Why The Ramones hated their biggest UK hit

The Ramones : Baby, I Love You

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On January 23, 1980 The Ramones biggest UK hit, a cover of The Ronettes' "Baby I Love You", spent its first week at #60. It be the band's biggest it in the UK, peaking at #8. Despite the success, The Ramones hated the song which was produced by Phil Spector. Johnny Ramone calls it "the worst thing we ever did".

It should have been a dream come true for the Ramones to record with Phil Spector. You can hear his influence in many of the band's earliest songs: simple hooks, catchy choruses, lots of repetition. After five years, it was time for The Ramones to get a hit and Spector got the call.  But Spector was a perfectionist and The Ramones liked to get things done quickly. When Spector was hired to produce End of the Century, the band and producer clashed at gunpoint.

In his book Lobotomy -Surviving The Ramones, Dee Dee Ramone writes about one incident at Spector's Beverly Hills mansion where he'd been sitting for three hours waiting for Spector to finish his conversation with Joey:

Phil must have thought I was an intruder. I really don't know what provoked him, but the next thing I knew Phil appeared at the top of the staircase, shouting and waving a pistol. The he practically field-stripped the thing in two seconds flat, put it back together in two more seconds flat,. He has all the quick-draw, shoot-to-kill pistol techniques....

Dee Dee told Spector he wanted to go back to the motel

"You're not going anywhere, Dee Dee," Phil said.

He leveled his gun at my heart and then motioned for me and the rest of the band to get back in the piano room. Everybody sat down on the couch and had another beer. We were all very drunk by then - I was fed up, confused, and hungry. Phil was a merciless host. He only holstered his pistol when he felt secure that his bodyguards could take over. Then he sat down at his black concert piano and made us listen to him play and sing "Baby I Love You" until well after 4:30 in the morning. By 5:00 AM I felt as I was going to completely lose my mind.

Both Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone had left California by the time Joey Ramone sang "Baby I Love You" with an orchestra. That song and the album would be a disappointment for the rest of Johnny's life. In his autobiography Commando, Johnny Ramone dismisses the song as something only Joey did with Phil Spector.

No wonder we never went gold. Chasing some kind of commercial success is more like just sitting there ready to give up. I would never have put  something like a hit song just to have a hit if it wasn't in our style. I would have had to live with that  for the rest of my life, and I don't think I could look myself in the eye after I did something like that.