Trivia / Ramones

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• Breakthrough Hit: "Blitzkrieg Bop".
• Chart Displacement: Their highest charting "hit" on the charts? "Rockaway Beach", which peaked at #66. In fact, of their three charting singles, none of them were the legendary "Blitzkrieg Bop" or "I Wanna Be Sedated". Even on other charts, it was songs from the band's final years, "Pet Sematary" and "Poison Heart" (#2 and #6 at the Modern Rock charts). They fared much better in the charts in the UK, where their cover of "Baby I Love You" hit the top ten - which itself could be a case of Black Sheep Hit, specially compared to their second most successful song "Sheena is a Punk Rocker" (#22).
• Creator Backlash:
  • Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee hated how End of the Century turned out. Joey said:
    Joey: I think that some of the worst crap I ever wrote went on the album. That was me at my worst.
  • Johnny said:
    Johnny: End of the Century was just watered-down Ramones. It's not real Ramones. "Baby, I Love You"—I didn't play on that at all. What am I gonna do—play along with an orchestra? There's no point. End of the Century was trying to get a hit on each song, instead of trying to get a hit on one or two of the songs on the album and trying to make the rest as raunchy as you can. They ain't gonna play the other ten songs, anyway.
  • Johnny raved about Mondo Bizarro when it was released, but grew to hate it over the years, admitting a dislike in the End of the Century documentary.
  • CJ lost his enthusiasm for the covers album, Acid Eaters, before the band even finished making it, feeling that the focus on the late 60s didn't quite work. According to him, it was originally going to be an EP, and he believes it should've stayed that way.
    CJ: But the problem is that the time period that they were going for — that late '60s acid-pop stuff — that's an odd period to try to choose songs from for the Ramones. Some of them, like I said, really worked out well. But the slower, poppier ones just didn't come off. They didn't come off very well. When we sat down at the end of it to listen to the final mix, I was just like, "Oh my God, I can't believe this is gonna come out." I was actually dreading its release. And anybody I knew that was a Ramones fan, I told them beforehand, "Prepare to be disappointed."
  • Multiple members of the band think that Loco Live was the worst of their live records; it's perhaps notable that this one had the most overdubbing.
  • While "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes To Bitburg)" did make the live sets here and there (even popping up on Loco Live), Johnny hated it right from the get-go. Joey and Dee Dee, plus Animal Boy producer Jean Beauvoir, wrote the song to protest Ronald Reagan's visit to a German World War II cemetery, which they considered inappropriate, to say the least. Unlike Joey and Dee Dee, Johnny was a lifelong conservative, who balked at the song and told them "you can't call my president a monkey!" The title change from "Bonzo Goes To Bitburg" to "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down" was mainly just to appease Johnny.
  • In the End Of The Century documentary, Dee Dee's ill-fated rap album, Standing In The Spotlight, inevitably comes up, and while Dee Dee expresses great admiration for rappers and rap music, he fully admits that the album "wasn't so good" and that he just wasn't cut out to be a rapper.
  • While the band liked the album itself, Johnny and Marky both hated the front cover of ¡Adios Amigos!, which their manager picked without their input, depicting a pair of Allosaurs wearing sombreros ^note in the original painting, Enasaurs by Mark Kostabi, the Allosaurs were wearing yellow party hats / witch hats, which were digitally altered into sombreros for the album cover . Johnny and Marky admitted that the dinosaur theme was a little fitting because they felt like the band were considered "dinosaurs" at that point, but didn't like the execution (or the hats).
• Creator Breakdown:
  • Joey's girlfriend left him for Johnny in the early 80s - her and Johnny would eventually marry - and Joey took years and we mean years to get over it. As a result, Joey's contributions to the 1981 album Pleasant Dreams are such cheerful delights as "The KKK Took My Baby Away" and "Don't Go."
