My First Love: Bob Mould on the Ramones' Debut

“It was 1976. I was 15 going on 16, listening to music with my friends: Kiss, Aerosmith, Foghat, Rush, Silver Convention, Fleetwood Mac, all that stuff.

“But there had to be something more, and I didn’t know what it was. Then on my 16th birthday I get the Ramones album and I’m like: OK, I can do this now.

“All of a sudden, forget full-page pictures of Aerosmith getting on a private plane, the drugs, the groupies – it looked much more fun to be the kids in the leather jackets hauling a PA down some steps in the Bowery.

“There was nothing more interesting. The music was transparent, you could see and hear everything that was going on. And it was so easy to copy.

“It was brilliant. The Ramones is when I went from being a fan-slash-aspiring musician to being this guy that I am now.”[](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rCZR1QpbRg)

Bob’s new album Beauty & Ruin is out June 9

Stephen Dalton has been writing about all things rock for more than 30 years, starting in the late Eighties at the New Musical Express (RIP) when it was still an annoyingly pompous analogue weekly paper printed on dead trees and sold in actual physical shops. For the last decade or so he has been a regular contributor to Classic Rock magazine. He has also written about music and film for Uncut, Vox, Prog, The Quietus, Electronic Sound, Rolling Stone, The Times, The London Evening Standard, Wallpaper, The Film Verdict, Sight and Sound, The Hollywood Reporter and others, including some even more disreputable publications.