Yet another attempt to recapture past glory as a punk-rock powerhouse. Look, the Ramones’ greatest trait was their stubbornness. Holding out for a hit kept them going at least as much as the dependable income from schlepping the same 15 classics from town to town. Rather than rely on the same supporting cast, they could’ve demanded a winning vision for a music video, or a marketing department that would know how to present them to a larger audience. But they wouldn’t; they had faith in their songs. (That never stopped them from griping, of course.) So it doesn’t matter if Johnny wanted to return to Russia, which for him meant a clutch of hard-rockin’ goon-tunes. The melodies would always poke through the grime.

The biggest melody belonged to Dee Dee’s “Howling At The Moon (Sha-La-La),” an impressionistic take on the drug trade. Eurythmics’ Dave Stewart manned the keys, providing the hallucinogenic programming at the start and the spinet-style baroque accompaniment on the bridge. Joey claims full vocal territory: barks here, coos there, tenderness and rage at intervals. A music video was commissioned, an artsy, comic thing that kept the Ramones in a crate, delivered by a gangster Robin Hood to an elderly woman and her lapdog. It supported one of the eighties’ best rock singles, and it went nowhere. On the record, it was bracketed by two other songs that exceeded four minutes, a Ramones first. Each song featured a different keyboardist. Jerry Harrison boosts the posi vibes of the double-throwback “Chasing The Night” (Richie does an oompah impression of Tommy, Joey bats around the word “night” like a true doo-wopper), and Benmont Tench of the other Heartbreakers is pretty much invisible on “Daytime Dilemma (Dangers Of Love).”

The point was aggression, and to that end the band brought back Tommy Ramone and Ed Stasium. They frontloaded the record with the harder stuff, leading off with the taunting “Mama’s Boy.” A rare Johnny/Dee Dee/Tommy co-write, it’s a hard rock/psychobilly meld with Joey at his lowest register — too low, in fact, for the couplet “everyone’s a secret nerd/everyone’s a closet lame” to become an underground motto. Johnny gets a whopping four songwriting credits on the first half. One’s a 55-second instrumental (“Durango 95″); another is “Wart Hog,” a Dee Dee showcase and legit hardcore track that became a live fixture. One wonders what a solo Dee Dee would’ve sounded like as a hXc elder statesman, rather than the joke MC he dressed up as for a time. In his hands, the “wart hog/war!” refrain becomes pure sound, a bileful and joyous thing. (He still ends up railing about “junkies and fags”; whether he’s being sardonic or just baiting is immaterial.) Joey gets the next hardcore cut, “Danger Zone,” wherein he largely abandons melody for a monosyllabic assault. Still, with “New York City is a real cool town/Society really brings me down,” it boasts the worst opening of any Ramones song ever. After so much time away, it was clear that Tommy was brought back for the sound, not the vision. The boys figured they had that covered — every song was written by a Ramone, even though they had a gutter-punk version of “Street Fighting Man” in the can and a Richie song on the album.

Ultimately, Too Tough To Die is a typical post-Tommy effort: everything is tried, but commercially, nothing stuck. There’s rock ‘n’ roll, rockabilly, synthrock, hardcore — even a fantastically crusty “Endless Vacation,” written and sung by Dee Dee. Thematically, the band foreswore romance, which is a kind of progression; in its place were paisley political sentiment and harrowing survivors’ tales. Not that either was insincere: Joey was a frequent activist, turning up on Little Steven Van Zandt’s protest jam “Sun City” the year after Too Tough; the year before, Johnny fractured his skull in a street fight with another musician. A smart PR team could’ve put either to work, but it’s likely the severely image-conscious Johnny would’ve squashed both. Too Tough To Die is a fine record, putting all the band’s facets on display. As always, though, it wasn’t enough.