On stage, they were the personification of unity - even

family. The four men dressed the same -in leather motorcycle
jackets, weathered jeans, sneakers - had the same dark hair
colour, shared the same last name. They seemed to think the
same thoughts and breathe the same energy. They often didn't
stop between songs, not even as bassist Dee Dee Ramone barked
out the mad "1-2-3-4" time signature that dictated the tempo
for their next number. Guitarist Johnny Ramone and drummer
Tommy Ramone would slam into breakneck unison with a power
that could make audience members lean back, as if they'd been
slammed in the chest. Johnny and Dee Dee played with legs
astride, looking unconquerable. Between them stood lead singer
Joey Ramone - gangly, with dark glasses and a hair mess that
fell over his eyes, protecting him from a world that had too
often been unkind - proclaiming the band's hilarious,
disturbing tales of misplacement and heartbreak. There was a
pleasure and spirit, a palpable commonality, in what the
Ramones were doing onstage together.

When they left the stage, that fellowship fell away. They
would climb into their van and ride to a hotel or their next
show in silence. Two of the members, Johnny and Joey, didn't
speak to each other for most of the band's 22-year history. It
was a bitter reality for a group that, if it didn't invent
punk, certainly codified it effectively - its stance, sound
and attitude, its rebellion and rejection of popular music
conventions - just as Elvis Presley had done with early rock &
roll. The Ramones likely inspired more bands than anybody
since the Beatles; the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Nirvana,
Metallica, the Misfits, Green Day and countless others have
owed much of their sound and creed to what the band made
possible. The Ramones made a model that almost anybody could
grab hold of: basic chords, pugnacity and a noise that could
lay waste to - or awaken - anything.

But they paid a heavy cost for their achievement. Much of the
music world rejected them, sometimes vehemently. Others saw
them as a joke that had run its course. The Ramones never had
a true hit single or album, though at heart they wrote
supremely melodic music. They continued for years across
indifference and impediments, but the rift between the two
leading members only worsened. They're revered now - there are
statues and streets and museums that honour them - and we see
people wearing their T-shirts, with their blackened
presidential seal, everywhere.
But all four original members are gone; none of them can take
pleasure in the belated prestige. The Ramones were a band that
changed the world, and then died.

The Ramones didn’t share bloodlines, but they did have the
important common background of coming of age in suburbia - in
Forest Hills, Queens, a predominantly Jewish middle-class
stronghold that bred ennui and restiveness among its non-
conformist youth. The Ramones were a few years younger than
their 1950s and 1960s heroes - Presley, the Beatles, the
Rolling Stones - which allowed them a broader field of musical
references to draw from: bubblegum pop, early heavy metal,
surf music. More important, most of the original Ramones had
some sort of experience of living under dominance - sometimes
disconcerting, even frightful - or simply an ineradicable
sense of being the wrong person in the wrong place. "People
who join a band like the Ramones don't come from stable
backgrounds," wrote Dee Dee, "because it's not that civilized
an art form. Punk rock comes from angry kids who feel like
being creative."

Drummer Tommy Ramone - who was the catalyst in pulling the

band together and in moulding its musical aesthetic - largely
kept his back story and hurt to himself. He was born as Tamas
Erdelyi (later Anglicised into Thomas Erdelyi) in Budapest,
Hungary, in January 1949. His family moved to Brooklyn in the
mid-1950s - an eventful moment to arrive in the promised land.
"[Hungary] was a very restrictive regime," he told author
Everett True, in Hey Ho Let's Go: The Story of the Ramones.
'You didn't hear too much Western music. I remember the early
stages of rock & roll, how much it excited me - even as a
young kid I was into dressing cool, into wearing a certain
type of shoes." In his first year at Forest Hills High, Tommy
met John Cummings - later known as Johnny Ramone, the band's
oldest member, born October 8th, 1948. Johnny was charismatic
and brooding, and intended to command respect. Tommy and
Johnny joined a band, Tangerine Puppets - Tommy on lead
guitar, Johnny on bass - that became locally notable as much
for Cummings' volatility as for their music. One time, when
the Puppets were playing "Satisfaction", according to another
band member, John noticed the class president standing in the
wings. "[John] ran over to him and hit him in the balls with
his guitar neck," said the band member. "He told the kid that
it was an accident, but we knew John hated this kid."
Another time, Cummings got into a fight with the band's lead
singer, pummelling him onstage until the other members pulled
him off. "We all liked Johnny," Tommy said. "That anger is
pure."

Johnny was raised to be severe. His father, a hard-drinking

construction worker, once made Johnny pitch a baseball game
with a broken big toe: "What did I raise - a baby?" Johnny
became tough and domineering, like his father.

