STOP PLAYING THESE SONGS! - "I Wanna Be Sedated" by The Ramones
Joey Ramone's ode to road fatigue has become the Forest Hills Four's "Freebird". And that's not fair to the song or the band's legacy.
S.T.T.S. CASE #001:
SONG: “I Wanna Be Sedated”
ARTIST: The Ramones
SONGWRITERS: Joey Ramone, Johnny Ramone and DeeDee Ramone
ORIGINAL RECORDING: Road To Ruin, Sire/Warner Bros., 1978
KEY SIGNATURE: E major, modulating to F# major
SONG STRUCTURE: 16-bar blues variant (ABAB) with 8-bar guitar break and 16-bar coda
I had two strong candidates for the opening salvo in this series, and went with this one for a simple reason - I’ve always loved the Ramones. And that’s not some past-tense bullshit in my statement like “Oh, yeah, I used to listen to them a lot before I became an adult.” In fact, having been a fan of theirs since around the time between Road To Ruin and End Of The Century, it’s safe to say that The Ramones helped me become an adult. So to those of my high school peers that were secretly hoping that, forty-five years removed from the release of Road To Ruin and thirty-nine removed from my high school graduation, I would have consigned my Ramones albums to the attic, the used record store, or the Goodwill donation box, and bought a bunch of fucking Dave Matthews Band and Norah Jones CDs to take their place, kindly hail my upraised middle fingers.
Now to get down to business:
Having said what I said in my introductory paragraph, it’s hard for me to hate this song. How can I when the Ramones are one of my all-time favorite bands and a big influence on me as both a songwriter and a musician? But, just like a Led Zeppelin fan might have a little fatigue over “Stairway To Heaven” and a devotee of Lynyrd Skynyrd would rather hear anything of their original catalog other than “Sweet Home Alabama” and “Freebird” on the radio, I know there’s more to the Ramones than just side two, track one of Road To Ruin, better known to the general public as “I Wanna Be Sedated”.
To quote Far Out magazine, “‘I Wanna Be Sedated’ is one of the band’s most enduring anthems, and it turns out that it was written in response to boredom and isolation felt by the band at Christmas time when on tour in the UK.” The band’s original manager, Danny Fields, had the band on the road nearly the entire year, and given the timeline at this period in Ramones history, that would mean that the band was a few days away from preserving their last four shows of 1977 onto multi-track analog tape, the last show of which would become their first live album It’s Alive! Speaking of road burn, drummer Tommy Ramone was starting to feel it and was about to wind down his performing duties with the band he helped found, become a full-time producer, and turn the drum throne over to ex-Dust and Richard Hell And The Voidoids drummer Marc Bell, soon-to-be rechristened Marky Ramone. Lead singer Joey Ramone, as one of the band’s primary songwriters1 along with bassist DeeDee Ramone, took it upon himself to write his version of what Minutemen bassist Mike Watt would later refer to as a “tour spiel” song (think Steppenwolf’s “Hey Lawdy Mama” [which the Minutemen would later cover themselves], Kiss’ “Room Service”, Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re An American Band”, and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “What’s Your Name?” for four primary/semi-contemporary examples that preceded the existence of “I Wanna Be Sedated” lyrically.)
It’s a simple and catchy number, written in the key of E major (modulating up a whole step to F# major after the guitar break), with a variation on the traditional blues/rock I-IV-V chord sequence stretched across sixteen measures rather than the usual twelve common to blues songs; The chorus (the “20, 20, 24 hours to go” part) and the verse (“Just get me to the airport…” or “Just put me in a wheelchair…”) seemingly glued to each other (I-I-V-I x4 for the “chorus” half, then IV-I-IV-I-IV-I-IV-V for the “verse”). The guitar break is a standard I-IV-V-I played twice while Johnny Ramone - or maybe engineer/co-producer Ed Stasium, given Johnny’s impatience with both the recording process and the idea of tracking more than two guitar parts per song before leaving to watch baseball in the studio lounge - plays a ringing one-note guitar solo, a steady flurry of eighth-note E’s on the fifth fret of the B string that sounds like he’s fretting it with his middle finger. (“You want me to play a fucking guitar solo, Ed? Here you fucking go.”) The song then modulates to F-sharp (F#) for the last two chorus/verse sets and the final refrain. All crammed into a succinct two minutes twenty-nine seconds.
It should have been a major hit. The fact that it wasn’t in 1978 should be a crime against humanity. Thankfully, all good things reach their audience over time.
Unfortunately, this is where things get bad.
Bar bands - which for this article and series I hereby define as semi-ad-hoc groups of hobby musicians playing the easiest songs they can think of for a quick buck and some free beer - picked up on the simplicity of this song, years after it had first been released, and probably then only once the Ramonesmania compilation CD had been issued in 1988. No doubt, they used the excuse, “Oh, it’s only a punk rock song, we can get away with playing it badly” as a reason to not play it correctly. Never mind that the Ramones themselves were one of the tightest and most efficient live units ever to exist. Or worse yet, some of the man-babies in some of these bands will get the attitude that “We’re going to play this song better than those fucking Ramones could dream of” - and still fuck it up.
