But something else was happening on the other side of the Atlantic. In London, young musicians got hold of the album and heard in it a kind of permission. If four kids from Queens could make a record that raw and that alive, then the rules everyone had been following were not rules at all. The S*x Pistols, The Clash, The Damned: the entire first wave of British punk formed in the shadow of that $6,400 album. Malcolm McLaren, who would go on to manage the S*x Pistols, had already seen the Ramones play live in New York and carried the idea back to London like a lit match.
The influence did not stop with punk. Bands as different from each other as the Talking Heads, Nirvana, Green Day, and the White Stripes have all pointed to the Ramones as a formative force. The logic of the debut album, the idea that energy and attitude can matter more than technical complexity, became a kind of permanent alternative current running through rock music.
Every generation of young people who pick up guitars and want to make something loud and honest owes something to what happened in that New York studio.
