Fun Music Part 2: The Ramones

Yeah yeah, everyone knows about the Ramones.  On the off chance you don't know, go read the Wikipedia article.  If you want a sampler, Loud Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits is the one album to get.  From the liner notes:

The Ramones were also first: the first band of the mid-'70s to New York punk-rock uprising to get a major-label record contract and to put an album out; the first to rock the nation on the road and teach the British how noise annoys; the first new American group of the decade to kick the smug, yellow-bellied shit out of a '60s superstar aristocracy running on cocaine-and-caviar autopilot.

That's putting it mildly.

Story from when they played The Moon in Tallahassee in '89: the club had set up a barricade out in front of the stage, a low plywood wall that came up to stage floor level that gave about 5' standoff between the dance floor and the stage edge.  It was held out from the stage by box scaffolding, with a mean-looking bouncer in each box.  Right before the show Joey and Dee Dee took a look at the barricade, pointing and snickering.  They shout around to the rest of the band a change in the opening song to Blitzkrieg Bop and start in.  The crowd starts dancing, surges forward, crushes the barricade, while the bouncers leap out for their lives.  Now that's a show!

I was picking splinters from that cheap plywood out of my left hand for a week.