Craig Leon walked into Plaza Sound Studios in February 1976 with four guys from Forest Hills, Queens, a $6,400 budget, and seven days on the clock. The room was built above Radio City Music Hall, formerly used as a radio broadcast studio for the NBC Symphony Orchestra. He put the Ramones in it and recorded the most compact, violent, and joyful rock-and-roll album of the decade. The record was “Ramones,” released April 23, 1976, on Sire Records. You know the album. You probably don’t know his name.
Leon was born in Miami in 1952, raised in Fort Myers, and moved to New York in 1973, hired as assistant to producer Richard Gottehrer at Sire Records. He saw the Ramones in the summer of 1975 and did not do what every other industry person did, which was walk out. He stayed. Then he brought the demo to Sire president Seymour Stein, personally persuaded Stein to watch them play, and got them signed. Drummer Tommy Ramone later said, “Craig Leon is the one who got us signed, single handed. He risked his career to get us on the label.” That is not a small thing. At the time, Sire had signed only European progressive rock bands. Leon was asking them to release fourteen songs about beating on brats with baseball bats.
The recording decisions on “Ramones” were as deliberate as they were radical. Leon close-miked the drums to kill the reverb, panned bass left and guitar right, and double-tracked Joey’s vocals because doubling locked in the pronunciation, the same automatic double-tracking technique John Lennon used. The album was co-produced with Tommy Ramone, credited as T. Erdelyi. Mixing was split between two studios: tracks one and two were mixed by Rob Freeman and Leon at Plaza Sound, while tracks three and four went to Shelly Yakus and Leon at the Record Plant. The result was a record that sounded like it was recorded in a basement even though the studio was a concert hall. Leon described the Ramones as “performance art,” and the record sounds like it was captured, not manufactured. “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “53rd & 3rd,” “I Don’t Wanna Go Down to the Basement”: fourteen tracks, just under thirty minutes, no fat anywhere.
But the Ramones album is only one entry in what Leon built between 1976 and 1977. After leaving Sire following the Ramones release, he joined Richard Gottehrer and Marty Thau to set up a production company called Instant Records and kept working the CBGB circuit. He co-produced the Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ debut EP, featuring “Blank Generation,” “Another World,” and “You Gotta Lose,” recorded at Bell Sound Studios in New York in late 1976 and released on Ork Records in November of that year. That EP, and the persona Richard Hell had assembled, was the thing Malcolm McLaren carried back to London and reconstituted as the visual and attitudinal blueprint for British punk. Leon also co-produced Suicide’s debut album in 1977 on Red Star Records with Marty Thau, the record that gave “Ghost Rider” and “Frankie Teardrop” to the world and proved that punk’s confrontational energy had nothing to do with guitars. And he produced Blondie’s self-titled debut, released in 1976 on Private Stock Records, with tracks like “X Offender” and “Rip Her to Shreds” sitting right at the intersection of punk attitude and pop hook.
That is four foundational records in roughly eighteen months. The Ramones. The Richard Hell EP. Suicide. Blondie. Each one essential. Each one pointing in a different direction from the same source. The Ramones built the template for every three-chord band that followed. Suicide showed what happened when you stripped guitars out entirely and kept the menace. The Richard Hell EP gave British punk its aesthetic DNA. Blondie proved the whole thing could have melodies. Leon did not have a house sound. He had ears and the ability to hear what a band actually was, not what they looked like or how rough their playing was. He told the Red Bull Music Academy in 2015 that Blondie, in 1974 or 1975, “were probably voted the band that wouldn’t ever get signed, because they were very, very shoddy players, even by CBGB and Max’s standards.” He made their debut anyway.
The name that gets attached to this era is CBGB, or Seymour Stein, or the bands themselves. Leon is the figure who was in the room making the actual sonic decisions, and who had the A&R instincts to get those bands in front of a label in the first place. He is now a classical composer and orchestrator, recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and producing work performed by Luciano Pavarotti. The distance from “Blitzkrieg Bop” to Pavarotti is not as strange as it sounds if you understand that both required the same fundamental skill: hearing what a performance actually contains and getting it onto tape without crushing it. New York punk had a lot of people who were there. Craig Leon was one of the few who knew what to do with what he was hearing.
