50 years ago, the Ramones released their self-titled debut LP. Adorned with a black-and-white photo of the faux brotherhood against a brick wall at the back of CBGB (taken by photographer and CB’s door person, Roberta Bayley), Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee stood somewhat awkwardly wearing jeans in various stages of destruction, T-shirts (shoutout to drummer Tommy for going with the belly shirt), leather jackets and sneakers. 

It’s important to remember that it was 1976, so this particular fashion choice was not yet au courant, because they had just codified it. The outfits that they’d wear walking around were the same outfits they’d wear onstage. They standardized on this particular uniform because everyone had different ideas of what they wanted to wear onstage and they didn’t want audiences to think they were a glam band or, worse. “I mean, these guys were not hippies,” said Legs McNeil, co-creator of “PUNK” magazine. No, they weren’t.

“Ramones” features 14 songs in total, seven songs on each side, because Ramones songs come in around two minutes and change. The album opens with one of the best opening tracks of any debut album: “Blitzkrieg Bop.” That wall of sound barrage of guitars and then: “Hey, ho, let’s go!” It never fails to sound like a call to arms. As an introduction to this band, they couldn’t have chosen a better song; it precisely conveyed exactly who the band was and what they were about. 

Fifty years later, “Blitzkrieg Bop” feels ubiquitous. The intro gets blasted at sporting events to raise energy or when something good happens, and it never fails to rally a crowd. That opening track has been featured in at least one video game and a wide selection of TV commercials for a long line of different product offerings: airlines, car brands, fast food, exercise equipment, financial products, mobile phone networks, vaccinations, a cartoon movie, and perhaps most memorably, diet soda, featuring animated pogoing soda cans. 

But in 1976, and in fact the entire duration of the band’s existence (they officially ceased operations in 1996), the Ramones did not achieve chart positions of any note. “Ramones” went to #111 on the Billboard 200, and their highest charting album was 1980’s Phil Spector-produced “End of the Century,” which reached #44 in the U.S. and got as high as #11 in the U.K. “It’s crazy when Phil Spector produces your record and you still don’t have a top ten record,” Eddie Vedder mentioned when he inducted the Ramones into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

Their singles didn’t do much better. Only three Ramones songs ever made it to the Billboard Hot 100 — “Rockaway Beach,” “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker,” and “Do You Wanna Dance,” all absolute bangers that should be enshrined in the culture. “Rockaway Beach” did the best out of the three, and by “best” we’re still talking #66 (and it took a year to get there); the other two only got as high as the 80s. The numerous post-breakup compilations and live albums didn’t fare any better, and not even an appearance on “The Simpsons” in 1993 or numerous other mainstream cinema placements (like the title track for a Stephen King movie, “Pet Sematary”) moved the needle in any meaningful direction from a sales or chart or airplay perspective.

With that information in hand, it won’t be surprising to learn that none of the singles released from the 14 albums put out during the band’s existence (or again, afterwards) garnered any radio airplay on commercial radio (college radio is of course another story), and outside of places like Brazil (and towards the end of their career), the Ramones could not get arrested, much less sell out arenas or anything much larger than a theater. (In Brazil, however, they sold out stadiums and their tour bus was mobbed with crowds that made Beatlemania look like nursery school.) 

“Ramones” also featured such hits as “Beat on the Brat,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” and “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.” Of course that statement is inaccurate, because the Ramones didn’t have any hits, not in 1976 and not ever. That wasn’t the plan — no one in the Ramones, their management or their record company was pretending that commercial success wasn’t important to them. It just eluded them.

To quote Legs McNeil in “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones”: “Those songs are classic American pop songs. Why weren’t they played on the radio?” 

Two words: punk rock. 

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The Ramones were the second band from downtown NYC’s Class of 1975 to be signed to a major label (Patti Smith was first). They had the full support of Sire Records and a great manager in Danny Fields (who would become the subject of the band’s song “Danny Says” later). The band toured the U.S., playing anywhere that would have them; there was no touring circuit for original bands starting out back then. Danny Fields later explained, “Every place we went to, there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there, and when they came back, they did.” (They’re not the only band that can make that claim, but that doesn’t make it untrue or irrelevant.)

