PITTSBURGH — The fans were busy trying to get up close, the owner was worried about his chandeliers and anyone in a conventional blues-based rock band could feel the Earth shifting beneath them.

It was November 1977, and the Ramones had arrived in Pittsburgh.

The venue was a pizza place on Craig Street in Oakland. Tony Policicchio — who would later open Graffiti — began booking music at Antonino’s, first with such coffeehouse artists as Livingston Taylor, Bruce Cockburn and Townes Van Zandt. The performers stood (or sat) with their backs against the front window.

On Halloween 1977, Antonino’s threw a costume party with Talking Heads, a month after the band released its landmark debut album.

The gig came up during a 2023 appearance on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” when frontman David Byrne asked his former bandmates — including Fox Chapel native Chris Frantz — “You remember the show in Pittsburgh? We played a pizza parlor and the opening act was a fire eater. We did two sets, and so did he! But during our first set, he got drunk. We’re just like, ‘Oh no, this is not good.’”

Antonino’s survived that and, 12 days later, hosted the Ramones, a band Talking Heads would regularly open for at the famed CBGB’s in Manhattan, despite having very little in common aesthetically. For whatever reason, Antonino’s ad in the local papers billed them as “New Jersey’s Best!”

The Ramones — singer Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman), guitarist Johnny Ramone (John Cummings), bassist Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Colvin) and drummer Tommy Ramone (Thomas Erdelyi) — rose out of Queens in the early ’70s, each with a different backstory but a shared distaste for the state of rock.

Joey and Johnny were Queens natives, Dee Dee grew up in a military family in Germany and Tommy was born in Budapest to Jewish parents who survived the Holocaust and then settled in Queens in the mid-’50s.

Johnny and Tommy played together in a high school garage band in the mid-’60s. The lanky, 6-foot-6 Joey, who was in an early ’70s glam band called Sniper, teamed with Johnny and Dee Dee in ’74. After a few switchups — the biggest being Dee Dee handing vocals to Joey — they added Tommy, who was working at a Manhattan studio.

As a nod to Paul McCartney’s early pseudonym Paul Ramon, Dee Dee adopted the Ramone name and convinced the others to follow.

Punk fusion

In the waning days of hippie rock and the rise of glam, the Ramones, in leather and jeans, found a way to fuse ’50s rock ’n’ roll, bubblegum pop, girl group hooks and the brute force of the Stooges and MC5. The lyrics were just as disruptive — catchy two-minute blasts about boredom, glue-sniffing and suburban alienation, delivered with a deadpan humor.

In a 1987 interview, Joey told me, “The Ramones initially was a reaction to all the crap, all the pretentiousness, all the superficial nature of what rock ’n’ roll had become. We liked songs. We liked three-minute songs.”

Those were the longer ones.

He also said, “We came off the heels of Vietnam when Joan Baez and Country Joe and the Fish and Bob Dylan were singing anti-Vietnam political songs. We wanted to get away from all that.”

The Ramones debuted on March 30, 1974, at Performance Studios and made their CBGB debut that Aug. 16, delivering a nonstop, 17-minute set of songs separated only by Dee Dee’s call of “1-2-3-4!” Live, they hit with the force of an oncoming freight train.

Legs McNeil, who co-founded Punk magazine in 1975, described that gig, saying, "They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song ... and it was just this wall of noise ... They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new."

The Ramones signed to Sire Records in late 1975 and recorded their 14-song debut in January 1976 at Plaza Sound in New York, finishing it in seven days for $6,400. It was a little loud and fast for radio, so it only went to No. 111 on Billboard and the two singles — "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" — didn’t chart. To the critics, it was a refreshing jolt, with The Village Voice's Robert Christgau writing, “For me, it blows everything else off the radio.”

London calling

The Ramones toured in early ’76 — and actually played Cleveland and Youngstown, Ohio — before heading to England to make their London debut on July 4, 1976 in the so-called 2nd Assault on the British.

That July 4, the American bicentennial, may be the most important single day in punk history. The Ramones rocked a crowd at the Roundhouse that included Chrissie Hynde, members of the Damned, and co-billed bands The Flamin’ Groovies and Stranglers. Later that night, The Clash made its debut, supporting the Sex Pistols at the Black Swan in Sheffield, England, and then both of those bands saw the Ramones the following night at Dingwalls.

The music paper Sounds wrote of The Clash, "[They are] the first band to come along who’ll really frighten the Sex Pistols.”

Meanwhile, Melody Maker’s Allan Jones declared the Ramones “moronic,” which — with songs like “Beat on the Brat” and “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” — they admittedly were. The Clash’s Joe Strummer, who exited the pub band 101ers to embrace punk, would later say, "It can't be stressed how great the first Ramones album was to the scene. ... It was the first word of Punk, a fantastic record.”

