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This mash note to surfing, punk girls and New York was actually cut twice: first as a single that was rushed to radio and became one of the Ramones’ few, modest hits, then in a slightly souped-up version for the band’s third album, Rocket to Russia. “I combined Sheena, Queen of the Jungle with the primalness of punk rock,” said singer Joey Ramone. “It was funny, because all the girls in New York seemed to change their names to Sheena after that.”

From the original Rolling Stone review of the album in 1977:

Rocket to Russia is the best American rock & roll of the year and possibly the funniest rock album ever made. Not that the Ramones are a joke — they’re more worthwhile than almost anything that’s more self-conscious because they exist in a pure and totally active state.

Rocket shows substantial progress in the group’s sound—it has opened up so that hints of Beach Boys harmonies float among the power chords, kind of like moving with the Who from My Generation to Happy Jack. Certainly, there is nothing resembling the lock step of the first two albums holding them back. The guitars still riff relentlessly, but they are freer within the murky sound, and the songs give them much more to work with.

Despite the title, the Ramones aren’t about escape. Reductionist aggression never is — conquest is more like it. And if you’re alienated by it, that’s because you’re supposed to be. The Ramones explore the dirty truths that pop music and rock designed to “entertain” have to cover up.

Most contemporary music—yeah, even the New Wave stuff—asks why we’ve slowed down or complains about the fact. The Ramones consider this irrelevant. The question they pose is more interesting: why can’t you keep up? I dare you to try.

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With “raw power,” producer [David] Bowie tried to mold the Detroit punks into glam-rock stars like himself. The mixed-bag experiment yielded this feral rocker, inspired by a headline from an article about the Vietnam War. The “streetwalking cheetah with a heart full of napalm” is Iggy Pop himself, who said he wrote it while wearing his cheetah-patterned leather jacket and “snorting big Chinese rocks of heroin.”

From the Wikipedia article on the album:

Raw Power was largely ignored upon its release, and the group broke up in obscurity a few years later. However, it was embraced by a small, rabid fan-base that included many younger musicians who would go on to help create the punk rock genre in the mid- to late-1970s and experience commercial success, making Raw Power one of the most important proto-punk documents of its era.

From the original Rolling Stone review of the album in 1973:

The Ig. Nobody does it better, nobody does it worse, nobody does it, period. Others tiptoe around the edges, make little running starts and half-hearted passes; but when you’re talking about the O mind, the very central eye of the universe that opens up like a huge, gaping, suckling maw, step aside for the Stooges.

With Raw Power, the Stooges return with a vengeance, exhibiting all the ferocity that characterized them at their livid best, offering a taste of the TV eye to anyone with nerve enough to put their money where their lower jaw flaps. There are no compromises, no attempts to soothe or play games in the hopes of expanding into a fabled wider audience. Raw Power is the pot of quicksand at the end of the rainbow, and if that doesn’t sound attractive, then you’ve been living on borrowed time for far too long.

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