“Complete chaos”: inside the first gig the Ramones ever played
No one can credibly claim to have started the punk rock movement. Music was already heading towards a more pompous sound in the late 1970s, so it was only natural for every group that came afterwards to make something much more dissonant than the crystal-clean sounds of Boston and Air Supply. If there were one band that could own the rights to the genre, it would be the Ramones, and it all started with one nightmare gig.
While they had wanted to be in a band together, none of them could claim to have been novices on their instruments. Every one of them had a rudimentary understanding of what their instruments did, but what they lacked in technical skill, they made up for in passion whenever they played.
From the first notes of their debut, they were out for blood, playing songs with machine-gun precision and refusing to do anything but downstrokes when performing. While that kind of behaviour can cause a lot of people to get muscle cramps just thinking about it, the band only got there through years of practice.
Before their album in 1976, the first show that the outfit ever played was on March 30th, 1974, on East 20th Street in New York. Many people may claim to display their credibility by claiming they were at that concert, but it wasn’t like the audience was bouncing off the walls at the show.
Because this wasn’t the normal venue people were used to. This was a glorified studio that they co-opted to perform their first gig for a bunch of friends. Driven by pure inspiration and heart, the band performed like their lives depended on it… only for everything to go sideways more than a few times.
When reminiscing on those times, biographer Tony Fletcher talked about the show being a complete mess most of the time, featuring “the set collapsing several times into complete chaos”. In the case of most punk rock outfits, having everything descend into mayhem is practically a compliment.
Even though the band would tighten their live act to the point of becoming a machine, they were already writing the kind of songs they would build their empire on. They may not have been known to have the most imaginative of titles. Still, tracks like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ and ‘I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement’ were exactly what punks were feeling, as opposed to prog rock acts that were more interested in writing about slaying dragons.
Despite the lacklustre showing that day, history had already been made. By the time the band finally got the chance to show their stuff on record, they had the ear of the rest of the world. Considering Sex Pistols’ debut would come out a few months after this, it would have been no surprise if John Lydon said he listened to this record once and built his entire persona around it.
For all of the walls that they broke down for punk rock, the Ramones would remain the underdogs of rock and roll. Compared to the millionaire bands they inspired, like Nirvana and Green Day, they would always be on the fringes, ultimately choosing to hang it up in the 1990s right when a whole new generation of pop-punk acts was co-opting their brand of punk rock.
When looking at how much pop rock has broadened out since then, it’s hard to imagine most modern punk acts existing had the band not gotten together on that fateful evening in 1974. They may not have been looking to be the next rock gods, but if you look around any punk scene today, we’re still living in a world that the Ramones built.