"Rocket To Russia is a great record and that was kind of my entry point, my first experience with the Ramones - then I got to go back and discover the first two. Leave Home is great too. Fuck, you could just say the first Ramones record or any Ramones record but Rocket To Russia was my first introduction to Johnny Ramone’s guitar playing. We would read about the Ramones in Punk magazine and see these pictures of Johnny Ramone downstroking and I got to finally see them in like ‘79. That was a great year for me as I saw the Ramones and – and this will take us into the next record – The Clash."

"I would’ve been fourteen or fifteen years old and in Wisconsin when I heard this. I was in high school and there was somebody who had some shared interests and liked certain kinds of music. I'd never heard the Ramones before and he said I had to hear them, so he let me borrow his Ramones album. This would’ve been around ‘78 or ‘79 maybe. “That’s the strongest memory I have of putting a needle on an album and hearing something I’d never heard before. It was instant and immediate - 'this sounds so good'. I feel like there’s ‘before I heard the Ramones’ and then ‘after I heard the Ramones’ as a point in time for me, because it was the strongest feeling I ever had of hearing something on an album and within a couple of seconds going ‘'Yes, this is amazing.' “I thought, ‘I’m so late to find out about them’ because they had already been around for three or four years, and ‘Wow, what a shame that I found out about them this late, after they’d been around so long.’ Now, looking back at it, I think I caught them pretty early, so that’s good!"

"This was the first Ramones song I heard. I was nineteen or twenty years old and I’d read about them in New Yorker Magazine and alternative music magazines like Village Voice and Trouser Press. They were getting all this press but they weren’t getting any radio play in Wisconsin, so you had to wait until it came into the record store to hear it and I was smitten the first time I heard ‘Blitzkrieg Bop.’ I bought their record and it just floored me in its simplicity, two minutes or a minute and thirty renditions of songs that were verse, chorus, verse, chorus, chorus, end of song. The songs were super precise and cut down to the bare bone, they were pop songs and had a very crude simplicity to the recordings. I think I went through three vinyl copies of their first record. I’d get up in the morning and play it twice before I’d go to the university and then I’d come back at night and just blast it non-stop. We’d have these punk rock party nights just listening to The Ramones album and ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ always set the tone for me, it’s an incredible song. We’d bring all our friends over, get kegs of beer, clear all the furniture out of our living room and jump up and down and slam-dance. The first Ramones record is the greatest punk rock record of all time, it inspired The Sex Pistols, it inspired everybody. A thousand punk rock bands were formed after they saw The Ramones, they were the first true originals to do that and I’m still a huge Ramones fan."

"The Descendents don’t have a political agenda or the sense of humour of a band like the Ramones. They’re straight-up suburban punk. They’re clearly not from the gutter, but they still have this energy and anger which comes from a different place. Just because you grew up in the suburbs, doesn’t have to preclude you from making exciting and important music."

"The Ramones are quite a cartoon-friendly band and I thought they'd have more illustrated sleeves. Pleasant Dreams is always the album of theirs that gets overlooked even though it's got some great really poppy, bubblegum songs on it in the style for which they're known for. And it kind of looks like a Saul Bass cover. When I was a kid it was my favourite Ramones record, with songs like 'You Sound Like You're Sick'. Just brilliant. How many times can you say "this record's good" as a reason for liking it? I guess I've found there are two types of people: people who find a record, really love it, and don't want anyone else to hear it. Then there are other people that find a record, love it and are almost baffled as to why more people haven't heard it and make it their mission to spread it around. And I guess I'm the second type. Pleasant Dreams is one that I was sort of confused as to why it wasn't mentioned more."