  • Dee Dee averted this. He was depressed and had an eating disorder after years of constant touring with the band, even while writing songs like "Apeman Hop" and "Weasel Face." Instead of taking his ill health out on his music, he abruptly quit after 1989's Brain Drain, and started doing rap music.
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Johnny named Rocket to Russia as his favourite Ramones album.
• Cut Song: "Carbona Not Glue" from Leave Home was deleted from copies, due to a potential lawsuit from the makers of Carbona, a trademarked cleaning solvent. A live version of the song was a Hidden Track on the version of Loco Live released by Sire records, and the studio version appeared on the box set Weird Tales Of The Ramones, but it took until special anniversary editions were released in the 21st century for the song to actually be included on Leave Home itself.
• Genre Popularizer: They unintentionally created and popularized the Pop Punk genre. Averted with Punk Rock itself, as the band, despite kickstarting the genre, were only a cult favorite until they dissolved (and later got Vindicated by History).
• Hostility on the Set: Band relations were often tense:
  • Tension between Joey and Johnny colored much of the band's career. The pair were politically antagonistic, Joey being a liberal and Johnny a conservative. Their personalities also clashed: Johnny, who spent two years in military school, lived by a strict code of self-discipline, while Joey struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism. In the early 1980s, Linda Danielle began a relationship with Johnny after having already been romantically involved with Joey. Consequently, despite their continued professional relationship, Joey and Johnny had become aloof from each other. Johnny did not contact Joey before the latter's death, although he said that he was depressed for "the whole week" after his death.
  • Tommy quit the band after being "physically threatened by Johnny, treated with contempt by Dee Dee, and all but ignored by Joey".
  • The tensions among the group members were not kept secret from the public as was heard on the Howard Stern radio show in 1997, where during the interview Marky and Joey got into a fight about their respective drinking habits.
  • A year after the band's breakup, Marky Ramone made disparaging response against C.J. in the press, calling him a "bigot," a statement he would reiterate a decade later. C.J. would later respond that he was unsure as to why he would make negative comments against him in the press though he denied that it had anything to do with his marrying Marky's niece. He also denied being a bigot. Many years later, C.J. mentioned that despite being the two surviving members of arguably the band's most commercially successful era, and despite reaching out a few times to join him on stage, he and Marky were no longer in contact.
  • Johnny, being Johnny, was really hard on new kid C.J. after he joined the band. He especially chewed him out after one show where C.J. took off his shirt mid-set, which Johnny thought was out of character for the Ramones. However, this faded with time, as Johnny later professed that C.J. was great for the band. While Johnny did not succeed in reconciling with Joey and Dee Dee before they passed away, Johnny was able to make peace with C.J. and thank him for his contributions, shortly before Johnny succumbed to cancer.
• Late Export for You:
  • The band's first Live Album, It's Alive, was released in 1979 — everywhere except America, where it didn't come out until 1995.
  • "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" was issued as a British single in June 1985. It wasn't released in the rest of the world until it came out as part of the Animal Boy album in May 1986.
• Missing Episode: "Carbona Not Glue" was taken off of Leave Home due to a threatened lawsuit by Carbona, a trademarked cleaning fluid. Most versions of the album replaced it with "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker", which means that "Sheena..." is now on two of their albums, Leave Home and Rocket to Russia - harder to find copies replaced it with the B-Side "Babysitter" instead. A live version of "Carbona Not Glue" was a Hidden Track on one version of the Live Album Loco Live and the studio version appeared on the box set Weird Tales of the Ramones, but it's still not on the most recent reissues of Leave Home.
• No-Hit Wonder: The Ramones are legends by any reasonable measure, and one of the most pivotal bands in rock history. And yet, their highest selling album (End of the Century) peaked at #44, and they never got higher than #66 on the Billboard Hot 100 ("Rockaway Beach"). Early in their career (as explained by Johnny, above), the band tended to release slower songs as singles for radio play, while the rest of the album was much louder and faster - i.e. the Ramones we know and love. Just for example, "I Remember You" and "Swallow My Pride" were the only two singles from Leave Home, and by the standards of the rest of the album, those two are practically ballads. Please note that this is the album that has fan favorites like "Pinhead" and "California Sun" on it.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Replacement bassist C.J. Ramone was a big fan of the band before joining.
