Marky’s first album starts slower than a Ramones sprint
In May 1978 the Ramones walked into Mediasound, a former church in Midtown Manhattan, with a new drummer and a song that refused to sprint. I Just Want to Have Something to Do opens Road to Ruin at midtempo, two minutes and forty-two seconds, slower than Blitzkrieg Bop. Joey Ramone wrote it. The sleeve still credits the band, the way Ramones songs often did, but the complaint is his: hanging out on Second Avenue, eating chicken vindaloo, wanting one person and nothing else to do. Johnny Ramone plays the downstrokes. Dee Dee Ramone holds a heavy bass line. Marky Ramone, hired only weeks earlier, keeps the beat straight and adds a little more fill than Tommy used to allow.
Tommy had left the kit after Rocket to Russia. The albums were not selling the way the road suggested they should, and touring had worn him out. He stayed in the room as producer, credited as T. Erdelyi, next to engineer Ed Stasium. They rehearsed Marky on the old songs, then recorded and mixed through the summer, May to July, at Mediasound. Assistant engineer Ray Janos worked the sessions. Greg Calbi mastered the album at Sterling Sound. Sire put Road to Ruin out on 22 September 1978. This track was not the single. Don’t Come Close, the cover of Needles and Pins, and I Wanna Be Sedated took that job. The opener’s job was to set a pace the band had not used as a front door before.
The verses climb in short steps instead of charging. The chorus swings. Then the band punches a stop and shouts “wait” and “now”, and the room is meant to answer. That bridge became a concert bit, with the crowd taking half the line. On 31 December 1979 they played the song at the Palladium in New York, inside a set that WNEW-FM broadcast. Stasium mixed the night live from the console. The tape stayed in the archive until the 40th anniversary edition of Road to Ruin. The song also turns up in Rock ‘n’ Roll High School (1979), under a scene that treats boredom as the plot.
After Tommy left the band, we went straight into working on the Road to Ruin album with Marky Ramone. We rehearsed with Marky, just getting it down. Then we went into the studio, recorded, and mixed the record at Media Sound. We spent a lot of money, and the entire summer, on Road to Ruin.
(Ed Stasium, on the Road to Ruin sessions)
Road to Ruin peaked at number 103 on the Billboard 200, more than fifty places behind Rocket to Russia, and at number 32 in Britain. Tommy later described the American campaign as a flop: a deliberate reach for radio that did not land. Critics split. Robert Christgau in The Village Voice still gave the album an A. Charles M. Young in Rolling Stone heard a band that had not lost its grip, and he saved the phrase “killer cut” for I Wanna Be Sedated. The opener got less ink, then stayed in the live set. Fans learned the “wait” and “now” shouts and used them.
What you are hearing is Marky’s first album with the group, not a later remaster. Joey snarls and pleads in the same verse. Johnny does not take a solo here, though the album elsewhere starts to allow them. The 1999 version that sits on Greatest Hits is the same 1978 take, cleaned up by Bill Inglot and Dan Hersch. The work happened in a church studio, with a drummer who had come from Richard Hell and the Voidoids, a producer who had just quit the stool, and a lyric about having nothing to do that gave the band something very specific to play.
