The truth that haunts the Ramones: 'They sold more T-shirts than records'

Summary

On April 23, 1976, the Ramones’ first, self‑titled album was released. It was recorded over seven days on the eighth floor of New York’s Radio City Music Hall and cost $6,400 at the time — an almost laughably small amount compared with the big budgets common in the record industry then. Their label, Sire, decided to release two singles, Blitzkrieg Bop and I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, but neither made it onto the sales charts, nor did the LP itself. Even so, it is considered one of the most influential albums in the history of popular music. The cultural weight attributed to it far exceeds the 29 minutes and four seconds it takes to listen to what is widely regarded as the album that invented punk.Jeffrey Hyman, John Cummings, Douglas Colvin, and Tom Erdelyi were between 24 and 25 years old at the time. They had met at Forest Hills High School, a middle-class neighborhood in New York City, where they felt like outcasts, out of place. For them, the band was a way to forge a new identity, something they did quite literally. They adopted the surname Ramone, as if they were all brothers, and the first names Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy, respectively. They also adopted a uniform, like superheroes of the underclass: shaggy hair, black leather jackets over worn-out T-shirts that were too small, ripped blue jeans, and sneakers. They posed against a wall, unknowingly creating one of the most iconic images in rock history. Today, that portrait — which appeared on the album cover and was shot by Roberta Bayley, a photographer for Punk magazine, in an alley in the Bowery — hangs in New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).A Ramones fan photographed wearing a Ramones T-shirt at a concert in 1976.Roberta Bayley (Redferns)The Ramones wore the perfect street uniform for unleashing loud, dirty, fast, infectiously melodic, and silly songs that never reached the three‑minute mark. At the time, it was a revolution — one that marked a before and after in the history of rock. As sociologi...