R.I.P. Johnny Ramone
ok i know i posted bout this earlier... but as i got reading... i ran across these... these are some editorials written by Steve Miller... they are sad... but it comes from one of Johnny Ramone's best friends... and i thought that i should share em...
JOHNNY RAMONE
by Steve Miller
What the public didn't know about Johnny Ramone is that he cared.
Johnny cared about the people he may have not paid enough attention to during his life and he cared about anybody he might have inadvertently hurt along the way to creating music history.
''I didn't ever want to do anything to hurt anyone,'' he told me as we gathered notes for his upcoming memoirs, which we began working on in April. ''I was always doing the best with what I had.''
To begin the upcoming book, Johnny says something, which he dictated with succinct precision, as if he had been holding it in for the moment: ''I want you Ramones fans to understand that I would not play the way I play if I were not the person I am, and the Ramones would never have been the band it was without that.''
It seemed to be an apology of sorts, as if the person that he had been did not square with the person he grew into, who was a faithful husband, and, by all accounts, a very true friend.
Johnny would hate for his legacy to be ''whitewashed,'' a word he used when he read or heard something that glossed over the bad or negative aspects of an issue.
So to some, Johnny was a nasty, difficult person. Many have said as much, it's out there among the books and articles and video collections. Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. Some more of it will soon be out there for people to decide.
But from this vantage point, even in the throes of his illness, he was never brusque, never impatient. Listening back to the tapes of our many hours of conversations, he was at times strident and opinionated. Other times, he was tired, worn out by the sickness that he fought with such courage.
His illness had sapped some of his anger, he noted ruefully.
"It has changed me and I don't know that I like how,'' he said. ''It has softened me up and I liked the old me better. I don't even have the energy to be angry. I liked being angry. ''
But he kept on and we kept on, daily phone calls and several weeks of meetings at his Los Angeles home. Sometimes he talked baseball. Sometimes he bitched about liberals.
And he always understood his lot in life and how lucky he was to play music. And he was very grateful.
" There are people who really have to work for a living, they work in coal mines, they sweep streets, they collect garbage,'' he told me. ''It was taxing on the mind because of all the travel and there were certain pressures, but it was nothing like real work that most people do. I was very lucky.''
As Arturo Vega, the band's lighting man and art director for all of its 22 years, most aptly said, ''Johnny was the misunderstood Ramone. What he did was so basic and elemental that it was beyond the idea of liking him. People never like authority and that was what he had to exert in the Ramones. He was misunderstood because he was not the lovable Joey or the crazy punk Dee Dee.''
The Ramones were what counted for Johnny, more than himself, and bigger to him than any other entity in his universe. He loved that unit more than he loved himself.
When we worked through changes in the manuscript, Johnny would quietly chastise me if anything looked as if he were taking credit, due or not.
It was that selflessness that made the Ramones the giants they were. When Johnny recognized that a guitar part could be played better by someone other than himself, he stepped aside.
The guitar chord at the end of ''You're Gonna Kill That Girl'' was Tommy. Walter Lure and Daniel Rey played fills on some albums that, Johnny said, ''would've taken me longer to get down and even then they wouldn't have sounded as good.''
His leadership corralled the formidable individual talents of the Ramones and sent them from cult band during their existence to the mass acceptance of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
''The Ramones were his band, he was always right and he's a bully, a real bully,'' said Danny Fields, the band's first manager. ''But always for the right reasons. His sense of justice was impeccable.''
Gary Kurfirst, who succeeded Fields in 1980, saw right away who ran the show. ''Johnny was the glue,'' Kurfirst said. ''They would work for three months straight, come home for two weeks and take one day off, then he made them go into rehearsal so they wouldn't lose their chops. I asked him how they could do that and he said it was like a basketball team, 'you have to practice or you lose it.' That was Johnny.''
The fans were his playground, the people who made it worth all his while. Johnny signed endlessly for anyone who requested.
''I started to see them when I was 16 they were one of my favorite bands,'' said Jose Theodore who is now all-star goalie for the Montreal Canadians. ''But when I was 17, me and my brother and a couple of friends when to see them in Montreal and we waited outside the venue and followed them to their hotel and when they got out of their van I asked them for their autograph. I told Johnny that I was going to play NHL hockey and they were all really nice.''
