...Is a Punk Rocker

by editor Michele Catalano

I came upon the Ramones the way I was introduced to most new music in the mid to late ‘70s: on WNEW-FM (102.7) in New York. Maybe it was Dennis Elsas or Scott Muni who did the introductions. I don’t remember the DJ but I do remember thinking, What the hell is this and where can I get more of it?

This was 1976. I was a freshman in high school, leaning on a heavy diet of Genesis, ELP, Yes, and the ever-present Led Zeppelin. It was a banner year for new music. We had Fleetwood Mac and the Eagles, Frampton Comes Alive and Boston’s self-titled debut. I was all over the place musically, trying to fit in with my new prog rock friends at school, while also keeping room for my love for straight-up rock and roll. I was eager to please and often made musical decisions based on who I was hanging around with at the moment. Thus, I became well-rounded, musically. I listened to any genre put in front of me and gave any new band a chance. So I was all ears when the voice coming from the radio implored me to listen to this new music. 

“Blitzkrieg Bop” hit me over the head. It was not subtle like Fleetwood Mac, nor did it have the intricacies of Yes. In fact, it was quite the opposite. It was noisy. It was brash. It was in your face. And I loved it. I wanted to hear it again and again. I called the station and asked them to play more. Later, when they played “Judy is a Punk,” I had my tape player ready to record. I listened to “Judy” ten times that night, hitting the rewind and play buttons over and over again until I was sure it was the best thing I’d ever heard.

When you are 14, the world is a confusing place. Sure, it’s confusing most of the time, but 14 is such a weird, gangly age. You’re a novice at being a teenager, yet to perfect the surly countenance of your older peers, yet to start feeling jaded, yet to start feeling cool. You wonder if you’re ever going to get there, or if you’re going to feel like a kid forever. I wanted so badly to be cool, to be in with the in crowd, to have my older cousins in the school treat me like a peer instead of someone they had to look out for. I wanted to prove my worth, to up my status. So I introduced my friend to the Ramones.

I pulled out my tape after school while we were hanging out at the Village Green. I wasn’t sure if anyone had heard it yet, but it had only been two days since I first heard it on WNEW-FM, and most of my friends listened to albums over the radio. Let’s face it, they were never going to hear Genesis’s “Supper’s Ready” by listening to FM radio. I was half afraid to play it for them, and half excited. I felt like I had discovered a treasure map and we were going to decode it together. What was this music about? What kind of people performed this? Where could I find more? These were all questions I asked myself that I wanted my friends to investigate with me. 

I pressed play and waited. I didn’t have to wait long. The song was only a minute and a half long. I saw Kevin’s eyes get big. I saw Jim’s face light up. Donna looked disgusted, but I honestly didn’t care about the opinion of someone whose favorite song was Springsteen’s “Thunder Road.” I had yet to get into Bruce, and I honestly did not care for him at 14, or I did and just didn’t tell anyone about it. There were others there, and some of them looked bemused while the rest of us jumped up and down in time to the music the second time around. Punk rockers were born that day. 

A couple of us pooled some money and went to Jimmy’s Music World to get the Ramones self-titled debut album. We took it to my house, sat in my bedroom, and played it through.

What was this? We had no idea. We had no vocabulary for what we were hearing. Beat on the brat with a baseball bat? Excuse me? I found it thrilling to be singing those kinds of lyrics. I found it exhilarating to listen to those chords being strummed, to the drums being pounded. I was swept up in the breakneck speed at which the songs were played. I wanted to dance, to pogo up and down, to bang my hands on my dresser in time with the beat. “I just want to sniff some glue,” we all sang on the third time around. We were delirious. We were thrilled. Well, most of us.

There was something about the Ramones that spoke to the primal rage of a 14-year-old. I was mad at the world for being such a shitty place. I was mad at my hormones for being so unregulated that I never knew what my mood would be from hour to hour. I was mad at my parents for trying to instill their rules and regulations in my life when I was all about finding my freedom. I was mad at school, that I had to be there at all, learning about past civilizations and algebra and old, dead English writers whose words were dreadfully boring to me. I suddenly wanted to do nothing but listen to the Ramones and find other music like it. 

My parents assumed my punk rock loving Ramones fandom was a phase, and they were determined to let me have this moment and just wait it out. But I won that game, because it wasn’t just a phase. It became a lifestyle, a brand, my entire personality. As time went on and punk became more present, I discovered other bands. The Sex Pistols, the New York Dolls, the Clash, the Damned. I threw myself into all of it. I wanted to complete my transformation and stick a safety pin in my ear and spike my hair, but I knew how far I could push my parents and teachers. I was, after all, just a teen. But I was not that pushover, meek teen I was when I started high school. I was more outspoken, more inclined to hang out with my friends instead of going home after school, more likely to be smoking and playing pinball than dutifully doing my homework. 

If my parents were alarmed at the changes in me, they said nothing. To their credit, they didn’t blame my poor grades or juvenile delinquency on punk rock or the Ramones in particular. They blamed my friends until my vice principal told them I was a “harborer of truancy.” I got grounded a lot, but they never took away my records. I thank them for that.

In 1978, I finally got to see my beloved Ramones at the Calderone Theater in Hempstead, Long Island, a 2,500 seat venue that was filled to the brim that evening. My friend Liz and I were front and center, having waited in line for hours to get tickets. 

 I took stock of the scene around me before the show started. Mostly teenagers, though people in their twenties were well represented. People clad in black leather jackets, decorated with tons of pins advertising other punk rock bands. It seemed like everyone had a “Disco Sucks” button somewhere on their person. The crowd was wild, but an ecstatic sort of wild. We were all just happy to be there, reveling in the punk rock we helped usher in just two years earlier. I was thrilled to see so many people there, to share my joy and exuberance with 2,500 people two years after sharing a song that I taped off the radio with my close friends. 

We’d come a long way. Punk rock was real. It was out in force. My Ramones—and by virtue, my coolness—had made it. I was always a little smug about having introduced my friends to the band and to punk rock, and maybe I still am to this day. Sure, they would have discovered the Ramones eventually without me. But they didn’t, and that is surely part of my lore.

Long live the Ramones.