The story of Ramones

Four misfits from Forest Hills

The Ramones came out of Forest Hills, a middle class corner of Queens in New York City. The oldest was John Cummings, born on the eighth of October 1948, the only child of a construction worker and a waitress. His father was a strict disciplinarian who once made him pitch a Little League game on a broken toe. John loved rock and roll and the New York Yankees, and in the mid sixties he played in a high school garage band called the Tangerine Puppets. By his own account he spent about two years as a teenage delinquent, beating up kids and stealing, before quitting drink and drugs at around twenty, taking a job and trying, as he put it, to be normal. He later worked construction and plumbing jobs with his father.[1] [2] [3]

His bandmate in the Tangerine Puppets was a Hungarian boy named Tamas Erdelyi, born in Budapest on the twenty ninth of January 1949. His Jewish parents were photographers who had survived the Holocaust by hiding with neighbors, while many of their relatives were killed. The family left Hungary after the 1956 revolution, settled first in the South Bronx and then moved to Forest Hills, where Tamas became Thomas, or Tommy. After school he went to work as an assistant engineer at the Record Plant studio in Manhattan, where he worked on Jimi Hendrix recordings. That studio training would matter enormously, because Tommy was the member who understood how records were actually made.[1] [2] [3]

Douglas Colvin was born on the eighteenth of September 1951 at Fort Lee, Virginia, the son of an American soldier and a German mother. He grew up mostly in West Berlin, moving often and making few friends, while his father drank heavily. When his parents separated, fifteen year old Douglas moved with his mother and sister to Forest Hills. There he met Johnny and Tommy. He and Johnny were both outsiders in a tidy neighborhood, and they bonded over the Stooges and the MC5. Douglas had started using drugs as a teenager, and addiction, heroin above all, would shadow him for the rest of his life.[1] [2]

Jeffrey Hyman was born in Queens on the nineteenth of May 1951 to a Jewish family. His parents divorced, his mother Charlotte ran an art gallery, and Jeff found comfort in his transistor radio and the girl group records produced by Phil Spector. His mother bought him his first snare drum with supermarket stamps. He called himself a misfit and a loner. At eighteen he was diagnosed with obsessive compulsive disorder after a psychotic episode, and his towering, fragile frame has been attributed to Marfan syndrome. In 1972 he joined a glam band called Sniper, playing the New York clubs under the name Jeff Starship, and he started writing songs like I Don't Care.[1] [2] [3]

One, two, three, four

In January 1974 Johnny and Douglas went to Manny's Music in Manhattan. Johnny bought a used blue Mosrite guitar for just over fifty four dollars, because it was the cheapest one in the store, and Douglas bought a bass. The plan was two guitarists, with Douglas singing, Jeff Hyman on drums and a friend called Richie Stern on bass. Stern could not play, so he was gone after a few rehearsals and Douglas switched to bass. Douglas had read that Paul McCartney once used the stage name Paul Ramon, and he called himself Dee Dee Ramone. He talked the others into it too. Jeff became Joey, John became Johnny, and the band became the Ramones.[1] [2] [3]

The early line up kept reshuffling. Dee Dee found his voice gave out after a few songs and that he could not sing and play at once, so Tommy, who was meant to be the manager, pushed Joey to the microphone. Then Joey could not keep up the band's speed on drums. Tommy auditioned replacements and kept sitting down to show them how the songs should go, and it became obvious that nobody played them better than he did, even though he had never learned the drums. So he became Tommy Ramone. Dee Dee kept one job for good. He shouted the rapid one, two, three, four that launched almost every song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The Ramones played to an audience for the first time on the thirtieth of March 1974 at Performance Studios, a Manhattan rehearsal space linked to their friend Monte Melnick, later their tour manager for twenty two years. On the sixteenth of August 1974 they made their debut at CBGB, a scruffy club on the Bowery. By the end of the year they had played there seventy four times. Their sets averaged about seventeen minutes, with songs mostly under two minutes and no pause between them. Legs McNeil, who soon co founded Punk magazine, remembered black leather jackets, a count off and a wall of noise, from four guys who were clearly not hippies.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The look was deliberate: long hair, leather jackets, T shirts, torn jeans and sneakers, a uniform that matched the short, simple songs. Joey and Dee Dee lived for a while in the Bowery loft of Arturo Vega, a Mexican born artist Dee Dee had befriended in 1973. Vega became their artistic director and lighting man, and for the back of their second album he designed their logo, a spoof of the United States presidential seal with the eagle clutching a baseball bat for the baseball mad Johnny and an apple branch in place of the olive branch. The scroll in its beak soon read Hey ho, let's go. T shirts bearing that seal became one of the band's main sources of income.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Word spread through the downtown press. In early 1975 Lisa Robinson, an editor at Hit Parader, saw them at CBGB, wrote about them and urged Danny Fields, the former manager of the Stooges, to take them on. Fields became their manager in November 1975, later sharing the job with Linda Stein. In September 1975 they cut a demo, and the young Sire Records producer Craig Leon took it to the label's boss, Seymour Stein. Stein's wife Linda helped persuade him, and Sire signed the band in late 1975. Sire wanted a single first. The Ramones refused and insisted on making a whole album.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Hey ho, let's go

