"I was living in Forest Hills, walking around the neighborhood," he said. "Beat on the Brat" was taken right out of Joey's childhood in the Sixties. Little did they know it would be their peak. They thought it was just the start of a real career as hitmakers. Sadly, "Rockaway Beach" is the most successful song in their entire catalog. For most bands as famous as the Ramones, that would be a failure. He wrote it like a Beach Boys song, and it's clearly the lightest song on Rocket to Russia. How many people who have never spent a day in New York learned all about the geography of the city from Ramones songs? Rockaway Beach is deep into Queens (take the A Train to Broad Channel and then transfer to the S to Rockaway Beach) and it's where Dee Dee Ramone liked to spend time as a child. Oddly, radio programmers weren't thrilled about playing a song with the term "KKK" in the title. Whatever the truth, it's an amazing song, and it deserved to be a hit. Joey's brother Mickey Leigh says that Joey wrote the song about his parents disapproving of him dating a black woman. It's a great story, but the song was largely written years before it appeared on 1981's Pleasant Dreams. Joey was a committed liberal and Johnny was a pretty far-right Republican, and Joey supposedly equated him with the KKK. He was raised on simple pop songs like that, and had little use for the bloated rock songs that were all over radio when the Ramones formed.Īccording to Ramones lore, Joey wrote this biting song after Johnny stole away his girlfriend and married her. In homage to the 1965 Herman's Hermits classic "I'm Henry the Eighth, I Am," Joey yells out "second verse, same as the first" before singing the second verse a second time. It's about a "punk" and a "runt" who go to Berlin to join the Ice Capades and then to San Francisco to join the SLA. Joey wrote the song after seeing a bunch of kids hanging around an apartment building in New York. Still, it was their most successful single in years.Ī key part of their live show from the band's earliest days, "Judy Is a Punk" is 93 seconds of absolute minimalist brilliance. It rose high on the Modern Rock chart, but failed to cross over to pop radio and didn't crack the Hot 100. It's poppier and less abrasive than many of their songs, and the hook is very strong. Shortly before he left, longtime Ramones fans Stephen King asked if they'd write a new song for the film adaptation of his bestselling horror novel Pet Sematary. The decade began with the commercially disappointing Phil Spector-produced End of the Century and ended with Dee Dee Ramone leaving the band. Things got rough for the Ramones in the Eighties. "It has every element of what's great about them, in one song – the big drum intro and the 'Lobotomy' chant the little background-harmony ooohs the subject matter." "It's a mini-symphony," said Rocket to Russia engineer Ed Stasium. Oddly, many of the songs are about mental illness, including "Teenage Lobotomy," which kicks off side two. The group had been touring for three solid years by this point, and they finally captured their raw live energy on a record. It's very tough to pick the Ramones' single greatest album, but many fans would probably agree that it's 1977's Rocket to Russia.
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