In the exchanges of fandom and partings, Jose gave his address to Gene the Cop, Johnny's friend who was traveling with the band.
''That Christmas, I got a card and it said 'Merry Christmas' and it was signed by Johnny,'' Theodore said. ''With that kind of thing, and how nice they were, they taught me how to treat my fans. I was just a kid and they treated me like that. Imagine.''
Johnny relished the attention and felt humbly honored by those fans.
''I always had that in mind, to treat people like I'd like to be treated,'' Johnny said. ''I tell people who are becoming celebrities how important that is. I hope someone pays attention to that.''
Johnny was the tough Ramone, though, and nobody forgot about it. This was part of the reason for his remorse that was noted at the top of this page. He knew he knocked heads and he felt the tension he created in the band.
As for the money, well, Johnny was all about it. He watched his money grow with capitalistic glee as his career progressed, befitting his Republican status. He hated wasting dough and would scold others if he saw it going on. They stayed in cheaper hotels unless the promoter was paying.
And he was characteristically honest and unashamed about his quest for financial security.
When ''Blitzkrieg Bop'' became a music bed for a Bud Lite commercial, Johnny was ecstatic even as some cried sellout.
"I thought it was terrific. I liked seeing the commercial and I would get questions about how I could let them do it. It was the easiest money I ever made. It made the Bud commercial better. It would have been bad if it was a lame commercial, but I mean, beer, which is all-American. I thought it was good.''
Johnny departs as the purveyor of what is the most important musical movement of the 20th century, punk rock. It was born when rock music was still just breaking out of adolescence at the age of 20 or so.
The man who changed its direction was a 6-foot tall lightening bolt of wiry fury, a man who burst the sonic volume level with a frown and a Mosrite that was cranked to the heights, the man who influenced generations.
And the movement continues.
We sat in his living room one afternoon last month, several weeks after Johnny had narrowly escaped death via an infection he had developed related to his cancer. He was tired and we were about to wrap up a day of book talk.
But that mind, ever sharp, honed in on what is the substance of the parting chapter in the book, one in which he describes his battle with prostate cancer.
''We all have time limits and mine came a little early,'' he said to me, quietly, his eyes closing.
''But I've had a great life no matter how it turns out now. I've had the best wife, Linda, that I could ever hope to find and I've had such great friends that really care about me and would do anything they could for me.''
President Bush, speaking in eulogy of Ronald Reagan, who passed away in June and was one of Johnny's few heroes, said that the late president had ''principles that are etched in his soul.''
Johnny's own principle-riddled soul is finally resting. May his afterlife be as fruitful as his life was here with us.
- Steve Miller
JOHNNY RAMONE: Rebel in a rebel's world
by Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
For 100 nights a year over three decades, punk-rock guiterrorist Johnny Ramone stood with his head down, face in an intense scowl of concentration, legs shoulder-width apart, hammering at his blue Mosrite with a blurry right hand. The cacophony was pure bliss, a white noise ringing that punched holes in all that was peaceful, shards of the power chords busting into little aural stars, like the lights you see when you smack your head, only in your ears.
It was such good, loud pain.
Johnny dropped his job as a construction worker in 1974 and held down stage right for 22 years as the guitarist for the most influential rock band of the last 30 years. The Ramones fertilized the punk-rock scene first in their hometown of New York City, then in England. Eventually - who knew? - that sound would form the chassis for what the corporate rock industry later dubbed "alternative" and, eventually, infiltrated top 40.
He was a rebel in a rebel's world, though. Johnny Ramone was a fiercely Republican-voting, NRA-supporting musician in a milieu that is remarkable for its embrace of all things left.
Johnny went worldwide public with his partisanship in 2002, when the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the microphone to give props to the people who made it all possible, he offered his own version of a Michael Moore moment.
"God bless President Bush, and God bless America," he said, clad in his trademark T-shirt, ripped blue jeans and leather jacket.
"I said that to counter those other speeches at the other awards," Mr. Ramone says in a phone interview. "Republicans let this happen over and over, and there is never anyone to stick up for them. They spend too much time defending themselves."
Johnny Ramone is at an easy point in his life, where "Blitzkrieg Bop" can be heard at sporting events as rev music and where the Ramones are widely cited as one of the most influential bands in the history of rock 'n' roll.
They never had a hit single, and none of their 14 original studio albums ever went gold. The Ramones did it because they loved it and had something to say.
