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[This Just In]

IN MEMORIAM
Joey Ramone, 1951–2001

BY BRETT MILANO

Put it this way: do you really know anybody who didn’t love the Ramones? For that matter, would you even want to? It doesn’t take many words to sum up what the Ramones did: they put the fun back in rock and roll. And it’s hard to think of any band in the past two decades who’ve done anything more important than that.

Lead singer Joey Ramone, born Jeffrey Hyman, passed away mid-afternoon on Easter Sunday, reportedly with the new U2 album on the stereo. Though he never spoke much about it, his illness with lymphoma had been an open secret for years. During his last round of interviews (to promote the Rhino anthology Hey Ho Let’s Go!, released two years ago), he brushed off questions about his health with answers like “Yeah, I was having some problems, but I’m feeling pretty good right now.” Drummer Marky Ramone, recently in town to give a lecture/slide show, confirmed in a Phoenix interview that Joey was hospitalized, but said that he was pulling through fine and that the band was planning a reunion when he got better.

I sincerely hope they don’t try reuniting without him, because Joey — scruffy, gawky, and hopelessly in love with rock and roll — was the true spirit of the Ramones. Watch any other punk icons on stage, whether it’s Johnny Rotten, Iggy Pop, or Joe Strummer, and you’d know they worked on their presentation just a little; even Kurt Cobain bothered to dye his hair. But Joey was proof that any misfit could get it exactly right. His voice, posture, stage presence, and haircut barely changed during the band’s 20-year existence, but they didn’t need to. Like the Ramones’ music, his singing was down to basics, just as good as it was supposed to be. In “Beat on the Brat,” track two of the first album, he slips into a fake Bryan Ferry accent (“Beat on the brah-tuh! Beat ahn the braht with a baseball bat, oh yeah!”) and the sound you hear is 10 years of rock pretensions being blown away.

For evidence of how right Joey was, just check out any of the last few albums, where latter-day bassist C.J. Ramone did a share of the vocals. C.J. is technically a better singer, but his tracks come out sounding like solid, generic punk rock. Joey was the personality, and the connection to ’60s pop — he was the one who brought Phil Spector in to produce 1980’s End of the Century (still the last record Spector has ever finished) and later produced a terrific EP by Phil’s ex-wife Ronnie Spector. Though main songwriter Dee Dee Ramone was a master of three-chord street punk, Joey was the link to the Beatles and Brian Wilson. He brought in much of the New York wiseassery and, in later years, the warmth as well. “It’s Gonna Be Alright,” from the 1992 album Mondo Bizarro, is among the most appreciative songs any band has written about its fans. The sentiments therein (“When life gets all so frustrating, you make it all worthwhile. Go out and have some fun tonight, ain’t it great to be alive?”) were a minor shock from the band that brought you “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” and few others could have brought it off without sounding hokey.

Joey was going through changes when that song was written: he’d kicked a long-time drinking problem and taken over more of the songwriting. He wanted the band to get more political, writing a couple of topical songs that made the albums (“Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” “Censorshit”) — plus a handful, like “Fascists Don’t Fuck,” that didn’t. Guitarist Johnny and bassist C.J., both notorious right-wingers, responded by sneaking a pro-gun song (“Scattergun”) onto the last album, Adios Amigos; and while most fans were on Joey’s side of the fence, the conflict only made things more entertaining.

One thing about Joey Ramone never changed: by all accounts, he was one of the nicest folks ever to achieve rock stardom. When I last interviewed him in person (behind the 1995 release of Adios Amigos), he gave me a couple of rare Ramones records and called me up two days later to make sure I had all the quotes I needed. (Since I showed up to his Greenwich Village apartment a few minutes early, I caught his mom fussing over how messy his place had gotten — you can’t get more down to earth than that.) At the time, his apartment looked directly over Coney Island High, a great rock club that shut down a few years ago; the music remained his passion. Even after the Ramones broke up, he displayed an infectious, fannish enthusiasm; he’d sing the praises of Ramones-inspired bands like Green Day and Offspring, plus whatever new groups he’d caught that week.

Just three months ago, he posted a favorite-songs list to the online site uplister.com. Both his song choices (Dictators, Stooges, Alice Cooper) and his comments (on the Who: “The excitement, the songs, the antics, the attitude, the personality, the character, and the beautiful destruction of their equipment; I was hooked”) are evidence of how this stuff can make it good to be alive. And that’s a feeling I’ll always get when I put my Ramones albums on — so thanks, amigo, and adios.

Issue Date: April 19 - 26, 2001