  • Helen Love is a bubblegum pop-punk band that writes about almost nothing but the lead singer's crush on Joey Ramone. Joey Ramone did guest vocals on their song "Punk Boy".
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Marky was sacked during the recording of Subterranean Jungle due to his alcoholism. He rejoined in 1987, and remained until the end.
• Troubled Production: For nearly every album they made in The '80s:
  • They had a miserable time recording their fifth album End of the Century due to the antics of producer Phil Spector. He reportedly forced Johnny Ramone to play the opening chord of "Rock n' Roll High School" hundreds of times, made the band listen to him play the piano for all hours and pulled a gun on Dee Dee when he tried to leave. The resulting album divided fan opinion and was hated by most of the band.
  • It didn't get any better with the next album Pleasant Dreams. Although not as nightmarish as the previous album, the sessions were filled with conflicts on the direction of songwriting choices. As Johnny wanted to go in a hard rock direction while Joey preferred to go into a pop direction. To make it worse, Johnny started dating one of Joey's ex-girlfriends (who he would later on marry). As a result of all this, their relations were strained even more and the two would barely speak to each other for the rest of their careers.
  • Subterranean Jungle was more smoother, but it wasn't entirely trouble-free, as guitarist Johnny had dictated the style of the music. To make it worse, Joey and drummer Marky Ramone had been dealing with drug addictions at the time of recording. It got so bad that Marky was fired during the sessions.
  • After avoiding this trope from their previous album, it continued during the sessions of Animal Boy. Johnny had refused to perform on Joey's songs, which continued to cause more conflict within the band. Also, the producer - Jean Beauvoir, a member of the Plasmatics - was selected by the label. As a result, the guitar on the album sounds hideous, or in the case of "Something To Believe In," barely even there.
  • Halfway to Sanity suffered from this by a long shot. Johnny claimed that Joey and drummer Richie made it difficult by forcing the producer to make numerous remixes and different tracks. Richie however claims that Johnny and the manager had caused the issues by keeping the production at a low budget. Conflicts also continued on how the members wanted to make it more radio-friendly and a hit. But Johnny and the manager wanted to continue to be underground.
  • Brain Drain had it so bad that it caused bassist Dee Dee to refuse performing the bass altogether and Johnny not performing his parts on a number of songs. Dee Dee left shortly after it was released to pursue on a rap career, which was a huge commercial failure.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Blondie's Clem Burke, aka "Elvis Ramone," the short-lived drummer after Richie left the band. YouTube has audio of him playing his only two shows with the band (both of which have poor quality), and you can hear certain things that probably rubbed the other members the wrong way: his intro to "Do You Remember Rock & Roll Radio?" sounds like he misremembered it, but he also doesn't play double-time hi-hat, which just doesn't sound right for the Ramones. The main thing with him, though, is that his tempo was closer to the speed of the original records. It's interesting to hear the band playing live the same way they played during the It's Alive! days, and had they stuck it out with Clem, it could've been something of a return to form. The others, however, had gotten used to their faster concert tempos by that point, evidenced by how Joey doesn't sound fully comfortable singing with Clem behind him. Marky Ramone, more willing to play along (pardon the pun) returned shortly after.
  • Bruce Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" especially for the Ramones to record after Joey Ramone asked him to write a song for them, but his manager Jon Landau told him to keep the song for himself because he was tired of Springsteen giving away his most accessible songs to other artists that went on to have big hits with them (such as "Fire" for the Pointer Sisters and "Because the Night" for Patti Smith). Landau's request turned out to be a good move for Bruce, as "Hungry Heart" became Springsteen's first Top 10 hit in 1980, but that also meant that the Ramones missed out on a chance on recording it.

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