The Original Ramones

Friday, August 16, 1974, was a hot summer day in New York City…it was 31 degrees, but the humidity made it feel a lot hotter…and if you were down in the Bowery amidst all the concrete, it was hotter still...and it smelled…

This part of the city was, to be honest, rather uncivilized…it was a slum…lots of garbage, broken windows, abandoned buildings, drug addicts and homeless people…but there were also businesses and places to hang out—like a dive bar at 315 Bowery at Bleeker called CBGB…

Even though it was a Friday night, there was almost no one in the bar…there was the owner, the owner’s dog, two people from a transvestite band from San Francisco called The Cockettes, the manager of another band called television and an artist from the neighhourhood who had moved up from Chihuahua, Mexico, and a scenester named Leggs McNeil …that’s it…

And sometime around 9:00, four guys in leather jackets, t-shirts, torn jeans and converse high-tops got up on the tiny stage…

“They counted off this song,” he remembers, “and it was just this wall of noise…they looked so striking…these guys were not hippies…this was something completely new”…

Fifteen minutes after their set started, it was over…they had blown through all their songs—and had also found time to fight about which song was next and to struggle with broken guitar strings…it scared the crap out of the owner’s dog…

When it was over, the owner said to the band “nobody’s gonna like you, but I’ll have you back”…

And he did...the band came back the following night…and again…and again….and again…by the end of 1974, the group had played cbgb a total of 74 times…

But back to August 16th…that was the night music began to change forever…you’d never have guessed it, but when the bass player counted in that first song, it was the equivalent of “let there be light”…

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