With this track the RAMONES encountered trouble, attempting to mine another sick joke out of a subject too deeply rooted in their own actual personal experience. As a result, for a long time afterwards they had to offer uncomfortable rationales and explanations when grilled about it by the press, often attempting to sidestep responsibility for endorsing such a 'ridiculous' pastime though being clearly incapable of denying having partaken.
Starting off with a (relatively!) standard two chord change over the incantation of the essentially two line lyric, the song then moves on to two extremely atypical musical sections. First there is the heavy rock style accentuation of a descending progression of chords (although sonically speaking, between DEEDEE's high octave bass playing and the overall trebly mix, 'heavy' might be too generous a term.) Then later, after an already-veering-close-to-self-parody count in (this time all the way up to 8) one of the most out of place sounding passages on the lp kicks in: a tight, fluid, sinewy scaled guitar riff doubled ably by DEEDEE on bass. It stands as one of the album's only moments that even remotely resembles typical seventies hard rock, although JOHNNY omits the demo version's thrilling octave jump (see RAMONES: THE EARLY DEMOS).
Destined to become one of the groups most identifiable songs, musically the track's arrangement offers a diverting amount of surprises inside of a wild 94(!) seconds. Meanwhile, the minimalist lyric and vocals established a template that would find wide adherence as the English punk explosion commenced a short time later.
RAMONES NOW I WANNA SNIFF SOME GLUE
Photo by Roberta Bayley
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