The Ramones recorded their debut album in early 1976 at Plaza Sound, a studio inside the Radio City Music Hall building, in about a week and for roughly six thousand four hundred dollars. It had fourteen songs in twenty nine minutes, and the longest barely passed two and a half. Craig Leon produced, with Tommy as associate producer, and the rough sound hid some careful studio craft, including doubled vocals, tubular bells and Radio City's giant Wurlitzer organ on a cover of Let's Dance. Joey's brother Mickey Leigh sang backing vocals but went uncredited. Johnny told him they did not want people confused about who was in the band.[1] [2] [3]

The opening track was Blitzkrieg Bop, written mostly by Tommy, with Dee Dee supplying the title and one darker line. Tommy wanted a chant like the Bay City Rollers' Saturday Night, and came up with Hey ho, let's go while walking home from the grocery store. Elsewhere the album sang about glue sniffing, chainsaws, beating a brat with a baseball bat, and the Nazi imagery Johnny and Dee Dee liked to provoke with. Seymour Stein balked at the original lyric of the closing song, which had Joey singing that he was a Nazi, and the band rewrote the line. Dee Dee's 53rd and 3rd told the story of a hustler on a Manhattan street corner, and he called it autobiographical.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ramones came out on the twenty third of April 1976. The black and white cover, the four of them slouched against a brick wall on the Bowery, was shot by Roberta Bayley of Punk magazine, and the label paid just one hundred and twenty five dollars for it. It became one of the most imitated covers in rock. Critics raved. Rolling Stone heard rock and roll intensity not felt since the music's earliest days, and The Village Voice said it blew everything else off the radio. The public shrugged. The album peaked at number one hundred and eleven in America, sold about six thousand copies in its first year, and neither single charted.[1] [2] [3]

Britain was different. Linda Stein booked the Ramones into the Roundhouse in London on the fourth of July 1976, America's two hundredth birthday, supporting the Flamin' Groovies, with the Stranglers opening. Around three thousand people came. The next night, at Dingwalls, members of the Sex Pistols and the newly formed Clash were in the crowd. Danny Fields remembered the Clash bassist Paul Simonon saying his band was not good enough yet, and Johnny telling him the Ramones could not play either, so just get out there and do it. The Damned played their first gig two days later.[1] [2] [3]

The effect on British punk was immediate. Tony James of Generation X said everybody went up three gears the day they heard that first album, and the London bands began playing faster almost overnight. The key British punk fanzine, Sniffin' Glue, took its name from a Ramones song. Not everyone was charmed. The Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock later admitted he got overexcited at Dingwalls, threw a plastic glass at the band and made them walk off stage. The Ramones also energized new punk scenes in Los Angeles, where they reprised the Groovies double bill that August, and in Toronto that September.[1] [2] [3]

Leave Home and Rocket to Russia

Their second album, Leave Home, arrived on the tenth of January 1977. It was sharper and a little poppier, but it reached only number one hundred and forty eight in America, though it was their first album to chart in Britain. One song, Carbona Not Glue, was pulled after early copies because Carbona was a trademarked stain remover. The album also gave the Ramones their famous chant. On a rare night off in Cleveland after a cancelled show, they watched the 1932 horror film Freaks, whose outcasts chant that they accept a new bride as one of us. That became Gabba gabba hey, the refrain of Pinhead, and on stage a roadie in a pinhead mask waved a sign with the words.[1] [2] [3]

In spring 1977 the Ramones toured Europe with Talking Heads. In Marseille their amplifiers drew so much power at a soundcheck that a large part of the city lost electricity, and police broke up the show. Talking Heads' Tina Weymouth later recalled Dee Dee happily sniffing dry cleaning fluid from a handkerchief that night. When their tour manager offered a stop at Stonehenge, Johnny refused to leave the bus, calling it just a bunch of old rocks. British crowds showered the band with spit, and Talking Heads' Chris Frantz said watching from the side of the stage was like looking into a snowstorm.[1] [2]