He became scary even to himself. In his autobiography,

Commando, Johnny wrote, "I had been on a streak of bad,
violent behavior for two years. I was just bad, every minute
of the day." He recalled hauling discarded TV sets to the tops
of apartment buildings and dropping them near people on the
street. He threw bricks through windows, simply to do it, and
he also strong-armed people. "Then all of a sudden," Johnny
wrote, "one day everything changed. I was twenty. I was
walking down the block, near my neighborhood ... and I heard a
voice. I don't know what it was, God maybe, It asked, 'What
are you doing with your life? Is this what you are here for?'
It was a spiritual awakening. And I just immediately stopped
everything. It was all clear-cut right then."

Sometime later, delivering clothes for a dry cleaner, he met

Doug Colvin, known as Dee Dee. If his autobiography, Lobotomy,
is to be believed, Dee Dee's childhood was hellish. His
father, an Army master sergeant stationed in Germany, moved
the family back and forth between there and the U.S. His
mother, he wrote, "was a drunken nut job, prone to emotional
outbursts". His parents fought brutally. "Their lives were
complete chaos," he wrote, "and they blamed it all on me." Dee
Dee was already taking narcotics in his early teens. "I
couldn't see a future for myself. Then I heard the Beatles for
the first time. I got my first transistor radio, a Beatle
haircut and a Beatle suit. Rock 'n' roll [gave] me a sense of
my own identity." When Dee Dee was about 15, his mother left
his father, moving him and his sister to Forest Hills. "I can
see now how it was only natural that I would gravitate toward
Tommy, Joey, and Johnny Ramone," he wrote. "They were the
obvious creeps of the neighbourhood. No one would have ever
pegged any of us as candidates for any kind of success in
life."
Tommy, though, did. He urged Johnny and Dee Dee to form a
band. He'd help them find their sound and direction; he'd
worked as an audio engineer at Record Plant on sessions with
Jimi Hendrix and John McLaughlin. Johnny resisted. He'd become
practical-minded. "I want to be normal," he'd tell Tommy.
Also, he had seen plenty of rock & roll live - the Beatles,
the Stones, Hendrix, the Doors - and had become preoccupied
with Led Zeppelin. "I liked violent bands," he said. "I hated
hippies and never liked that peace-and-love shit." Johnny told
Tommy he couldn't play guitar like any of those other
musicians.

Then Johnny saw the New York Dolls, featuring singer David
Johansen and guitarist Johnny Thunders. The Dolls had taken
the license that David Bowie and the glitter movement had
implied, and brought a new trashy democratic feasibility:
Anybody could make meaningful noise. "Wow, I can do this,
too," Johnny thought. "They're great; they're terrible, but
just great. I can do this." Johnny finally accepted Tommy's
suggestion. He bought a $50 Mosrite (the same guitar that
MC5's Fred "Sonic" Smith and members of the Ventures played).
As things developed, Dee Dee played bass, Johnny guitar; and a
friend of theirs and Tommy's joined on drums: Jeffrey Hyman.

Hyman, who became Joey Ramone, had hardships his whole life.
He was born with a teratoma - a rare tumour that sometimes
contains hair, teeth and bone - the size of a baseball,
attached to his spine. Doctors removed the growth when Hyman
was a few weeks old, but it's possible the ordeal affected him
in later years, contributing to his tendency to infections and
bad blood circulation throughout his life. His parents
divorced as he was approaching adolescence. His father, Noel
Hyman, ran a trucking company; his mother, Charlotte, ran an
art gallery. Noel had a bad temper - he once picked up Joey
and threw him across a room into a wall. Joey's lanky height
and shy personality also made him a target for bullies. He
wore dark glasses everywhere - even to school. "I started to
spend a lot of time in the dean's office," he told Everett
True. "I was a misfit, an outcast, a loner. The greasers were
always looking to kick my ass. They'd travel in packs with
fucking chains and those convertibles. They were trying to
kill you. Johnny was like a greaser [for a while]. He was a
hard guy."
When he was in his teens, Joey began behaving oddly - climbing
in and out of bed repeatedly before he was ready for sleep,
leaving food out of the refrigerator at night, becoming
hostile with his mother when she asked him why he was acting
strangely. Once, he pulled a knife on her. He started to hear
voices, and could burst into inexplicable anger. In 1972, he
voluntarily entered St. Vincent's Hospital for an evaluation
and was kept for a month. There, doctors diagnosed him as
paranoid schizophrenic, "with minimal brain damage". Another
psychiatrist had told Joey's mother, "He'll most likely be a
vegetable." Not long after, his mother moved into a smaller
apartment in the same building but didn't take him along;
instead, he slept on the floor of her gallery.

