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49 Years Ago: Ramones Turn Pop Into Outsider Art
How four misfits from Queens made the past the future
I think it must have happened during high school football season, fall of 1976. I was in second grade, my sister was a senior. She and a couple of her friends had just come in late on a Friday night, dropped off by the band bus at the end of our street after an away game, still in their uniforms. They were giggling, so the Mustangs must have won. (They take their high school football very seriously in small-town west Texas.) One of her friends, the freckle-faced redhead, kept singing the same line over and over again.
“Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh yeah, oh yeah…”
It sounded like one of those nonsense songs you make up while you’re walking the dog, like it had just come into her head and she only kept singing it because it made her friends laugh. It was weirdly catchy, as well as just weird, and I’m sure that’s why I remembered it.
It wasn’t until almost a decade later, when I was in high school myself, that I discovered that my sister’s friend had been singing a Ramones song. I wasn’t surprised that I remembered hearing the song as a child, just that someone in Denver City, Texas had been hip enough to know a Ramones song in 1976.