A show the band played in London on July 4th, 1976 is considered by the people involved to be a major impetus to the formation of U.K. punk rock, with members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, the Damned (and more) in the audience that night. No less than Joe Strummer would later say, “If that Ramones record hadn’t existed, I don’t know that we could have built a scene here. Because it filled a vital gap between the death of the old pub rocking scene and the advent of punk.”

But it would be precisely that historical moment that would be the band’s downfall. When the Sex Pistols’ record came out, initially the Stateside reaction was positive, at least from people in the Ramones’ camp. “Not only did Malcolm [McLaren, Sex Pistols’ manager] steal the scene and repackage it, but the music was good,” Legs McNeil was quoted as saying. “We kind of felt us and the Sex Pistols would become almost like The Beatles and the Stones; we were the new revolution,” Joey said. 

And that might have happened, if the Sex Pistols had booked their first U.S. tour through the kinds of major, music-friendly cities that most bands visit. Instead, Malcolm McLaren wanted the tour routing to go through more authentic, working-class cities, so it opened in Atlanta and traipsed through the Southwest, visiting places like Memphis, San Antonio and Tulsa before finishing up (and breaking up) in San Francisco. 

The Sex Pistols headlining the Palladium in New York City or the Agora in Cleveland wouldn’t have made splashy headlines. But when you play smaller cities that don’t usually get international touring acts, and when everything you hear about the band and the movement they represent is exaggerated and sensationalized, and the band are absolutely willing to play into all of that for the sake of headlines, it’s not going to end up well for anybody. The Sex Pistols arriving in Memphis was the kind of news story that would show up on your local news station at 6 p.m., and once one station ran with it, the rest followed. 

“It was getting such a negative feeling of . . . it was going to destroy the whole thing, which is what happened; it scared everyone else off, scared off the music industry, scared off the radio,” Joey remembered. And then there was the episode of NBC’s “Weekend” news magazine, which would run in place of “Saturday Night Live” one weekend a month. In June of 1977, “Weekend” ran an episode about U.K. punk. Years later, Joey Ramone offered, “One day on 60 Minutes was a thing about the Sex Pistols and the safety pins and everybody gouging each other’s eyeballs out and strangulation, and everybody flipped out, and things changed radically. It really kind of screwed things up for ourselves.”

Danny Fields explained how the view of the Sex Pistols as 100% representative of “punk rock” ended up impacting the Ramones: “. . .when their records went around to radio stations, they intuitively say, ‘What do I know about them? They’re trouble. They throw up, and if we play it, we’ll have to have them here, and they’ll throw up on the console in the recording studio, and we don’t want them. Don’t play their records; it’s easier.’ It’s always easier not to do something than to do it.”

It wasn’t just the Ramones. Blondie’s Debbie Harry complained that the radio stations would tell her, “We like you. Give us something to play,” when they’d just released their version of “Denis,” a surefire pop hit if there was one. Blondie would eventually break through into actual pop stardom, but also had to fight back against the “punk” label.

This explanation is going to feel thoroughly anodyne in 2026, when you can walk into places like Hot Topic or Target and buy merchandise from bands that at least once upon a time were considered “punk.” If you could even find a Ramones T-shirt in the ’70s or ’80s, you weren’t going to wear it anywhere besides a Ramones concert unless you wanted to find yourself in an argument, or worse. Musician Jesse Malin lived in Queens, a subway ride away from CBGB, and yet he tells endless stories about getting hassled by random passersby or having stuff thrown at him from car windows just for dressing differently. 

The Ramones eventually retired because of interpersonal issues: Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend. And it would probably be a lot easier to deal with all of that if your band had achieved the kind of commercial success you deserved and weren’t still touring in an Econoline van. (When they were inducted into the Rock Hall, Eddie Vedder commended them for still touring in a van, but a tour bus might have kept them around a while longer.) The Ramones wrote songs and played music because it was the only thing they wanted to do, the only thing they could do, the only thing that made sense to them. 

Countless bands have given them their props — Pearl Jam took them out on tour, they were asked to play Lollapalooza in 1996, U2 wrote a song about them, among many others  — and the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, their second year of eligibility, but not early enough for Joey to have seen it happen; he died in 2001, and would be followed by Dee Dee (2002), Johnny (2004) and Tommy in 2014. (Later, Ramones CJ and Marky are still carrying the torch.) 

The records are still there and still sound great, even if they didn’t earn their creators the kind of money and lifestyle that they deserved. And the Ramones are still inspiring kids all over the world to write a song, pick up a guitar, and go out and play, no matter how bad they might think they are, because that’s exactly what the Ramones did. 