But by then, Joey had found his path out of a life of cut off
prospects and mental limitation. "Rock & roll was my
salvation," he said in 1999. Another time, he said, "I
remember being turned on to the Beach Boys, hearing 'Surfin'
U.S.A.' But the Beatles really did it to me. Later on, the
Stooges were a band that helped me in those dark periods -
just get out the aggression." As a teen, he rented a high-hat,
and tapped along to the rhythms of the Beatles and Gary Lewis
and the Playboys. Joey later discovered the epoch-changing
music of David Bowie - which offered a new kind of identity
and pride to nonconformists. Joey started bands and joined a
glam-rock group called Sniper as lead singer, wearing a
tailor-made, skin tight outfit and calling himself Jeff
Starship. He had already left Sniper when, in early 1974, Dee
Dee asked him to join him and Johnny in their new band. When
Johnny first met Joey, he thought Joey "was just a spaced-out
hippie", according to the singer's little brother, Mickey
Leigh, in his memoir, I Slept With Joey Ramone.

The new band mates began practicing in Johnny's apartment;

they determined early on that they should come up with a new
song every time they met. At one of those early sessions, they
discussed what to call themselves. "Dee Dee got the name 'the
Ramones' from Paul McCartney," Tommy said. "McCartney would
call himself Paul Ramon when he checked into hotels and didn't
want to be noticed. I liked it because I thought it was
ridiculous. The Ramones? That's absurd! We all started calling
ourselves Ramones because it was just a fun thing to do. There
were times we were pretty light hearted when we were putting
this together."
It would take several months to figure out what would work.
Dee Dee had trouble playing and singing at the same time, and
Joey wasn't any good on the drums. Tommy suggested moving Joey
to lead vocalist, front and centre of the band. "Joey was not
my idea of a singer," Johnny said, "and I kept telling Tommy
that. I said, 'I want a good-lookin' guy in front.'" Dee Dee
didn't see it that way. "Joey was a perfect singer," he said.
"I wanted to get somebody real freaky, and Joey was really
weird-lookin', man, which was great for the Ramones. I think
it looks better to have a singer that looks all fucked up than
to have one that's tryin' to be Mr. Sex Symbol or something."
Later, Johnny agreed: "It was all Tommy, and it turned out to
be a good move."

The Ramones also figured out what wouldn't work: Johnny didn't
want their sound to derive from the obvious past - not from
the turbulent bands that had inspired them in recent years,
such as the Stooges, MC5 and the New York Dolls. "What we
did," said Johnny, "was take out everything that we didn't
like about rock & roll and use the rest, so there would be no
blues influence, no long guitar solos, nothing that would get
in the way of the songs." In the place of the rock frills was
doo-wop, girl groups, bubblegum - they all loved the Bay City
Rollers - and the surf rock of Brian Wilson and Jan and Dean,
which informed many of the melodies, a tuneful undertow to the
cacophony.

When Tommy joined the band as drummer - as the story goes,

none of the drummers they auditioned could play without
bombast and flourishes - the Ramones' sound came together. "I
wanted to lock in with the guitar," he told Mojo in 2011.
"Most people assume that the bass and drums lock in together.
But I locked in with Johnny, and Dee Dee's bass was the
underpinning of it all." The effect was primitive but also
avant-garde: harmonic ideas stacked on a rapid-fire momentum.
"We used block chording as a melodic device, and the harmonics
resulting from the distortion of the amplifiers created
counter melodies," Tommy told Timothy White in Rolling Stone.
"We used the wall of sound as a melodic rather than a riff
form; it was like a song within a song, created by a block of
chords droning."
The Ramones played their first public show in August 1974 at
New York's CBGB - at least half a dozen songs in roughly 17
minutes. CBGB, a small, dank and narrow bar in Manhattan's
Bowery - long seen as a disreputable area, with cheap lodging
and homeless alcoholics on the street - would become the vital
centre of New York's cutting edge new music scene. The owner,
Hilly Kristal, thought the Ramones' first appearance didn't
bode well. "They were the most un-together band I'd ever
heard," he wrote later. "They kept starting and stopping -
equipment breaking down - and yelling at each other." As he'd
also recall, "They'd play for 40 minutes. And 20 of them would
just be the band yelling at each other." But they became a
good draw, and Kristal featured them on his stage dozens of
times in the next few years.

By early 1975, the Ramones had honed their presentation.

Thanks to their goal of a new song every practice, they were
developing a large repertoire of original material. All the
members had adopted leather jackets like Johnny's and wore
torn jeans; they looked more like a gang than a band. Also,
they didn't fuck around onstage anymore - no talking among
themselves, no guitar tuning, no pauses. Johnny and Tommy
found that lock the drummer had described; Johnny played down
stroke chord strums in eighth-note rhythms at full volume; it
sounded like a force that had always existed, and couldn't be
held back.

