Christmas 1977 saw The Ramones holed up in a London hotel, with nothing to do and nowhere to go. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy were dazed and disoriented after 11 consecutive months spent slogging through 144 concerts, touring the US, Europe, Canada, around the US again, then back to Europe.
In their home town of New York, they were still largely ignored and gigging mostly at CBGB. But in Britain, the hard work was paying off. The band’s blaring punk-pop urgency was boosted by radio play and an enthusiastic music press. That year had brought two UK chart hits. On New Year’s Eve, The Ramones would headline a showcase at the Rainbow Theatre, one of the capital’s biggest venues, supported by crowd-pleasers The Rezillos and Generation X. Johnny said later that gig was their greatest moment.
But until December 31, they were caught in the festive limbo days, when the UK capital closed down.
“It was great and it was rough,” the group’s singer, Joey, said in an interview years later, as he recalled the circumstances behind his most nihilistic lyric. “Me and Dee Dee were sharing a room and we were watching The Guns of Navarone. Here we are in London… finally… and what are we doing? We’re watching American movies.”
“I Wanna Be Sedated”was written by Joey in those hours. Always fragile, by some accounts he was recovering from a scalding accident a few months earlier, and still in pain.
“He was also coping with the jet lag and time change, when you’re up in the middle of the night. When you come home from a gig and you are wide awake,” recalls Monte A. Melnick, the band’s former tour manager and co-author of On the Road with the Ramones, a book that documents the band’s most productive years of touring, which was republished in an extended edition this year.
And London hospitality in the 1970s was bleak, as Johnny recalled in the book: “I hated everything, from the dumpy hotels to the communication problem... None of the conveniences.”
With its punk-brat sentiment and “bam-bam-bambam, bambam-bam-bambam” hook, this straightforward six-chord tune (which would have been three without the key change) was the ultimate anthem to desensitisation, clocking in at two minutes and 29 seconds. It is the song that crystallises Joey’s clever-moronic lyrical style. And for British audiences, it resonated with the spirit of the age — the strikes and rampant inflation of the so-called winter of discontent of 1978 would arrive just as the song was released on Road to Ruin, the band’s fourth studio album.
Joey had employed a similar lyrical trick in 1976 with “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”,and would again with “I Just Want to Have Something to Do”(another Road to Ruin refrain). That repetitive nihilism, as Melnick points out, was most effective when played live: “Audiences always sang along,” he says. Rolling Stone readers voted “I Wanna Be Sedated” the best Ramones track in 2013.
But it was never a conventional hit single. It would appear as a UK B-side, and later in 1980 on the soundtrack to Times Square, a long-forgotten US film about teenage runaways. It is not The Ramones’ best-known song (that is “Blitzkrieg Bop”, according to Spotify). Neither is it their biggest hit (“Baby, I Love You”). And it is certainly not their most festive (“Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight)”). But it was Joey’s favourite.
It has also been covered extensively, often employed as an energetic closing number in live sets. Californian punkettes and Ramones contemporaries The Go-Go’s lent it a sweetness— and notched up the tempo — for a live performance in Central Park during a 2001 reunion. Kirsty MacColl was another enthusiastic adopter at live gigs.
But it belongs to The Ramones, not least because it represents the band at their most cartoonish. They would later try to ditch that trope. After continuing to tour solidly in 1978 and 1979 and in a state of exhaustion, they switched tack, pursuing commercial success and recruiting Phil Spector to produce their next album, End of the Century, in 1980 — more sophisticated, less nihilistic.
Today, all the original members of the band are gone. Joey died of cancer in 2001, as did Johnny three years later and Tommy in 2014. Dee Dee overdosed in 2002. To their fans, their absence is felt keenly.
But this year, 43 years after it was written, “I Wanna Be Sedated” has taken on a whole new significance. “Just get me to the airport, put me on a plane” — the perfect Christmas sentiment for 2020. Especially in London.
What are your memories of ‘I Wanna Be Sedated’? Let us know in the comments section below.
‘The Life of a Song Volume 2: The fascinating stories behind 50 more of the world’s best-loved songs’, edited by David Cheal and Jan Dalley, is published by Brewer’s.
Music credits: Rhino/Warner Records
Picture credit: Richard McCaffrey/Michael Ochs Archive/Getty Images