The post 50 years later, the Ramones’ debut still defines punk appeared first on Salon.com.

Lenny Kaye is one of rock ’n’ roll’s national treasures. He’s the guy who never has to pay for his drinks in bars from Stockholm to Shanghai, thanks to “Nuggets,” his now-essential compilation of what were obscure garage rock classics that became the foundation of punk rock and a lingua franca for the spirit of DIY. He’s the kind of guy who should have been given a Guggenheim Fellowship because of his galactic range of interests, knowledge and influences and for his input and his contributions to rock ‘n’ roll as an art form. 

Kaye was writing about music — for publications like Rock Scene, Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone — when the discipline was still nascent. If you read his early writing, which is well worth your time to hunt down (like this review of The Rolling Stones’ “Exile On Main Street,” in 1972), he brought knowledge and curiosity and genuine enthusiasm; even if he didn’t like something, he still gave it his serious consideration. 

It was that exact spirit of inquiry, within an article about the history of the doo-wop revival, that caught the attention of another doo-wop aficionado from South Jersey. She tracked him down and they became friends, hanging out and listening to music. One night, she asked him if he thought he could make a guitar sound like a car crash for an upcoming poetry reading she was doing, and that’s how Kaye joined forces with Patti Smith.

Lenny was at Patti’s side until she bowed out of public life and rejoined her when she returned — but he’s never sat still. Across the years, he put together a band (The Lenny Kaye Connection), accompanied Jim Carroll as he tried to work out his rock ‘n’ roll form, wrote Waylon Jennings’ biography, produced Suzanne Vega’s first two solo albums (among others), has a country and western alter ego, wrote introductions and liner notes and seemingly offered and participated in hundreds of other contributions across the decades. Lenny Kaye was the kind of cool, level-headed rock ‘n’ roll maven who was both important to and part of our history. His openness and curiosity — still, turning 80 later this year! — makes him the music fan’s music fan. 

The only thing Lenny Kaye somehow hadn’t done was release a solo record, which he rectified in July of 2026 with the release of “Goin’ Local,” out on Yep Roc on July 17. “Goin’ Local” is a collection of deliberate compositions across a range of styles, whether straight-ahead rock ‘n’ roll (the title track), ballads (“This Love,” “Let’s Make A Memory”), folk rock (“The Things You Leave Behind”) and sweet ditties (“World Book Night,” “Pennsylvania Girls”) that might seem light until you find yourself humming them later after only listening to them once. There are bulletproof pop melodies, gentle riffs, solid construction, and engaging stories. And that’s the result of a formidable quantity of skills acquired over half a century immersed in the rock ‘n’ roll trenches, whether as a listener, critic, producer, or active participant. 

“Goin’ Local” was assembled both from songs he started 15 years ago with friend and bandmate Tony Shanahan (who has a co-production credit and also plays on half the tracks), and another half dozen that were written over the last few years. “I don’t write a lot of songs,” Kaye told Salon, “I believe a song has to need to be written, if only for one to figure out a situation or to understand the dynamic of a relationship, or something occurs to me that needs framing as if in a picture. So if I write one or two songs a year, I’m happy with that, and I bring them to fruition. But I just continue to sit there with the guitar, and come up with something that is meaningful to me and hopefully, whoever listens.”

The title track is a perfectly crunchy, rock ‘n’ roll number about haunting the East Village’s watering holes and the people you meet (and the challenges of maintaining a cross-borough relationship). Emphasizing the ‘local’ point, the album’s cover is a black-and-white historical photograph from the early 1900s, taken from the New York Public Library’s historical collection, with Kaye imposed into the frame, standing under elevated train tracks. Look closer and you can just make out the street number of the Lyceum Concert Garden (“Follies of the Day!”), which was located on the Bowery at number 302. That’s across the street and about half a block away from where CBGB’s would find itself decades later, and also just happens to be adjacent to another landmark: “If you stand in front of CBGB and look in the 10:00 position, that’s where I lived,” Kaye confirmed.