People began to take notice. Influential columnist Lisa

Robinson told music exec Danny Fields, 'You'll love this
band.’ When Fields, who had signed the Stooges and MC5, caught
them at CBGB, he thought, "'This is overwhelming. What more do
you need?' I loved them within the first five seconds, from
the minute they started to play. I couldn't stop and think."
After the show, Fields offered to manage them, and won the
band a contract with Sire Records. Johnny felt that he and the
group were ready. "By the summer of '75," he told road manager
Monte Melnick, in On the Road With the Ramones, "I started to
take it seriously. I felt that we were better than everyone
else. In the New York scene, the only band I looked at as any
sort of competition was the Heartbreakers [led by Johnny
Thunders]. I remember seeing a clip of Led Zeppelin, they were
playing in '75 at Madison Square Garden, and I thought, 'Oh,
God, these guys are such shit.'"
The Ramones' April 1976 debut album, Ramones, with its black
and white photo on the cover, defined punk rock. The term
"punk" had been around for many years, usually with
distasteful or threatening connotations. A punk was a coward
or a snitch or a snivelling villain. Sometimes it was used to
signify male homosexuality; Beat author William Burroughs
said, "I always thought a punk was someone who took it up the
ass." By 1975, punk came to describe a handful of emerging
rock & roll artists, such as Patti Smith, who sang about
people outside of society. Critics Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs
began using the term "punk rock" to describe a dissonance and
spirit that had owed in a continuum from the mid-1960s,
including several of the American garage-rock bands that
appeared on Lenny Kaye's Nuggets collection. You could also
hear that spirit in English bands, such as the Stones and
early Kinks. In the late 1960s, Detroit's Stooges and MC5, and
New York's Velvet Underground, took that dissonance further,
musically and lyrically. But beginning with the Ramones, punk
came to represent an aesthetic and a subculture. Actually, the
opening song alone, "Blitzkrieg Bop", did the job: noisy
guitars, insistent rhythms and hurried vocals pronouncing a
young generation piling into the back seat for a ride down
deadman's curve, with trouble ahead and behind.

Some took Ramones as threatening, with songs about beating

brats, sniffing glue, gunning your enemy in the back, a Green
Beret male prostitute, slashing a trick to prove he's no
sissy. "We started off just wanting to be a bubblegum group,"
said Johnny. "We looked at the Bay City Rollers as our
competition. But we were so weird. Singing about '53rd and
3rd', about some guy coming back from Vietnam and becoming a
male prostitute and killing people? This is what we thought
was normal." There was also the problem that the band flirted
with Nazi imagery: "I'm a shock trooper in a stupor, yes I am/
I'm a Nazi schatze, y'know/I fight for Fatherland," they sang
in an early version of "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World".
According to Melnick, after hearing the lines, Seymour Stein,
the head of Sire Records, recoiled. "You can't do that," he
said. “You can't sing about Nazis! I'm Jewish and so are all
the people at the record company." The band - half of whom,
Joey and Tommy, were Jewish - complied, up to a point. Said
Johnny, "We never thought anything of the original line. We
were being naive, though. If we had been bigger, there would
have been a bigger deal made of it by the press."
Plenty of rock tastemakers hated everything about Ramones.
Most American radio refused to play the music (one DJ
described hurling the album "across the room"). The most
succinct kiss-off review described Ramones as "the sound of
10,000 toilets flushing". The band was undeterred. "We weren't
going to let anything knock us down," Joey told Rolling
Stone's David Fricke in 1999 - "There was always something
thrown at us. It was always that way."

By the time of their U.K. tour in 1976, word of their sound

and style had spread before them. Johnny disliked England,
especially the audiences who spat on bands as a sign of punk
affection. But he found time to give some famous advice to the
Clash, who were nervous they were under-rehearsed: "We're
lousy, we can't play," Johnny reportedly told Joe Strummer.
"If you wait until you can play, you'll be too old to get up
there." The Ramones set the standard for a new, democratic
aesthetic. "We wanted to save rock and roll," Johnny wrote in
Commando. “We weren't against anybody. I thought the Ramones,
the Sex Pistols, and the Clash were all going to become the
major groups, like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and it
would be a better world."
Later, Johnny worried that the Sex Pistols' infamous doings -
swearing on British TV; playing riotous shows on their 1978
U.S. tour and then self-imploding; bassist Sid Vicious'
subsequent arrest for murdering girlfriend Nancy Spungen - had
done the Ramones and punk rock serious damage, making it
reprehensible rather than merely revolutionary.

Tommy Erdelyi remained with the Ramones for two more albums,
Leave Home and Rocket to Russia (both 1977). They were of a
piece with the first album - they extended the sound somewhat,
but kept the same dense texture. Notably, some songs were
about mental illness; "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment" and
"Teenage Lobotomy" (and later "I Wanna Be Sedated") seemed to
be drawn from things that Joey and Dee Dee had witnessed or
experienced. "I think we were all trying to get as mentally
unsound as possible," said Tommy. For him, life in constant
close quarters with the band had become too much. The Ramones
toured steadily - playing something like 150 shows some years,
spending hours and days going from city to city in a van,
often finding fault with one another and erupting into fights.
Once, at the Sunset Marquis hotel in Los Angeles, Johnny and
Tommy got into a fierce argument. "This is my band," Johnny
yelled, "and I am the star of this band, not you! What are you
gonna do about it?" Tommy later said, "They were always
paranoid I would take over, which I had no intention of
doing."
Tommy played his last show with the Ramones in May 1978, at
CBGB. Johnny tried to get him to stay. He wouldn't, but he
remained to produce one more album, Road to Ruin (1978), with
Ed Stasium. Drummer Marc Bell, who had played with the
Voidoids and other downtown bands, replaced Tommy under the
name Marky Ramone. Road to Ruin was a masterpiece - the fourth
in a row by a band that had burst out of nowhere. It was also
the last great album the Ramones would ever make.

