Unfortunately, my aforementioned lack of instrumental talent reared its spotty head. ![]() I wanted to play everything on that album, three honest chords on a feedback-drenched electric guitar? Piece of piss. Most of all it sounded so simple, and I wanted to learn to play it the moment I heard it. It was also my introduction to one of my favourite musical subgenres ever in surf punk, even if I didn’t realise it at the time. I wanted to be “out there having fun in the warm California sun” more than anything in my life, a dream I wouldn’t fulfil for another seven years. It was so entrancing the summery chord progression and good-time lyrics that filled my 15-year-old head with images of Venice Beach and bikini babes and rolling down a highway in an MG convertible. Originally performed by little known NOLA crooner Joe Jones and then made into a semi-hit by The Rivieras in 1964, it was the Ramones version from this album that first hit my ears, in typical teenage fashion watching Steve-O polevault himself into a palm tree on the first Jackass movie. And of course, my absolute favourite track on the entire record (and it’s not even a Ramones song) in California Sun. There’s romantic 50s and 60s throwbacks, shades of the Beach Boys and The Contours and the sound Joey Ramone longed for, with those idiosyncratic doo wop ‘whoa-oh’ choruses (although coated in a heavy layer of grit and grime) in I Remember You and Oh Oh I Love Her So. The perfect blend of nihilistic punk in tracks like Gimmie Gimmie Shock Treatment and the cleaning solvent sniffing belter Carbona Not Glue, the sarcastic call-and-response middle finger to the armed forces in Commando and the ode to the girl who digs her music good and deafening in Suzy Is A Headbanger. Full of no frills, militaristic chugging chords from Johnny Ramone with the fuzz cranked all the way up, a mercilessly pounding rhythm section in Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone, Joey Ramone’s unmistakeable sneering drawl. No song of the 14 recorded clocks over three minutes, the longest being the Freaks-referencing Pinhead (the song that coined the famous “Gabba gabba hey!”) that runs for an eternal 2:42 (by Ramones time anyway). There’s so much good on Leave Home and it’s such an easy and fun listen. Nothing was broken and they didn’t fix a fucking thing, a principle the band would adhere with rigidity to for much of their career together. It didn’t break ground but it didn’t need to. The perfect extension from the foundation the Ramones had shot punk rock to the pinnacle of public visibility to on Ramones. ![]() Most people when quizzed on their favourite Ramones album (and if you don’t have one, are you really giving 110% in life?), will point to their seminal self-titled debut or the more critically lauded Rocket To Russia, but for me it has always been their sophomore LP Leave Home, released in 1977. ![]() Hearing the Ramones changed my mind about that. Lacking any sort of technical prowess with an instrument or much of a musical ear or a voice that doesn’t sound like someone is punching a goat was seemingly always going to leave that particular dream, like a lot of others I’d had over the years (I never did get to be a professional wrestler), within the realm of delusional fantasy. It’s always been my dream to be in a band and play even just one show.
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