The “horrible” bands Joey Ramone wanted to destroy
It’s impossible to talk about the punk revolution the Ramones spearheaded without wading into the well-covered narratives of the 1970s rock and roll crisis.
While a maligned term at the time, and absolutely hijacked by the corporate labels for a slew of cleaner-cut imitation bands, a new wave really did rear its head midway through the decade. Glam had paved the way, the first sign that the rock world was bored with double-denimed earnestness and singer-songwriter stult still wedded to a Woodstock legacy whose hippy idyll had curdled to a bad joke into the 1970s.
Along with the bad fog of ennui creeping across the Western world and the biting economic downturn, the rock on offer across both sides of the Atlantic looked bafflingly tone deaf to the mood on the street.
Even half a century later, prog still exists as a punchline among popular music’s consensus; the likes of Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer are only ever touched on when discussing punk’s explosion in rock lore. But there was also an eye-rolling aversion to the day’s arena monsters, Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones, perceived to have stumbled into bloated self-parody far removed from what made rock so exciting barely a decade earlier. On the Sex Pistols’ very first show in 1975, their set was filled with numbers from Small Faces, The Who, and even The Monkees.
It was hippies and the counterculture that was deathly averted, a nostalgia felt by Joey Ramone too when reflecting on his namesake band’s New York legacy. “Well, all the music that we loved was gone, we weren’t hearing it anymore,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1995. “We started in ‘74, and the only thing that you heard on the radio was disco, whereas you used to hear great, great music like the Kinks and the Who and the Beatles and all that stuff.”
Disco would offer pop pearls of brilliance, Chic and Donna Summer scoring enduring gems, and even CBGB peers Blondie dipping their toe and plucking ‘Heat of Glass’ orbit of the Studio 54 dancefloor. But the rock world was indeed bereft of danger, urgency, or sexiness of any kind when the Queens quartet first fired up their garage rock turbo charge, Joey immediately offering a roll-call of worst culprits when casting his mind back to the Hot 100’s lost years.
“You’d also hear CW McCall, that ‘CB song’, and you’d hear the Captain & Tennille, and then you’d hear Boston, REO Speedwagon, Journey, Foreigner, Toto, Kansas, Styx, [laughs]. I lived through this [expletive]. I remember it. It was horrible. There was something really fresh and distinct and unique and exciting about what we were doing.”
It’s unlikely Ramones was aware of just how sorely needed they were. While big hitters, a crop of kids were deathly bored of hokey novelty numbers like McCall’s ‘Convoy’ country schtick, and the easy listening married couple Captain & Tennille’s MOR dross, clogging the airwaves, and baffled how their beloved rock flame had devolved into the soft rock snooze scoring the yacht rock soundtrack.
They wouldn’t die, in fact, Toto, Journey, and REO Speedwagon would score massive hits in the 1980s, but the war waged by Joey and the punk generation was decisively won by the new wave, the image of those four leather-clad toughs on 1976’s Ramones still flashing with arresting cool, beckoning future generations in a way that You Can Tune a Piano, but You Can’t Tuna Fish never, ever will.
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