My Life in the Cutout Bins: The Ramones/Leave Home

My Life in the Cutout Bins is a book project that I’m working on based on the cutout records in my collection. The first two installments were published to paid subscribers only. I am making this month’s installment covering The Ramones second album, Leave Home, available to all my readers. Please enjoy, and feel free to offer your comments. M.B.

The Ramones were as responsible for my friends and I getting into punk rock as anything else. My friend Dave, who worked the midnight to six am shift at White Hen Pantry just off route 53, had joined some kind of record club, and his purchases were always of interest because they were rarely run of the mill pop or rock albums that the other suburban high school spuds were listening to. So one week, among the Martin Mull and a Steve Martin albums, were The Ramones and Rocket to Russia.

The songs were a revelation, because they were funny and dumb, and the Ramones' group persona was that of moronic, mongoloid, glue-sniffing losers. Everything about their first  album seemed like it was part of a schtick, from the tough guy front cover pose to the group members all using the last name Ramone. They were the kind of band that, when I became a fan, my father would listen for a moment, and then ask 'sure, but how long is it going to last? People will get tired of it after one or two records," and in many cases, he was right, but not in the case of the Ramones.

On these first couple of records, The Ramones were running a gag, but if you were in on the joke, if you just somehow got it and weren't at all upset about songs like "Beat on the Brat" or the ones about sniffing glue or being a serial killer, then it was the best thing going.  In 1977, if you were an outsider in the world of suburban malls and didn't necessarily fit into your school environment, the Ramones were playing to you, making you feel like part of their tribe of happy idiots and non-conformists. The group's film debut, Rock and Roll High School, captured exactly the feelings of their fans, and it was aimed at them, the kind of people who would appreciate a movie that also had music like Brian Eno's "Energy Fools the Magician" in its soundtrack.

But The Ramones were an acquired taste, and most of those whose pictures adorn my freshman high school year book never acquired it. Not surprising when the favorites that played on radio and in the cars of those who cruised the neighborhood were Fleetwood Mac, ELO, Journey, REO Speedwagon, and the like. And so their first three or four records, considered classic albums today, were quickly consigned to the land of the cutout bins. Already having taped my friend's copies of the first and third albums, my first Ramones purchase was the band's second release,  Leave Home.

Leave Home was released a mere nine months after the group's eponymous debut, and expectations among fans were high. To say that they were met with ease serves to point out the band's complete mastery of their style. The opening track, "Glad to See You Go" combines a hook that doesn't quit with verses in which the speaker talks about killing the girlfriend he's bored with with a matter-of-factness that presages the future as well as satirizing the celebrity of serial killers--'gonna be a blood bath/gonna want my autograph.'  That one is written by Dee Dee and Joey, with the follow-up 'Gimmee Shock Treatment' penned by Dee Dee and Johnny.

The third track, "I Remember You," points out the dichotomy at the heart of The Ramones, every bit as energizing and friction-inducing as the relationship between Lennon/McCartney, and that is the contrast between the high energy, juvenile delinquent vibe of Dee Dee and sometimes Johnny Ramone and the romantic girl-group approach of Joey. This balancing act is used to increasingly great effect on records like Road to Ruin and the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century. End of the Century is where things boiled over a bit, with Johnny hating Spector and the strings-soaked, guitarless cover of the Ronettes' hit "Baby I Love You."

As Chris Stein told The Guardian in 2016:

"Everybody was sick of the Eagles and all those overblown, faceless bands like Chicago. Ramones took rock back to basics. They were very self-aware. Their album was a return to rock innocence, but very knowing. We felt more of an affinity with them than we did Talking Heads or the others. We liked Richard Hell and all the guys in Television, but there were two camps – the art crowd and the pop crowd. The Ramones and Blondie were more in the pop crowd."

Dee Dee scores big with the iconic "Pinhead," a reference both to Todd Browning's Freaks and comic book character Zippy Pinhead, who became an unofficial mascot for the band (kind of the punk version of The Dead's use of the Keep on Truckin' character.). The song popularized the Ramones chant "Gabba Gabbba, Hey!" with it s corollary opening: "Gabba Gabba we accept you/we accept you/one of us."

