‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’
Ramones’ Blitzkrieg Bop contains one of the most instantly recognisable chants in all of rock music history, all revved up and ready to go. Two-minutes-and-21-seconds blast of pure punk perfection, the song also served as the majority of people’s introduction to the New York quartet, kicking off their classic self-titled 1976 debut in glorious fashion and helping light the blue touchpaper on the whole punk movement.
While the main songwriters of the original Ramones were thought to be Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, it was in fact drummer Tommy Ramone (real name Tommy Erdelyi) who wrote the majority of Blitzkrieg Bop by himself.
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“It’s my song,” he told Classic Rock in 2007. “Dee Dee came up with the title, and changed a line from ‘They’re shouting in the back now’ to ‘Shoot ’em in the back now.’ The rest of the song is mine.”
With most mid-70s punkers drawing inspiration from The Stooges and The New York Dolls, Ramones were busy studying an unlikely source.
“We were looking for a chant-type song, along the lines of The Bay City Rollers’ Saturday Night,” he recalled. “I was trying to think of ideas for something like that.
“Coming home from the grocery store one day, I just thought of a chant – ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s go!’ Which basically comes from a song called Walkin’ The Dog by Rufus Thomas, where he goes, ‘Hi ho’s nipped her toes’.
“When we were kids we used to goof around; when Mick Jagger sang the song for the Rolling Stones, it sounded like he was saying ‘hey ho’. It was a silly thing, but I remembered that from the past.”
According to Tommy, the song was written sometime in 1974 – shortly after the Ramones formed. He recalled the time the germ of the idea for the song came to him: “The actual music and melody, I was fooling around with a guitar at Arturo’s loft – Arturo Vega was our lighting guy – and I just started playing the riff. The song slowly came together. I went home, I liked that riff, and I just wrote the lyrics.”
Many have unsuccessfully tried to decipher the song’s true meaning over the years, but the true meaning is simple: “The lyrics are basically about people going to a concert and having a great time,” said Tommy in 2007.
Up until that point, the other Ramones members thought of themselves as the group’s main songwriters, so the arrival of Tommy’s song caused some anxiety.
We did that record really fast; it only cost $6,000. We did it quickly and without much fanfare.
Tommy Ramone
“They were upset because they thought it was a good song. That was their honest reaction! They thought they were the only ones who could write songs at the time. A lot of ego in the band. They couldn’t turn that song down.”
It was immediately introduced into the group’s live set, probably at CBGB (along with Television, the Ramones were one of the first rock bands to play at the club). While Tommy didn’t recall the audience’s initial reaction – “We go from one song to another; we don’t wait for a reaction,” he said with a laugh – it didn’t take long for the band themselves to realise that Blitzkrieg Bop was one of their strongest songs.
“It became pretty much ‘the anthem,’” Tommy said. “We started the album with it; when the album came out, it was the first song. It then became the ‘go-to song’. Initially we used to put it as the third song – we’d warm up with two other songs, and then hit ’em with Blitzkrieg Bop, get the audience pumping their hands and all that stuff.”
For a bunch of proto-punks who had grown up in the suburbs of Queens and cut their live teeth in the dive bars of the Big Apple, the experience of recording the song was like being beamed into another world.
“We were put into this really interesting studio that had been a beautiful art-deco radio station before being converted into a recording studio in the Radio City Music Hall building,” Tommy remembered.
“It was a beautiful studio. But we were separated – we were each put in different rooms. It was a strange experience making that record. We knew it was an important song – I think it might have been one of the first songs we recorded, actually. We did that record really fast; it only cost $6,000. We did it quickly and without much fanfare.”
Blitzkrieg Bop was issued as a single in November 1975 in the US – almost six months before the arrival of the Ramones’ self-titled debut album in April 1976. “I’m sure it was a different mix, but it was the same recording,” Tommy told Classic Rock.
The song has since become one of rock’s most renowned and enduring anthems. It’s even played regularly at US sporting events to get the crowd pumped. Tommy’s reaction to hearing Blitzkrieg Bop played at American football games? “Sort of disbelief. It seems surrealistic.”
The million-dollar question is a tricky one: did he think Blitzkrieg Bop is the greatest Ramones song?
“No,” he replied, as modest as ever. “There are so many other great ones: Rockaway Beach, Cretin Hop. I think Blitzkrieg Bop… It’s hard to say, since I wrote it. I’m very self-conscious about it. But people seem to like it.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 113 (Nover 2007)