Ramones is one of the happiest albums ever made: fourteen songs recorded for $6200, all about the joys of cartoon stupidity (“Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue”), cartoon violence (“Beat on the Brat”), cartoon male prostitution (“53rd & 3rd”), and gigantic cartoon riffs. “Second verse... 

 Leave Home is pretty much the same album, just with different songs: Instead of “Judy Is a Punk,” we get “Suzy Is a Headbanger” and so on. They’re mostly great songs, though. “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” and “Pinhead” became Ramones standards, and “I Remember You” and “Sw... 

 By Rocket to Russia, the Ramones had decided it was time for the big time: They wanted a hit single. Their not-yet-embittered attempts are a delight, and their fabulous summertime anthem “Rockaway Beach” and the love song to their audience, “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” have had a considerab... 

 Tommy Ramone left in 1977 and was replaced on drums by his previously unknown brother Marky Ramone, who toughens up the band’s sound a bit on Road to Ruin (still coproduced by Tommy, under his real name, T. Erdelyi). It’s got two stone Ramones classics, “I Wanna Be Sedated” (another faile... 

 On New Year’s Eve, 1977, the Ramones played in London, each song separated only by Dee Dee’s onetwothreefour, and the result was released as It’s Alive, the best of their live albums.  

 You can’t say as much for the bizarre misfire End of the Century, for which they hooked up with legendary producer Phil Spector, who scarcely understood them. Only “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” benefits from the hyperproduced wall-of-sound treatment, though Dee Dee’s heroin m... 

 Subterranean Jungle, another attempt at radio-friendly production, almost recasts the group as an oldies act, with three covers, including the Chambers Brothers’“Time Has Come Today,” and self-recycling originals like “Psycho Therapy.”  

 By Pleasant Dreams, the Ramones were barely on speaking terms, so Joey steered them toward their fluffiest pop album, a vision, perhaps, of what Spector might have done for them 20 years earlier. The Ronettes-on-a-bad-trip anthem “The KKK Took My Baby Away” became a live standard; Dee Dee’s... 

 Marky got the boot before Too Tough to Die and was replaced by Richie Ramone; Joey only wrote or cowrote three songs because of health problems. The result is a nasty, grisly punk-metal album, with Dee Dee as its dominant songwriting voice (he even sings a couple cuts, tunelessly). Tough, yes, bu... 

 Of the many Ramones best-of collections, Ramones Mania is the most entertaining; it’s sequenced for listenability rather than chronology, and came out too early to include anything from the dire final albums.  

 The much-maligned Acid Eaters, a collection of Sixties covers, is better than its rep; for one thing, it solved the Ramones’ songwriting problem. Pete Townshend helps out with backing vocals on the Who’s “Substitute,” but the band does better with a thundering race through Love’s “7 a... 

 Not exactly what the title promises, Greatest Hits Live is a live set from early 1996. Joey has given up on getting the lyrics across and is just sort of hiccuping bits of them (C.J. even fills in for him a few times), and the band plays so fast that the songs melt into a single long polka. The s... 

 The two-disc Hey Ho Let’s Go! has all the hits but flows awkwardly, especially the second disc.  

 One week later, they did almost exactly the same set, in the same order, in New York City; it eventually appeared as NYC 1978 though not quite as well recorded as Alive. The hits keep coming–27 of them in less than 54 minutes.  

 Weird Tales of the Ramones is an 85-cut overview that comes with a DVD and oversize comic book.