The Ramones song inspired by bubblegum pop
Although he came off as one of the more imposing figures in the punk scene, Joey Ramone was a big softie at heart. The legendary lead singer of the Ramones was tall, gangly, and dressed to kill in live performances, shouting out lines about violence, prostitution, boredom, and sniffing glue on a nightly basis. But from his personal demeanour to his musical influences to his sense of humour, most of Ramone’s qualities were much tamer than his public perception might make him out to seem.
“Joey was usually very soft-spoken and not at all demonstrative, but if you were his friend, he would be happy to tell you his thoughts,” Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz later remembered. “One very important thing is that he always hit the notes. Even in the early days when he couldn’t hear himself, Joey’s singing was pitch-perfect. He performed with complete conviction and with a seriousness that defined the Ramones’ on-stage presence. He rocked the crowd without moving around at all, and he did this with the power of his voice. He was a true original outsider artist.”
Once Joey hit the stage, he was a completely different person than the shy and reserved guy who snuck around the backstage area of shows. With a snarl in his voice and a conviction in his mind, Joey Ramone was not the Jeffrey Hyman who walked around during the daytime. But Ramone’s commitment to the Ramones’ aesthetic was clear from the songs that he wrote, including the tongue-in-cheek ‘Beat on the Brat’ from the band’s classic debut LP.
“There was a playground with women sitting around and a kid screaming, a horrible kid just running around rampant with no discipline whatsoever,” Ramone told Rolling Stone about ‘Beat on the Brat’. “The kind of kid you just want to kill. You know, ‘Beat on the brat with a baseball bat’ just came out. I just wanted to kill him.”
Even though the blunt lyrics were always meant to be humorous in tone, the image of a gigantic Joey Ramone chasing an unruly kid around with a baseball bat was completely believable. With only a basic set of lyrics, ‘Beat on the Brat’ had to rely on the stripped-back chords favoured by the rest of the band and Joey’s own intuitive sense of melody. As it turns out, ‘Beat on the Brat’ took its cues from the bubblegum pop that Joey loved listening to.
“I wrote ‘Beat On The Brat’ about the spoiled brats in Queens,” Ramone later recalled. “That chord change at the top of the song comes directly from bubblegum songs ‘Chewy Chewy’, ‘Yummy Yummy Yummy’ – all those good songs, those fun songs.”
Check out ‘Beat on the Brat’ down below.
