For the Ramones, Leave Home was an aspirational album title. Despite the critical hosannas, the Ramones didn’t sell many copies of their 1976 debut, a situation that made the make-believe brothers from Queens restless to break out of their borough and conquer the world. The solution seemed easy: take the couple grand extra Sire gave them for a second album and record a colorized version of their first album. All the essential elements remained in place—the songs still zip by at the speed of light, every hook ramming into the next—but everything seemed bolder and louder than what came before, as if the problem with the debut wasn’t the formula but the execution.
Stardom eventually would happen for the Ramones, but the hits they craved never materialized. If anything, Leave Home marked a step backward in that regard, peaking at 148 where Ramones went to 111. But by falling short of the group’s grand ambitions, the album crystallized the conundrum at the heart of the Ramones: no matter how badly they yearned for hits, they couldn’t help but sound like variations of their basic selves.
Maybe this consistency is part of the reason why Leave Home often gets dismissed with the praise that it merely offers more of the same. To an extent, that’s true: often, it seems like the Ramones are determined to deliver an answer to their debut, writing responses to their glue-sniffing escapades, Nazi flirtations, and horror film infatuations. They even cherry-picked another old frat-rock hit (1960’s “California Sun”) to reiterate that their heart lied in the music made before the Beatles. But viewing Leave Home through that prism undersells how the record sounds and feels very different from its predecessor.
Part of the Ramones’ charm is how they seemed like renegades from an underground comic book—a degenerate answer to the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, celebrating all the glories that slithered out of the sewer. On the debut, all this filth still seemed nasty, but there is a slight shift in tone on Leave Home that pushes the band toward caricature. Some of that derives from the album’s comparative thematic lightness: The group may still be huffing fumes, but they’re not selling their bodies on a street corner; the inherent scuzz and sleaze no longer feels quite so dangerous. Instead, the band sell their rebellious stance with a smile, turning a freak show taunt into the rallying cry of “Gabba gabba, we accept you/We accept you, one of us.” Elsewhere, the band shows hints of heart—they’re advocating for the woman subject of “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” and their griping about Sire on “Swallow My Pride” reveals some of Joey’s soul—but those moments are overshadowed by hooks so oversized they seem cartoonish.
Like before, the hooks are extrapolated from singles that cluttered the AM airwaves in the ’60s and early 1970s, and if the trash aesthetic doesn’t seem as artful here as it does on Ramones, blame it on the decision to try for a hit. Never mind that the Ramones’ version of a hit was decidedly low-rent—all the group wanted was to play the catchy parts as loudly and quickly as possible—because the Ramones could never differentiate between what would appeal to a larger audience and what was best left unsaid. They’d throw away their most immediate melody on “Carbona Not Glue,” a song that couldn’t make it on the album due to legal reasons, and they’d play their sweetest harmonies with the intensity of a buzzsaw. Sure, the record sounds beefier than what came before, but the group didn’t write straight rock songs for Leave Home because they were besotted with pop. They churn out bubblegum garage and ragged love songs, camouflaging their fizziness with brawn.
To that end, it makes sense that the 40th Anniversary Deluxe edition of Leave Home is littered with alternate mixes, all attempting to achieve a precise balance of muscle and effervescence. The great majority of the unreleased cuts on this three-disc set are devoted to slight variations on the original trackings. A new mix by the album’s engineer Ed Stasium gives the record a heavier bottom end and trims some of its trippy phasing. There’s also a bunch of raw mixes that were knocked off during the group’s first days at Sundragon studio, all followed by a plethora of alternate mixes cobbled together from original elements Stasium discovered during the assembly of this reissue. While none of these variations are startling, they are clarifying. Every one is labelled after one of the group’s obsessions—“Psychedelic,” “Bubblegum,” “TV Track,” and “Doo Wop”—highlighting how thoroughly the group was rooted in the junk culture of the ’60s.
The deliberate intent of all that studio dithering is brought into sharp relief through the inclusion of an April 2, 1977 gig at CBGB’s, a show performed about three months after the album’s release. It’s a different set than the one included on the 2001 expanded reissue of Leave Home, which housed a concert given at the Roxy in Hollywood on August 12, 1976, about two months prior to the tracking of Leave Home. And while the live recording suffers from some dodgy audio, it’s a welcome tonic to the onslaught of mixes that demonstrate how even the most primitive of rock stars could never stop fiddling with faders.
On top of the live show and mixes, this deluxe edition rounds up the rest of the stray songs surrounding the release of Leave Home. Notably, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” and “Babysitter”—songs added to the respective U.S. and UK releases of Leave Home when “Carbona Not Glue” was pulled from the record under the threat of a lawsuit from the titular cleaning company—and the B-side “I Don't Care” are added here. Alongside the proper album, the result is about 40 minutes of astounding music. The Ramones were masters of minimalism but, oddly enough, they benefit from this plethora of vaguely differing mixes. These extra tracks underscore just how much work it is to make something simple sound effortless.
