On March 25, 1979, Bruce Springsteen went to the Fast Lane nightclub in Ashbury Park, New Jersey to see his friend Patti Smith play. One year earlier, Smith had scored her first Billboard chart hit single with Because The Night, a song originally written by Springsteen during his studio sessions for his Darkness on the Edge of Town album, and passed along to the punk poetess by Jimmy Iovine, who was working on both Darkness... and Smith's Easter album. The Fast Lane show actually inspired Springsteen to write another punk rock song, not for Smith, but for the Ramones, who were also on the bill that March 1979 evening.
"I saw the band, I had a lot of fun, talked to them backstage, and I said, Maybe I'll write a song for the Ramones," Springsteen recalled in a December interview with Howard Stern. "I went home, middle of the night, took about 20 minutes, it was done."
