THE MAKING OF RAMONES' RAMONES

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"BOSTON, STYX, TOTO - do you remember we did a show with Toto?" Joey Ramone asks, rolling his eyes; the hostile musical environment into which Ramones released their self-titled debut still gives him chills. "1976 was the height of disco and corporate rock, and we were like nobody else." It was just because of that difference that Ramones became a Molotov cocktail that set the nascent British punk scene ablaze. "[The song] 'Judy Is a Punk' mentioned punk before anyone," says Tommy Erdelyi, a k a Tommy Ramone, the band's original drummer. "And Joey sang with a cockney accent because he loved English bands like Herman's Hermits. The funny thing is, when English groups like the Clash started, they all sang with cockney accents. Joey from Queens [N.Y.] initiated cockney singing in punk rock!"

Ramones' call to arms began with its grainy black-and-white cover photo. Posed in front of a Lower East Side tenement, the band - with its sullen glares and straight-leg jeans - offered an affront to the bell-bottomed pret-ty-boy rockers of the day. "We wanted to communicate our rawness, that we hung out on New York streets," Erdelyi explains. The cover was barely preparation for the sonic violence inside - when the band recorded a real chain saw for the intro to "Chain Saw," it could barely be differentiated from Johnny Ramone's hammering guitar.

Ramones was recorded at Plaza Sound, a now-defunct studio on the eighth floor of Radio City Music Hall that featured a Wurlitzer pipe organ, a sprawling Rockettes rehearsal room and art-deco decor "straight out of a Shirley Temple movie," says Erdelyi. Still, he remembers less-than-ideal recording conditions: "We recorded everything with *50 guitars in less than a week, for $6,000! For an album! It was absurd!" While that added to the group's rough aesthetic, he feels that it caused the album's sonic complexity to be overlooked. "We experimented with what we called pingpong stereo," Erdelyi says. "It's like early Beatles or Cream records, where guitar is in one channel, bass is in the other, the drums are in the middle, and it sounds bizarre. That's one of the things that makes Ramones sound..."

"Schizophrenic?" Joey Ramone interrupts.

Schizophrenic, indeed. A junkyard assemblage of Beach Boys' bubblegum, Stooges-style guitar mayhem and numbing, Andy Warhol-influenced repetition, Ramones' scavenger approach remains most evident in the sing-along chorus to "Blitzkrieg Bop." "There was this line from Rufus Thomas' 'Walking the Dog' that went: 'Hi-ho's nipped her toes,'" Erdelyi remembers. "But instead of 'hi-ho,' I said 'hey-ho.'" Calling this mongrel mix "urban roots music," Erdelyi knew Ramones was ahead of his time, just not how far ahead. "When we went into the studio, we knew what we were doing was important," he says. "What we didn't know was that we were gonna change [music]-- that we'd still be imitated 20 years later."

By Matt Diehl