In the early 1980s – half a decade into their career - the

Ramones' story fractured in all respects. Their music hadn't
yielded the mass audience that they'd expected. "I don't feel
desperate, not yet," Johnny said, "although I don't feel like
waiting another two years to get big." Relations in the band
were tense, even degrading. Though Joey was seen by many as
the Ramones' front man - congenial, commanding onstage,
increasingly outspoken in interviews - it was Johnny who ran
the band with an iron hand.

He instituted fines if members were late or too messed up to

play. He yelled, and slapped people. "We could often hear John
pushing and smacking Roxy [his girlfriend] around in their
hotel room," Marky wrote in his autobiography, Punk Rock
Blitzkrieg. “We would hear her stumbling, bouncing off a thin
wall, and then falling onto a bed and shrieking." Danny Fields
told Mojo, "Dee Dee was terrified of Johnny, because Johnny
would punch him in the face. It would always be after the
show, about something like, 'You did a B-major when you should
have done a C-minor.' I'd stand outside the dressing room.
Inside you'd hear glass shattering and bodies slamming into
walls."

Johnny soon met his match in producer Phil Spector. In 1978,

the Ramones were invited to star in Rock & Roll High School, a
musical about rock rebellion, produced by B-movie legend Roger
Corman. The title track was a hit to their fans, but it wasn't
enough for Sire, which around the same time decided that if
the Ramones hoped to achieve real success they would need to
change their sound. The label teamed them with the legendary
Spector to oversee the band's next LP, End of the Century.
Spector had been after the Ramones for a long time. "You wanna
make a good album by yourselves," he asked them in 1977, "or a
great album with me?" But in 1979, the producer was past his
prime and a spooky eccentric. Early on, Spector invited the
band to his mansion.
"There were a lot of warning signs," wrote Marky. "Do not
enter. Do not touch gate. Beware of attack dogs. The signs
looked pretty amateurish, and that made them more rather than
less imposing." Spector wore pistols, one under each arm, and
kept bodyguards around. He made the band stay all night,
watching the psychological horror film Magic, starring Anthony
Hopkins. Dee Dee claimed that one night, the producer pulled a
gun on him when he tried to leave. "He had all the quick-draw,
shoot-to-kill pistol techniques," Dee Dee recalled.

One day, Spector pushed Johnny too far. The producer demanded
that the guitarist play the opening G-major chord of "Rock &
Roll High School" over and over. The engineer would play the
chord back and Spector stomped around the studio yelling,
"Shit, piss, fuck! Shit, piss, fuck!" Then he'd demand that
Johnny hit the chord again. This went on for an hour or more,
until Johnny got fed up. He finally put down his guitar and
said he was leaving. Spector told him he wasn't going
anywhere.

Johnny replied, "What are you gonna do, Phil, shoot me?" The
band mates had a meeting with Spector and told him they could
no longer work with him if he was going to keep displaying the
same temperament. "Nobody was enjoying any of it," Joey said.
"We were all pissed off with his antics, high drama, and the
insanity."

Spector had boasted to the band that Century, which cost

$200,000, would be its greatest album ever. Instead, it was
the album that broke the Ramones' momentum and cost them their
aesthetic. Vapid arrangements prevailed where storms had once
ruled. Century charted higher than any of the band's other
albums, rising to Number 44 on the Billboard 200, but Johnny
regretted making it. Near the end of his life, he told Ed
Stasium that he wanted to remix the album and "de-Spectorise"
it. "That was his final wish," said Stasium, "get Phil's stuff
and make it a Ramones record."

Decades later, Spector was convicted of second degree murder

for the 2003 shooting of Lana Clarkson, and is serving a 19
years-to-life sentence in California. In Commando, Johnny
wrote, "After he shot that girl, I thought, 'I'm surprised
that he didn't shoot someone every year.'"
When The Ramones visited Los Angeles to record End of the
Century, Joey was accompanied by his girlfriend, Linda
Danielle. According to his brother Mickey Leigh, Joey had
probably met Linda at CBGB or Max's Kansas City in the
Ramones' 1977 heyday, and the two became a couple during the
filming of Rock & Roll High School in Los Angeles. Joey liked
her more than any other woman he'd known. After the filming
ended, Linda boarded the Ramones' van to join Joey on tour.
Johnny made plain the hierarchy: He decided where people sat.
Since she was with Joey, he told her, "You sit in the back."
Linda replied, "Not for long." In Commando, Johnny recalled,
"What is this, this girl answers back to me? Joey told her not
to say anything, but she did anyway. I thought it was kind of
funny."

