The controversial Ramones song Tommy Ramone called a “parody”
“The Ramones are a multi-dimensional band as far as the kinds of songs we write,” Joey Ramone told the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in 1991. “The lyrical content, the implications that, y’know, are there in the songs, y’know what I mean?”
Part of what made Joey Ramone such a relatable rock ‘n’ roll hero was how long it sometimes took him to explain what he was getting at.
“We didn’t want to write these boy-girl bullshit songs,” he continued. “We wanted to write songs that really meant something to us. We wanted to express our frustrations and feelings of alienation and isolation, getting out your aggression and your disgust.”
No one could deny that the Ramones, at the height of their power, touched the outcast nerve like few musical acts before or since. And while playing extremely loud and extremely fast were arguably their two biggest contributions to rock, the group was consistently breaking new ground in the lyrical department, too. Paul Simon or Leonard Cohen they were not, but in a time of easy listening FM radio and brainy singer/songwriters, delivering a one-minute and 34-second song called ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ sounded like a sudden lightning bolt in a sleepy meadow.
The song, which appeared on the Ramones’ 1976 self-titled debut album, contains just 14 unique words repeated and arranged as such: “Now I wanna sniff some glue / Now I wanna have somethin’ to do / All the kids wanna sniff some glue / All the kids want somethin’ to do.”
Bassist Dee Dee Ramone was the brains behind the “narrative” on this track, and as far as Joey understood it, there was no deeper message or metaphor going on.
“Dee Dee wrote that about . . . well, I guess he used to sniff glue,” Joey said in 1991, as if he’d never pondered the song’s origins before. “And that’s what it was about. It was kinda its own anthem.”
Naturally, there were a lot of parents who were none too pleased about their kids listening to music glorifying glue sniffing, but as would become the new norm of the punk rock ethos that the Ramones helped define, everything had to be taken at least a little bit tongue-in-cheek.
Tommy Ramone directly stated years later that he felt like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ was a bit of a joke. “I thought of it as a parody,” he said in Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: The Ramones Anthology. “[Dee Dee] might have been a little more serious.”
“We thought it was funny,” Johnny Ramone added. “We thought we could get away with anything.”
Back when ‘Sniff Some Glue’ was still a relatively new song, the Ramones did occasionally face some on-the-ground backlash that was harder to laugh off. During a tour of the UK in 1977, the band were asked by authorities in Glasgow to keep the song off their setlist “because about 20 kids had died from glue sniffing in the city,” Tommy Ramone told the Belleville-News Democrat at the time. According to an online setlist supposedly preserved from the band’s gig at the University of Strathclyde that spring, however, the Ramones played the song anyway. Punks will be punks.
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