“We managed to convince the hierarchy at Rhino that this should be done, because there’d never been a proper release of It’s Alive here in the United States,” says Stasium. What led to this vital piece of rock history finally getting its due? It was basically a hundred percent show, in my mind.” Everybody was freaking out - they didn’t expect the mosh pit in a seated theater. It also sticks out in my memory because the crowd destroyed the first ten rows of the theater there, which was amazing at the time. Everything went well they sounded great, and they were together, and the venue was terrific, and the crowd was great. Melnick, the Ramones’ long-time road manager, aide de camp and soundman, says that even though he saw over 2000 Ramones shows, the Rainbow show on It’s Alive was special: “That was one of the best shows they ever played. What struck me was that because of the ambience of the clubs and the way the boys adjusted to the sound of the rooms, it doesn’t sound like the same show three times.”
The Friars club up in Aylesbury on the night before New Year’s Eve was kind of in between those two. The first one we did on December 28 at the Top Rank in Birmingham was a quite a small place, so the sound of that is like a tight club and then the Victoria Hall show the next evening in Stoke-on-Trent was in a large hall, so you have the ambience of the room in there. “The sets are similar,” Stasium notes, “but they all have different levels of performance, and also the venues that they played in all had completely different sounds. Instead of feeling repetitive, this collection reveals the intensity of the tightly wound, staccato downstroke metronome that was the Ramones during the era when they were both defining an era and making some of the most enduring music in rock n’ roll history. The new It’s Alive features 109 tracks of Ramones magic, four complete performances that testify to the consistency and the power of the Ramones rock n’ roll machine, just a month after the release of their third album, Rocket to Russia, and shortly before founding member and drummer Tommy Ramone left the legendary group.
England was a perfect place to do it, because the British audiences loved them and the Ramones loved to play there.” “Their studio records were great,” remembers Stasium, who helmed six Ramones albums, including Rocket to Russia and Leave Home, “but there was nothing like a live Ramones show. The package will not only feature the previously released live album, but it will also include three additional complete Ramones shows: It turns out that producer Ed Stasium recorded the trio of performances immediately preceding the Rainbow gig in order to test microphone placement and work out technical quirks. 27), Rhino releases a deluxe edition of It’s Alive to mark the 40th anniversary of the original live recording.
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