Johnny had a girlfriend at the time. Others began to notice

that he and Linda would flirt or sometimes furtively disappear
to meet each other. When Marky and Mickey Leigh each tried to
tell Joey that Linda and Johnny were having an affair, he
refused to believe them. According to Commando, Linda left
Joey in the summer of 1982, and soon Johnny left Roxy.

Johnny and Linda began living together in a Manhattan

apartment, but Johnny worried that Joey would leave the band
if he found out. "I had never really gotten along with Joey,"
Johnny later wrote, "but I didn't want to hurt him, either. We
tried our best, but you can't live a lie."

Within a few years, Johnny and Linda were married. Linda

became Linda Cummings, but she went by Linda Ramone. Joey
never got over her. The sense of romantic and isolated
clinging in his songs deepened, and he wrote some of his best
about the lost relationship, including "The KKK Took My Baby
Away" (some saw it as aimed at Johnny). Late in his life, Joey
told Mojo, "Johnny crossed the line. He destroyed the
relationship and the band right there." Joey began to drink
heavily and also developed a cocaine habit. Why didn't Joey
leave the Ramones at that point? “We're the only rock & roll
band out there," he told a friend. "Everybody else has quit,
but we're never going to quit. We're always going to be the
Ramones."

The Ramones kept their secret well; they would go onstage

night after night for a decade and a half after the schism
between Joey and Johnny.
After End of the Century, Sire kept treating the band's music
as a problem that needed to be solved. The label brought in
new producers for five of their next six albums: Pleasant
Dreams (1981), Subterranean Jungle (1983), Animal Boy (1986),
Halfway to Sanity (1987) and Brain Drain (1989). On some of
these, it sounded as if the Ramones were competing with their
own shadows; they played faster, harder, as if trying to catch
up with many of the hardcore bands - Black Flag, Fear, Circle
Jerks, Discharge, Crass, Suicidal Tendencies, among others -
that were running with the Ramones' original template of short
songs and high speed beats. In many ways, they had grown as
artists. The writing went deeper, and Joey's voice took on
more character - a mean drawl in some songs, a haunted wraith
in others. The one album that broke the hex was 1985's Too
Tough to Die, a triumph that saw the return of producers Tommy
Ramone and Ed Stasium.

Dee Dee had always written from his own fucked-up perspective,
but in songs like Too Tough's "Howling at the Moon", he turned
his own ruination into a human concern that looked outward ("I
took the law and threw it away/Because there's nothing
wrong/It's just for play"). The trouble was, Dee Dee's
problems proved irrepressible. He had used hard drugs since he
was a child, had been diagnosed as bipolar, and often mixed
mood disorder medications with cocaine. Johnny tolerated the
usage as long as it didn't interfere with the band's live
shows - and it never did ("Dee Dee was on the road with
hepatitis and could still play fine," said Johnny). But Dee
Dee grew tired of the Ramones and their fights. He sent
signals that he intended to make a change. One day he showed
up with spiky hair and gold chains, proclaiming a new devotion
to hip-hop. He intended to make a rap album. According to
Marky, Dee Dee once sat at the back of the van announcing,
"I'm a Negro! I'm a Negro!" It drove Johnny crazy. "No, you're
not," Johnny said. 'You're a fucking white guy who can't rap."
Dee Dee in fact released a (sort of) rap album in 1988,
Standing in the Spotlight, under the name Dee Dee King. The
record failed in all respects; one critic reviewed it as "one
of the worst recordings of all time". In 1989, Dee Dee kept
his word: He left the Ramones, catching the others, especially
Johnny, off guard. "Why we didn't stick together, I don't
know," Dee Dee later wrote. "It's hard to get anywhere in
life, and when we did, we just threw it all away."
Christopher Joseph Ward replaced Dee Dee on bass as CJ Ramone
in 1989, and remained with the group until it split in 1996.
Dee Dee continued to write for the band, contributing several
notable songs to Mondo Bizarro (1992) and Adios Amigos!
(1995). He was the complex and addled essential spirit at the
centre of the Ramones' brilliant and damaged story. Without
him, the band would not have made as much great music at any
point in its life span.