One of the record’s highlights is a co-write with the musician who stood to Kaye’s right onstage for more than 50 years. “Solstice,” where he shares writing credits with Patti Smith, possesses the same kind of metaphysical shimmer that’s often intrinsic to a Patti Smith composition (think “Ghost Dance” or “Beneath the Southern Cross” to name two other relevant co-writes from the pair). As to how the song ended up on “Goin’ Local,” Kaye said, “As the song developed, Patti thought it certainly suited my new persona,” he told Salon, “and she urged me to sing it. I mean, she could have sung it quite well, but she urged me to take it under my wing and express it. And she felt it appealed to a certain sense of the celestial that I have in my solo persona.”

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Then there’s the delightful “World Book Night,” a song that Kaye performed live via livestream from Electric Lady with Smith during the days of the COVID-19 lockdown, on the anniversary of their first performance together at St. Marks On The Bowery in 1971. “I wrote it originally when there was a kind of strange day set aside called ‘World Book Night.’ Publishers would give books to people and they would spread out all over the city or wherever they were and just hand them out for free, at subway stations or on the beach, and I thought that was a beautiful thing,” Kaye explained. “. . . It’s just my tribute to the written word, how it feels putting those words one after another after another, and the readers out there who find them and find something of themselves within the pages of a book.”

On the note of physical media, there’s “The Things You Leave Behind,” a song that Kaye’s been playing at the occasional solo show for a while now. It’s a wistful, country-folk paean that offers both a wry yet realistic assessment of the disposition of collections someone leaves the planet. “Gonna pick up the pieces and your life and theirs/who gets what and why/we all cart around a whole lot of baggage/that would better be left/by the side of the road/books and records, old clothes and photos. . .” and of course, in Kaye’s case, guitars.

Even at 79 — he’ll hit octogenarian status in December — Kaye confesses he hasn’t slowed down as a collector. “I haven’t cut myself off yet, but I’ve been more discerning,” he tells Salon. “That said, I always come home from being on the road with a few well-chosen records and a few well-chosen books that I will read one of these days.”

Does he still have a holy grail?

Kaye laughs. “Absolutely not. At this point my holy grails are things I have yet to discover. I found most of the things I really needed to have, but every once in a while you’re exposed to a new record, and sometimes it’s not that great to just be able to go on eBay and poke the bid. You want to find it. You want to find it in context.”

He’s on a roll now: “The other day I was in the East Village and I went past a store on E. 2nd Street called Ergot and I walked in and they had 12 Umm Kulthum 45s from the ’60s and I just put my money down, came home with them, and they’re all fascinating. I have certain genres that I always check out: I’m particularly into Jamaican gospel now, which is kind of primitive and not reggae, very illuminated, great singers. I’m into Egyptian music too; I really like the music of the Middle East. And of course then there’s the rock band that I’ve never heard of that really needs to be part of my collection.” He pauses. “I always think, like the song, about cleaning it up or at least culling it so I could get all the records off the floor and onto the shelves.” 

Kaye was good friends with Tom Verlaine, the late Television guitarist whose epic collections of books are still being distributed and caused hour-long lines when they were first put up for sale, and whose music equipment is next for dissemination. Salon asked Kaye if he had any clue to the extent of his friend’s collection, or its future plans for disposition? 

“No, but I’m very excited because it’s kind of a way for me to perhaps move my accumulations into the world at large,” he said. “I knew that Tom loved records, books, all of the above, and often would find the weirdest, which is of course great. I think it’s wonderful that his legacy of intellectual curiosity is being moved into the world at large so other people can be illuminated by his quest for the unusual.”

On the subject of holy grails, there’s the first recording by Lenny Kaye, “Crazy Like A Fox,” released under the nom de guerre Link Cromwell. That was the result of Kaye’s uncle Larry Kusik, who was a working film songwriter (his credits include the love themes from both “The Godfather” and “Romeo and Juliet”), trying to get in on the burgeoning protest music movement in the 1960s. He recruited his nephew to sing the vocals and although the song didn’t chart (it got re-released a decade later under the auspices of Ork Records, the label that launched in order to release the first Television single), it did give the young hopeful Kaye the conviction that he could find a way in the music business. And decades later, that’s Uncle Larry’s lyrics behind the plaintive and gorgeously intricate “Yes I Will,” the album’s closer. 

So while “Goin’ Local” is technically Kaye’s first solo record, back in 1984, there was another project, the Lenny Kaye Connection, a quartet which gigged around New York City and environs. They released one album, “I’ve Got A Right,” not on a major label but instead on Giorno Poetry Systems, a record label started by downtown poet John Giorno. The Connection reunited back in 2022 for a show in honor of Kaye’s 75th birthday, but the record’s been out of print for some time. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans to reissue it, even just on streaming. 

