With their new drummer in place, The Ramones recorded their fourth album, Road to Ruin, which was released in the fall. He was replaced by former Voidoid Marc Bee, who immediately changed his name to Marky Ramone. Tommy Ramone left the band in the spring of 1977, although he produced the group's subsequent album. Top 40 hit "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," The Ramones released their third album, Rocket to Russia, in the fall of 1977. By the summer of 1977, the Sex Pistols and The Ramones were seen as the two key bands in the punk rock revolution, but where the Pistols imploded, The Ramones kept on rolling. charts, Leave Home became a genuine hit in England in the spring of 1977, peaking at number 48. By the end of the year, the group released their second album, Ramones Leave Home. Throughout 1976, The Ramones toured constantly, inaugurating nearly 20 years of relentless touring. On July 4, the band made their debut appearance in Britain, where their records were becoming a big influence on a new generation of bands. The resulting album, Ramones, was released in the spring, gained some critical attention, and managed to climb to 111 on the U.S. By the end of 1975, The Ramones secured a recording contract with Sire discounting Patti Smith, they were the first New York punk band to sign a contract.Įarly in 1976, The Ramones recorded their debut album for just over 6,000 dollars. All of The Ramones sets clocked in at about 20 minutes, featuring an unrelenting barrage of short, barely two-minute songs. For the next year, they played regularly at the nightclub, earning a dedicated cult following and inspiring several other artists to form bands with similar ideals. By the end of the summer, The Ramones earned a residency at CBGB's. Two months after the show, Joey switched to vocals and Tommy became the band's drummer. The group played their first concert on March 30, 1974, at New York's Performance Studio. All of the group's members adopted the last name "Ramone" and dressed in torn blue jeans and leather jackets, in homage to '50s greaser rockers. 18, 1951), with Tommy Ramone (born Tom Erdelyi, Jan. 8, 1951), and Dee Dee Ramone (bass born Douglas Colvin, Sept. Originally, the band was a trio consisting of Joey Ramone (vocals, drums born Jeffrey Hyman, May 19, 1951), Johnny Ramone (guitar born John Cummings, Oct. Although some punk diehards - including several of their peers - would have claimed the band's long career wound up undercutting the ideals the band originally stood for, The Ramones always celebrated not just the punk aesthetic, but the music itself.īased in the Forest Hills section of Queens, NY, The Ramones formed in 1974. And The Ramones themselves were major figures for the next two decades, playing essentially the same music without changing their style much at all. The band's first four albums set the blueprint for punk, especially American punk and hardcore, for the next two decades. While their peers such as Patti Smith, Television, Talking Heads, and Richard Hell all were more intellectual and self-consciously artistic than The Ramones, they nevertheless appealed to the same mentality because of the way they turned rock conventions inside out and celebrated kitschy pop culture with stylized stupidity. Since their breakthrough was theoretical as well as musical, they comfortably became the leaders of the emerging New York punk rock scene. By cutting rock & roll down to its bare essentials - four chords a simple, catchy melody and irresistibly inane lyrics - and speeding up the tempo considerably, The Ramones created something that was rooted in early '60s, pre-Beatles rock & roll and pop but sounded revolutionary.
Other bands, such as the Stooges and the New York Dolls, came before them and set the stage and aesthetic for punk, and bands that immediately followed, such as the Sex Pistols, made the latent violence of the music more explicit, but The Ramones crystallized the musical ideals of the genre. The Ramones are the first punk rock band.
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