Rocket to Russia came out on the fourth of November 1977, recorded in a converted church in Midtown Manhattan. On the first day Johnny brought in the Sex Pistols' God Save the Queen, grumbled that the British band had copied them, and told engineer Ed Stasium to make the Ramones sound better. The album was full of surf and bubblegum pop: Sheena Is a Punk Rocker, Rockaway Beach, Teenage Lobotomy and Cretin Hop. It reached number forty nine, and Rockaway Beach climbed to number sixty six on the Hot 100, the highest any Ramones single ever went in America. The band blamed the Sex Pistols' shocking headlines for scaring radio away from anything called punk.[1] [2] [3]

On the nineteenth of November 1977 Joey's vaporizer, which he used to open up his throat before shows, exploded in his face just before a concert in Passaic, New Jersey. He went out and sang anyway, his face smeared with cream, then spent a week in a hospital burn unit. On New Year's Eve that year the band played London's Rainbow Theatre. Fans ripped out and threw ten rows of seats at the stage when the show ended, and that night's recording became the double live album It's Alive, released in 1979 and often called the band at its live peak.[1] [2] [3]

By then Tommy had had enough. He found touring depressing, he was troubled by the low sales, and he felt the others were grinding him down. He later said Johnny was taking more and more power and could be really mean, and one account has him physically threatened by Johnny and treated with contempt by Dee Dee. His last show as the Ramones' drummer was at CBGB on the fourth of May 1978. He did not leave completely. Under his real name, Erdelyi, he stayed on as co producer, and he would return to produce them again in the eighties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Marky, the movies and Phil Spector

The new drummer was Marc Bell from Brooklyn, born on the fifteenth of July 1952. He had drummed in the hard rock band Dust, had nearly joined the New York Dolls, and played on Richard Hell and the Voidoids' Blank Generation. Dee Dee sounded him out at CBGB, and after auditioning on songs like I Don't Care and Sheena Is a Punk Rocker he became Marky Ramone. Three weeks later they started Road to Ruin, released on the twenty second of September 1978. It added acoustic guitars, ballads and short solos, and peaked at number one hundred and three. But it contained I Wanna Be Sedated, which grew into one of their best known songs.[1] [2] [3]

In 1979 the Ramones starred in Rock 'n' Roll High School, a teen comedy produced by Roger Corman and directed by Allan Arkush. It began life as Disco High, and Corman had wanted Cheap Trick or Todd Rundgren until the actor Paul Bartel suggested the Ramones. P. J. Soles played Riff Randell, a Ramones obsessed student who ends up blowing up her school with the band's help. While filming, the band stayed at the Tropicana Motel in Los Angeles and wrote songs for their next album. The film gave them a cult following, but it did not make them stars.[1] [2]

Phil Spector, the Wall of Sound producer behind the Ronettes, had wanted to work with them since 1977. Their management, desperate for a hit, finally agreed, and sessions began at Gold Star Studios in Hollywood on the first of May 1979. It was a collision. The Ramones liked to work fast and cheap, while Spector was a perfectionist. Dee Dee remembered him listening to Marky hit a single drum for hours, and Johnny had to repeat one guitar part hundreds of times. The album cost around two hundred thousand dollars, compared with six thousand four hundred for their debut, and took nearly six months to mix.[1] [2]

End of the Century came out on the fourth of February 1980 and became their highest charting album, reaching number forty four in America and number fourteen in Britain. Its cover of the Ronettes' Baby, I Love You, with Joey singing over strings and session players, went to number eight in the United Kingdom, their biggest British hit. The album also had Do You Remember Rock 'n' Roll Radio and Danny Says, a tender song about life on the road named after their manager. Johnny hated most of it. He called it watered down Ramones and said the real Ramones were not on it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The next album, Pleasant Dreams, was produced by Graham Gouldman of 10cc because Sire insisted on a famous name. Released on the twentieth of July 1981, it reached number fifty eight. Behind it lay a love triangle. Joey was engaged to Linda Danielle, whom he had first met at CBGB. Around the time the album came out, Linda left Joey and began a relationship with Johnny, whom she married in 1984. Joey was devastated. The band kept touring and recording, but the two men barely spoke again. Many fans heard the album's The KKK Took My Baby Away as Joey's bitter comment on losing Linda to the right wing Johnny.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Too tough to die