"It was a job, and I was just doing my job," Mr. Ramone says now.
The Ramones were so far ahead of their time that Johnny Ramone makes more money each year, thanks to Ramones tunes used in advertisements, discerning record buyers paying their debt to history and the increasing number of Ramones reissues.
"I'm just honored that people still like us and people are still nice to me," he says, 55 years old and very retired in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Linda, and their three cats.
He sold his guitars and amps when the Ramones finally got out of the van after 2,263 live shows.
L.A. is 3,000 miles from Queens, N.Y., where he was raised as John Cummings, but he is never far from his legacy. People still know him when they see him, even though he disputes his own celebrity.
"I really can't believe that my career has gone like it has," he says. "I don't need much more money, and I thought that when I retired that nobody would want to talk to me anymore. Then I did, and people still want to talk to me." He pals around with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, tooling about in his black Cadillac DeVille, "a good American car," Johnny says proudly.
He is an avid film buff, and he watches two flicks a day - sci-fi, horror or anything intense - and his private collection numbers 4,000.
He reads mostly books on film and baseball. He still buys music, "old rock 'n' roll, '50s is my favorite," he says. "I also get some early '70s stuff, punk stuff, but I think I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel now." He won't play any Ramones, but Linda does.
"Constantly," he says, with a weary resignation.
"Yeah, the first five albums," she says. The two click on politics though.
"I grew up a Republican," she says. "My family was the only Italian family in Queens that voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy."
Johnny was driven right by a youthful revulsion against, um, face-ism. "It was in 1960, the Nixon-Kennedy election," he says, recalling his first inclination toward the right. He was an only child of Irish heritage in a working-class neighborhood. Families on his block voted left, pro-union. "People around me were saying, 'Oh, Kennedy's so handsome,' and I thought, 'Well, if these people are going to vote for someone based on how he looks, I don't want to be party to that.' "
For his news now, he hits the Drudge Report and Newsmax.com, Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," and "The O'Reilly Factor." He listens daily to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved. In L.A., people spend a lot of time in their cars, and he uses that time to educate himself, he says.
His list of favorite Republicans should humble the Republican National Committee, or at least get him invited to a GOP fund-raiser: Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Charlton Heston, [actor and close friend] Vincent Gallo, Ted Nugent, Messrs. Limbaugh and Hannity, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Wayne and Tom DeLay.
He relishes agitating his left-wing peers - and has since the band started in 1974.
"Oh yeah, they really get upset," Johnny says. "I remember in 1979 doing an interview for Creem magazine with [famed rock and roll scribe, now deceased] Lester Bangs and telling him that Ronald Reagan will be the next president. He was really mad that I liked Reagan, who was the greatest president of my lifetime. So I turned it around on him and asked to see his commie card. In fact, ever after that, I would ask him for his card. I think he had one, really."
The other day, when Stray Cats bassist Slim Jim Phantom was complaining about his tax bill, Johnny reminded him that the charges would be higher if President Bush hadn't gotten his tax cuts passed. "I told him he needs to vote Republican to keep his taxes lower ... and donate to President Bush's campaign," he says.
"I try to make a dent in people when I can," he says. "I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is."
He has found few allies in show business, but one stands out as a fellow renegade and conservative: Mr. Gallo, an actor, director and musician. "What's radical about saying you are for the poor?" Mr. Gallo, 41, demands. "Johnny Ramone has never been like that. He is incredibly authentic as both a musician and a person. I respect him not because we agree on a lot of things but because he is an individual." They bonded over [former New York Yankees star pitcher] Ron Guidry, cinema and politics.
Not that Mr. Ramone's friends must pass an ideological litmus test. He still holds ideological hopes for the relentlessly liberal Mr. Vedder. When the Pearl Jam singer impaled a mask of Mr. Bush and slammed it to the stage at a Denver concert on the heels of the Iraq invasion last April, Johnny Ramone let him know that he thought it was a stupid move.
"I got serious with him and told him that he was alienating people," Johnny says. "And I got him to see the point." When Johnny Ramone tells you something is uncool, well, it is.
Harnessing chaos, humor and danger, the Ramones created the template of the rock 'n' roll revolution that was punk rock.
Even then, though, Johnny's conservative side showed. When the band wanted to record "Chinese Rocks," a song co-written by bassist Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny disapproved of the reference to a strain of dope that was prevalent at the time.
