‘Ramones’ Debut LP (Signed)

The Ramones' self-titled debut, released by Sire Records in April 1976 — twenty-nine minutes, fourteen tracks, two of them under ninety seconds. The album is widely identified as the first American punk LP and, alongside the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks and the Clash's debut, one of the three founding documents of the form. The present copy is signed on the front sleeve by all four original members — Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone — and by the cover photographer, Roberta Bayley. A signed example by all four originals is rare: Joey died in 2001, Dee Dee in 2002, Johnny in 2004 and Tommy in 2014, closing the line-up entirely.

The cover photograph is Bayley's: the band shot against a brick wall on Manhattan's Lower East Side, ripped jeans, leather jackets, sneakers and bowl cuts — the visual template every subsequent rendering of "punk" would either follow or push against. Bayley took the image in February 1976 at an abandoned playground near the band's loft on East Second Street (now Joey Ramone Place; the playground is today a community garden), shot for a Punk Magazine interview rather than for the album sleeve itself. Working on Plus-X film rather than her customary Tri-X in pursuit of better daylight saturation, she exposed the entire session on the twenty-eighth roll of film through her camera.

The image's adoption as the cover is one of the foundational accidents of punk's visual history: Sire Records had been working toward an April deadline with professional photographer shots the label had rejected. Punk Magazine's John Holmstrom called Bayley; Sire offered $125 for the photograph and she accepted. Johnny Ramone reportedly wanted "a real photographer." Holmstrom insisted on using Bayley's image. The label relented.

PROVENANCE:

From the personal archive of Roberta Bayley