Ramones' Ramones by Rombes Nicholas

Author:Rombes, Nicholas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Continuum International Publishing
Published: 2005-04-29T04:00:00+00:00

Ramones

Details of the trajectory that led the Ramones from the underground scene to a record contract have been well documented; I’ll briefly touch on them here. In early 1975, Lisa Robinson, who edited Hit Parader and Rock Scene magazines, saw them at CBGB and began championing them in her magazines. As Joey Ramone recalls: “Lisa came down to see us, she was blown away by us. She said that we changed her life. She started writing about us in Rock Scene, and then Lenny Kaye would write about us and we started getting more press like the Village Voice, word was getting out, and people started coming down.”86 Robinson also convinced Danny Fields, who had managed the Stooges and was an influential person on the New York music scene, to see the band; he would eventually end up managing them beginning in November 1975. According to Fields the “Ramones had everything I ever liked. The songs were short. You knew what was happening within five seconds. You didn’t have to analyze and/or determine what it was you were hearing or seeing. It was all there.”87

The Ramones received further exposure, this time on a more national scope, after the CBGB 1975 summer festival of unsigned bands. As Tommy has noted the “turning point was when Hilly decided to publicize the place [CBGB] by having the Summer of Rock Festival in ’75. It got a lot of publicity and after that the place was always packed. This was the Bowery, and nobody went to the Bowery, so it was a big deal.”88 On September 19, the band made a demo of “Judy Is a Punk” and “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” both produced by Marty Thau, who had previously managed the New York Dolls. Craig Leon, who had arrived in New York in 1973 to work for Sire Records and who was on the prowl for new talent, had seen them perform shortly after the summer festival, and was enthusiastic, eventually bringing the Thau demos to the attention of his boss Seymour Stein, who was president of Sire Records. According to Tommy Ramone, “Craig Leon is the one who got us signed. Singlehanded. He brought down the vice president and all these people—he’s the only hip one at the company. He risked his career to get us on the label.”89 Stein’s wife, Linda Stein, also played a crucial role in convincing her husband to sign the band. The Ramones auditioned for Seymour in the late fall of 1975; they signed with Sire in January 1976. According to Johnny, “our advance was $20,000 to do the album and buy equipment.”90

It’s always tricky to claim that rock and roll is great art, in part because, at its best, rock and roll promises an escape from the tyranny of all attempts to force hierarchies on human experience. In her classic 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” Pauline Kael wrote of “trash” films that when “you clean them up, when you make movies respectable, you kill them.

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