For comparison, the first British punk single was The Damned’s “New Rose” on Oct. 22, 1976. The first Clash album dropped on April 8, 1977, and the Sex Pistols debut, “Never Mind the Bollocks,” landed Oct. 28, 1977, almost a full year after the release of the single “Anarchy In the U.K.”

Punk panic

Back home, in July ’77, a PG critic ran a satanic-panic-style screed, calling punk “a malignant tumor” and warning that artists “spit and vomit” on fans while promoting “sadism and violence.”

“Had the media ignored such ‘artists’ as Johnny Rotten and the Sex Pistols,” he opined, “no doubt the movement would have grossed itself out of business.”

Should they come to Pittsburgh, he warned, it could be like the New York Dolls show at the Nixon Theater, Downtown, in 1973 that drew “a packed house that was high on everything from grass to cough syrup.”

Before playing in Pittsburgh, the Ramones released two more albums: “Leave Home” in January 1977 with "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” and the more loaded “Rocket to Russia” (with “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” “Cretin Hop” and “Rockaway Beach”) in November ’77.

While the Ramones played to 2,000 in England, there were about 60 people crammed into the Pittsburgh pizza parlor on Nov. 11, and it bore no resemblance to Livingston Taylor.

“I had these little chandeliers hanging, and the Ramones were just vibrating the space,” Policicchio told the PG in 2004. “People were standing on chairs, which I never saw before. For me, it was different, it was scary, the whole thing. The place got disheveled, to say the least.”

In attendance were two guys who would pioneer Pittsburgh’s own punk scene: John Shanley of the Shut-Ins and Kim Walters, aka Pat Hearse, of The Puke, who still can’t believe the Ramones traveled 350 miles to play a pizza shop.

There were four shows over two nights, opened by an accordion player named Tumbleweed who covered “God Save the Queen.”

There’s an idea around punk that anyone can simply pick up a guitar, learn three chords and just do it. That was not the impression Walters got seeing the Ramones.

“I think by that point,” he said, “they had played so many times that they were incredibly tight. They really knew what they were doing. It was really powerful. Joey was so tall and kind of lumbered over everyone, and it was just really high energy. They were so polished in their act, they were pretty much flawless. And so for me, they seemed unobtainable.”

The pizza parlor had no dressing room, so the Ramones were just sitting there at a corner table. Walters and his friends went over after the show to have them sign the copy of the first album, which he bought at Eide’s.

“We mentioned something about Tumbleweed, and they were really mad,” he said. “They were like, ‘Oh, we can't believe how wasted he is.’ I was just amazed by their strong Queens accents. Meanwhile, Dee Dee's way of saying ‘Hello’ was, ‘Hi, do you have any dope?’ That was the first thing he said to us. But they were really friendly.”

On to Atwood

After releasing fourth album “Road to Ruin” — complete with “I Wanna Be Sedated” — in October 1978, the Ramones returned to Pittsburgh on March 6-7, 1979, to play The Decade, where “disheveled” was the norm.

Steve Sciulli, a member of another pioneering Pittsburgh band, Carsickness, was there.

“I saw both nights at the Decade,” he said, “but I’ve never been a huge fan. I was more inspired personally from Krautrock or The Stooges, who are way earlier than Ramones. The Ramones were more like the punk-rock Monkees.”

“Packed and loud” is how Steve Acri, former record store manager and WYDD online DJ, described it.

“I arrived extra early to get a table right in front,” he said. “I had a ticket but ended up inside during load-in. I was trying to be as inconspicuous as a 6-foot-5 guy could be. I was playing pinball and Joey approached and asked if he could play in, and put a few quarters on the machine. We played and chatted baseball for about 15 minutes.”

Basketball may have been more appropriate.

End of the century

The Ramones returned to Pittsburgh about 10 more times, last playing the Station Square Amphitheater in April 1996, less than four months before their swan song.

They were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in March 2002, a year after Joey died of lymphoma at 49 —honored at the ceremony by Green Day, one of the many bands to follow in their path.

Dee Dee died at 50 of a heroin overdose in June 2002, Johnny died of prostate cancer in September 2004 at 55 and Tommy died of bile duct cancer at 65 in 2014.

In the ’87 interview, Joey lamented that the Ramones were shortchanged in commercial success.

“The fact that we started it, we got screwed in a lot of ways,” he said. “When new wave was accepted in ’77, radio started playing the safe bands, you know. They wouldn’t play the Ramones. We wouldn’t compromise. That’s why we stayed above the rest.

“When we started, we pretty much stood alone — and we still stand alone. There’s nobody like us, and there never will be.”

Indeed. Although thousands of punk bands were created in their image, none really even tried to look, sound and act like the Ramones.

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