The average bar band won’t rehearse the song more than once or twice - if they get to bother to set up a rehearsal beforehand at all. They just might “learn the changes at home and wing it live” - which usually ends in a disaster. The drummer, who spent most of his developing years trying to copy Neil Peart rather than Ringo Starr, Charlie Watts, or Phil Rudd, will get instantly bored trying to play 16th-notes on his high hat like Marky Ramone and try, unsuccessfully, to cram a metric fuckton of tom-tom fills in wherever he can. (And also refuse to acknowledge that “Pratt” and his band brothers in Rush, Dirk and Lerxst, had a lot of respect and admiration for punk and new wave bands.)
The bass player will not only get bored with keeping the proper eighth-note pulse going, and throw in some Jaco-isms that were never part of the original song - thus destroying any groove the rest of the band was supposed to be holding for the song; He’ll also be playing his part with his fingers rather than with a pick like DeeDee did on the original recording. As a bassist myself, I always endeavored to play the song with the same methodology the original artist used; for a bassist to not adapt to what the song calls for is the most unprofessional thing he can do. Or if he does bother to take out a pick for this song, he’ll probably half-ass his way through the process, and do alternate picking rather than straight downstrokes like DeeDee did.
And then you have the guitar player that had his head so far up his ass in high school with his basement black light ditchweed dreams of playing like Ted Nugent that when it comes time for the guitar solo, he’s going to go through the entire E major pentatonic scale, played as fast as he can, and end up sounding more like Yngwie Malmsteen with an arthritic hand and four broken fingers.
I don’t even want to know what the singer is going to do with the vocals and lyrics. Will he sing the song properly? Will he be in tune? Will he stick to the lyrics Joey wrote and not make any juvenile substitutions to them? Will he be a few steps are from completely self-sedating himself after abusing his part of the band’s beer privilege?
Or worse yet, will the entire band just treat “I Wanna Be Sedated”, Joey’s well-meaning punk tour spiel, as a blues song that doesn’t swing at all? I heard one band in my lifetime ruin the song by playing a standard blues form underneath it. The song started falling apart almost immediately - apparently, only one member of that particular band bothered to learn the song completely and was part of one of those “let’s just learn the changes to the songs and wing it onstage” outfits.
So what to do about this song if it’s going to come up in the set? If you’re serious enough even for a side-hustle cover band, you should rehearse it properly. That shouldn’t have to be said for any song, but from my experience with some of these weekend warriors who couldn’t be bothered to rehearse more than a few times a year (if that… and then not at all six months down the line), I’ll repeat that shit until my caretaker at the Old Punk Rocker’s Home has to put me under sedation.
And honestly, as much as I love the Ramones, there’s no fucking way any band should be playing the song if it’s going to be nothing more than an obligation - something you’re putting in the set only because they think “every other band in the area plays it”. I had one ex-bandmate try to convince me to see a local country/southern rock cover band a few years ago with the excuse “C’mon, man, they even play the Ramones!” To which I responded, “Unless they happen to be playing ‘She’s The One’ or ‘Questioningly’ (Two of the band’s most country-esque songs, both also written primarily by Joey and appearing on Road To Ruin), I’m not wasting the driving time or the gas to go over there.”
Look, the Ramones’ music has existed since 1976. None of it has ever gone out of print. Casual fans know a lot more Ramones songs than just “I Wanna Be Sedated”. Let’s list some of them for the people in the back: “Blitzkrieg Bop”, “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker”, “Do You Remember Rock And Roll Radio”, “Psychotherapy”, “Glad To See You Go”, “Judy Is A Punk”, “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”, “Rock n’ Roll High School”, “Howlin’ At The Moon”… hell, sample your way through the Weird Tales Of The Ramones box set below and take your pick, maybe even put together a good medley of some of their classics. Just remember three things: Make your drummer play more disciplined, have your bass player get better at his flatpicking technique, and encourage your lead guitarist to keep his wanna-be-Eddie Van Halen-isms in his back pocket for two and a half minutes.
Just so you’re aware: when it came time to pick their choice of Ramones song to cover for the We’re A Happy Family tribute album in 2002, The Offspring picked “I Wanna Be Sedated” in the hopes that they’d have a bigger hit with it than the Ramones did. It didn’t exactly work. Be forwarned.
Joey is acknowledged as the sole author of the song in Ramones fandom, even though the ASCAP database also credits Johnny and DeeDee as co-writers; the band members wouldn’t start dividing songwriting credits individually until they recorded Pleasant Dreams in 1981, thus making the dichotomy of Joey and DeeDee being the band’s primary songwriters (with Tommy being the third for the first three albums) obvious.