Listen: I Wanted Everything / The Ramones
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SPIN magazine put it perfectly when they named The Ramones the #2 Best Band Of All Time: “Punk exists because of the false assumption that The Ramones can be imitated”.

Or as Seymour Stein said, “A band like The Ramones don’t come along once in a lifetime, they come along once”.

We all remember how the mainstream and the old guard laughed down at The Ramones in the 70′s, accusing them of being limited to three chord simplicity. ‘I Wanted Everything’ was just one of the songs being played in the offices of WYSL when I stopped by for my weekly drill, plugging MCA’s product. My job at the time being the label’s New York State local promo guy and I just loathed most of those moronic programmers who fought hard to keep punk off their airwaves. These guys were spot checking their way through the newly released ROAD TO RUIN album, having a laugh, their self appointed intelligence wrongly assuming it was superior to the band’s.

None of them have jobs in the business now. They were yesterday’s version some of today’s musicians who dismiss electronic music for not being real or from the heart, fooling themselves into believing that their tired guitar rock sludge is. Doesn’t anyone learn from the past?

The nice thing about many of The Ramones’ singles through the years were the songs chosen for B sides. I mean, every song they ever did was single worthy, and it’s nice to discover the unexpected when playing their flips.

‘I Wanted Everything’ was coupled with ‘Needles And Pins’ and has way more than three chords. Besides not having their finger on the pulse, those 70′s radio programmers apparently couldn’t count either.