Go Hard and Stay Home

Album: Ramones, Too Tough to Die, 1984

Best Track: "Chasing the Night"

Lasting Memory: The house my family lived in for most of my childhood had four levels, with the first and fourth levels being separated from the second and third levels by three-step stairways. The Ramones' Too Tough to Die makes me think about the set of stairs that led from the ground floor to the main floor. Listening to this album, I can practically smell the dingy green carpeting on that short stairway.

What to make of that memory, I have no idea. And that's pretty much how I feel about Too Tough to Die. The album's songs are split roughly equally between hard core punk (e.g., "Warthog") and the power poppery upon which the band had made its reputation (e.g., "Howling at the Moon [Sha-La-La]"). The album is also rife with unwelcome "message" songs such as "Planet Earth 1988."

While the resultant mix of music doesn't exactly rise to the level of genre-hopping, Too Tough to Die does strike the ear as more of a compilation of at least two different bands' songs. One of those bands would be the standard-issue Ramones about which I've been enthusing for a couple of weeks. This is the "staying home" piece of my post title.

The other band goes hard and bears little resemblance to the standard-issue Ramones. While I can personally attest from several concerts' worth of experience that the Ramones pulled off their hard core material pretty well in a live setting, those songs transfer poorly to magnetized tape.

Unfortunately for my personal tastes, the Ramones edged further into hard core territory with each subsequent album after Too Tough to Die. Which only goes to prove the point that most punk bands strive to make -- and which the Ramones hammered away on in "Human Kind" -- the more things change, the more they suck.

Up Next: Ramones, Animal Boy, 1986