A band drowned by the flood: The story of Ramones

I was born 22 years after the Ramones made their nasty debut album about the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Nazism, male prostitution, sniffing glue, and bashing toddler skulls, but I was 16 when it finally went gold. Upon release, critics turned Ramones into an avatar for prog-rock’s antithesis. In his NME review, Nick Kent said that the album, as a punk artifact, “separates the men from the boys. If you love hard-ass retard rock, you’ll bathe in every groove. If you pride yourself on being a sensitive human-being, this record will gag on you like a Gatorade and vermouth fireball.” Creem magazine celebrated the tape, too; Gene Sculatti said the songs “drive a sharp wedge between the stale ends of a contemporary music scene bloated with graying superstars and overripe for takeover. Right now, the Ramones have their hands on the wheel.” But music critics didn’t buy records, and nobody outside of New York City or Los Angeles bought Ramones. 

By the time I “found” Ramones—when VH1 did a TV special in 2009 and named “Blitzkrieg Bop” the 25th greatest rock and roll song of all time—hundreds of SoCal pop-punk, English twee, and East Coast garage bands had already reheated the Ramones’ sound. For most of my life, every Walmart, Target, and Hot Topic in America has sold a black T-shirt with Arturo Vega’s Ramones seal on it. In our post-Is This It economy, leather jackets, garage blowouts, and borough scene reports are played-out. But 50 years ago, the Ramones were simply too unique to do the same old sock-hop song and dance as anybody else. While most of the industry was playing Beatle dress-up, the Ramones barely combed their mop-tops. They weren’t some cheap, bastardized advent of the Velvet Underground, but Standells and Bay City Rollers fanatics with mouths full of blood, playing fast, vulgar music. They had fuzz-tone fadeouts and 1-2-3-4 countoffs coming out of their ears. 

In 5th grade, my mother finally added a “Blitzkrieg Bop” mp3 to my iPod Shuffle. I’d ride the bus every morning and wig out over $50 Mosrite guitar thrashes. I was taking lessons myself but didn’t have the talent nor the dexterity. What the Ramones were doing, even to my cherub ears, was primordial and vicious. When you’re 11 years old and endeared only to what CDs your parents let you raid from their collection, head-pounding, seam-splitting rock and roll drama is a treasure. My friends were listening to iHeartRadio and the Billboard Top 40 while I ripped action figures apart to the spank of AC/DC and Aerosmith. It’s no wonder I spent every recess that year with my nose against the wall for cussing. 

Though I have the vocabulary now to articulate why the Ramones are one of the five most important American bands ever (alongside the Velvets, Meters, Grateful Dead, and Funkadelic), my connection to them remains as primal as ever. I love the simplicity, the hooks, the power. I love the album’s cover, a black-and-white picture of four make-believe brothers shot by Roberta Bayley for Punk magazine, now as ubiquitous as the Unknown Pleasures and Dark Side of the Moon designs. Most punk rock, to me, has an expiration date. Ramones, conversely, is as exciting now as it was when I thought the lyric was “let’s drink pop,” not “blitzkrieg bop.” Every day I grow apart from a band I used to like, but the Ramones keep hanging on. I’ll probably still be humming “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Danny Says” when I’m six feet below. 

I’ve always wanted to write about Ramones, but it’s nearly impossible to tell any record’s story when all of its makers are dead. Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny Ramone each checked out of this planet during Bush’s first presidential term. Tommy was the last to go, back in 2014. It wasn’t the CIA that got them, just cancer and heroin. But last summer, a publicist reached out to me with an idea. Let’s do a Ramones roundtable, he said, with four names attached to it: Joey Ramone’s little brother Mickey Leigh, Ramones producer Craig Leon, photographer Roberta Bayley, and Punk co-founder John Holmstrom. There are a couple other folks still kicking who had a hand, or at least a finger, in the making of Ramones. But, from my vantage point, these are the four most reputable living sources on the album. Marky Ramone is around and touring, but he didn’t replace Tommy on drums until 1978. Here, then, is the Mount Rushmore of Ramones anecdotes in 2026. Anyone who thinks this lineup is second-rate can take a hike. Bench players still get a championship ring, you know. 

This project began just as planned: a 90-minute roundtable Zoom call with all four of the aforementioned talking heads. But when Leon monologued for 40 of those minutes, I realized that it couldn’t be just a one-and-done Q&A retrospective. As one of the most impactful releases in a year full of them, Ramones is an album that every generation deserves to love, and you cannot tell the story of its songs, the Queens greasers who wrote them, and the supporting cast around them without going all-in on it. So while America’s biggest music festival thrummed and hollered a quarter-mile away, I holed up in an Airbnb in the California desert and ransacked the Creem, Village Voice, and Punk magazine archives, transcribed seven hours of interviews, pillaged subreddits and Facebook groups for old posters and advertisements, and collaged together this 13,000-word story of bicentennial-era New York City, punk rock, and the people who made it, loved it, and wanted it dead. 

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