By the early eighties three of the four Ramones were battling addiction. Joey and Marky were drinking heavily and Dee Dee was using cocaine. During the sessions for Subterranean Jungle, released on the twenty eighth of February 1983, Marky's drinking got so bad that another drummer, Billy Rogers, played on their cover of Time Has Come Today. On the album cover, shot inside a subway car, Marky peers out of a window on his own. The photographer said Johnny wanted him there because they were about to fire him and he did not know it yet. Joey made the phone call. Marky later said he deserved it. The album was their last to reach the Billboard top one hundred.[1] [2] [3]

His replacement was Richard Reinhardt, a New Jersey drummer born on the eleventh of August 1956. At first he performed as Richie Beau, then became Richie Ramone. Joey said Richie saved the band and put the spirit back in it. He became the only Ramones drummer to sing lead on their songs and the first drummer since Tommy to write for them. In 1983 Johnny was badly hurt in a street fight with Seth Macklin of the band Sub Zero Construction and needed emergency brain surgery. He was ready to play again in about three months, and the next album was named after the experience.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Too Tough to Die, released on the first of October 1984, brought back Tommy and Ed Stasium as producers and stripped the band back to fast, hard punk, partly in answer to the young American hardcore bands they had inspired. Dee Dee wrote or co wrote nine of its thirteen songs, and critics hailed it as a return to form. The cover silhouette, the band standing in a Central Park tunnel inspired by A Clockwork Orange, happened by accident when the photographer's flashes failed to fire. Even so, the album reached only number one hundred and seventy one in America.[1]

In May 1985 President Ronald Reagan visited a German war cemetery at Bitburg where members of the Waffen SS were buried. Joey, who was Jewish, was disgusted, and with Dee Dee and the producer Jean Beauvoir he wrote Bonzo Goes to Bitburg, mocking Reagan with the name of the chimpanzee from one of his old films. It came out as a British single in June 1985 and became an import favorite on American college radio. Johnny, a devoted Reagan admirer, hated it. When it reappeared on the 1986 album Animal Boy, he made sure it was retitled My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, with the original name pushed into the subtitle.[1] [2] [3]

Animal Boy, released on the nineteenth of May 1986, opened with Richie's Somebody Put Something in My Drink, inspired by a night his drink was spiked with LSD. Halfway to Sanity followed on the fifteenth of September 1987. By then Richie had walked out. In August 1987 he quit after Johnny refused him a small share of the band's merchandise income. Blondie's drummer Clem Burke stepped in as Elvis Ramone for two shows, on the twenty eighth and twenty ninth of August, but Johnny called it a disaster because he could not hold the tempo. Marky, now sober, returned, playing his first show back on the fourth of September 1987.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Dee Dee walks, C. J. arrives

In 1988 the compilation Ramones Mania came out, and a new video for I Wanna Be Sedated, full of dancing nuns, cheerleaders and a young Courtney Love as a bride, gave the old song a second life. Ramones Mania was the only record certified gold in America during Joey's lifetime. Meanwhile the horror writer Stephen King, a big fan, invited the band to his home in Bangor, Maine. He handed Dee Dee a copy of his novel Pet Sematary, and Dee Dee went down to the basement and came back about an hour later with the lyrics for the film's theme song.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Pet Sematary opened the album Brain Drain, released on the twenty third of May 1989, and climbed to number four on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, their highest charting song in America. It was also nominated for a Razzie as worst original song. Behind the scenes, Dee Dee wanted out. He said everyone took their problems out on him, and he did not even play on the album, where the bass was handled by others. After the tour, his last show with the Ramones was on the fifth of July 1989. He briefly reinvented himself as a rapper called Dee Dee King, but soon went back to punk, and he kept writing songs for the Ramones.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His replacement was Christopher Joseph Ward from Queens, born on the eighth of October 1965, the same birthday as Johnny. He was a Ramones fan who had just been discharged from the Marines after going absent without leave. He came to the audition expecting only to jam and got the job. He learned forty songs in five weeks, adapted his fingerstyle playing to Dee Dee's downstroke style, and played his first concert as C. J. Ramone in Leicester, England, on the thirtieth of September 1989. Johnny said he knew at once, because C. J. had the right look, and Tommy later credited him with keeping the band young.[1] [2]

