Ramones: Dee Dee, Tommy, Joey, and Johnny. Photo via the Ramones' official Facebook page.
Tommy Ramone died on Friday, and now, there are no more founding members of the Ramones. It’s jarring. Most of their contemporaries—the Clash, Sex Pistols, Talking Heads, Television, Blondie—still have living members. Key players from forebears like the Stooges, the New York Dolls, the MC5, and the Velvet Underground are walking the planet. Beatles, Beach Boys, and Stones live. Chuck Berry and Jerry Lee Lewis are still around.
And sure, there are living Ramones (Marky, CJ, Richie), but not the ones who made that incredible first string of recordings: Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, and It’s Alive. Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy—the men whose names are emblazoned on the Ramones crest—are not around anymore. (Even Arturo Vega, who designed that logo, is gone.)
The Ramones were palpably, undeniably cool—four skinny, longhaired dudes in leather jackets and ripped jeans singing songs about Burger King and sniffing glue. Their muses were horror movies and punk-rock girls with names like Sheena and Judy. Their subject matter—both the love songs and the more acerbic stuff about drugs, lobotomies, and shock treatment—paired perfectly with their Queens accents. They were like cartoon characters (which they played up big time in Rock 'n' Roll High School) who made badass music and didn't give a shit about what you thought ("I don't care," they sang). In every way, they were the polar opposite of a gawky middle-school kid wearing too-baggy clothes in the year 2000.
I still have the Ramones shirt I bought at Hot Topic as a seventh grader. It’s frayed and too small and there are holes in the armpits now, but I doubt I’ll get rid of it. It’s an artifact from a time in my life when I needed the Ramones. Back then, I was hit hard by a death in the family. I was sulking all the time. I hated school. Papa Roach and Creed were omnipresent. I took refuge in two CDs called All the Stuff (and More)—compilations collecting the first four Ramones records—and a barely-working (but plenty loud) boombox in my parents’ basement. These songs were catchy and loud, tough and fun. They made sense to me.
And while it's easy to pin the Ramones as the dominant example of punk's "anyone can play this stuff" credo, their appeal wasn't merely due to those utilitarian riffs. By taking cues from girl groups, bubblegum acts, and early rock'n'roll records, they made perfect two-minute pop songs and performed them with the intensity of the early Who, the MC5, or the Stooges. Live, they'd shave an extra 20 or 30 seconds off those tracks by playing them even faster. It was thrilling music, the sort of stuff that encourages kids to start bands, rip holes in their jeans, buy Chuck Taylors, and scour the world for that perfect black jacket. There are enormous bands who have cited the Ramones as an influence, from U2 to Metallica, but that's only scratching the surface when considering their impact.
The turn of the century turned out to be a heartbreaking time to become emotionally invested in the Ramones. Joey died of cancer in 2001, Dee Dee of an overdose in 2002, and Johnny of cancer in 2004. Just like that, the band's three biggest personalities were gone. Joey was the iconic face and voice—a swamp-man figure who could effortlessly command the stage while clutching a mic stand. Dee Dee was the charming-but-unpredictable character shouting "1-2-3-4!" from behind his bass. Johnny provided the unrelenting power-chord battering rams. By comparison, Tommy seemed like "the quiet Ramone," but his role as drummer was essential: He had to keep pace with Johnny.
Behind the scenes, none of them got along very well. Johnny and Joey fell out in the early '80s when Johnny began dating (and later married) Joey's ex-girlfriend. Dee Dee frequently struggled with drug abuse and bipolar disorder. They all treated each other poorly. Tommy quit in 1978 when he realized that he couldn't survive the road with the Ramones. In the documentary End of the Century, he said: "In a studio, I was in control and creating. And on the road, I was a passenger, basically being bossed around and not treated very well, actually. I felt like I was losing my mind, and I would explain to people, 'I think I'm losing my mind,' and they would find this amusing. So the choice was me staying on the road and becoming a vegetable, or helping them write the songs and producing the records—which I felt would be a little more productive—and bringing in another drummer."
It was a rational decision. Tommy wanted to focus on the part of the job that he liked and bring in someone else who could hold his own with the other guys and, as he put it, "beat the crap out of them" when they got out of line. When Tommy left, Johnny worried that they were losing the band's mediator, the reasonable one who kept everyone else in check.
Late in life, after producing records by the Replacements and Redd Kross, Tommy didn't look like a Ramone. Johnny always had the hair and the jacket, but near the end, Tommy just looked like an older man—gray hair, gray beard, glasses. He played dobro and mandolin in a bluegrass band. He did live acoustic versions of Ramones songs, smiling at the crowd.
In End of the Century, Dee Dee and Johnny are asked if Tommy was important to the Ramones' sound. They both say "no," essentially arguing that he was in the right place at the right time, that any drummer could've done what he did. And maybe that's so. But Tommy was the one who encouraged the Ramones to take Joey out from behind the kit and make him the frontman. He acted as their first manager and pushed them toward their uniform. He wrote their first press release, not to mention some of their most indelible songs (including "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" and "Blitzkrieg Bop"). He co-produced some of their best records. Without Tommy Ramone, there wouldn't be the Ramones. Without the Ramones, rock'n'roll wouldn't be nearly as interesting.
