The Ramones: Rocket To Russia
Reviewed as part of Addison Godel's Desert Island Collection
Rocket
To Russia has a total of fourteen songs. Of these, only three can be
considered remotely "slow" - and on a lot of bands' records, they'd be
considered the wild rock-out numbers. Here they come across as pauses for
breath; this album is so propulsive and danceable, we sense that even the
legendary Ramones would have collapsed on stage if they didn't get some kind of
break while playing it on tour. Hence, "Here Today, Gone
Tomorrow," "I Don't Care," and "I Wanna Be Well."
These three tracks are vaguely catchy and have enough of a groove that you can
still keep tapping your feet to them, but generally they're not exactly
classics.
The other eleven songs? Classics through and through. By this, their third album, the Ramones had mastered their sound: sped-up, fuzzed-out, two-minute songs about girls, drugs, and dancing that basically ignored everything that had happened in rock since The Peppermint Twist and Da Doo Ron Ron; in a sense, we can think of them as a second, independent Beatles - another band that took fifties rock and rollers and girl groups and came up with a new way to play their music. The Ramones certainly never did as much with their new ideas as the Beatles - but they had an incredible amount of fun with their straight-ahead "Blitzkrieg Bop," and the listener has little problem joining them in their madness. Their early records remain about the most fun for your buck you can get; I challenge you not to listen to them and not start bobbing your head. Play them at a party and there will be bopping.
Why Rocket to Russia in particular? The Ramones never approached their albums as individual artistic statements or works in and of themselves; they were simply collections of the songs they happened to be writing at the time they were recording. Their greatest hits record (Ramones Mania!) is out the window for irrationally being a whopping two discs and containing a fair amount of filler, missing a major facet of the Ramones' formula: brevity. I have to include a Ramones record in my desert island collection; but which one? Rocket To Russia wins out for its title (great), cover art (great), and sheer numbers: no other Ramones album has quite so many unbeatable killers. The band touches all the bases here in top form: depravity and madness ("We're A Happy Family," "Teenage Lobotomy," "Why Is It Always This Way?"), romance ("Ramona," "Locket Love"), and of course, rock and roll. ("Cretin Hop," "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker," "Do You Wanna Dance?" "Surfin' Bird," "Rockaway Beach"). Every one of the songs I've just mentioned is a razor-sharp, clockwork-tight three chord explosion. There's never been another band as infectious as the Ramones, and Rocket To Russia captures them at their peak.