Ramones: Road to Ruin (180g) [SIRE/RHINO]

Why you'll love it

This Sire / Rhino edition puts the remastered album on 180g vinyl. "I Wanna Be Sedated" became one of the band's best-known songs, second to Blitzkrieg Bop in Spotify streams.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• Remastered
• Pressed in the EU
• Booklet included

About the album

Road to Ruin is the first Ramones album with Marky Ramone behind the kit. Tommy Ramone stepped down as drummer to focus on producing, Dee Dee approached his friend Marc Bell, then drumming for Richard Hell and the Voidoids, at CBGB, and after around twenty auditions Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee picked Marky on the strength of his takes on I Don't Care and Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.

Three weeks later they were recording at Mediasound in Midtown Manhattan, with Tommy (credited as T. Erdelyi) co-producing alongside Ed Stasium. The band stretched out, adding guitar solos, acoustic touches and 1960s-style ballads to the buzzsaw. "I Just Want to Have Something to Do" kicks things off at full tilt, "Needles and Pins" is a tender cover of the Jackie DeShannon and Searchers hit, "Questioningly" heads for country, and "Bad Brain" carries the funny noises Rolling Stone noticed. "I Wanna Be Sedated," which got a music video almost a decade later, is the one everybody knows. The cover idea came from fan Gus MacDonald, and John Holmstrom of Punk magazine reworked it to swap Marky in.

It has been reissued again and again with fresh work from Stasium, and it still sounds like a great night out. Mediasound was a former Episcopalian church, which explains a good deal about the band's devotion to the downstroke.

Also at Kops: more Ramones on vinyl · browse Punk

Tracklist

Listen

On Sire / Rhino (cat# 0349-78582-6), a reissue of the 1978 album.