'Pleasant Dreams' (Annotated) : Appreciating the Ramones' Overlooked Power-Pop Classic

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this has always been one of my favorite ramones records, and i think it tends to get lost in the gap between their early obvious greats and their too-tough latter-day stuff. (e.g., it's the lowest-rated ramones album on allmusic until animal boy.) i think it's the best pop production they ever got, and at the very least "we want the airwaves" should have been an fm rock-radio monster. i was listening to it last week and thinking it deserves a thread. not a poll, because who cares and anyway the winner would almost certainly be "kkk," with "airwaves" as an outside bet. but so anyway, forthwith, some consideration.

context: their 6th studio album in 5 years, the first not to feature them -- or cartoons of them -- on the cover. produced by graham gouldman (which explains the otherwise non-sequiturish 10cc shout-out on "it's not my place"). unlike the albums before and after, it contained no covers, and there's more rhythmic and harmonic diversity on it than any other ramones album i can think of. (very much including phil spector's.) i think it's the album that most takes advantage of the fact that marky was actually a really good drummer. before this, he had stuck more to tommy's boom-bap-boom-bap template. johnny didn't like the album and i understand why, but johnny was a purist and ramones were not ever really a pure band the way he wanted them to be. joey and dee-dee were both too pop for that.

so, the tracklist:

1. We Want the Airwaves
2. All's Quiet on the Eastern Front
3. The KKK Took My Baby Away
4. Don't Go
5. You Sound Like You're Sick
6. It's Not My Place (in the 9 to 5 World)
7. She's a Sensation
8. 7-11
9. You Didn't Mean Anything to Me
10. Come On Now
11. This Business Is Killing Me
12. Sitting in My Room

wasnt End Of The Centiry the 1st Ramones album with more or less the same sound as this one?

oh, awesome record. everything end of the century was meant to be but wasn't. i've always considered it my favorite next to rocket to russia.

(with Chinese Rock and RocknRoll Radio? etc..)
xpost
i mean, that was their groundbreaking sounds record

personal connection: i got into the ramones via a friend when i was about 13, which would have been '82-'83. they were the second actual rock band i ever saw, in the fall of '83 at SUNY Brockport, on the subterranean jungle tour. because i could only really afford used LPs at the time, my ramones collecting was erratic and dependent on what turned up in the bins. ergo, pleasant dreams was the second one i bought (leave home was the first -- the reissue with "sheena is a punk rocker" added to it). in some ways it reassured me, i think, because i was still listening to a lot of mainstream rock radio, in addition to exploring the local college stations. more than leave home, which i loved but freaked me out a little bit ("you should never have opened that door," brrr), pleasant dreams sounded like rock music i knew. except it didn't because the songs were weird and funny and distinctly ramones. and even my dad agreed "the kkk took my baby away" was a classic. he used to play it for his friends when they came over and they'd crack up.

xpost:

like mike a sez, i think this is what end of the century was moving toward, but even though that has some of my favorite all-time ramones songs on it, i think the overall songwriting is tighter here. and gouldman's production is just more interesting and really works with and teases out the band's sound, instead of sort of swamping it the way spector did.

don't get me wrong: end of the century is another favorite (and the first ramones album i ever bought). but pleasant dreams is just stronger in general. love subterranean dreams as well.

(uh, jungle)

pleasent dreams-subterranean jungle-too tough to die:
a trilogy of sorts imo

i mean a tetralogy with End Of...

yeah for me there basically isn't a ramones album i don't love to some degree until halfway to sanity (and even that's got a few great tunes). this is just one of my favorites, and you don't hear a lot about it. overshadowed by the whole spector thing with end of the century.

on with the annotating...

We Want the Airwaves (Joey) 3:32

a sequel of sorts to "(do you remember) rock 'n' roll radio," but where that was basically a nostalgia trip this is forward-looking and pissed off. and it serves as the album's mission statement, it sets up what they're trying to do: make their version of rock-radio music, without compromise. johnny's ascending/descending riff is ominous and storm-cloud militant (and one of my favorite uses of flanger ever). the opening lines, with joey snarling "9 to 5 and 5 to 9/ain't gonna take it, it's our time," set up the later takedown of the working-stiff world in "it's not my place." the Man owns 9 to 5, but the band owns 5 to 9 (the bigger and better part of the day). and the whispered "that's right, that's right" on the chorus signals the sophistication (johnny would say slickness, not incorrectly) of the mix. here and throughout, gouldman gives joey's voice exactly the right levels of treble and delay. i don't know if joey was ever recorded better by anyone. spector got the romantic side of him, but gouldman lets him stay tough, too. key moment: "mr. programmer/i got my hammer/gonna smash my smash my radiO-O." a thoroughly rockist sentiment, obv., and reflective of the band's contempt for anything soft, funky or, basically, not-white. (of course, no band whose singer loves girl groups as much as joey did can really be as musically fascist as its mission statements.) but it's a huge track and should've/could've been a huge hit. i do remember hearing it a few times on rock radio, but it fell away fast.

