Forty Years of It's Alive by The Ramones

Released forty goddamn years ago this week, It’s Alive by the Ramones is many things for me.

First and foremost, it’s far and away my favorite Ramones release. Secondly, it’s without question my favorite live album of all time (which isn’t saying that much, being that live albums are frequently shit). Thirdly, it may be the single document that definitively captures that nebulous, elusive essence of Punk Rock. If you can listen to It’s Alive without wanting to get up and leap about like a loon or at least downstrum maniacally on a battered imaginary Mosrite, you should probably go buy yourself a Joan Baez record and go smoke some damn cloves.

Boasting a particularly feral incarnation of the original band that is tightly wound and ready to detonate, It’s Alive is essentially the contents of the first three Ramones albums played harder, faster and sloppier than their comparatively genteel studio-recorded iterations. Songs brusquely shove into you in a torrent of feedback, shouty count-offs and echoey harmonics. While you’re still recovering from the pugnacious assault of one song, da brudders are already three-quarters of the way through the next song, barely pausing a moment for Joey to make some bizarre quip about Indian food (“After eating that chicken vindaloo ….”) before Dee Dee has slammed his weathered Plimsoll down on the gas pedal once again. It’s not so much a performance as a stealthy execution. If you happen to enjoy it, that’s nice, but they’re not doing it for your listening pleasure in the slightest.

I first heard It’s Alive in the summer of 1980, when I was sequestered largely against my will at a camp in Maine called Great Oaks (as in “from little acorns, Great Oaks grow”). I’d already been exposed to punk rock via some hipper kids at my grade school, but had gotten a greater taste for it when my father, who was a London correspondent for Forbes Magazine in the late `70s, sent my sister and I a crate of promo LPs from a friend of his at CBS records. In said crate were the first albums by The Clash and The Vibrators, which I immediately gravitated to. How could one not?

But shamefully, while they were from my own hometown, the Ramones hadn’t yet made the same inroads for me. That all changed via a suitably battered (read: well-loved), homemade cassette of It’s Alive that circulated like a virus through the cabins of Great Oaks (each named after a state – ours was West Virginia, swiftly re-christened West Vagina by some wisenheimer or another). That cassette ostensibly belonged to a junior counselor named Andy Romeo, who I tenuously knew from my grade school back home in the city. When not blithely disregarding his duties as a junior counselor, Andy played in an acoustic punk duo called The Latrines with another counselor. I was largely just a pesky nuisance to Andy until I informed him, while canoeing across Saturday Pond one insufferably sunny afternoon, that I owned the first Clash LP (British edition, no less), which dubiously earned me his respect.

In any case, at the end of the summer, guess who went home with that battered, shitty, tinnily recorded homemade cassette of It’s Alive? This guy, that’s who.

I continued to play the shit out of it, thrilling to every manic nanosecond of its 28 furious tracks until my shitty tape recorder (notice I didn’t say “boom box”? I mean, shitty tape recorder, like those no-fidelity, one-speaker pieces of garbage) decided to unceremoniously eat the tape in a tangled spool of warbling disappointment.

Crestfallen, I immediately went out in search of the proper double LP, finding it in the cut-out bin at … of all places … Woolworth’s, a suitably shitty “five’n’dime” on East 86th Street and Third Avenue.

True to the no-frills nature of the recording, the sleeve art of It’s Alive displayed a comparable lack of finesse. Presumably taken from screen grabs of the video of the same performance (at London’s Rainbow Theatre on New Year’s Eve, 1977), the pictures on the cover and in the gatefold are grainy and strangely saturated with the overall visual aesthetic being “this’ll do.”

Regardless, the images of Dee Dee leaping, Joey leaning into his mic and Johnny about to strike another rafter-shaking chord absolutely thrilled me.

Thirty-nine years after first hearing the breakneck sprint of “Teenage Lobotomy” via that shitty, homemade cassette of It’s Alive, it remains dearer to me than I can practically put into words. Every fleeting moment of the It’s Alive recording is crucial to me, from Johnny’s first power-chord clashing with Dee Dee’s false-start count off (stepping on Joey’s terse introduction of “Rockaway Beach”) to the culminating gallop through “We’re a Happy Family.” It is a perfect record from start to finish.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, and I mean it most sincerely: I intend to be buried with a copy of it.