The 100: Ramones, TOO TOUGH TO DIE
I’m always making lists, and last year I put together a compendium of my 100 favorite albums of all time. The only hard and fast criterion followed was that at some point in my life I had to have considered each record on the list to be my absolute favorite at that time. My long list was way longer than 100 but I managed to whittle it down to a representative rundown. It’s a living document (I’ve swapped out a handful of titles since the initial drafting), but the bulk of the entries feel pretty permanent. I didn’t bother to rank them (for sorting purposes, it was easier to leave the list in alphabetical order) so I tossed the whole list into a random generator and will endeavor to break down each individual entry in this space.
Let’s begin with the Ramones, whose first four full-length releases (1976’s Ramones, 1977’s Leave Home and Rocket to Russia and 1978’s Road to Ruin) are all bulletproof compendiums of raw punk energy and deceptively sweet songcraft. So why do I gravitate toward a far more uneven release from the Ramones’ tumultuous 1980s?
Like a lot of kids my age, my introduction to punk rock came via Green Day’s watershed 1994 record Dookie. My experience with that album fundamentally set a template for how I would absorb music for the rest of my life: Whereas most of my peers were content to shake around to “Basket Case” and “Longview,” I felt compelled to pull the thread and go deeper. My logic was, “I like this very much, and I want as much of this in my life as possible.” It’s a broad philosophy on art that has often turned one CD purchase into seven.
Diving into Green Day not only led me to their previous two albums (including the excellent Kerplunk, which may or may not have made The 100) but also to the bands that formed them. I had heard “Rock the Casbah” on the radio but my post-Dookie education included my first real exposure to the Clash, particularly London Calling. I started listening to both the California skate punk that informed Green Day’s rise, and I also dug deeper into the history of CBGB and gorged myself on those bands, which led to obsessions with Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, and of course the Ramones.
Too Tough To Die is the eighth Ramones album, and like most Ramones albums in the 1980s it found the band in transition. Drummer Marky Ramone had left the group and was replaced by newcomer Richie Ramone (Richie was gone in three years and Marky came back to the drum stool until the band called it quits in 1996). Meanwhile original drummer Tommy Ramone had come back to the group to produce, just as he did on the band’s debut. After a few years of experiments (working with Phil Spector, embracing different genres like New Wave and metal), Too Tough To Die was meant to be a throwback to the group’s origins, down to the title and the cover photo.
Through that prism, the album is a failure. Too Tough To Die doesn’t have the same wide-eyed sugar punch as their earlier records, and Tommy’s production sometimes gets in the way of the album’s momentum. But my friend Zack, who was my gateway into the punk world, had given me a tape that had “Wart Hog” on it, and for whatever reason that song activated me. For a long time, Too Tough To Die was the only Ramones album I owned, and I scoured that bad boy from top to bottom. I’ll admit not everything works, but I dig the guttural wail of “Wart Hog” and the surf-adjacent vibes of “Durango 95” and the primordial thrills of “Chasing the Night” and “Danger Zone.” I’ve never enjoyed “Humankind” but the closing one-two punch of “Endless Vacation” and “No Go” was the kind of finale that always made me want to go back to track one and give it another round.
When I was in the eighth grade, we had a technology class wherein we produced a fake newscast. Zack and I commandeered the best jobs on the floor: he operated the switcher (which also handled video effects) and I was in charge of sound (which also gave me control of the music). I remember all my music cues so vividly: The opening titles were set to the intro to Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Shallow Be Thy Game,” the outro was a remix of White Zombie’s “More Human Than Human,” and the tune that accompanied a package of sports highlights was “Durango 95.” To this day, I can’t hear that song without thinking of Shawn Kemp dunking over Chris Gatling. I love a lot of Ramones songs, and there’s some good stuff on even their worst album, but Too Tough To Die holds a place in my heart because of its noble failure and its off-the-rails commitment to the joy of punk.