Their Sire deal ended in 1991 with the live album Loco Live. Bad Religion's Brett Gurewitz wanted to sign them to his punk label Epitaph, but Johnny chose Radioactive Records, a label owned by their own manager Gary Kurfirst, over C. J.'s objections. Mondo Bizarro followed on the first of September 1992, reuniting them with Ed Stasium. It included Poison Heart, one of three Dee Dee songs the band acquired after he needed money for a lawyer following a marijuana arrest. Poison Heart reached number six on the Modern Rock chart, but the album stalled at number one hundred and ninety, their lowest ever.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Adios amigos

In 1993 the Ramones released Acid Eaters, an album made entirely of sixties covers, with Pete Townshend, Sebastian Bach and Traci Lords among the backing singers. That same year they appeared as cartoon versions of themselves in The Simpsons episode Rosebud, the first punk band to guest on the show. The show's executive producer called them gigantic Simpsons fans. By the mid nineties Joey had learned he had lymphoma, a diagnosis he kept private for years. Inside the band, the long silence between Joey and Johnny continued, and a new rift was growing between Marky and C. J.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the eighteenth of July 1995 they released their fourteenth and final studio album, ¡Adios Amigos!, which means goodbye friends. It opened with a cover of Tom Waits' I Don't Want to Grow Up, which reached number thirty on the Modern Rock chart, and it included six Dee Dee songs. Dee Dee even sang a verse in German on the closing track, Born to Die in Berlin, recorded down a telephone line. The cover showed two dinosaurs in sombreros. The band announced it would be their last album, and they set off on what was billed as a farewell tour.[1] [2]

Then came one more offer. In the summer of 1996 the Ramones joined the sixth Lollapalooza festival tour, where Metallica's Kirk Hammett bonded with Johnny over rare horror movie posters. The final Ramones concert took place on the sixth of August 1996 at the Palace in Hollywood. Dee Dee came back to sing Love Kills, and the guests included Lemmy of Motorhead, Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, Chris Cornell of Soundgarden and Tim Armstrong of Rancid. The show was released as We're Outta Here. After twenty two years and 2,263 concerts, the Ramones were finished. Johnny sold his guitars and amplifiers and retired to Los Angeles.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The end of the century

On the twentieth of July 1999 Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, Tommy, Marky and C. J. sat together at a Virgin Megastore in New York to sign autographs. It was the last time the four original members appeared together. Joey, whose lymphoma had been a secret, fell in December 2000 and broke his hip, and his health collapsed. He died of lymphoma at New York Presbyterian Hospital on the fifteenth of April 2001, Easter Sunday, at the age of forty nine. That night Bono told a U2 crowd in Portland, Oregon, that the Ramones got his band started, and the whole arena sang Joey's I Remember You.[1] [2] [3]

Tommy, Richie and C. J. were the only former bandmates at Joey's funeral, alongside Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and Joan Jett. Johnny did not call him while he was dying, and later said a reunion would have been pointless, though he admitted he was depressed for a week afterwards. On the eighteenth of March 2002, in their first year of eligibility, the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Eddie Vedder inducted them and Green Day played. Johnny ended his speech with God bless President Bush, Tommy said how much it would have meant to Joey, and Dee Dee jokingly congratulated and thanked himself.[1] [2] [3] [4]

It was one of Dee Dee's last public appearances. On the evening of the fifth of June 2002 his wife Barbara found him dead at their home in Hollywood. An autopsy confirmed a heroin overdose. He was fifty. A show booked for him in Ventura became a memorial. He is buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery, and his headstone carries the Ramones seal and the line O.K., I gotta go now. Joey's solo album Don't Worry About Me was released that year, featuring his version of What a Wonderful World, and in November 2003 New York renamed a block of East Second Street near CBGB as Joey Ramone Place.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1999, and by 2004 it had spread. That year the documentary End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones laid bare two decades of bitterness, and he died at his Los Angeles home on the fifteenth of September 2004, aged fifty five. Friends including Eddie Vedder and Rob Zombie were reportedly at his side. Days earlier he had been too ill to attend a thirtieth anniversary Ramones tribute and cancer benefit. His wife Linda oversaw an eight foot bronze statue of him at Hollywood Forever, unveiled in January 2005, not far from Dee Dee's grave. Vedder wrote Pearl Jam's Life Wasted while driving home from the funeral.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Tommy, the last original Ramone, spent his later years producing bands like the Replacements and playing bluegrass in a duo called Uncle Monk with his partner Claudia Tienan. He died of bile duct cancer at his home in Ridgewood, Queens, on the eleventh of July 2014, aged sixty five. Asked earlier how he coped with losing the others so close together, he said he liked to think of them as still being around. The deaths continued among the band's circle. Arturo Vega died in 2013 and Seymour Stein in 2023. Clem Burke, the two show Elvis Ramone, died of cancer on the sixth of April 2025, at seventy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

