The Ramones’ weird legend is growing 50 years after it accidentally sparked a punk-rock revolution – even though all of the New York City band’s founding members are long dead.
The odd-looking foursome made the unusual pop-culture journey from misfit outsiders with little commercial success to one of a handful of bands with a case to get a spot on rock’n’roll’s Mount Rushmore.
Fifty years after the band first played CBGB’s on Aug. 16, 1974 – one of the moments now viewed as the birth of punk – the band’s “Blitzkrieg Bop” and its chant of “Hey Ho! Let’s Go!” is blasted into stadiums at every sporting event, the leather-and-jeans uniform is instantly recognizable, and T-shirts with the band’s presidential-seal logo are so popular they’re worn by people who couldn’t tell a pinhead from a parrothead.
If the pioneering original members – vocalist Joey Ramone, guitarist Johnny Ramone, bassist Dee Dee Ramone and drummer Tommy Ramone – were alive and in playing shape today, they could sell out arenas after spending most of their careers headlining clubs and theaters, longtime tour manager Monte A. Melnick told The Post.
Key to their staying power is that their stripped-down rock sound with three-chord simplicity and singalong hooks has served as an instruction guide for hordes of punks while inspiring everyone from U2 to Soundgarden, said Melnick, author of the 2003 book “On the Road with The Ramones.”
“They were kind of like Johnny Appleseed, where he went around all over the place planting apples,” Melnick said. “These kids would come to see them and say ‘hey that’s not too complicated’ and all these bands started after seeing the Ramones.”
It wasn’t magic
The four original Ramones were four guys from Forest Hills just trying to make catchy rock music cut from the same cloth as the early Beatles or 60s garage rock – simple, two-minutes long and without indulgent flashy musicianship.
“I got tired of watching these guys doing guitar solos making all those strange faces,” Joey’s brother Mickey Leigh said last month. “I loved hearing these songs with no guitar solos at all. Really, it was refreshing.”
The first gig at CBGB’s on Aug. 16, 1974 is the stuff of legend now but the reality is those early days weren’t exactly magical, Melnick said.
“Seeing them in the beginning, I didn’t like them,” said Melnick, who had been a touring musician and recorded two studio albums. “They weren’t that great of musicians in the beginning … So when I first saw them, it was kind of rough on me but they developed over the years. They really worked hard on it.”
They had played their first gig as a three-piece on March 30, 1974 at the now-defunct Performance Studio with Johnny (real name: John Cummings) on guitar, Joey (real name: Jeff Hyman) fumbling around on drums and Dee Dee (real name: Douglas Colvin) struggling to sing lead and play bass at the same time, Melnick explained.
Melnick’s pal, Tommy (real name: Erdelyi) worked in a studio and wanted to produce and manage the band but joined as drummer by the time of the Ramones chaotic debut at CBGB’s that took place about a week after President Richard Nixon resigned in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
The dive bar’s owner Hilly Kristal had famously told the boys “no one’s going to like you, but I’m going to let you play here,” according to PUNK Magazine co-founder and artist John Holmstrom – who’d end up illustrating the band’s “Rocket to Russia” and “Road to Ruin” albums.
The band would eventually perfect their air-tight high-octane live show and looks. Joey would hold his mic stand tightly and barely move while Dee and Johnny would scowl as they assaulted their instruments in downstrokes played so quickly that an observer’s wrists could cramp up just from watching.
But that first night the band was still dressing a little glam and Joey was trying some awkward dance moves “like David Bowie or something,” his brother said.
It took a while for them to not worry about “fitting in” and do something different, he added.
Location, location, location
CBGB’s wasn’t exactly magical either, located on the Bowery on New York City’s Lower East Side – the kind of place most people tried to avoid in those days.
Leigh remembers driving his beat-up Plymouth Duster from Forest Hills to the neighborhood and being on high alert as he parked in an area full of prostitutes, drunks and “junkies.”
“Anything can happen,” he said. “You could get probably shot, stabbed, your car could get smashed in or stolen – it was like a Wild West town.”
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But soon the venue, one of the few in the city that welcomed original music, became a haven for the flashily dressed hipsters of the day, and artists and creatives define “punk” style in music, fashion and art.
Holmstron, of PUNK Magazine, first saw the Ramones in 1975 and by then they were firing on all cylinders.
“The first time I saw them, I was like this band is going to be huge. This is like I’m seeing the Beatles at the Cavern Club,” he said.
