Ramones: It's Alive

It’s Alive

Best song: you’ll never see this one coming will you… Blitzkrieg Bop!

Worst song: one of the covers; maybe California Sun

Overall grade: 6 (at this point I can’t imagine ever giving a live album a 7, to be honest)

Well, if I’m not very much mistaken, this is my first review of a live album! Wait, no, I did ‘Ummagumma’, which is half live and half studio… so this is my first time looking at just a live album. And I can’t really think of a better one to start with: ‘It’s Alive’ is easily in my top five live albums of all time, as well as being my favourite Ramones album, because it’s as close as you can buy to the absolute essence of the Ramones, smothered as it is in accelerated riffs, random bursts of aggression and a fuzzy home-grown feel. Course, it would be far better to actually see them in concert, and if that were still possible, you can bet that I’d be there the moment ticket sales opened. Sadly, this album is the closest thing I’m ever going to have.

Most live albums work because they show a different side of the band to the studio albums. Not the case here. ‘It’s Alive’ is amazing because it amplifies every aspect of the Ramones listening experience into a barrage of great sounds that attacks you non-stop for twenty-eight songs and fifty-three minutes. The first aspect it takes to extremes is (as you might have worked out if you can do quick maths) song lengths. In direct contrast to most live albums, these songs are actually even shorter than their studio counterparts, and are basically all sped up to make room for as many songs as is humanly possible. That’s fine. Even after only three albums (this was recorded before ‘Road to Ruin’, though it was released afterwards) they already had more than enough great songs to justify this approach.

Brief interlude: four concerts were recorded and considered for a live album, and the reason this one won out over the others was because the front ten rows of seats were thrown at the stage after the concert was over. That’s clearly how you judge the success of a concert.

Other features of the band highlighted by this album include their sheer energy – a lot of these songs flow directly into one another with barely a pause for applause, and they manage to keep this up for the entire set without it noticing in their performance whatsoever – and their complete lack of taking themselves seriously; see the way Joey growls the title of each song before they start playing it, and before ‘Here Today Gone Tomorrow’ he even claims that it’s “for all you lonely hearts out there”. That line gets me every time.

While the setlist generally sticks to my favourites, there are of course a handful of songs that I didn’t love quite so much in their original incarnations. Without exception, though, I prefer the versions included here. The fact that the songs themselves are a bit unnecessary is cancelled out by the way the group put just as much effort into them as they do the fan favourites – it’s incredible to me how they can be so hardworking in each of their live performances and perform as many times per year as they did and still manage to reach the high standard that they did.

The big hits aren’t all collected at the tail end of the album, they’re nicely spread throughout it, meaning that even someone who doesn’t know the band’s entire output could still find something they knew every few minutes. And nothing is a significant drop in quality from its original! If I had to pick a song that doesn’t work quite as well on here… it might actually be ‘Surfin’ Bird’, because its infuriating catchiness doesn’t have quite the same effect sandwiched between so many other super-catchy songs. On the other hand, absolute highlights (aside from the obvious) are ‘Sheena Is A Punk Rocker’, ‘Cretin Hop’, ‘Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment’ and the impossibly fast ‘We’re A Happy Family’, all of which already set themselves some pretty high standards, but only manage to improve on them in this context.

I love this album because it’s so unashamedly hedonistic and because it manages to achieve the same heights as most objectively “serious” albums just by being a head-spinningly good time. By 1979, disco was in the mainstream, post-punk and New Wave were the new musical movements, most punk bands (including the Ramones themselves) were embracing other styles of music into their work, and this was one of the last true documents of the original punk era – but what  a high for the genre to end on.