“Blitzkrieg Bop” and the Consensus Shift by Tomas Zandir
An Insider’s Experience in the Music Industry
I was pushing my cart along the bread aisle of Stop & Shop, looking for a loaf of sourdough bread. Then suddenly a sound came floating down from the ceiling, filling the aisles with an insistent, angry pulse. It caught my attention. I stopped in the middle of the aisle. Could it be? Yes—the opening chords of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” by the Ramones.
I hadn’t heard the entire track in decades. But there it was, as if emerging from memory, alive again.
After the loud and aggressive intro, the guitars dropped out, leaving only the steady drums. Voices: “Hey, ho—let’s go! Hey, ho—let’s go!” Then the guitars and bass re-entered as Joey wailed the opening lines.
Involuntarily, I smiled as I remembered when I had first heard “Blitzkrieg Bop” nearly fifty years earlier. Had it really been that long? It was November, 1975. Thanksgiving weekend, to be exact. Cold and drizzly. My friend Bruce and I had driven from Boston to New York City. His family lived in Clifton, New Jersey, right across the Hudson River from Manhattan. Our goal was to check out the nascent “punk rock” (so it was called) music scene in New York. We bought a copy of the Village Voice and learned The Talking Heads were playing at a gay bar called Mother’s, on 20thStreet in Manhattan. We drove there in Bruce’s unreliable 1960 Chevy Impala with the big flaring fins. We walked into the place and made our way past the actual bar, with its smattering of bored-looking patrons. Going through a door, we found ourselves in a rectangular space with a tiny stage and maybe fifty seats at little tables. Half the seats were empty.
The Talking Heads took the stage—just David, Chris, and Tina. No Jerry yet. He would join later. The band played “Psycho Killer.” We were transfixed. We had made the pilgrimage from Boston and had found our musical mecca. The answer to the boring, traditional fodder pumped out by commercial radio stations. Heavy metal, disco, happy-time songs, oldies—they all missed the mark. The wavelength was off. We weren’t in tune with them. That was music for other people, not us.
This was ours.
After the set, we talked with a man who was lingering at the back of the room. His name was Danny, and he was the manager of the Ramones. They were not playing anywhere that weekend, so he was out on the town. He invited us back to his loft. A former warehouse space with brick walls and tall industrial windows. He asked if we had heard the Ramones. We had read about Johnny, Joey, Tommy, and Dee Dee Ramone—as they had christened themselves—in Rolling Stone and The Boston Phoenix, and had seen grainy black-and-white photographs of four sullen kids in black leather jackets and torn jeans. But we had never actually heard them. They had not yet released a record. We did not know what they sounded like.
Danny played a cassette. It had been recorded live, at a gig, probably at CBGB. The sound quality was murky. The song was called “Blitzkrieg Bop.” It came surging out of the tiny speaker like nothing we had ever heard. Sleek, fast, hard, loud, nothing wasted, not one extra note. Like a factory assembly line, built for efficiency, but made beautiful by Joey’s plaintive singing. That kid knew how to write a melody.
Two minutes and fourteen seconds later, it was over. A faint smattering of applause, then “one-two-three-four!” and another rocket-propelled song took off. Exactly the same as the first, but different.
“What do you think?” asked Danny.
“Rootless,” I replied. “Synthetic.”
It was true. Their music showed not a trace of blues, R&B, or country—the building blocks of rock and roll. It was pure pop—nothing but a steady rock beat, relentless eighth-note chords, and a childlike melody. The lyrics were cartoon poetry—silly, offensive, repetitious, dark. It was all funny and frightening, like a carnival clown wielding a butcher’s knife.
Danny asked us if we intended to start a band.
“Umm—I don’t know,” I replied. We really hadn’t thought of being in a band ourselves. Bruce had played clarinet in his high-school marching band. I had been practicing guitar for two years. I felt spectacularly unqualified to ask anyone to pay money to hear me play.
Danny looked at Bruce. “You’d be a good band leader,” he said, as if this were an obvious fact. He looked at me. “You’re tenacious. The kind of guy who will never give up.”
I thought, well, okay, that seems like a pretty positive reading of the imaginary tarot cards.
