Released February 1976 Genre Punk rock Label Sire/ABC | Recorded January 1976 Length 1:30 Writer(s) Joey Ramone | |
Judy Is a Punk is a 1 minute, 32 second 1975 song by the Ramones.
Contents
Composition
Judy Is a Punk was written around the same time as "Beat on the Brat". Joey had explained that the first line came about after he walked by Thorny Croft, an apartment building that Joey said was "where all the kids in the neighborhood hung out on the rooftop and drank." The second line came about after walking down a different street. The lyrics refer to two juvenile offenders in Berlin and San Francisco and their possible deaths at the conclusion of the song. The song acknowledges that it is fictional, according to Nicholas Rombes, who describes this meta-perspective of punk in his analysis of the song as "both a line in a song and a line in a song about a line in a song." "Judy Is a Punk" is the original album's shortest song, being one minute and 32 seconds. The lyrics make joking references about going one better by stating the second time around, "Third verse/different from the first".
Demo versions
In 1975, "Judy Is a Punk" was recorded at 914 Studios in New York by Marty Thau. One version of this demo, along with a demo of "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" that was recorded at the same time, was originally released in 1991 on The Groups Of Wrath: Songs Of The Naked City. The same two songs were later released as a 7" on Norton Records in 1997, and then on the remastered and expanded version of Ramones in 2001.
In 2016, for Record Store Day, Norton Records released another 7", this time featuring two different 'lost versions' of "Judy Is a Punk" from the same 1975 session.