What held The Ramones together was also what divided them: the
partnership of Joey and Johnny. It was a necessary coalition,
and a harsh one. Joey would continue to suffer from OCD
throughout his life, needing to touch things repeatedly in
certain ways; one time, after the band returned from England,
he insisted on driving back to the airport just to retrace one
step. He was prone to infections and illnesses that often
hospitalised him. Johnny was impatient with it all. "I didn't
know what it was called," he admitted. "Obviously it was some
sort of mental disorder that he had to keep doing this kind of
stuff, but at the same time I felt a lot of the times it was a
prima-donna attitude. Half the time he's psychosomatic. It
would always be before a tour, when we'd be starting an
album." (The lack of empathy was mutual: In 1983, Johnny got
into a late-night street fight with a musician he caught with
Roxy, his ex, and ended up severely injured, requiring
emergency brain surgery. According to Marky, Joey was ecstatic
over the news.)

In the end, it was Johnny who decided how long the Ramones
lasted. He settled on a final show on August 6th, 1996, at the
Hollywood Palace. Before the event, the band had been invited
to play a high-paying date in Argentina. Everybody wanted to
make the trip except Joey, who said he had health concerns. If
they waited a few months, he would maybe do it. The others
took it as a refusal - especially Johnny - and resented him
for it. "Joey was always sick," said Johnny. "Anything he
could get, he had." There were moments at that final Hollywood
show - the torrid "Blitzkrieg Bop", for example - when the
Ramones were as good as they had ever been. After the last
song - the Dave Clark Five's "Anyway You Want It", with Pearl
Jam's Eddie Vedder - the Ramones retired to their dressing
room. They packed up their clothes and instruments and left
separately. "I said nothing to the other guys, I just walked
out - it was the way I lived my life," recalled Johnny.
"Of course, I was really feeling loss of some sort. I just
didn't want to admit it."

Joey had good reason to decline the South America trip; in

1994, he had learned he had lymphoma in his bone marrow. His
doctor assured him it had been caught before it became life
threatening, and didn't yet require treatments. Nonetheless,
said Melnick, "it was harder for him to get the stamina. It
wasn't easy to do a Ramones set, especially when you're
wearing the heavy leather jacket. And I don't think Joey
exactly felt comfortable confiding in the band with his
problems, especially Johnny."

One day, in winter 1997, Joey's chiropractor showed up at his

apartment for a treatment session, but nobody answered the
door. The chiropractor opened the door. "I saw Joey lying on
the floor unconscious," he said, "with blood spilling out of
his mouth." The emergency crew judged that Joey had been lying
there for a day, maybe two. Another hour, even less, he would
have been dead. In the autumn of 1998, his lymphoma worsened;
doctors put him on chemotherapy. Joey used his good days to
work on a solo album (Don't Worry About Me, released in 2002).
By Christmas 2000, he had been doing well enough that his
doctors believed his cancer might be in remission in a few
months. Then, in the predawn hours of December 31st, Joey
began to hear voices while at his downtown apartment: Had he
closed the door properly to his chiropractor's office the
prior day? "He headed uptown to [the] office to repeat a
movement," wrote Mickey Leigh, "to push a button or turn a
doorknob - and do it right this time - so he could silence the
voices and move on into the next year without them challenging
him." He made the trip once, but the worries persisted. He
made the trip to check the office door again. Snow had built
up, the sidewalks were slippery, and Joey fell. He couldn't
get back up. He laid there some time before a female police
officer found him and called an ambulance. Joey had broken his
hip during the fall and required surgery, which meant there
would be a temporary halt in his cancer treatment. Over the
next few weeks, his condition didn't improve. Joey's doctor
told his family that things didn't look good.

The only member of Joey's former band to stop by was drummer

Marky Ramone. Marky called Johnny - now living in Los Angeles
- the next day. "You need to visit him," Marky said. "The
window is closing." "Let it close," replied John.
"He's not my friend." On April 15th, 2001, Joey's family and a
few friends gathered at his bedside. Doctors turned off his
respirator. Mickey played a song on a boom box that Joey
liked, U2's "In a Little While" ("In a little while/ This hurt
will hurt no more/I'll be home, love"). By the time the song
finished, Joey Ramone had closed his eyes. He was 49.

Three years later, Rolling Stone's Charles M. Young asked

Johnny if he had gone to Joey's funeral. "No," said Johnny. "I
was in California. I wasn't going to travel all the way to New
York, but I wouldn't have gone anyway. I wouldn't want him
coming to my funeral, and I wouldn't want to hear from him if
I were dying. I'd only want to see my friends. Let me die and
leave me alone."

During those years, belated recognition finally came around

for the Ramones. In 2002, the band was inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in its first year of eligibility. Tommy
told Rolling Stone, "It mattered a lot to us because we knew
we were good for the past 25 years or whatever. But it was
hard to tell because we never got that much promotion and the
records weren't getting in the stores. But the fact that we
were inducted on the first ballot seemed to say, 'Oh, wow, it
was real. We weren't kidding ourselves.'" When Johnny, Tommy,
Marky and Dee Dee went onstage to accept their Hall of Fame
awards, Johnny was the first to speak. He thanked the band's
earlier management and record-label head, and added, "God
bless President Bush, and God bless America." Tommy spoke
next. "Believe it or not," he said, "we really loved each
other even when we weren't acting civil to each other. We were
truly brothers." Dee Dee said, "I'd like to congratulate
myself, and thank myself, and give myself a big pat on the
back. Thank you, Dee Dee. You're very wonderful. I love you."
None of them claimed Joey's award. It stood alone on the
podium.