On Sunday, we drove back to Boston. Cruising up I-95, Bruce and I decided to act on Danny’s suggestion. We could never be serious, respectable musicians like the Eagles or Steely Dan, but we could sure have fun, like the Ramones.
Bruce recruited a college dropout friend to sing. We recruited a lead guitar player (because I lacked confidence to take on the role), while I stuck to rhythm. We found a drummer. Bruce appointed himself bass player and chief songwriter.
It was January 1976. I called Danny and told him we had a band named the Atlantics. We were more mod than punk. Instead of leather jackets, we wore suits and ties, which in 1976 was equally subversive for rock musicians. I sent Danny a tape, and a few months later, he called me. The Ramones had just released their debut album. “Blitzkrieg Bop” was the leadoff track. Danny said they were playing at a venue called The Club in Cambridge. Three nights at the end of May—Thursday, Friday, Saturday. Would the Atlantics like to be the opening act?
We said, “Of course!” That was our big break. Those three nights put us on the musical map in Boston. We played to an audience of about one hundred people on Friday and Saturday nights. Maybe fifty people were there on Thursday. On Friday night after the gig, Bruce threw a party at his off-campus apartment, and all four Ramones showed up. Danny had told us that if we advertised blackberry brandy, Dee Dee would definitely be there. He was right.
During the next few years, we saw the Ramones many times, usually when our band opened for them. We also hung out with them in New York when we were recording there. The Atlantics played around New England, usually for the door receipts at clubs, but we were always broke. We had no record deal. Lots of interest from New York labels, but no takers. We looked successful, but we were living on pizza and subs. We experienced what every other local band did. Long drives to small clubs. Crappy fast food. Cigarettes, booze, drugs. Lonely girls and creepy guys backstage. Tough bouncers. Sticky, stinking beer-soaked floors. Drunk guys fighting in the parking lot at closing time. Driving back to Boston in our guitar player’s station wagon, at dawn, often getting lost. Getting our gear stolen from the U-Haul van in New York City. Desperately hoping to hear our song on local radio.
As for the Ramones, despite their notoriety and appearances on bigger stages, they were also just barely paying the rent. Their records sold only a few thousand copies. They got scant radio play—in New England, probably less than the Atlantics. Johnny told us they made more money selling t-shirts than music. They had no fancy tour bus, no posse of handlers.
Critics hated them, saying they couldn’t play their instruments, mainly because Johnny refused to play anything resembling a guitar solo. Back in the late seventies, people like Jimmy Page set the standard for rock musicianship, and his trademark was the blazing five-minute guitar solo that sold out stadiums around the world.
The Ramones were perceived as ugly, incompetent, dumb, moronic, dangerous. In 1977, their single “Rockaway Beach” hit number sixty-six on the U.S. radio charts. Everyone thought this was the harbinger of commercial success. That the dam had been breached and more hits would follow. But it was actually the beginning of the end. The Ramones never again produced a song that charted as high. In their entire nineteen-year career, they only put three songs in the Top 100. Their last single was released in 1995. “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” managed to hit number thirty in Australia but failed to make the charts in America.
As for me, after years of not making it, in 1994 I left the music business for good. I moved out of Boston to raise a family. The music business is tough, and most hopefuls eventually give up, burn out, or take an offstage job with a regular paycheck.
For many other performers in that original 1970s punk wave, the early twenty-first century took them to the end of the road. Joey Ramone died of cancer in 2001. He was forty-nine years old. You can visit his grave at Hillside Cemetery in Lyndhurst, New Jersey. Dee Dee followed in 2002, and Johnny in 2004. The last original Ramone to go was Tommy in 2014.
After a lifetime of battling addictions, my friend Bruce got clean—or so he said—and moved to Florida to work as a biology teacher in a high school. We lost touch, and in 2000 I heard he had taken his own life by putting his head in the gas oven in his kitchen. As for the recorded works of the Atlantics, like thousands of other local bands, our catalogue slowly dissipated into the vast sea of forgotten songs and records, preserved only by a few stubborn fans.