“Well, you never know,” Kaye said. “Right now I’m kind of pointed to the future. I’ve listened to that record recently and I do songs from it. I still do ‘I’ve Got A Right’ and ‘Record Collector,’ which I often play when I appear at record stores, but at this point I’m future-oriented. I mean, it came out 42 years ago. It represents a much younger version of myself, and right now I’m more in tune with who I am today. That doesn’t mean that it might not see a reissue along with some of the bonus tracks that got left by the wayside in those days, but right now I’m really moving into the future.”

He continued, “I have studio time booked and Dennis Dyken from the Smithereens is going to come up and play on a couple of songs that I have under construction, and that to me is where my fascination is. I think the Lenny Kaye Connection has merit. It is kind of my debut solo album, even though it was within a group context. But to be honest, I’m more about the future. I mean, Patti has that great quote, ‘Progress isn’t the future, it’s keeping up with the present,’ and my present is unfolding at actually quite an unexpectedly rapid rate, so today, I’m just gonna ride that pony.”

In 2022, Kaye’s book “Lightning Striking: Ten Transformative Moments in Rock ‘n’ Roll” was published. It wasn’t the long-awaited memoir folks might have hoped for, but it was a sterling example of the kind of careful scholarship Kaye excels at, where he can maintain a 30,000-foot view over music history while diving deep into specifics and individual historical moments. This was Kaye’s fourth book, along with the other considerable inches of print he’s logged over the decades. Salon asked Kaye if there were any plans for more long-form writing.

“I think I mostly got it out of my system for ‘Lightning Striking,’ that seemed to cover all the bases, though I just did a foreword for a Led Zeppelin biography called ‘When Giants Walk The Earth’ by Nick Walls. So I still write. I have some vague ideas, but right now more on the musical side of my personality,” Kaye said. “You know, writing is time-consuming and very solitary and I’m enjoying making music and following that inclination in my personality. I’m not ruling out another piece of writing. But again, you go into any bookstore and there’s millions of volumes, so just like a song, it has to mean something.”

But he’s not saying no. “I would like to assemble a collection of some of my writings. But that means I have to go into the file cabinet and be shocked by some of my early attempts at explicating rock ‘n’ roll . . . when I finish this next solo record, and see the Adrift project (his “goth psych jam band, a power trio”) through to its record, perhaps I’ll feel like I’ve done that and I can return to the one word after another, after another, after another. I do believe that in writing, there is a rhythm and melody within a sentence, just like there’s a narrative arc in a guitar solo.”

Across the last 60 years or so, Kaye has toured the globe, worked with amazing musicians, and witnessed multiple incredible moments. Salon asked if he had one favorite thing that he’d gotten to do because he was Lenny Kaye.

“It’s really hard for me to say ‘favorite things,’” he explained. “My favorite thing is, I like to go and hang out, and see what the serendipity and pinball of the night shows me. I mean, I’ve done incredible things as a musician. The Dalai Lama put a scarf around my neck at Glastonbury, and I’ve also stayed up till four o’clock in the morning with Tom Clark singing songs at the Treehouse at 2A. To me, they’re all kind of a thing. But what my favorite thing to do is see what my inclination is in terms of the next sentence or the next song or the next guitar part. The fact that I can continue to do that is really my favorite thing.”

Kaye’s always had an optimistic, positive attitude, and that has not changed. “Right now I’m a solo artist, which is kind of fun. I’m up there like a folk troubadour, singing the songs, reading from the book, and making some well-timed joke,” he told Salon. “It’s portable and there’s a certain sense of being able to control the song. I do like the power of a band behind me, but I’ll see how that begins to reveal itself. I’m having a good time.”

He continued, “I feel good. I’m a new artist! That’s what cracks me up. I feel whatever I’ve done in the past, this is a new mode of presentation for me. And it feels very much at one with who I am at this moment, drawing on the experience of, at this point, sixty years of playing that guitar, and yet I feel an excitement because I’m entering uncharted territory. And that, to me, is what makes life exciting and revelatory.”

“Goin’ Local” is out now via Yep Roc and Bandcamp; you can keep up with him on YouTube and Instagram.

The post How Patti Smith helped Lenny Kaye find his solo voice appeared first on Salon.com.