More famous now than then

Recognition came late. In 2011 the Ramones received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and Tommy, Marky and Richie attended, the first time all three drummers had been under one roof. On the thirtieth of April 2014 their debut album was finally certified gold in America, thirty eight years after release. Rolling Stone has ranked it among the greatest albums ever made, and the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry in 2012. Danny Fields summed up the irony. They are more famous now, he said, than they were then.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Their influence reached far beyond punk. Green Day, the Offspring and Blink 182 built pop punk on their template. Billie Joe Armstrong named his son Joey. Metallica's Kirk Hammett credited Johnny's relentless downstrokes, and Bad Brains took their name from a Ramones song. In Japan, Shonen Knife formed because of them. A 2003 tribute album that Johnny oversaw featured Metallica, U2, Kiss, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tom Waits. Their seal logo became one of the most worn T shirts on earth, and Arturo Vega noted that they sold more T shirts than records. He was not always pleased about it.[1] [2] [3]

Fans keep finding new ways to pay tribute. The Joey Ramone Place street sign became the most stolen sign in New York, and the city moved it about twenty feet up. Marky joked that you now had to be a basketball player to reach it. In Berlin, where Dee Dee grew up, a Ramones Museum holds more than a thousand pieces of memorabilia. And at Hollywood Forever, a group of black ducks named Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, Tommy and Sheena march up to Dee Dee's grave every day when their keepers play a quacking version of Blitzkrieg Bop.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The feuding outlived the band. Joey's share of the Ramones business passed to his mother and then to his brother Mickey Leigh, while Johnny's went to his widow Linda, and the two heirs fought for years over control of the name. In January 2024 Linda sued over a planned Netflix biopic based on Leigh's memoir, with Pete Davidson attached to play Joey, and in August Leigh countersued, calling her a self promoter. At the end of 2024 an arbitrator ruled against his side, and the film stalled. As of 2026, Marky, Richie and C. J. are the three surviving Ramones, and Marky still plays the songs around the world with his band Marky Ramone's Blitzkrieg.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around Ramones

Joey Ramone and Johnny Ramone. The singer and the guitarist held the Ramones together for twenty two years while barely speaking. Joey was a liberal who struggled with obsessive compulsive disorder and drink, Johnny a disciplined, sober Republican who ran the band's business. After Johnny began a relationship with Joey's girlfriend Linda, they communicated through others, even on the tour bus. Johnny never called Joey as he was dying, yet he said later that he felt Joey was his partner and that he missed that.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Johnny Ramone and Linda Ramone. Linda Danielle dated Joey from her late teens, then began a relationship with Johnny and married him at New York's city clerk office in 1984. They were together about twenty years. She said he was intense and angry but had a soft side, and she kept his ashes after his death. As Linda Ramone she organizes an annual tribute at Hollywood Forever that raises money for cancer research, and in 2012 she released his autobiography, Commando.[1] [2] [3]

Ramones and Phil Spector. Spector courted the band from 1977 and finally produced End of the Century in 1979, giving them their best selling album and their biggest British hit, Baby, I Love You. The sessions were remembered for his perfectionism, his guns and his clashes with Johnny and Dee Dee. Marky, a fellow New Yorker, said the two of them got along well. In 2009 Spector was convicted of murdering the actress Lana Clarkson, and he died in prison in 2021.[1] [2]

Danny Fields and Linda Stein. The two co managers who turned a CBGB house band into an international act. Fields, who had discovered the Stooges and the MC5, took over in November 1975 after Lisa Robinson urged him to. Linda Stein, Seymour Stein's wife, helped get them signed and set up the historic London shows of July 1976. They ran the band until about 1980. Joey's song Danny Says is named after Fields, who later said the Ramones are more famous now than they were then.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Seymour Stein and Craig Leon. Craig Leon, a young producer at Sire Records, saw the Ramones in 1975, brought their demo to the label's president Seymour Stein, and then produced their debut. Tommy said Leon risked his career to get them signed. Stein kept them on Sire for over fifteen years, even forcing them to rewrite a Nazi lyric on the first album, and he marveled that they were the only act he signed who came out of the studio under budget. Stein died in 2023.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Arturo Vega and Ramones. Often called the fifth Ramone, the Mexican born artist gave Joey and Dee Dee a place to live in his Bowery loft, designed the presidential seal logo, ran the lighting and the T shirt business, and missed only two of their 2,263 concerts. He campaigned for Joey Ramone Place after Joey died and helped build the Ramones Museum in Berlin. He died of cancer in June 2013 at sixty five.[1] [2] [3]

