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Fri 11 September 2026 22:00, UK
Rick Rubin didn’t have a policy about trying to make everything sound perfect.
Sure, he wanted to make records that had a lot of punch behind them, but if someone had the right feeling for what a song needed, it didn’t always matter if the guitars were perfectly in tune or the drummer hit the crash cymbal a little too early. It was about trying to find the right energy and capture the moment where the air moves in a certain way, because that’s where all of the magic tends to come in.
And that’s true of every stripe of musician that Rubin has ever worked with. No one wanted to admit that hip-hop was one of the biggest forces in the world when Rubin first got involved with it, but when looking at his collaboration between Aerosmith and Run-DMC, the reason why it works is that it never asked politely for permission to be on the radio. It commanded your attention, and that’s what sticks with people longer than just a bunch of catchy tunes out on the radio.
The same is true of the kind of metal that he produced. There was no way to escape a band like Slayer if you had tried, and yet while their songs weren’t going to get on the radio by any means, you couldn’t deny the energy that came off of a song like ‘Angel of Death’ whenever it came on. This was the sound of pure mayhem, and that’s the kind of energy that traces all the way back to when Rubin was a kid listening to punk rock acts in the late 1970s.
Because if you think about it, a lot of the first hip-hop bands did have a certain punk edge about them – Beastie Boys were practically a bunch of punk kids that happened to be rapping instead of playing instruments, and when Public Enemy first broke through, it felt like Chuck D was a one-man version of The Clash on every song, while Flava Flav acted as the court jester of every single song.
That punk foundation was always present, and that came from Rubin digesting everything that he heard from the Ramones. No one was able to imagine that a band with four non-brothers from the forgotten boroughs of New York had something to say, but their approach had the ability to create a musical forest fire every single time they got up onstage and blasted through any of their tunes.
Rubin had grown up considerably since the days of hearing Ramones in his bedroom, but he said that the effect that the punk originators had on him was enough to rival anything The Beatles ever did, saying, “There was no point of reference for music that fast. But I did see the Ramones probably fifty times, and they were my favourite band by far. If you ever met the four Ramones, you know that they are bigger than any of the members. It’s just like The Beatles. They’re incredibly talented, inventive people, [but] The Beatles are a much bigger thing. Ramones are a much bigger thing. It’s not just four people.”
Further reading: From The Vault
You don’t really need the bearded guru to tell you how Ramones influenced a generation, though. If you look at the entire pop-punk revolution that happened around the 1990s, everyone from Billie Joe Armstrong to Travis Barker will say that the band were one of the pioneers of punk, and there still aren’t that many people on Earth who haven’t been introduced to them through ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’.
So while Rubin has travelled farther on from his punk roots, there’s something special about being able to say that you saw Ramones in the flesh. They had the energy of a freight train whenever they played, and when you look at their pedigree, there aren’t many bands that seemed to be as important for the modern age of rock and roll as those four leather-clad badasses.
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