“Everything about them was radical, but at the same time it was kind of – what’s the word? – retroactive,” Holmstom added. “There was sort of borrowing a lot from the past but also kind of futuristic.”
“Punk” finally had a name, though acts like The Stooges or even the early 50s rock’n’roll pioneers were punk by attitude and sound, Holmstrom said. The Ramones and other early “punks” shied away from the phrase as backlash grew and the older generation came to look at the fledling genre as offensive, uncouth and even dangerous.
That was the uphill battle as the Ramones outgrew CBGB’s and went national, with contemporary audiences not always “getting” their music. Occassionally, they faced hostile crowds and projectiles flung onto the stage.
Chasing a hit
Their band’s 1977 self-titled debut is now considered one of the greatest records of all time but it wasn’t a hit. Neither were any of its 13 studio follow-ups.
After three albums, Tommy left the group and was replaced by former Dust drummer Marc Bell aka Marky Ramone but still the next level of success never came.
With Marky the band recorded one of its most well-known songs “I Wanna be Sedated,” starred in the cult Roger Corman B-movie “Rock’n’Roll High School” and were paired up with legendary record producers like Phil Spector.
Marky was kicked out and replaced with Richie Ramone (real name: Reinhardt) for three records including “Too Tough to Die,” considered a hard-edged return to form. Still no hit.
“Joey always thought about that,” Richie Ramone said in a phone interview from Calfornia. “He kept trying and trying and every record we did, he’d go “Richie, this is the one – he’d look at me through the top of his rose-colored glasses … and it was never the one.”
The Ramones wrote songs called “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” and “Teenage Lobotomy” and has lyrics that referenced Nazi stormtroopers, Charles Manson and beating on the brat with a baseball bat. That might have hurt them breaking to the next level, members of their inner circle said – but most believe songs like “Rockaway Beach” and “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” could have been hits.
Richie abruptly left the band in 1987 and Marky returned but then Dee Dee – the creative force behind a large portion of the band’s catalogue – left in 1989 to pursue a bizarre, short-lived rap career.
The band, now receiving cred as the godfather of punk, marched on with bassist CJ Ramone (real name: Christopher Ward) who gave the aging rockers an added spark and adopted Dee Dee’s responsibility of shouting “1-2-3-4” to start each song. The band broke up in 1996 as punk was having a new wave, with bands like Green Day achieving muti-platinum success that the Ramones never were able to sniff.
‘They’re lasting forever’
There wasn’t much time after the breakup to hope for a reunion. Joey died in 2001 after a battle with lymphoma, before he ever got to see the band get into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.
The tragedy came as fast and furious as the band’s performances — Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose in 2002 and Johnny and Tommy each succumbed to cancer, in 2004 and 2014, respectively.
Melnick said he sometimes thinks it’s sad the boys aren’t around to see their legend grow, even though they got a taste of rabid fandom in South America and other countries where they were got the royal treatment and were chased in their limo by fans like a scene out of “Help!”
“I tell a joke a million times – if the Ramones were this big when I was working for them, I would have gotten a big raise,” Melnick said.
But Holmstrom said the Ramones’ story isn’t sad, but one of triumph — and good music.
“It’s great stuff and i think that’s kind of their triumph was that they overcame all those odds,” he said. “The story of the Ramones is they’re a band that made it without radio play or even real Mtv acceptance.”
The Ramones famously didn’t get along – liberal Joey had OCD and a romantic while conservative Johnny was a rough street kid who was tough to get close to, friends said. Johnny married Joey’s ex-girlfriend, which put the chill on whatever friendship they had the 80s and 90s.
Joey’s brother and Johnny’s widow, who share control of the Ramones brand today, are now feueding with each other in court while the surviving members don’t get along or associate. Marky is now on tour playing Ramones tunes and CJ has been touring with Me First and the Gimme Gimmes, a band covers radio songs with its own punk flare.
In the end, “fans don’t care” about any of the beef, said Richie, who recently released his third solo album “Live to Tell” and has taken up acting. And the reason we’re still talking about the Ramones 50 years after that awkward first CB’s gig is because of the music, Richie said.
“Their songs – they’re timeless, they’re not really dated,” he said. “When you listen to a Ramones song, you don’t go ‘oh, thats 1977’ … I think that’s important to their legacy and being the innovators – that’s why they’re lasting forever. They’ll be around forever and ever and ever, you know.”