Ditto when the other guys in the band came up with "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," a tune disparaging Johnny's beloved Mr. Reagan. (Sample lyric: "You're a politician / Don't become one of Hitler's children.") Both times, he lost. After all, a band is a democracy.
"But I really enjoyed upsetting them," Johnny says of his former bandmates. "They called me the Rush Limbaugh of rock 'n' roll one time in a Village Voice interview. But, hey, they were just old hippies." Two are dead now: Singer Joey succumbed to cancer in 2001 and Dee Dee to a heroin overdose in 2002. Longtime (but not original) Ramones drummer Marky still plays around in the underground scene.
Like so many other right-wingers. who are fed up with the media establishment, Johnny tunes in to the radio every day for some roiling rhetoric and to the Web for some news that doesn't seem to make the local newspaper.
"Hey," he says, perusing Newsmax.com as he speaks on the phone, "what's going on with these illegal aliens now?"
... ok this last one... is written by Jed Davis....
The whole story of Johnny Ramone is right there in the guitar. In the cracked and mottled paint, the dented neck, the slashed body, the beat-up pickguard held on by a half-dozen mismatched screws.
Johnny played this guitar from 1977 to 1996. Here, slip it on. When you sling the strap over your shoulder, the guitar freefalls right to your knees - stopping with a jerk just when you think it's gonna crash to the floor.
There's only one way to reach the strings of a guitar slung so low: spread 'em like you're getting arrested. You have to be a delinquent to feel comfortable playing this instrument.
Sit down for a second and hold the guitar up for a closer look. First thing you notice is the paint job, or the lack of one. Two decades of sweat have eaten away the white finish down to the bare wood - wood that is nicked, scratched, bashed and slashed. Never repainted, never sanded, never restored.
Check out the pickguard - it looks like a slab of armor sliced from the breastplate of a vanquished black knight. Like it's survived the bloodiest of battles to fight another day. Each screw that holds it on has a different color and head; some of them barely fit in their assigned holes.
But Johnny's fingerprint is an indentation in the neck where it meets the body - when you see that, feel it, you know this guitar could have belonged to only one man. It's scalloped out, carved completely concave as if by a thousand years of elemental force. Of course, twenty years of downstroke is more powerful than anything God or Mother Nature could ever muster.
In the Business Of Rock, guitars are smashed to shit every night. Everybody from the Windmilling Stratolegend to the Latest Petulant Poseur Trying Desperately To Look Badass has consulted the BUSTING UP AN AXE chapter of the Rockstar Handbook. What is singular, and incredible, about Johnny Ramone's Mosrite Venture is that it arrived at its condition simply by being played. And played. And played.
The thing is held together with spit and bubblegum. Which tells us two things:
1. This guitar meant nothing to its owner, who treated it like a Craftsman tool - determined to run the fuckin thing into the ground before he'd even think about replacing it.
2. This guitar meant everything to its owner, who maintained his trusty axe through two decades of punishment and considered it irreplaceable to the end.
Does one of these statements really disqualify the other? Can't they both be true of a guy who played guitar every night of his life... but never practiced? Who gained a following of millions by ignoring trends and public opinion? Who helped save rock and roll by dismantling it?
Eh, maybe neither is true. Maybe Johnny just didn't want to spend any money on a new guitar. One thing is crystal clear, though: this is the instrument of a man who refused to give up when things were bad, and refused to sell out when things were good.
Anyway... the guitar is in your hands, right? Play something. How about "Blitzkrieg Bop"? Go on, you can do it. You CAN do it, that's the whole point. Downstrokes are sufficient - you don't even need to hit the strings on your way back up. Just don't you dare solo. Johnny's watching.
- Jed Davis.
JOHNNY RAMONE
by Steve Miller
What the public didn't know about Johnny Ramone is that he cared.
Johnny cared about the people he may have not paid enough attention to during his life and he cared about anybody he might have inadvertently hurt along the way to creating music history.
''I didn't ever want to do anything to hurt anyone,'' he told me as we gathered notes for his upcoming memoirs, which we began working on in April. ''I was always doing the best with what I had.''
To begin the upcoming book, Johnny says something, which he dictated with succinct precision, as if he had been holding it in for the moment: ''I want you Ramones fans to understand that I would not play the way I play if I were not the person I am, and the Ramones would never have been the band it was without that.''
