They already had the songs. Having logged about 150 live shows, give or take, the Ramones had the facility, too. Sire tossed them four thousand more bucks and the services of Tony Bongiovi, a veteran engineering/production hand who’d recently finished tracking Talking Heads’ debut. (Three years later, Tony give his cousin, John Bongiovi, his first break, getting him on Meco Monardo’s Christmas In The Stars: Star Wars Christmas Album.) The Ramones still had a backlog of tunes, and the combination of more time and better production made for a muscular set. They abandoned their stereo-separation gimmick and got Johnny a bigger chainsaw. Joey’s vocals are still multi-tracked, but it’s less obtrusive, and he’s going further into his lower register. As you’d expect, Dee Dee’s bass takes a step backwards in the mix, but I’m not sure even he would complain.

Setting the production aside, the biggest leap on Leave Home is the nagging riff cycles that stand in for solos… on the debut, they were fidgety placeholders, the artiest thing in the band’s arsenal. Now, the boosted levels more than cover the lack of lead guitar. They’re additive. The legend holds that the Ramones wrote 30 songs, and 29 of them ended up — roughly in the order they were written — on the first two records. But while I’m pretty sure that’s not how bands work, the first three LPs are near-matches in songcraft and theme. For the devoted listener, “Carbona Not Glue” was a cute follow-up, both in subject matter and in the way it repeated verses with a shrug. To Sire, it represented a potential legal headache, and the song was swapped out. The Nazi shit from “Today Your Love…” gets a similarly jokey update on “Commando”; the new rules include following “the laws of Germany” and eating “kosher salamis.” The lancing “Glad To See You Go” starts with the promising line “gonna take a chance on her,” but quickly goes off the rails, referencing gun murder and Charlie Manson. Didn’t these guys want to hit the big time? The first single was “Swallow My Pride,” an oblique gripe against an industry that hadn’t made them Grand Funk Railroad-large after two years. (To be fair, Joey does sing the title as a series of gulps.) The second was “I Remember You,” which doubles down on the frustration while halving the words.

But whether they knew it or not, Leave Home did kick open the gate. They were never going to be Grand Funk, but songs like the cheery/crushing “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” and the immortal “Pinhead” made clear who belonged to the first wave of Ramones fandom. Just by existing, Leave Home freed the debut from being a weird, one-time document; by boosting the levels and sticking to the script, it drove thousands of weirdos into madness. They’d locked in their iconography: Vega’s Great Seal parody (the busiest punk-rock logo in history), the HEY HO/GABBA GABBA signs, Vega (or a drum tech) dashing across the stage in a Zippy mask. They could’ve toured off the first two records until the end of time. Thankfully, they didn’t have to.