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Pin a date to the birth of punk and you will get an argument, but the strongest single candidate is April 23, 1976, the day Sire Records pressed fourteen songs and twenty-nine minutes of noise onto a record called Ramones and put four guys in leather jackets against a brick wall on the cover.
That record did not invent punk so much as it gathered up everything punk had been threatening to become for a decade and made it into one thing you could finally point at and name. Whether that counts as invention is the whole question, and the honest answer is that it depends on what you think the word means.
Start where they started, in Forest Hills, Queens. John Cummings and Tamas Erdelyi had played together in a mid-1960s high school garage band called the Tangerine Puppets. Douglas Colvin had moved to the neighborhood from Germany. Jeffrey Hyman had been the singer in a glam outfit called Sniper.
Four misfits from a middle class corner of Queens who felt like freaks, bonded over a shared love of the Stooges, a band almost everyone else they knew couldn’t stand. Danny Fields, who managed them, put it bluntly: the only thing that brought the four of them together was that they all listened to the Stooges. They took the surname Ramone from a stage alias Paul McCartney used in the early Beatles days, and the whole package, the fake brotherhood, the bowl haircuts, the four man lineup, came partly out of Beatles worship turned upside down.
The CBGB Years
They played their first show as a trio at Performance Studios on March 30, 1974, with Joey on drums and Dee Dee singing and playing bass. It didn’t work. Dee Dee couldn’t sing and play at once, Joey moved up front, and Tommy, who had been coaching drummer candidates on the band’s stripped down style, took the kit himself.
On August 16, 1974, they made their CBGB debut, the date now treated as the spark. Legs McNeil, who co-founded Punk magazine the next year, described what hit him: “They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song … and it was just this wall of noise … They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new.” They became regulars fast. That year alone they played the club no fewer than 74 times, sets that averaged about seventeen minutes from beginning to end, and it was that blur of a live show that got them signed to Sire in late 1975.
What They Actually Brought
What did they actually bring? Speed, brevity, and a ruthless editing job on rock and roll itself. Johnny said it best in his autobiography: “What we did was take out everything that we didn’t like about rock and roll and use the rest, so there would be no blues influence, no long guitar solos, nothing that would get in the way of the songs.”
Tommy framed their whole reason for existing as a rebuke to the era: “Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses.” The songs ran under two minutes. The chords were few, the tempos brutal, the lyrics about glue sniffing and boredom and a hustler on 53rd and 3rd, delivered with a deadpan cartoon humor.
They cut the album over seven days at Plaza Sound above Radio City Music Hall, instruments in three days and Joey’s vocals in four, for $6,400, entering the studio on February 2 and finishing February 19, 1976, with the whole thing clocking in at 28 minutes and 53 seconds. It peaked at number 111 on the Billboard chart, the singles failed to chart, and it sold only about 6,000 copies in its first year before eventually passing half a million in the United States decades later.
Critics adored it anyway. Robert Christgau nailed what made it new in his 1976 Village Voice review: “For me, it blows everything else off the radio: it’s clean the way the Dolls never were, sprightly the way the Velvets never were, and just plain listenable the way Black Sabbath never was.”
The Bands That Got There First
Here’s where the invention claim gets complicated, because Christgau’s own praise name checks the bands that got there first. The Velvet Underground had broken rock open with dissonance and deadpan menace in the late 1960s. In Detroit, the MC5 cut the incendiary live album Kick Out the Jams in 1968, released in early 1969, and guitarist Tom Morello later said the MC5 “basically invented punk rock.” Their little brothers the Stooges, with Iggy Pop bleeding and rolling across stages, dropped their self titled debut in August 1969 and Raw Power in 1973, records routinely called the blueprint for punk.
The New York Dolls played trashy, cross dressing rock and roll in 1972 and 1973 that critics call a more quintessential proto-punk record than anything the Stooges made. Go back further and you reach the garage bands: the Sonics out of Tacoma playing simple chords hard and fast in 1965, and the Kingsmen’s gloriously sloppy 1963 “Louie Louie,” which Dave Marsh and Greil Marcus traced as the root from which nearly all punk descends.
Even the word predates the band. The phrase “punk rock” was coined by rock critics in the early 1970s to describe 1960s garage acts. Dave Marsh used it in the May 1971 issue of Creem to describe Question Mark and the Mysterians. Greg Shaw used it in Rolling Stone the month before. Lenny Kaye applied “punk rock” to the 1960s garage groups in his 1972 liner notes for the Nuggets compilation. By the time the Ramones existed, the label had been kicking around music criticism for years, attached to everyone from the Stooges to Alice Cooper.
Crystallizing the Genre
So if the sound, the attitude, and even the name were all in circulation before 1974, what exactly did the Ramones do? The best critical answer is that they crystallized what punk had been threatening to become. The proto-punk strands were scattered: Detroit had the rage, the Dolls had the look, the garage bands had the simplicity, the Velvets had the nerve. The Ramones fused them into a single coherent, repeatable formula and bolted on a uniform that any kid could copy for the price of a leather jacket. Before them there were great bands doing punk-like things. After them there was a genre.
The British Reaction
The clincher for the invention argument is what happened when the formula crossed the Atlantic. On July 4, 1976, the Ramones played the Roundhouse in Camden to 2,000 fans, blitzing through a fourteen song set followed by three encores, then playing Dingwalls the following night. Joe Strummer of the Clash was unequivocal: “It can’t be stressed how great the first Ramones album was to the scene. It was the first word of Punk, a fantastic record.” Generation X bassist Tony James put the musical effect even more exactly: “Everybody went up three gears the day they got that first Ramones album.
Punk rock, that rama-lama super fast stuff, is totally down to the Ramones. Bands were just playing in an MC5 groove until then.” Jon Savage, who wrote the standard history of British punk in England’s Dreaming, was blunt: “the first time I heard the sound that would become known as punk was the Ramones,” and aside from the Pistols, he said, nearly every British band was working off them.
What the British did with it is its own answer to the question. They took the velocity and the three chord dare and added rage, politics, and a tabloid talent for provocation that the Ramones, with their cartoon Americana, never had. Johnny Ramone reportedly told Strummer and Mick Jones that it wasn’t technical skill that made the band work, just nerve and effort, which is close to the founding scripture of punk: learn three chords and start a band. The Pistols made the world pay attention. The Clash gave punk a conscience. Both built on a template the Ramones had already cut to shape.
An Idea More Than a Sound
Invention implies a single inventor and a clean before-and-after, and punk just doesn’t work that way. It was a convergence, a dozen tributaries running together: Detroit fury, New York art-damage, English glam, 1960s garage primitivism, all flowing toward the same delta until one band gave the current a name and a face.
The Ramones didn’t invent the raw materials of punk any more than the Kingsmen or Iggy Pop did. What they did was rarer and arguably more important: they made the pieces fit so cleanly that the world finally had a thing to call punk rock. Tommy Ramone always insisted it was bigger than a sound. “It wasn’t just music in The Ramones: it was an idea.” That idea, more than any single riff, is what they invented.
My first ever record was by The Beatles, picked up secondhand from a charity shop near my house. I was twelve when I found it, and I still have it sitting on my shelf today. That one purchase is the reason I fell in love with music in the first place.
When I'm not writing, you'll usually find me out playing disc golf. And if there's a dance floor nearby, I'm the one who can't resist whipping out an air guitar solo. I like to think that makes me a bit different from the rest.
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