(the plinky, echoey lone piano note is a nice touch too.)

pulled this out of a used bin recently (on a reissue disc with it and End Of The Century both on it) and yeah, really enjoying this. the singles were almost some of my favorite Ramones songs and I wasn't disappointed by the rest.

All's Quiet on the Eastern Front (Dee Dee) 2:15

classic ramones wham-bam, juiced up by marky's heart-attack shuffle. another one of dee dee's new york songs, a vibrant, possibly sinister snapshot of the early '80s lower east side. it's not hard to imagine dee dee writing it in his head, wandering around wired to the gills: "i am too amped to sleep/lamp rays shining down/street lamps make that buzzing sound/subway creaking down below/garbage piled up and ready to go." then he gets almost lyrical: "shaky lock and kicky door/smoky air that i adore/down in the alley is where i hunt/all is quiet on the eastern front." dee dee also chimes in vocally on the chorus, with the "can't you think my movements talk" line -- which sounds somewhere between a plea to be left alone and a threat of consequences if he's not.

The KKK Took My Baby Away (Joey) 2:31

the other instant classic. first there's the 5-count riff: da-da-da-da-DAHT (hey) da-da-da-da-DAHT (ho), straight johnny muscle. then there's the lyrics, which for years i just thought were great and funny, made funnier by joey's actual emotional engagement. (true of a lot of their songs, which is one of the keys to their music. joey's always in the joke, but he never exactly seems like he's joking.) but then of course after years of loving the song i found out it's actually about johnny stealing joey's girlfriend. which makes its humor, and the fact that johnny could stand there wordlessly hammering riff, something like tragic. the "ring me ring me ring up the fbi" bridge either deliberately or accidentally echoes chuck berry ("30 days"), and puts the song in a hyperbolic blues lineage that the ramones were never as far from as they thought.

(nb:johnny "stealing" joey's girlfriend is one way of saying it. who knows. they ended up married and stayed married til he died.)

"kkk" also has one of those great last-verse key changes, kicking up the sense of desperation.

Don't Go (Joey) 2:49

one of the album's throwaways i guess, but nice for a throwaway. chords and melody line are similar to (the superior) "7-11," which makes this sound like a demo that ended up on the album. joey at his minimalist, simple repeated verse and chorus. seems like just another broken-hearted lament -- until the bridge (this album also i think has more great bridges than any other ramones record). suddenly from "don't go, don't go/baby don't go", joey takes a left turn and his sneer comes back: "she wouldn't do what i wanted her to, she wouldn't do it for me" -- no sense of what "it" is, but he sounds mad instead of hurt and it's just enough to make you think she had good reasons for leaving. it deliberately complicates the song's emotional landscape.

If memory serves, didn't they go with Gouldman because he was the writer of the Yardbirds' hits?

I was so impressed by the Gouldman credit. I didn't know him from 10CC, I knew him from the import Yardbirds hits collection I scored at Target, and the Herman's Hermits 45's from my parents.

Here he was on a Ramones album. (also scored in the clearance bin at Target).

I can't wait to hear what Tipsy says about "You Sound Like You're Sick"

big lyric album for my teenage life.

I can't wait to hear what Tipsy says about "You Sound Like You're Sick"

Waiting for "She's A Sensation" here

You Sound Like You're Sick (Dee Dee) 2:43

the requisite mental illness track, and one of the better ones (though i'm not sure they ever wrote a bad song about mental illness). a classic three-chorder that somehow squeezes three hooks into a simple verse-chorus structure: the first half of each verse ("well if you must act up/again and again"); the last bars of each verse ("in the institoo-oo-tion/cuz you're so laa-aa-zy"), with the backing vocals echoing dit-dit-dits from channel to channel and marky hammering quarters on the ride; and the actual chorus. backing vox are key to the whole thing, with a squad of joeys (and maybe dee dee) shadowing every line ("ooh-ooh-ooh") and singing a great high harmony on the chorus. the mostly straightforward drumming is augmented with tambourine and handclaps, which brighten the rhythm track. lyricwise it covers dee dee's normal misfit ground ("everybody knows you're a hopeless problem"), with tongue in cheek but more than a little sincerity. song definitely felt real to me in my own misfit teenagehood. there's only a zillion songs about being a misfit, but dee dee's have particular edge to them, a mixture of sympathy and hardness, an ambivalence about whether the toughness of the world is funny or sad. (in that vein, i'm especially a sucker for "outsider" on subterranean jungle.)

this album got a lot of airplay on wnew-fm alongside bruce, pat benatar, bob seger etc. calling it power-pop makes sense. i've always thought of it as the most produced ramones album, a more successful version of what they tried to do on end of the century. looking forward to ypur analysis of "not my place in the 9-5 world" which is a very compelling song and also kind of terrible at the same time IMO.

speaking of which...

