“We got booed”: The band the Ramones hated opening for
If one were to sum up what the archetypal punk band is, it’s a toss-up between the UK’s Sex Pistols and the Ramones over in the States.
We’re not talking greatest or most inventive, but when the decades roll by and punk becomes a distant slice of countercultural lore, the image presented to encapsulate the insurrectionary chapter in popular music will either be Johnny Rotten seething into a microphone or four long-haired misfits from New York sporting Schott leathers and sharing the same surname, taking the stage at the legendary CBGB.
The Ramones’ story goes back further than is remembered. Enamoured with Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew hits as much as The Stooges or MC5, the garage quartet from Queens melded their love of hooky pop with a fired-up rock attack that actively eschewed the era’s arena bluster populated by the likes of Billy Joel, and a plane of detached loftiness that had even threatened their beloved Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. Rock was in need of upending, and the Ramones helped conjure the most consequential plugged-in lightning bolt since the original rock and rollers 20 years earlier.
Officially formed in March 1974, most who first witnessed the Ramones’ early shows in the emerging CBGBs and Max’s Kansas City scenes hadn’t even heard of punk. Garnering a fierce reputation for their whirlwind sets, rarely exceeding 20 minutes, the Ramones found themselves as de facto figureheads of the new revolution, before long surrounded by the likes of Blondie, Talking Heads, Suicide, and Patti Smith in the city’s celebrated musical chapter. Signing to Sire Records, Ramones would drop their eponymous debut in 1976.
Such critical buzz and street cache didn’t translate commercially. Even three albums in, sales were so sluggish that, along with internal band fractures, drummer Tommy stepped away from the kit to concentrate on producing, recruiting Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Marc Bell to pick up the sticks, adopting the Marky Ramone moniker. With 1978’s Road to Ruin behind them, a support slot in December with Black Sabbath during the tail-end of Ozzy Osbourne’s frontman duties highlighted just how little the punk wave had reached the metal world.
“…it was a strange combination and a lot of the metal fans just wanted to see Black Sabbath,” Marky confessed to Songfacts in 2015. “So after about five or six songs, we got booed, we got every kind of coin tossed at us, and any other thing you could imagine, and we just said, ‘Fuck you,’ and we left the stage. We gave them the middle finger and walked off. But then we realised that it’s very important to be paired with people in the right genre, y’know?”
Despite Sabbath’s ‘Never Say Die!’ single pursuing a much more stripped-down sound than earlier cuts, the metalheads had already entrenched themselves in their besieged rejection of the new wave; indeed, the show at California’s Long Beach Arena was even promoted under the Punk Rock vs. Heavy Metal banner, only animating the crowd further to let rip on the little known New York band who wouldn’t even play a solo.
The Ramones were quietly confident, however, and likely enjoyed the provocation their new sound triggered underneath the projectiles and missives. Looking back, Marky made clear that while lacking Sabbath’s sophistication, the Birmingham metal pioneers could never match them in speed: “…I don’t think they could play as fast as us, but we could play as slow as them!”