Marky Ramone and C. J. Ramone. The rhythm section of the band's final seven years fell out badly. They clashed over politics, and after the split Marky called C. J. a bigot in the press, a charge C. J. denied. C. J. had married Marky's niece, Chessa, and said that had nothing to do with it. Despite being the last two survivors of that line up, C. J. said in later years that they were no longer in contact.[1] [2]

Joey Ramone and Marky Ramone. Joey made the phone call that fired Marky for his drinking in 1983, and in 1997 the two argued on The Howard Stern Show over each other's drinking habits. They made up live on the same show in 1999. Marky then drummed on most of Joey's solo album, and Joey called him his favorite drummer, alongside Keith Moon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Dee Dee Ramone and Barbara Zampini. Dee Dee's first marriage, to Vera Boldis in 1978, buckled under his mental illness and drug use. In 1994, on tour in Argentina, he met Barbara Zampini, then a sixteen year old fan and bass player. They later married, she played bass in his bands, including a Ramones tribute band with Marky, and she was with him until his death, when she found him at their home in 2002.[1] [2]

Mickey Leigh and Linda Ramone. Joey's younger brother sang uncredited on the first album and later wrote the memoir I Slept with Joey Ramone. He and Johnny's widow each inherited half of the band's company and fought for years in arbitration and court over the Ramones name, merchandise and a planned Netflix film. He accused her of calling herself Linda Ramone to pose as keeper of the legacy. She accused him of developing a film behind her back.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Ramones and Stephen King. The horror writer was a devoted fan. He invited the band to his home in Bangor, Maine, where Dee Dee wrote the lyrics for Pet Sematary in about an hour after King handed him the novel. The song played over the film's credits and became their biggest American radio hit. King later wrote the liner notes for the 2003 tribute album that Johnny oversaw.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Ramones

