that aspect, they have some songs that are very sweet, like their cover of “Do You Wanna Dance?” And there aren’t really many songs about prostitutes and murder on this specific album. All things considered, it’s pretty tame, aside from a few slightly more ironic songs, like “We’re a Happy Family” or “I Wanna Be Well”. Occasionally it just sounds like the Beach Boys but for people who wear leather jackets. Not in a derogatory way, though — who doesn’t like the Beach Boys?
They explored the ‘60s pop influences even further with one of their following albums, End of the Century, which was produced by Phil Spector. However, Spector hated their spontaneous style in recording and made them work on miniscule details for up to 12 hours, which drove the band insane. At one stage, Spector forced them back to the studio at gunpoint. Credit to them, they weren’t really shy in saying that the man was a gun-wielding nutjob who was difficult to work with at the time.
I liked the album. It’s good, it’s fun to listen to, it’s a nice little trip down memory lane. It’s probably not something I’ll listen to that much, but I’m glad they’re back on my radar. 7.5/10.