There is arguably no song in the history of rock better suited for a sports game than the Ramones‘ “Blitzkrieg Bop.” The opening track on the group’s revolutionary self-titled debut, “Blitzkrieg,” was an immediate bop for disaffected punkers and disgruntled rock critics alike, and it didn’t take long before rock critics brought it to sports games. As pointed out by Bluesky user Chris Steller, one of rock’s greatest critics may have been the first to take the Ramones’ classic out to the ballgame.
Buried within the pages of the December 1976 Creem magazine, Bangs tells of a May 30, 1976, Twins game at the former Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, MN, which he attended with Blue Öyster Cult member Allen Lanier. It was there that Bangs introduced America’s pastime to the four lads from Queens.
“I was at a baseball game with Allen Lanier—the Twins vs. the Rangers or some such shit, it was in Minneapolis anyway— and he kept trying to explain to me why baseball was good because it was boring, a line of reasoning also pursued unsuccessfully (at least to my understanding) by R. Meltzer in barroom conversations past,” Bangs wrote. “I just kept drinking beer, and just happened to have brought along my trusty cassette deck, which I kept turning on, blasting out with the Ramones, whom I discovered were perfect baseball cheering music: ‘Eye! Oh! Let’s go?’ Even the assiduously scorekeeping little kid in front of us was getting off on it. In fact everybody was but Allen who kept shutting off my recorder.”
While elements of the rest of Bangs’ story couldn’t be confirmed (if anyone on United Airlines flight 431, which reportedly saw Bangs thrown off the plane for continuing to play the song, please get in touch), the rest of the story lines up neatly. The game would’ve taken place about a month after the album’s April 1976 release, and as Steller notes, Blue Öyster Cult did play Minneapolis that weekend, as did the Texas Rangers, which lost to the Twins, 4 to 3.
At a time when the internet is drowning in slop, it’s heartening to see that there’s still room for unimportant but endlessly fascinating trivia to bubble to the surface. Beat on the brat with a baseball bat, indeed.
