Ramones, by Nicholas Rombes(33⅓ Series)

I’ve been a Ramones fan for nearly half a century. I bought their debut album in ’76 and never looked back. For years, Rocket to Russia was my favorite of theirs, until the 40th-anniversary mono remix of the debut knocked it off the throne. Johnny’s guitar sounded raw, crunchy, feral, the way the band probably intended all along. So, when I spotted this used 33⅓ volume in the music stacks at The Strand, I happily grabbed it.

Like most entries in this series, this one is a mixed bag. (This series, if you’re not familiar with it, offers up small, very portable books that take a deep dive into one specific music album.) Some 33⅓ books are fantastic (Marquee Moon), some are a slog (Horses, sorry Patti). This one sits squarely in the middle. When Rombes writes as a fan, digging into context, attitude, the early CBGBs atmosphere, the book hits the mark. But when he flips into academic overdrive, suddenly you’re reading a dissertation on the philosophical implications of punk irony. Interesting? In theory, perhaps. In this book, it just made my eyes glaze over.  

And then there’s the ridiculous section about Beat on the Brat.

Rombes argues that Joey’s explanation of the lyric – a bratty kid wreaking havoc in a playground, a negligent mom doing nothing about it, Joey fantasizing about hitting the kid with a baseball bat — is somehow disappointing because it closes down other interpretive “possibilities.” As if the world needed a deeper symbolic reading of:

Beat on the brat

Beat on the brat

Beat on the brat with a baseball bat…

Of all the songs to treat like a Talmudic text, he chooses the least mysterious lyric in the entire Ramones canon. (Okay, maybe Loudmouth is even less complex, but you get my point). It’s peak overthinking, and it’s not the only time he gets lost in the forest.

A larger issue for me is that the actual discussion of the songs on the album is surprisingly thin. Some of the cultural detours, about punk magazines, art-school aesthetics, U.S. vs. U.K. lineage, etc., are interesting in isolation, but most Ramones fans picking up a 33⅓ volume want stories behind “Blitzkrieg Bop,” or “53rd & 3rd,” or what it felt like to hammer out 14 songs in under 30 minutes. Rombes seems reluctant to puncture the mystique of their debut with too much concrete detail. I respect the impulse, but that’s the actual purpose of the books in this series, so as a reader, I found it frustrating.

Still, the book does a nice job of conveying just how shocking, how different, how important that first album was; the sense that if the Ramones hadn’t existed, someone would have had to invent them. When Rombes stays close to that idea — the band as both parody and purity of American rock — he nails it.