It's Not My Place (in the 9 to 5 World) (Joey) 3:24
in some ways i think this is the album's signature song, thematically and also because it's hard to imagine it on any other ramones album. it's where gouldman i think has the most sway, from the sound effects (the alarm clock that starts it) to the massed backing vocals and the tympani-laden who-style bridge. it's kind of an aural trainwreck, but i love it for the beat (kind of a bastardized, punked-up latin thing) and marky's drumming -- he's all over the snare and toms, it really makes me wish more songs gave him so much room. and the lyrics are an entertaining mishmash of ramones shout-outs (to phil spector, alan arkush, stephen king, roger corman, themselves -- "ramones are hanging out in kokomo") and contempt for the straight world. ("to get a good job you need the proper schooling/now who the hell do you think you're fooling?") who needs a job when you can hang out with lester bangs? (was this song the first one to mention lester?)

I can remember ten of these tracks!

My mom really hated "She's a Sensation."

My first Ramones record. Never got the hate. She's a Sensation was great and Morbs mom, while usually otm, is off base here.

I'm sure the similarity is probably coincidental or the result of some shared influence I'm not aware of, but is anyone else unable to hear "We Want The Airwaves" without thinking of Elvis Costello's "I'm Not Angry," or vice versa?

can sort of see that. the whispered "angry!" falls in the chord progression about the same place the "that's right, that's right" does.

She's a Sensation (Joey) 3:28

with all due respect to morbz's mom, i think this is pretty close to perfect, as far as joey's '60s-pop pastiches go. starts with a spectorish guitar-drums vamp, and then joey rolls on the double alliteration of the title (SHe's a Sen-Say-SHun/SHe's a Sen-Say-Shu-un). i love his singing on this, including the way he sometimes stretches the title out to double its length instead of repeating it -- "she's a sensay-sha-aaan-oh-wo-oh/she look a so fine." christgau wrote a good thing at one point about how underrated joey was as a rock singer, which is otm. dude really knew how to play a line. anyway, the song structure is ridiculously simple: verse-chorus-bridge, repeat the same verse/chorus/bridge, and out. the only real variation is marky gets to throw some nice fills in on the second chorus. but the bridge! the bridge is the real key, the way the song modulates up a notch and joey just sounds so smitten: "i didn't know until i walked you home ..." also, i think after the first bridge, it stays in that key for the next verse, and then climbs again on the second bridge, so the whole song has an exuberantly upward trajectory. the only song on the album where joey gets and keeps the girl...

yeah the whispers in both choruses are really what put it over the top and make me go 'hmm'

Why is this considered overlooked? Did it not sell very well? Isn't "KKK..." their most famous non-70s hit?

i don't know how it sold, tho none of their albums sold all that well. but by overlooked i just mean it tends to get lost in the shuffle when people talk about them.

I'm sure the similarity is probably coincidental or the result of some shared influence I'm not aware of, but is anyone else unable to hear "We Want The Airwaves" without thinking of Elvis Costello's "I'm Not Angry," or vice versa?

Probably coincidental, because the Ramones' "That's right!" is a direct lift from Donovan's "Mellow Yellow."

(Speaking of direct lifts, the melody of the "Don't wanna be a working stiff..." section in "It's Not My Place" is taken from the John Entwistle Who song "Whiskey Man.")

OK, I'm off to Oxfam tomorrer.

the melody of the "Don't wanna be a working stiff..." section in "It's Not My Place" is taken from the John Entwistle Who song "Whiskey Man.")

aha! i knew it sounded who-ish. and true about "mellow yellow," obv.

