‘Leave Home’: Revisiting Ramones’ Sublime Second Album

“I got in and I was like, What the heck is this?” Stasium said of joining the Leave Home sessions. “But after an hour, I got it. I thought it was great, it’s what every kid wants to do. It wasn’t about virtuosity, but the feel and the lyrics were so ridiculous!”

The recording: “It was all live and didn’t have many overdubs”

Stasium toiled on Leave Home at New York City’s Sundragon Studios throughout October and November 1976, working in tandem with the production team of Tony Bongiovi and Ramones’ then drummer, Tommy Ramone (billed as “T Erdelyi”). The fact that Tommy and ex-Motown producer Bongiovi had previous was a help to all concerned.

“I had worked as an engineer with Tony at [New York studio] The Record Plant,” Tommy remembered in the liner notes for Rhino’s Hey Ho! Let’s Go: The Anthology box set. “Also, with this record, we weren’t so rushed. I was able to have a little more control. It was a little more leisurely – but not much!”

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In the same notes, Stasium furthered: “It was all live. We set up the boys, baffled them off a bit for isolation, put headphones on them and away we went.” With guitarist Johnny Ramone turning “all the knobs on his Marshall [amp] up to 10”, as Stasium recalled, Ramones blasted through the album with little fuss.

“Leave Home didn’t have many overdubs,” Tommy noted. “We tried to keep them down until [1978’s] Road To Ruin, where Ed Stasium and I played a lot of guitars. Ramones didn’t like being in the studio. We wanted to get straight back out on the road again. Johnny played acoustic on some of the songs and I tried to keep the drumming straightforward, simple and driving – like Stax Records and [The Rolling Stones’] Charlie Watts.”

The songs: “Dee Dee and I really inspired each other in the early days”

Even allowing for the brightness of its production, Leave Home wouldn’t have been half the record it was if its songs weren’t so good – and it was simply stacked with classics, beginning with the magnificent Glad To See You Go.

“Me and Dee Dee wrote Glad To See You Go,” Joey revealed in the Hey Ho! Let’s Go notes. “We were sharing this loft and he gave me these words. He and his girlfriend went out to cop dope or something and when he came back, I had the music. I was playing it on my two-string guitar and I made it sound like a 12-string. It’s safe to say that Dee Dee and I were fans of each other’s songwriting and really inspired each other in the early days.”

Inspired by Dee Dee’s then girlfriend, Connie, Glad To See You Go came roaring out of the speakers and set the bar extremely high. Leave Home, though, hurdled it time and again. Yet while the album clearly paraded a succession of the band’s most enduring punk-pop missives (Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, Pinhead, Commando, Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy), it also demonstrated that Ramones had plenty more to offer.

Issued as the album’s second single, the melancholic I Remember You proved that “Da Bruddas” could write bona fide love songs of real substance, while their collective passion for 60s girl groups such as The Ronettes and The Shangri-Las was apparent on the songs You’re Gonna Kill That Girl and the lovelorn What’s Your Game. Indeed, all the above – and their supercharged cover of The Rivieras’ surf-pop classic California Sun – suggested that Ramones may have aligned themselves with punk’s velocity and faster tempos, but they didn’t subscribe to its “Year Zero” mentality.

The controversy: “‘Carbona not glue’ has to be tongue-in-cheek”

That said, the release of Leave Home wasn’t entirely free of the controversy associated with punk rock. The album’s original tracklist featured the barnstorming Carbona Not Glue, a follow-up of sorts to Ramones highlight Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, with lyrics that suggested that the high obtained from inhaling the cleaning solvent Carbona was more pleasurable than sniffing adhesives. However, because Carbona was a registered trademark, Sire insisted on removing the track from the album and replacing it with Sheena Is A Punk Rocker in the US and with Babysitter in the UK.

Reflecting on this years later, a still slightly incredulous Tommy Ramone said, “Something like Carbona Not Glue has to be tongue-in-cheek. It’s absurd, like saying that you should try something more poisonous than glue. But with Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, I have a feeling Dee Dee was talking about his childhood, how he actually thought it was some kind of release when he was a kid. I thought of it as parody. He might have been a little more serious.”

Even allowing for this stand-off with their label, Leave Home showed that Ramones were at the very top of their game. Released on 10 January 1977, the album came housed in a sleeve designed by Moshe Brakha, who had worked with The Rolling Stones on Black And Blue. In contrast to the monochrome portrait with which Ramones introduced themselves on their debut album, Brakha shot the band in full colour, reflecting the brightness and confidence of the music contained within. The record’s title was telling, too: NYC’s newest heroes were about to spread punk’s gospel around the world.

The legacy: “There’s nothing on this album that gets old”

In the long run, that’s exactly what the band went on to do. But, in keeping with so many timeless Ramones records, Leave Home’s influence was a slow burn. Initially making only a modest dent on the Billboard 200, it did enter UK Top 50, and one of its spin-off singles, the punchy Swallow My Pride, cracked the Top 40 just ahead of the band’s widely acclaimed UK and European tour with labelmates Talking Heads in the spring of 1977.

Over time, however, Leave Home has stuck around to find the place where it always belonged – among Ramones’ (and punk’s) most essential titles. Having long since proved its worth, the band’s sophomore set is now frequently the subject of enthusiastic reappraisals, with Brooklyn Vegan’s 2019 retrospective perhaps nailing it best.

“There isn’t a song worth skipping,” they wrote. “The highs on this album are among the highest highs of the band’s career. Both Leave Home’s popular songs and its deeper cuts are among the best songs the band ever wrote, and there’s nothing on this album that gets old. Every time you put it on, it feels like the first time.”

Listen to ‘Leave Home’ on Dolby ATMOS.