Song of the Day 9/23: The Ramones, “I Wanna Be Sedated”

By the time you’re reading this I will have gotten Joey Ramone’s wish, and I’ll be minus a gall bladder.

Contrary to popular belief, the chorus isn’t about wanting pain relief. Joey wrote most of it in London on Christmas Day 1977 while the band was touring the UK. “we went over to England, and we were there at Christmas time, and in Christmas time, London shuts down. There’s nothing to do, nowhere to go. Here we were in London for the first time in our lives, and me and Dee Dee Ramone were sharing a room in the hotel, and we were watching “The Guns of Navarone.” So there was nothing to do, I mean, here we are in London finally, and this is what we are doing, watching American movies in the hotel room.”

Though the song was released on the band’s 1978 “Road to Ruin” LP, it wasn’t released as a single until two years later, after it appeared in a movie called “Times Square” that featured a heavily punk soundtrack. The video didn’t come until 1988, when it was filmed to help promote the “Ramones Mania” compilation album. The “special effect” of the background characters looking sped up while the Ramones are in normal time was achieved by having the band move v-e-r-y-s-l-o-w-l-y and then speeding up the playback.

The Ramones version has appeared on numerous soundtracks, but a 1999 movie called “Idle Hands” used a cover by the Offspring. They apparently thought Marky Ramone, whose debut as drummer was on “I Wanna Be Sedated,” provided a too-sedate beat, so they sped it up a bit.