As you can see from the picture of my neice Samantha below, born last week, our family has always considered The Ramones to be our "family band" and we indoctrinate our children early.
I may be a LITTLE BIASED when it comes to reviewing Ramones material, but so be it.
Released just in time for Christmas last year, the
Weird Tales of the Ramones box set may be the ultimate collection of Ramones music assembled in one place. At 85 songs and 93 minutes long (just kidding... one, two three, four, one, two, three, four...), the set has some rarities and b-sides along with essentially all the classics spanning the band's entire career. It also includes a documentary DVD
Lifestyles of the Ramones and a comic book based history of the band along with a set of 3-D glasses, with artwork by 25 comic book artists as Matt Groening, creater of the Simpsons, Sergio Argones of Mad Magazine
, and of course Zippy creator Bill Griffith.
If you only have one or two Ramones CDs, this is a great package to give you a taste of their whole career. If you have all their other discs most of the music will be redundant, with the exception of a handful of special mixes and b-sides, but the documentary and history can help justify the purchase. Even at its list price of $64.98 this box set is cheaper than buying each song one at a time at iTunes.
Personally, I have not had the opportunity to replace most of my vinyl Ramones collection with CD copies so this was a great gift for me. Kudos to our editor Christie Keith on her taste in gift selection.
Favorite Songs:
All of them