![]() By marrying surf rock, British Invasion, '60s girl groups, garage R&B and bubblegum to incongruous tales of beating on brats, serial killers and sniffing glue, they reinvigorated and reanimated them all. Yet what's usually downplayed even today is the album's unabashed love of the emphatically upbeat styles they stripped. ![]() This was rock and roll as minimalism meant to vanquish prog-rock, bourgeois folk, and other maximalist movements that defined the decade. There are overdubs, but not nearly as many as what would soon appear on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols. Each of the few elements in the mix were engineered to be heard as an entity distinct from the others, yet interlocked through mostly simultaneous performance. As producer Craig Leon explains in his notes to Rhino Records' newly released 40 th Anniversary Deluxe Edition, this was intentional. Unlike today's rock records that are often nearly mono to maximize their loudness, Ramones accentuated extreme stereo separation, just like Capitol's crude mixes of those early Beatles albums. On the left side, you heard Dee Dee Ramone's bass on the right roared Johnny Ramone's guitar. Where you stood in the store determined how you experienced it. Customers would alternately love it and loathe it every copy sold felt like a victory. I can't remember if Greg - who wore makeup daily as if his entire life was a rock and roll show - was ever hit, but words were definitely exchanged: The guitar dudes would send the vinyl flying down the basement stairs, and a fresh copy would hit the turntable like replacement troops in a war. The guitar salesmen hated Ramones like I hated Eat a Peach, and rather than growing on them, the record exponentially rubbed them the wrong way, like a mosquito bite that itches the more you scratch it. What I don't remember was when the fights began. This was my new drug, and like the other record clerks, I jonesed for more, and so we'd flip the record over and over again. ![]() It moved faster my brain thought quicker while engaged with it. That gloriously flawed '70s NYC they were singing about, and, more crucially, that joyful squall of sound that suggested cheerleaders with chain saws, was a home I wanted to live in. Every song was blurs and slurs, stopping and starting, sneering and leering, one after the other, and right away they gave me that exhilaration that other radical new music took repeated plays to glean. Yet I still recall the shock that shot through me as the blare pummeled throughout the store. So when the needle hit "Blitzkrieg Bop," I was more than ready. Previous CB's dispatches - Patti Smith's Horses, The Dictators' Go Girl Crazy! and Television's "Little Johnny Jewel" - had already blown our receptive minds: While the guitar salesmen naturally favored pickers like the Allman Brothers and Ted Nugent, us record clerks spun those CB's discs alongside kindred Krautrockers Can and Amon Düül II, vintage Velvets and The 13 th Floor Elevators. I and the other employees who fostered my teenage music education - particularly Greg Prevost, who'd soon front The Chesterfield Kings and other feral garage bands - had been awaiting this latest installment from the CBGB scene we'd learned about it from Lisa Robinson at Rolling Stone's hipper competitor Creem. It was the first Saturday after its Aprelease date, back when I was 14 and working weekends at the House of Guitars, Rochester, N.Y.'s greatest and still thriving record store/musical instrument shop/freak magnet. I remember the first time I heard Ramones.
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