Motown and Wall Of Sound imprints were all over Don’t Go, You Sound Like You’re Sick and She’s A Sensation.” I loved the Bo Diddley feel of the drums and the change to a straight beat in the break, which gave it the sound of an early Kinks or Who song. “It’s Not My Place (In The 9 To 5 World) sounded radio ready, even if radio wasn’t willing. “I loved the sound, and I loved a lot of the songs,” the drummer wrote. “It sounded radio ready, even if radio wasn’t willing” In his book, Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life As A Ramone, Marky Ramone recalled the Pleasant Dreams sessions with genuine relish. I was against the band doing that.”Įlsewhere, though, Gouldman’s input was more than welcomed. They were trying to go lighter, looking for ways to be more commercial. All I wanted to do was keep our fans happy and not sell out. “It really could have used another two or three punk songs. “Working with Graham was easy, in that he was always a gentleman, but I knew going in that Pleasant Dreams wasn’t going to be the type of album I wanted,” Johnny Ramone later recalled. Yet while their new producer greatly enjoyed the sessions (“They were fastidious, they were conscientious and I had a great time,” Gouldman told Bullz-Eye in a 2007 interview), his quest to help Ramones craft killer radio-friendly pop songs only caused further schisms within the band. And during the Pleasant Dreams sessions, at New York’s Mediasound Studios, Gouldman also came up with ideas for vocal harmonies and guitar overdubs, and taught the band to use the bass as a melodic – rather than purely rhythmic – instrument. Indeed, the renowned Mancunian had penned such huge 60s hits as Bus Stop, No Milk Today and For Your Love for British Invasion bands the group adored – The Hollies, Herman’s Hermits and The Yardbirds. Ramones certainly respected Gouldman’s track record as a songwriter. “All I wanted to do was keep our fans happy and not sell out” Ramones wanted to team up with rising Siouxsie And The Banshees/U2 producer Steve Lillywhite, but Sire rejected that suggestion, instead insisting that 10cc’s Graham Gouldman take the helm for Pleasant Dreams. Though End Of The Century was their best-performing album, it only peaked at No.44 in the US (it would hit No.14 in the UK), and Sire again insisted the group work with a name producer for their next record. To add to their woes, Ramones were still expected to produce the goods in the charts. Johnny later married Linda, but their relationship put the bandmates’ friendship under a strain from which it never properly recovered. The lack of communication was due to the almost irreparable rift between Joey and Johnny Ramone, which sprang from the guitarist beginning a relationship with Joey’s former girlfriend, Linda Daniele. You can’t run an organisation or a band or a government like that.” “Me and John had almost no communication whatsoever. “It would probably have split up most bands,” Joey continued. “There’s a lot of strong stuff on it,” vocalist Joey Ramone recalled in Everett True’s Hey Ho Let’s Go: The Story Of The Ramones, while also conceding that the album was recorded during “a real rocky time” for the group. “It would have probably split up most bands” Released in the summer of 1981, in the slipstream of the big-budget, Phil Spector-helmed End Of The Century, the record emerged from an especially stressful time in the New York City quartet’s history and, after stalling at No.58 on the Billboard 200, it was unfairly branded a failure. If (file.exists("data/ramones_lyrics_genius.Ramones’ sixth studio album, Pleasant Dreams, still cries out for some long-overdue respect. I’m embarressed to think about the tangled mess of web scraping code I was previously using.Īs usual, we check to see if the file with all the downloaded data is already available so, as we iterate versions of our project, we don’t hit the API over and over. This gets fed into a single function genius::add_genius which returns all the lyrics. First we build a data frame of album names and the year of release. There are numerous tutorials on this subject around.Īs always, we will be working in the tidyverse veracular. I will leave installing the token called GENIUS_API_TOKEN into your R environment as an exercise for the reader. Access to the lyric API does require a free application access token. Months passed then it occurred to me to Google “lyrics api” and, “viola!”, I found and the genius R package by Josiah Parry, available on CRAN. I coaxed it to get all of the lyrics but I didn’t want to share it in this post because you would likely not be able to get it to work smoothly. Originally, I built a very finicky web scraping routine to get lyrics from a site I commonly use in my browser. For this project we need a source of Ramones lyrics. Have you ever spent an enormous amount of time on something, only to discover there was a much simpler way? Yes, yes you have.
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