Eleven weeks later, Dee Dee Ramone was found in his apartment,
dead of an overdose of heroin. "He was trying to stay sober
toward the end but would fall off the wagon every so often,"
wrote Melnick.

"From my understanding," added Dee Dee's first wife, Vera, "he

didn't make it but a foot or two to the couch. He was bent
over the top of the couch where he passed out and died. When
Barbara [Dee Dee's then-wife] came home from work, he was in
that position." Perhaps he was writing a song in his head
about the experience as the dark rush moved through his mind
and veins and stopped his heart. Dee Dee Colvin's funeral was
small. An inscription on his headstone read ok i gotta go now.

In 1997, Johnny started to have some troubles - difficulty

urinating. He thought perhaps he had an enlarged prostate. It
got worse. He saw a nutritionist, but nothing helped. Then he
had his blood tested and a biopsy. Johnny learned he had
prostate cancer. He elected for radiation treatment, and the
symptoms eased a bit. "Still, the cancer clawed at me
physically and in my mind," he wrote in Commando. The cancer
spread, and in June 2004, doctors told Linda Cummings her
husband was going to die.

Johnny's Commando was amazingly candid in many respects. "For

all the success," he wrote, "I carried around fury and
intensity during my career. I had an image, and that image was
anger. I was the one who was scowling, downcast, and I tried
to make sure I looked like that when I was getting my picture
taken. The Ramones were what I was, and so I was that person
so many people saw on that stage. While retirement seemed to
soften me, the prostate cancer I was diagnosed with in 1997
did so even more. It changed me, and I don't know that I like
how. It has softened me up, and I like the old me better. I
don't even have the energy to be angry." At the book's end,
Johnny wrote, "It's interesting that I have never felt that I
was going to die until this last time. I've known that my time
is limited, but I had nothing definite. If this happens again,
I want them to just let me die. I won't go through that again.
Of course, now I know. We all have time limits, and mine came
a little early." On September 15th, 2004, Johnny Ramone died
at his Los Angeles home, attended by his wife and some
friends, at age 55. He was cremated the following January.
That same month, a four-foot-tall bronze statue of the
guitarist was unveiled at Los Angeles' Hollywood Forever
Cemetery. John Cummings had paid for it himself.

On July llth, 2014, Tommy Erdelyi - who had spent the last
decade of his life quietly, playing in a bluegrass band, Uncle
Monk, with his long time girlfriend, Claudia Tiernan, died at
his Queens home, of cancer of the bile duct. He was 65.

The four original Ramones had gone to the dust.

Bloodlines make bonds irrefutable. You might hate your brother

for what he's done, but you can't undo the blood; he's still
your brother, you're his. A makeshift family, the kind many
bands construct, may seem easier to leave behind. It's a
musical partnership, a fraternity at best. But the bonds can
be just as indelible, as sublime, as painful.

One thing bound Joey and Johnny Ramone in the years after the
band's breakup: a belief in the worth and endurance of what
the Ramones had done. That necessitated some sort of belief in
one another. As late as 1999, noted David Fricke, Joey still
spoke of the Ramones as an ongoing force: "The Ramones were,
and are, a great fuckin' band. When we went out there to play,
the power was intense, like going to see the Who in the
Sixties. When I put the Ramones on the stereo now, we still
sound great. And that will always be there. When you need a
lift. When you need a fix." Said Johnny, "I rarely had any
contact with Joey after we broke up; two or three times maybe.
When we did the Anthology in-store on Broadway in New York in
1998, I asked him how he was feeling. This was after I found
out he had lymphoma, which eventually killed him. 'I'm doing
great,' he said to me. 'Why?' I gave up."

Still, both men always hoped for something more. During

Marky's visit to Joey near the end of the singer's life, Joey
asked the drummer if he thought there might ever be a Ramones
reunion. Not long before he died, Johnny admitted he'd had the
same buried hope. "In my head," he wrote, "it was never
officially over until Joey died. There was no more Ramones
without Joey. He was irreplaceable, no matter what a pain he
was. He was actually the most difficult person I have ever
dealt with in my life. I didn't want him to die, though. I
wouldn't have wanted to play without him no matter how I felt
about him; we were in it together. So when it happened, I was
sad about the end of the Ramones.

I thought I wouldn't care and I did, so it was weird. I guess

all of a sudden, I did miss him."

Johnny never considered working in the Ramones without Joey?

"No way. I would never perform without Joey. He was our
singer."

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