Cool Groove #1: "Rockaway Beach"

The Ramones. Album: “Rocket to Russia” (1977).

The Ramones, to say the least, did not seem like beachgoers.

I’ve always found it hilarious that these guys—leather-wearing New Yorkers who seemed pasty-skinned to the very depths of their souls—did as much to raise awareness of a beach as those Coppertone-slathered pussies the Beach Boys ever did.

You don’t live in New York City because you love the water. This place is asphalt and MTA buses belching grime into your lungs while you stroll to the bagel shop, avoiding the more dangerous-looking sidewalk residents and picking up your French bulldog’s poop along the way.

That’s the charm of it, for Christ’s sake.

It’s also no secret that the west coast of this dazzling, ethically spiraling country of ours features gorgeous beaches teeming with suntanned beauties advertising their high-maintenance charms in the blistering heat.

No one really needed “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” not to mention all the get-rich-quick copycat singles the song generated, to clue them into this. Ask the average Midwesterner to name a beach near New York City, though, and they’re stumped.

Coney Island is viewed by most people as an amusement park, one that’s frankly not as much fun as it used to be since they shut down the “attraction” where you shot a guy with a paintball gun while he ran serpentine routes in an alley between some concession stands.

All for the best. Coney Island’s beach is only so-so anyway. Way too many rocks and hot dog wrappers. But pristine white sand is available in the Big Apple summertime, should you want to make a trek to the peninsula.

In fact—as you may have heard—it's not hard, not far to reach. Why, you could even hitch a ride there, should you choose to do so.

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Enter Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Marky, with their 1977 pro bono offering to the New York State Tourism Commission, all two minutes and seven seconds of it.

That, technically speaking, is not the official Ramones single of “Rockaway Beach,” by the way. It’s the raw, stripped-down “tracking mix” that’s included in the 40th anniversary release of Rocket to Russia, a totally live-in-the-studio (actually, it was a converted Baptist church) track with no aural ornamentation whatsoever.

This is the Ramones as nature intended, and if you can’t tell why they were a great band while you’re listening to it, please return to your cornmeal gruel and flat soda pop.

The boys make their reliably primitive thoughts known with “Rockaway Beach.” Clearly, they didn’t mind a little surf and frolic once they got done doing whatever one does while locked in the graffiti-filled toilet at CBGB’s with “Handsome Dick” Manitoba pounding on the door.

And Dee Dee, certainly the most enthusiastically self-degraded member of the group, wrote, “Rockaway Beach!” Regardless of how hard-charging the record is, that adds an almost wistful dose of nostalgia to it.

It’s a dream of somewhat more innocent times, before recording albums and bouncing around the country in a tour bus placed the unwanted burdens of adulthood on Dee Dee’s scrawny shoulders.

“Rockaway Beach,” then, is “Penny Lane” for huffers.

Uplift apparently did not come naturally to the Ramones. Here’s one of my favorite passages from Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s entertainingly droll and depraved book, “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”:

Richard Hell on the Ramones: “I felt an immediate affinity with the Ramones. I dug them and didn’t have any reservations about them. They were just the way they always were. Lisa Robinson hired me to write about them in “Hit Parader”—the first article about them that was ever published nationally. All their songs were two minutes long, and I asked them the names of all their songs. They had maybe five or six at the time: “I Don’t Wanna Go Down in the Basement,” I Don’t Wanna Walk Around With You,” I Don’t Wanna Be Learned, I Don’t Wanna Be Tamed,” and “I Don’t Wanna” something else.”

“And Dee Dee said, ‘We didn’t write a positive song until “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.’”

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I used to see Joey Ramone wandering the East Village pretty often in the early nineties, when I had just moved to New York City. He was usually somewhere around St. Mark’s Place. You could find lots of used record shops on St. Mark’s Place back in those days.

Not so much now.

On a good day, Joey looked like a bored, emaciated praying mantis. I suppose Sire Records was wise not to put a photo of him, sans shirt and wearing a Speedo, on the sleeve of the “Rockaway Beach” single, as most of America—immune, as it was, to the Ramones’ special brand of charisma—surely would not have understood.

But man, I really wish they had!