Pleasant Dreams Archives

Album: Pleasant Dreams
Year: 1981

. . .

It was a bit of a miracle that Pleasant Dreams got made at all, as something happened at that time that forever changed the trajectory of the band: Joey’s girlfriend Linda — for whom he had written “Danny Says” — left him for Johnny.

This, of course, is the type of incident that usually wipes bands out, but like The Rolling Stones before them, the Ramones believed so much in their core mission that they soldiered on for another 15 years, Linda eventually marrying Johnny. And while people often thought that the pummeling “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was about all of this, it was supposedly written years earlier.

Album: Pleasant Dreams
Year: 1981

. . .

And so the Ramones soldiered on into the 1980s, following the Phil Spector-produced End of The Century with the far less bombastic Pleasant Dreams, their sixth album, and the first that didn’t feature a full-band shot on the cover. It was also the first Ramones album where the credits listed who actually wrote the song, as opposed to the Joey-Johnny-Dee Dee-Tommy credits of the first four albums and the Joey-Johnny-Dee Dee credits on End of the Century.

All of this reflected internal tensions that we will discuss more fully tomorrow, but in a weird way, it meant that Joey could now take full credit for his songs that posited the Ramones as the saviors of rock ‘n’ roll, like the opening track, “We Want The Airwaves.”

Pleasant Dreams

Certain Songs #1807: Ramones – “Sitting in My Room”

Certain Songs #1806: Ramones – “We Want The Airwaves”