In 1975, music business legend Danny Fields, the man who signed The Stooges and MC5 to Elektra Records, was writing a weekly music column for New York arts paper Soho Weekly News, covering emerging artists such as Television, Suicide and Patti Smith.
Each and every week, after the publication of his latest column shining a light on one of the city's bright new talents, Fields would receive a phone call from a band from Forest Hills, Queens, telling him, "We're better than them! We’re great!" Eventually, in November '75, in a bid to shut up these mouthy upstarts, Fields agreed to go see the band at East Village dive bar CBGB. Which was the night that he discovered that the Ramones were every bit as fabulous as they claimed to be.
"They sounded great, they looked great, and it was like the sound was inhabiting your body from top to bottom," Fields told me in 2016. "And of course, I loved them."
"They were loud and swift and really smart and ambitious and their songs were perfect," he told Classic Rock's Mark Ellen the following year. "We met up outside CBGB afterwards that night and they said, 'Are you going to write about us?' And I said, I want to manage you. You’re the future!"
In January 1976, Fields got the band signed to major label Sire Records. That same month, the quartet - vocalist Joey Ramone, guitarist Johnny Ramone, bassist Dee Dee Ramone, and drummer Tommy Ramone - began recording their debut album at Plaza Sound studio. They finished within a week, and the record - 14 songs in 29 minutes - was released on April 23, 1976.
