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1. Ramones
   Ramones is a 1992 album by Screeching Weasel covering the first album by The Ramones in its entirety. The band was approached to cover the album at a party for the completion of their fourth album, Wiggle. Having just lost bassist Johnny Personality, the band was unsure of its future, and they claim that the recording of these covers helped revitalize them. For future Screeching Weasel songs, Ben would play second guitar and Danny Vapid moved back to bass, but, for this recording, Ben just sang since the Ramones only had one guitarist. The band mixed the album just like the Ramones record, with the guitar panned hard to one side and the bass to the other. Very little was changed in terms of the songs themselves, though all were slightly faster than the originals.
2. The Ramones
   The Ramones are cagey boys. Forest Hills, Queens was the first cage, now it’s Manhattan. (Tomorrow, the world.) The city may be a jungle but to the Ramones it felt more like a zoo. They were all brought up in Forest Hills, a neighborhood that apart from a certain exaggeration in scale and proximity to New York City looks and feels like 9/l0th’s of the populated territory of the modern USA (sounds like a German corporation). Big hatchery brown brick apartment houses along wide hot boulevards, with the spaces in between occupied by blacktop playgrounds, two story drugstores with storage space or a dentist’s offices upstairs, ice cream parlors, fast food, and supermarkets. (Elvis Presley, in fact, spent much of his boyhood in a similar housing development neighborhood in Memphis.) They’ve known each other for ten years, since their earliest teens.
3. The Ramones -- Johnny Ramone
   The Ramones' big inspiration was The New York Dolls. The Dolls' lead guitarist, Johnny Thunders, was from Queens and his greatest song was called "Subway Train". And you thought Punk Rock just HAPPENED!?!
4. Ramones -- Johnny Ramone
   The Ramones survived the Spector experiment, but at a price. Management and record companies continued to press celebrity producers on the group. Personal tensions between Johnny and Joey, complicated by Dee Dee's state of mind and body, and Marky's new-boy status, threatened their one-for-all vibe. "The turmoil," Johnny says dryly, "was starting." But it was not enough to make them give up. Pleasant Dreams-produced by 10cc's Graham Gouldman, brought in as a paragon of Britpop efficiency after Spector's Wagnerian overspill-was not the low point its cheap, bland cover art suggested.
5. Ramones -- Ramones Raw
   Despite the recent deaths of original band members Dee Dee, Joey and Johnny Ramone over the last three years, fans of the Ramones finally have a reason to rejoice. That's because a new DVD entitled Ramones Raw has recently been released and features over five hours of rare live performances, home movies and various television appearances throughout the band's career.
6. Ramones -- Songs
   There are some alarming signs that the Ramones are pretty much at the end of the rope, which... can be interpreted differently under different circumstances. When I first heard 'The Return Of Jackie And Judy', I only saw it as a song formally written in the tradition of stuff like 'Peggy Sue Got Married' or all those 'Schoolday' clones of Chuck Berry (if your song was a hit, why not do it again? Sequels are cool!), but too much of a dumb, uninventive mix of 'Judy Is A Punk' and 'Beat On The Brat' to be of any importance. Tradition is fine, but not when it reeks of stagnation. Today, though, I'm more inclined to treat it as a hilarious reinvention of the old motive and admire the way the boys take snippets of the old melodies and make them develop differently - like the 'and oh I don't know why...' thing that segues into '...she wrote that letter' this time instead of serving as the "chorus". Stagnation?
7. The Ramones -- Bands
   The Ramones were and are one of the most influential punk bands of all time. They took their mutual love of 60s Girl Group records (particularly those produced by Phil Spector) and applied that to short rock songs. They were great fans of pop music, although many fans didn't seem to realize this, which is odd, given the sound and structure of their songs and choices of covers, though one could see the confusion given the subject matter of many Ramones songs. The inter-band tensions are widely known, but they stayed together for a long time. Sadly, the 3 core members have died within a couple years of each other, but their influence reigns on.
8. Ramones -- Bands
   The Ramones are the first punk rock band. 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. 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. Since their breakthrough was theoretical as well as musical, they comfortably became the leaders of the emerging New York punk rock scene. 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 ... appealed to the same mentality because of the way they turned rock conventions inside out and celebrated kitschy pop culture with stylized stupidity. The band's first four albums set the blueprint for punk, especially American punk and hardcore, for the next two decades.
9. The Ramones -- Spring
   The Ramones formed as a 3-piece in 1974, with Joey on drums and Dee Dee singing and playing bass. This proved difficult for Dee Dee, so Joey took over on vocals and Tommy signed on to play drums.
10. Ramones -- Recording
    Eventually, the Ramones burn out, sucker the audience into multiple farewell tours and toss out second rate efforts. Whadda expect? You can't stay young and rebellious forever. But if tempted to try, get "The Ramones," "Leave Home," "Rocket To Russia" and the aptly titled "Road To Ruin." These CDs will surely stave off complacency. After "Pleasant Dreams," recorded in '81, the prolific Ramones stall, nearly permanently.

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