‘Blitzkrieg Bop’: How the Ramones crafted their rallying cry
Let’s picture the scene. You’re a new band, but quickly, you’ve made a name for yourselves. In our home city of New York, you’re doing the rounds of the grimy rock venues, and as more and more people flock to catch you play, a whole scene seems to build around you that crowns you the leaders. You’ve got good songs, but you feel like one thing is missing. You’re the Ramones, and you want a hit.
Forming in 1974 in Queens, the Ramones weren’t brothers, but they might as well have been. They met in their high school years and had been playing together since then, so when the decision came to all adopt the fake surname of Ramone, and name the band after it too, it made sense.
The Ramones never had the musical tightness that tends to come naturally to sibling bands, but they did have the trust and energy that comes from a group of friends doing something exciting. Their own DIY, rough-around-the-edges energy didn’t just define them, but it would go on to define punk as a whole. They prioritised feel over everything as the atmosphere at their shows was king, and so the songs they wrote were built to serve that.
They wanted to get people going and get bodies moving, especially once they’d started playing consistently around New York. But at the start, their set seemed to lack one big song that would absolutely guarantee that.
Wanting a crowdpleaser isn’t very punk, though, or at least it doesn’t seem like the kind of thing a punk band would admit to when the whole point of the genre is to be outsiders who don’t care about the mainstream system. Luckily, though, the Ramones never really claimed to be that – “I think we wanted to be a bubblegum band,” Johnny once said as they looked towards pop music for pointers more than anything else.
The band were clear about wanting a hit and wanting a song that would have the crowd hooked, and so they knew they needed to turn on the mainstream radio. “At one point, the Bay City Rollers were becoming popular. They had written ‘Saturday Night‘ and we sat down and said, ‘We have to write a song with a chant in it, like they have,’” Johnny recalled, and suddenly, that felt like a cheat code.
Give the crowd something to chant, and you’ll get the crowd chanting. If you write it into a song, chances are it will happen like a self-fulfilling prophecy in the form of a catch hook. Just as the Bay City Rollers got their audience going as they all sang together “S-A! T-U-R, D-A-Y! Night!”, the Ramones wanted an equivalent.
That planted the seed for an idea, but it was a different band that gave them the specifics. Around the same time, The Rolling Stones were enduring radio favourites too. Tommy Ramone was into them, and he said, “I wanted a rallying song.”
Suddenly recalling one he knew well, he added, “I was trying to think of a good rally when I remembered The Rolling Stones’ version of [Rufus Thomas’] ‘Walking the Dog,‘ where Mick Jagger sings the line, ‘Hi Ho’s nipped her toes.’”
“Hi ho” – sounds familiar, right? How about, “Hey ho, let’s go”?
From that little moment in The Stones’ version, seen as another example of a sure-fire way to get a whole room singing back at you, the Ramones knew they needed a chant and suddenly had one. And so, ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ was born, and the band released it as their debut single, knowing exactly how quickly they’d be herding a whole room yelling that one hook back at them.
