Blitzkrieg Bop

The Ramones recorded “Blitzkrieg Bop” in January 1976 and released it as their debut single that February, produced by Craig Leon, opening the self-titled album that arrived that April. It didn’t chart. It’s since been ranked among Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, and its two-minute-twelve-second blueprint – three chords, a shouted chant, no solo, nothing extra – became the template a generation of punk bands worked from directly or not.

The song is credited to the band collectively, but it was written mainly by drummer Tommy Ramone, with Dee Dee Ramone contributing the title and a line. The detail that actually explains the record’s most famous moment is stranger than either credit suggests: the “Hey Ho, Let’s Go” chant, the part of the song most people can sing without knowing another word of it, came from Tommy Ramone’s own reading of the Rolling Stones’ cover of Rufus Thomas’s 1963 “Walking the Dog” – specifically, how Mick Jagger’s delivery of a line in that cover sounded to him like “hey ho.” Punk’s founding chant, in other words, started as a mishearing of an older genre’s cover of an even older song.

Greatest of All Time. – two minutes and twelve seconds that built punk’s blueprint out of a half-heard line from someone else’s cover song.

Hero image: “Blitzkrieg Bop” single cover, 1976, Sire Records. Used under fair use for editorial commentary.