7-11 (Joey) 3:39

the album's longest track and one of my favorites. joey's loving send-up of "leader of the pack," transposed from '60s teenville to bland '80s urbia. he meets her at the 7-11, they spend a torrid night at the holiday inn, and then she dies in a car crash. lots of funny lines -- "she was standing by the space invaders/so i said, can i see you later?" -- but also manages to pick back up the album's thematic thread: "whatever happened to the radio/and where did all the fun songs go..." and since this is joey fantasyland we're visiting, where the radio stayed fun, when they go down to the record swap the kids are dancing to the blitzkrieg bop. the song is mostly a joke, though, as joey makes clear with the deadpan reading of the climactic verse (accompanied by strings and thunder and rain audio effects): "the crash, shattering glass, the sirens and pain." yet another terrific bridge. makes me wonder if gouldman kept demanding bridges or something.

i mean a tetralogy with End Of...

Ramones albums do seem to go together in fours, conceptually:

* Ramones/Leave Home/Rocket/It's Alive: the classic era with Tommy
* Road to Ruin/End of the Century/Pleasant Dreams/Sub. Jungle: the pop era with Marky
* Too Tough/Animal Boy/Halfway/Brain Drain: the 'return to rock' era with Richie (well not BD, but it fits)
* Mondo/Acid Eaters/Adios/We're Outta Here: the final, post-Sire, post-Dee Dee, post-me bothering to buy new Ramones albums era

yeah i think that's a good way to break them down. obviously the drummer wasn't the only influence, but it's interesting how important that is. marky's chops worked well with more ambitious production, and i think richie's muscle was what johnny was looking for at that point.

You Didn't Mean Anything to Me (Dee Dee) 3:00
Come On Now (Dee Dee) 2:34

choice dee dee cuts, back to back. the first is some kind of weekend getaway gone bad ("everybody was cranky/even the maids were mean") leavened with oddball grace notes ("we came across a miracle/there was beer in the soda machine"), powered by a stomping surf-guitar riff and sweet aah-aah harmonies. johnny does one of his begrudging stripped-down solos, over a flaring organ. there's more organ (and another johnny solo) on "come on now" -- on the surface, a straight-up throwback that just about lives up to its ancestry ("come on, let's go," "come on everybody"). (of course, they'd already used the opening riff of "come on everybody" in "suzy is a headbanger.") but anyway, "come on now" also works in some classic dee dee couplets: "i'm just a comic-book boy/there's nothing scary to enjoy," "freak admission, stroll inside/i was born on a rollercoaster ride." and it goes out over one of johnny's single-note progressions, which get me every time.

supposedly walter lure (of the heartbreakers) was brought in for the gtr solos on this LP and Sub Jungle.

because johnny couldn't play them, or wouldn't?

This Business Is Killing Me (Joey) 2:42

i like this song, but i've never known wtf it's about. i like the intensity of the verses, joey's frantic, stream-of-anxiety singing -- "i'm sick-ta-death i'm nervous wreck this bizness killin me ya know this bizness killin me ya know" -- but it seems sort of unconnected to anything in particular. the only hint of any kind of business comes on the bridge ("you work, you work/you write all night") but that collapses into paranoia and resentment ("can't please all the people all the time/but then they don't please me"). the chorus is just a long string of "oh no, oh no, oh no." since this came out the year after the shining and "it's not my place" namechecks stephen king and jack nicholson, it's occurred to me the song could be written from the p.o.v. of jack torrance, but that's a random guess. anyway, gouldman amps up the psycho-tension with thumping piano and those ghostly soaring oohs and aahs in the coda.

Sitting in My Room (Dee Dee) 2:31

the album admittedly ends with a bit of a whimper. these is pro forma dee dee alienation, feels pretty tossed off. i like the line about "humming a sickening tune," but mostly it's by the numbers stuff, including the glue-sniffing reference. album would have been better served by, say, "touring" (demo version of which is on the rhino reissue). but maybe they were trying to keep some semblance of a joey/dee dee balance -- even though this is, on the whole, much more a joey record.

Joey was not a well budgie, you know...

of the original quartet, only tommy seems anything like a well-adjusted human being.

I remember seeing them on the Tomorrow show when this album came out ... alas, there was a guest host for Snyder.

I've steered clear of this one all these years, but looks like I'll finally have to check it out.

supposedly walter lure (of the heartbreakers) was brought in for the gtr solos on this LP and Sub Jungle.

― m coleman, Tuesday, March 17, 2009 5:42 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

because johnny couldn't play them, or wouldn't?

― paper plans (tipsy mothra), Tuesday, March 17, 2009 9:42 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

even the solos such as they are aren't much. i love the one-note solo on "i wanna be sedated."

http://www.punkrockcds.com/images/OperationIvy.jpg
Is this meant as tribute?

I remember seeing lots of album covers that matched more closely.
I will probably lose this bet, but I bet there are more homage album cover arts to Pleasant Dreams than for Rocket to Russia.