But as time passed, the music of the Ramones, once toxic to commercial interests, mysteriously became acceptable and even heralded. Their irritating songs, once relegated to the late-night fringes of college radio, became the favorites of a special breed of human: music supervisors for major corporations and advertising agencies. As the actual Ramones left the scene, their memory was refreshed and polished. Romanticized, you might say. These music supervisors, who had been rebellious college kids in the late 1970s, were now driving BMWs to thirtieth-floor offices on Madison Avenue. They saw themselves as rule-breakers and began to place the catchy “Hey, ho, let’s go!” line from “Blitzkrieg Bop” into multi-million-dollar national TV ads. That thirty-second snippet appeared in an ad for Diet Pepsi. Then GoPro cameras, followed by AT&T Wireless, American Express, Nissan Pathfinder, Mitsubishi Outlander, Peloton. Movies and TV shows, too. Stop & Shop added the full track to its in-store playlist. Even classic rock radio—once their sworn enemy—embraced the Ramones. Every once in a while, you’d hear samples of other Ramones songs in commercials, but “Blitzkrieg Bop” was the rainmaker.
In 2020, Mitchel Hyman, the brother of Jeffrey Ross Hyman, also known as Joey Ramone, sold his late brother’s music catalogue for ten million dollars. The sale was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. It was more money than Joey had made in his lifetime.
It’s likely that the commercial legacy of the Ramones springs entirely from the first few bars of that first song on their first album. It’s like when you sow a field with a bag full of unknown and dubious seeds. You scatter them across the ground and hope for the best. Most of the seeds fail to take root. The unsuitable soil rejects them. A few of the seeds sprout and struggle to grow. But they don’t thrive and slowly wither. Oh well, you say, that’s life. The snows come and the seasons pass. Other plants spring up and blossom, but not your seeds. They lie dormant, forgotten, crowded out by newcomers.
But then one spring day you inspect your awakening garden, and to your amazement one of those misfit seeds has sprouted! Day by day, the tiny shoot grows taller and stronger. The strangely beautiful plant reaches a height you never imagined. It bears coveted fruit; and suddenly, without quite knowing how or why, like a character in 1001 Arabian Nights, you’ve become fabulously wealthy.
“Blitzkrieg Bop” is not a unique example of the castaway seed that unexpectedly thrives. Works of art—music, books, paintings, movies—often exist outside of the zeitgeist of the moment. When they’re produced, the gatekeepers who have the money or influence to elevate or suppress creative works, and who live within a particular cultural vibe seek works that reinforce their good judgement while rejecting that which is emotionally irritating or politically or economically oppositional. But times change and cultures evolve. The zeitgeist shifts. What was dangerous becomes interesting. What was bewildering suddenly makes sense. What was shocking becomes attractive.
It’s all about what I call a “consensus shift.” If you take the United States as one of the many cultural systems encompassing all 8.1 billion people on earth, then for any idea, work of art, or movement to take hold, you need a minimum viable consensus to be present. If too few people endorse an idea, it may continue to cling to existence, but it will slowly fizzle, never catch fire, and remain ineffective. It will never have value in the marketplace. Gatekeepers will not admit it.
Such was the fate of “Blitzkrieg Bop.” For years it had its core group of fans—probably never more than a few hundred thousand in the entire nation. The majority believed the song, and the Ramones generally, were worthless and marginal. But there came a shift. This was made possible by several factors, including changes in musical tastes. In the mid-1990s, the band Green Day suddenly became a platinum-selling household name, and the Ramones seemed less like unacceptable weirdo rebels and more like trailblazing pop music pioneers. Green Day had followed them to achieve success. Meanwhile, the punks who had followed the Ramones in the late 1970s had grown up, made money, and had become cultural gatekeepers.
You see the consensus shift in countless aspects of our culture. At its most trivial it’s fad and fashion, while at its deepest level it’s politics and ethics. The seed grows where the soil is fertile—and the tricky part is that barren soil can become fertile without looking or seeming to be much different than when you last looked at it.
Tom Hauck, the co-founder of the Boston band The Atlantics, is now a professional ghostwriter of non-fiction books for private clients, and uses the name Tomas Zandir for their fiction and literary work. Their short stories have been published in literary magazines including The Missouri Review, Armchair Aesthete, The Bitter Oleander, and The MacGuffin. Tom is a graduate of Tufts University (B.A., English), and they live in beautiful Gloucester, MA.