Rocket To Russia (Remastered) Ramones

• 1 Cretin Hop 01:55
• 2 Rockaway Beach 02:06
• 3 Here Today, Gone Tomorrow 02:49
• 4 Locket Love 02:11
• 5 I Don't Care 01:39
• 6 Sheena Is A Punk Rocker 02:49
• 7 We're A Happy Family 02:31
• 8 Teenage Lobotomy 02:01
• 9 Do You Wanna Dance 01:55
• 10 I Wanna Be Well 02:28
• 11 I Can't Give You Anything 02:01
• 12 Ramona 02:37
• 13 Surfin' Bird 02:37
• 14 Why Is It Always This Way 02:16
• Total Runtime 31:55

Info for Rocket To Russia (Remastered)

The third of the Ramones' original quartet of albums, 1977's „Rocket To Russia“ is actually a big improvement over the slightly disappointing 'Leave Home', released earlier in 1977. While not as solidly perfect as Ramones, „Rocket To Russia“ contains very little fat and boasts possibly the finest songs in the band's entire repertoire, 'Rockaway Beach' and the immortal 'Sheena Is a Punk Rocker.' 'We're a Happy Family' and 'Teenage Lobotomy' are only slightly lesser tracks, and the covers of the Trashmen's gloriously silly 'Surfin' Bird' and Bobby Freeman's 'Do You Wanna Dance' are conceptually perfect, linking the Ramones neatly with their garage rock and bubblegum roots.

The album carefully remastered sound makes it sound better than all previous incarnations of the album, highlighting the extent to which the cleaner production complements the group's poppier, slightly more complex new songs.

'...The most toweringly aggressive, misleadingly primitive, perfectly phrased musical statement ever made....The demos and alternate versions included demonstrate how finely honed every gangly gesture was from the very beginning...' (NME Magazine)

Joey Ramone, vocals
Johnny Ramone, guitar
Dee Dee Ramone, bass, background vocals
Tommy Ramone, drums

Recorded at Media Sound, New York, N.Y.
Engineered by Ed Stasium and Don Berman
Produced by Tony Bongiovi and T. Erdelyi

Digitally remastered

Ranked #106 in Rolling Stone's '500 Greatest Albums Of All Time'

The Ramones
were loud and fast - Everyone knows that, even the poor, blind saps who never loved the band. But the Ramones were many things, and gloriously so, from the moment of their inception in Forest Hills, New York, in 1974, until their final concert, 2,263, in Los Angeles on August 6, 1996.

They were prolific - releasing 21 studio and live albums between 1976 and 1996 - and professional, typically cutting all of the basic tracks for one of those studio LPs in a matter of days. They were stubborn, a marvel of bulldog determination and cast-iron pride in a business greased by negotiation and compromise. And they were fun, rock n' roll's most reliable Great Night Out for nearly a quarter of a century. Which seems like a weird thing to say about about a bunch of guys for whom a show, in 1974 or '75, could be six songs in a quarter of an hour.

The Ramones were also first: the first band of the mid-'70's New York punk rock uprising to get a major-label contract and put an album out; the first to rock the nation on the road and teach the British how noise annoys; the first new American group of the decade to kick the smug, yellow-bellied shit out of a '60s superstar aristrocracy running on cocaine-and-caviar autopilot.

Above all, the Ramones were pop: stone believers in the Top 40 7-inch-vinyl songwriting aesthetic; a nonstop hit-singles machine with everything going for it - hammer-and-sizzle guitars and hallelujah choruses played at runaway-Beatles-velocity - except actual hits. According to an August 1975 article in England's Melody Maker about the crude, new music crashing through the doors of a former country-and-bluegrass bar in lower Manhattan named CBGB, the local press was already hailing the Ramones as - get this - "potentially the greatest singles band since the Velvet Underground." A peculiar compliment since the Velvets' own few 45s were all crushing radio bombs.

But there was one thing you could never, ever say about the Ramones: that they were dumb. In their time, in their brilliantly specialized way, the Ramones - the founding four of Johnny (guitar), Joey (voice), Tommy (drums), and Dee Dee (bass); along with Marky, who spent 15 years and 11 albums behind the drums beginning with "Road To Ruin" and who was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the original four; - later followed by CJ, who stepped out of the Marine Corps and into Dee Dee's king-sized sneakers in 1989; and Richie, who kept the beat while Marky was on hiatus between '83 and '87 - were the sharpest band on the planet. Fully evolved as musicians and songwriters. Confident in their power and the importance of what they had.

The atomic-mono impact of Johnny's Mosrite guitar; Joey's commanding, sour-Queens vocal delivery; the unity of wardrobe and identity; right down to the original, collective songwriting credits and the mutually assumed surname - they were the result of a very simple philosophy. As Tommy puts it: "Eliminate the unneccesary and focus on the substance." That is precicesly what the group did on every record it ever made, on every stage it ever played.

The Ramones' place in rock 'n' roll history was already assured by 1978 with their first three albums: Ramones, Leave Home, and Rocket To Russia, all made in the span of 18 months, between February 1976 and the fall of '77. When it was time to make records, Tommy says, "our art was complete." The art was the combined product four strangely aligned personalities - all living within shouting distance of each other in the conservative, middleclass enclave of Forest Hills, where their mutual needs as fledgling musicians and bored delinquents far the mess of differences and civil wars that could never quite bust them apart. Once a Ramone, always a Ramone.

This album contains no booklet.