In the clean, conservative suburbs, the trash rock of New York City and London and the trashy people who made it became my heroes because they lived lives of doing exactly what they wanted to do--or at least I perceived it that way. It was great to read the tales of the exploits of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones in the early seventies and of Leonard Cohen getting head in the Chelsea Hotel. But these bands might as well have been the last of the Romanovs or The Pope, because there was no hope whatsoever that my life would ever be like that.

But the bands I read about that were playing at CBGBs or The 100 Club, they were not traveling town to town all over the world (yet) and they didn't have security or battalions of roadies. These were guys who might have lived in an apartment next door, or who you knew because you grew up in the same neighborhood. They walked off the street and onto the stage when it was time for their set, and just as quickly they were back in the crowd drinking or maybe they had already vanished into the night.

The lovable, affable junkie was an archetype pretty much created by Keith Richards. Of course, Richards was only lovable part of the time. The rest of the time he was annoying, dope sick, vomiting, or passed out. One of his acolytes, New York Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders, was affable and lovable even less of the time, and most of those qualities were evoked because his listeners realized that he was a soon-to-be tragic figure.

Dee Dee Ramone was cut from the same cloth, and he was an integral part of the Ramones, contributing songs from the start. Some of his songs were among the group's best, even though British writers loved to compare 'Pinhead' to more poetic lyrics by Strummer and even John Lydon as examples of American punk's deliberate dumbness compared to the more political lyrics of the Brits. But Dee Dee's poetry was the internal monologue of the loner, the outsider. One of the most poignant stories I've seen about this talented lost soul is that related by writer Donna Gaines, author of Why the Ramones Matter. She saw Dee Dee in a club a number of years after he had quit the band, and he told her that he felt like he didn't fit in anywhere:

"I said, 'Dee Dee, you don't have to. We fit in with you.' On the one hand, it was heartbreaking.  "On the other hand, it was the most validating thing he could have ever said. And I remember we were standing in a club where he was a king bee, and he was with his beautiful wife, Barbara Zampini, who was herself a musician. Anybody that would have walked by would have just been, 'Wow, that's Dee Dee.' And he's standing there in the city that he built -- basically downtown punk New York. And he's saying, look, I just don't fit in anywhere. And I looked at him and I said, 'Dee Dee, you don't have to. We fit in with you.'"

https://www.wpr.org/author-donna-gaines-explains-why-ramones-matter

The other thing that made it seem like The Ramones could be a big hit band despite the subject matter, attitude, and speed of their songs was the fact that on record The Ramones sounded good. By that I do NOT mean that they sounded better on record than they did live. But they could sound bigger, and that was part of the secret of the difference between the layers of bands. The Ramones sounded full and deep on their first recordings even though the first album was raw by the standards of the day. By comparison, The Clash sounded smaller and more tinny on their debut. They corrected course with Sandy Perlman as producer on Give 'Em Enough Rope, though many fans as well as the band themselves didn't care for it. They found their sound on London Calling and carried on from there.

In contrast, The Ramones arrived with a fully formed sound, even on record, thanks to co-producers (with Tommy Ramone (Erdyl) Craig Leon (the debut record) and Tony Bongiovi (Leave Home).  The first album didn't sell well, but received enough attention that Sire threw more money at the band for the recording of Leave Home (that's how the record industry used to work), and that money went into expanding on the first record's sound. Leave Home was engineered by Ed Stasium, who ended up working extensively with the Ramones as well as Talking Heads, The Smithereens, Soul Asylum, Julian Cope, and Living Colour.

It's worth mentioning that my copy of the album, with the characteristic notch in the sleeve, contains the track "Carbona Not Glue,” which was withdrawn from the record after initial pressings due to legal pressure from the makers of Carbona. It seems they had a problem with the song's assertion that their product was superior to plain old airplane model glue, which reminds me of a story that I had forgotten for many years:

I went through a pre-teen period where I liked to build model planes from a kit, carefully painting the pieces, then assembling and gluing them and finally applying any decals or other decorative items to the bicameral WWI planes, which were my favorite. I remember being in the hobby store with my dad and overhearing the salesman recommeding a certain brand of model glue with the assurance that 'it doesn't get you high, so they won;t be sniffing it.' I never had the least intention of huffing model glue, but hearing this made me just a little sad to think that I wouldn't maybe catch an accidental buzz  in the basement of my parent's house while bending over my airplane model and gluing it together.

Leave Home remains my go-to Ramones album to this day.