Rockaway Beach
by Ramones
- 192
- BPM
- A major
- Key
- 11B
- Camelot
- 47
- Danceability
- 1
- Acousticness
Dee Dee Ramone wrote "Rockaway Beach" in the style of the Beach Boys and early surf rock. The beach is the real one in Queens, New York, where Dee Dee liked to spend time. Joey Ramone had grown up there. Johnny Ramone said Dee Dee was the only real beachgoer in the group.
The song runs two minutes and six seconds. It opens with a rhythm guitar played at high speed in downstrokes, with grinding distortion, and has an interlude in a different meter from the rest. The verses set a hot New York summer against surfboards and discotheques.
The Ramones released it on Rocket to Russia in 1977. It reached number 66 on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest chart position of any of their singles. In 2002 the cartoon What's New, Scooby-Doo? used it in an episode called "She Sees Sea Monsters by the Sea Shore". In June 2013 the Queens Economic Development Corporation put it in a radio ad campaign to draw New Yorkers back to Rockaway Beach after Hurricane Sandy.
Rockaway Beach runs at 192 BPM, the tempo of speedcore, blast-beat metal and very fast hardcore. In classical terms it sits in presto territory. A bar of 4/4 lasts 1.25 seconds, and a quarter-note delay is 313 ms. It is in A major, Camelot 11B, which shares its notes with F# minor and mixes cleanly with D major and E major.
We use multiple sources as part of our online research for the song story including Wikipedia.