Anybody who knows anything about music knows that the Ramones were the best worst band ever. That old rumor that they had four chords and half a brain among them is only half wrong; by the time they retired in 1996, they had picked up another chord or two.
Johnny Ramone (John Cummings) died Wednesday of prostate cancer at the age of 55 in his Los Angeles home. He had played guitar for the Ramones for close to 30 years and along with singer Joey Ramone, who died in 2001, he was the only other permanent member of the band.
The Ramones formed in the early '70s and quickly became a fixture at CBGBs, a New York City club that hosted other punk luminaries like the Talking Heads, Blondie, and Television.
Somewhere between the bar band and the city icon lies the story of the Ramones. Their early singles were good - "Blitzkreig Bop," "Judy is a Punk," "Beat on the Brat" - but their look was better: torn jeans, leather jackets, sneakers and smirks. At some point they became the measuring stick for what all punk should look and sound like.
What people forget, or never knew at all, is that the Ramones were a pop band before they were punks. Their guitars may have been loud and their vocals sneered, but their songs were closer in spirit to the girl-groups of the '60s than they were to the hardcore punk that reared its head in the '80s.
During their long career, the Ramones wrote songs about sniffing glue ("Now I Want to Sniff Some Glue"), the KKK ("The KKK Took My Baby Away"), and Ronald Reagan ("Bonzo Goes to Bitburg"). They collaborated with Beatles and Ronettes-producer Phil Spector, starred in Roger Corman's "Rock N'Roll High School" (1979), and survived longer than many of the bands that were directly inspired by their music.