• Johnny bought his first Mosrite guitar for just over fifty four dollars, because it was the cheapest in the store. He bought it used at Manny's Music in January 1974. He also liked that it was not the guitar everybody else was using.[1]
• Tommy Ramone had never played drums before he became the Ramones' drummer. He was meant to be the manager. While demonstrating the songs to auditioning drummers, he realized nobody played them better than he did.[1] [2]
• Before the Ramones, Tommy worked as an assistant engineer at the Record Plant on Jimi Hendrix recordings. That studio experience made him the band's producer as well as its drummer, and he co produced their first run of albums.[1] [2]
• Joey's mother bought him his first snare drum with supermarket stamps. He rented a hi hat and played along to the Beatles on his record player, and he started the Ramones as their drummer.[1]
• Early Ramones sets at CBGB lasted about seventeen minutes. The songs were mostly under two minutes and they barely paused between them. By the end of 1974 they had played CBGB seventy four times.[1]
• The famous cover photo of the first Ramones album cost the label just one hundred and twenty five dollars. Roberta Bayley of Punk magazine took it against a brick wall on the Bowery. It became one of the most imitated album covers in rock.[1]
• The Ramones' debut album went gold thirty eight years after its release. It sold only about six thousand copies in its first year. The certification came on the thirtieth of April 2014, after all four original members had died.[1] [2]
• Sire Records originally wanted to release just a single, but the Ramones refused and demanded an album. The label had offered to put out You're Gonna Kill That Girl. The band insisted on a full album, and Sire gave in.[1]
• The Hey ho, let's go chant was inspired by the Bay City Rollers. Tommy wanted something like the chant in Saturday Night, and the words came from mishearing Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones' Walking the Dog.[1] [2]
• The British punk fanzine Sniffin' Glue was named after the Ramones song Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue. It became the central fanzine of the early UK punk scene. Dee Dee joked that he hoped nobody thought they really sniffed glue.[1] [2]
• Gabba gabba hey came from the 1932 horror film Freaks, which the band saw after a show in Cleveland was cancelled. The film's outcasts chant that they accept a newcomer as one of us. The line became the refrain of Pinhead and a band motto.[1] [2]
• At a 1977 soundcheck in Marseille, the Ramones' amplifiers knocked out power to a large part of the city. Police came and the show was cancelled. They were on a European tour with Talking Heads at the time.[1] [2]
• Johnny Ramone refused to get off the tour bus at Stonehenge, calling it a bunch of old rocks. Dee Dee and Talking Heads wanted to see it. Johnny stayed on the bus.[1] [2]
• Fans threw ten rows of seats at the stage after the concert that became the live album It's Alive. It was New Year's Eve 1977 at London's Rainbow Theatre. Four shows were recorded on that tour, and that one was chosen.[1]
• Joey Ramone sang a whole concert with burn cream on his face after his vaporizer exploded. It happened in Passaic, New Jersey, in November 1977. After the encore he was rushed to a burn unit and stayed a week.[1]
• Roger Corman's first choices for Rock 'n' Roll High School were Cheap Trick or Todd Rundgren, not the Ramones. The film's working title was Disco High. The actor Paul Bartel suggested the Ramones when the others were unavailable.[1]
• End of the Century cost around two hundred thousand dollars, compared with six thousand four hundred for their debut. Phil Spector took nearly six months to mix it. It became their highest charting album.[1]
• Their cover of Time Has Come Today involves three different drummers. Billy Rogers played on the record, Marky was credited on the album, and Richie appeared in the video.[1] [2]
• Richie Ramone first performed with the band under the name Richie Beau. He switched to Ramone by the time he recorded with them. He remains the only Ramones drummer to sing lead on their songs.[1]
• Somebody Put Something in My Drink was inspired by a real spiked drink. Richie wrote it after someone slipped him LSD. He has said he was dating Frankie Valli's daughter at the time.[1] [2]
• The cover of Animal Boy features Legs McNeil of Punk magazine in a gorilla suit. The Bronx Zoo would not lend a chimp, so they hired Zippy the Chimp, who had been on David Letterman's show. Zippy would not sit still.[1]
• Joey recorded his vocals for Animal Boy at ABBA's Polar Studios in Stockholm. He flew there with the producer Jean Beauvoir in the winter of 1986, and the album was mixed there too.[1]
• The Too Tough to Die cover silhouette was a lucky accident. The photographer's flashes failed to fire in a Central Park tunnel. Johnny had wanted an image that recalled A Clockwork Orange.[1]
• Marky Ramone nearly became the New York Dolls' drummer in 1972. He auditioned after Billy Murcia died, but admitted he overplayed. Jerry Nolan kept a steady beat and got the job.[1]
• Pet Sematary was nominated for a Razzie as worst original song, yet it became their biggest American hit. It reached number four on Billboard's Modern Rock chart in 1989.[1]
• C. J. Ramone shared a birthday with Johnny Ramone, the eighth of October. He was the youngest member by nine years, and his first appearance with the band was on the Jerry Lewis telethon in September 1989.[1]
• Metallica asked C. J. Ramone to join them in 2001, and he said no. They invited him after Jason Newsted left. He turned it down because his son had just been diagnosed with autism.[1]
• Johnny walked out on Pete Townshend's session for Acid Eaters to watch a Yankees game. Townshend, one of Johnny's guitar heroes, was half an hour late, so Johnny gave up and left.[1]
• The sleeping man on the back cover of ¡Adios Amigos! is the band's tour manager, Monte Melnick. He posed as the sleeping figure from old cowboy films, next to the band facing a firing squad.[1]
• Arturo Vega missed only two of the Ramones' 2,263 concerts. He joked that he had the police records to account for those two. He ran lights, merchandise and the band's art.[1] [2]
• The Joey Ramone Place sign was New York City's most stolen street sign. It was moved about twenty feet up. Marky joked that you now had to be a basketball player to see it.[1]
• Joey Ramone was reportedly listening to U2's In a Little While when he died. Bono said Joey's family told him. Joey's friend Andy Shernoff of the Dictators later confirmed it.[1]
• According to the BBC, Bruce Springsteen wrote Hungry Heart for the Ramones. He had seen them at a New Jersey club, but his manager persuaded him to keep the song, and it became his hit.[1]
• Dee Dee's headstone reads O.K., I gotta go now. It also quotes his song Highest Trails Above. A flock of black ducks named after the band visits the grave daily.[1] [2]
• I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend, the gentlest song on the Ramones' debut, was Tommy's homage to the Beatles' I Should Have Known Better. Tommy wrote it alone, and the recording used a twelve string guitar, a glockenspiel and tubular bells.[1]
• The French cartoon Oggy and the Cockroaches named its three cockroaches Joey, Marky and Dee Dee. The trio of insect villains are a nod to the band.[1]
• Johnny Ramone collected horror movie posters and bonded with Metallica's Kirk Hammett over them. They met on the 1996 Lollapalooza tour. Johnny's Hollywood Hills house was covered with posters of old monster films.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.