It seemed to be an apology of sorts, as if the person that he had been did not square with the person he grew into, who was a faithful husband, and, by all accounts, a very true friend.
Johnny would hate for his legacy to be ''whitewashed,'' a word he used when he read or heard something that glossed over the bad or negative aspects of an issue.
So to some, Johnny was a nasty, difficult person. Many have said as much, it's out there among the books and articles and video collections. Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. Some more of it will soon be out there for people to decide.
But from this vantage point, even in the throes of his illness, he was never brusque, never impatient. Listening back to the tapes of our many hours of conversations, he was at times strident and opinionated. Other times, he was tired, worn out by the sickness that he fought with such courage.
His illness had sapped some of his anger, he noted ruefully.
"It has changed me and I don't know that I like how,'' he said. ''It has softened me up and I liked the old me better. I don't even have the energy to be angry. I liked being angry. ''
But he kept on and we kept on, daily phone calls and several weeks of meetings at his Los Angeles home. Sometimes he talked baseball. Sometimes he bitched about liberals.
And he always understood his lot in life and how lucky he was to play music. And he was very grateful.
" There are people who really have to work for a living, they work in coal mines, they sweep streets, they collect garbage,'' he told me. ''It was taxing on the mind because of all the travel and there were certain pressures, but it was nothing like real work that most people do. I was very lucky.''
As Arturo Vega, the band's lighting man and art director for all of its 22 years, most aptly said, ''Johnny was the misunderstood Ramone. What he did was so basic and elemental that it was beyond the idea of liking him. People never like authority and that was what he had to exert in the Ramones. He was misunderstood because he was not the lovable Joey or the crazy punk Dee Dee.''
The Ramones were what counted for Johnny, more than himself, and bigger to him than any other entity in his universe. He loved that unit more than he loved himself.
When we worked through changes in the manuscript, Johnny would quietly chastise me if anything looked as if he were taking credit, due or not.
It was that selflessness that made the Ramones the giants they were. When Johnny recognized that a guitar part could be played better by someone other than himself, he stepped aside.
The guitar chord at the end of ''You're Gonna Kill That Girl'' was Tommy. Walter Lure and Daniel Rey played fills on some albums that, Johnny said, ''would've taken me longer to get down and even then they wouldn't have sounded as good.''
His leadership corralled the formidable individual talents of the Ramones and sent them from cult band during their existence to the mass acceptance of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
''The Ramones were his band, he was always right and he's a bully, a real bully,'' said Danny Fields, the band's first manager. ''But always for the right reasons. His sense of justice was impeccable.''
Gary Kurfirst, who succeeded Fields in 1980, saw right away who ran the show. ''Johnny was the glue,'' Kurfirst said. ''They would work for three months straight, come home for two weeks and take one day off, then he made them go into rehearsal so they wouldn't lose their chops. I asked him how they could do that and he said it was like a basketball team, 'you have to practice or you lose it.' That was Johnny.''
The fans were his playground, the people who made it worth all his while. Johnny signed endlessly for anyone who requested.
''I started to see them when I was 16 they were one of my favorite bands,'' said Jose Theodore who is now all-star goalie for the Montreal Canadians. ''But when I was 17, me and my brother and a couple of friends when to see them in Montreal and we waited outside the venue and followed them to their hotel and when they got out of their van I asked them for their autograph. I told Johnny that I was going to play NHL hockey and they were all really nice.''
In the exchanges of fandom and partings, Jose gave his address to Gene the Cop, Johnny's friend who was traveling with the band.
''That Christmas, I got a card and it said 'Merry Christmas' and it was signed by Johnny,'' Theodore said. ''With that kind of thing, and how nice they were, they taught me how to treat my fans. I was just a kid and they treated me like that. Imagine.''
Johnny relished the attention and felt humbly honored by those fans.
''I always had that in mind, to treat people like I'd like to be treated,'' Johnny said. ''I tell people who are becoming celebrities how important that is. I hope someone pays attention to that.''
Johnny was the tough Ramone, though, and nobody forgot about it. This was part of the reason for his remorse that was noted at the top of this page. He knew he knocked heads and he felt the tension he created in the band.
As for the money, well, Johnny was all about it. He watched his money grow with capitalistic glee as his career progressed, befitting his Republican status. He hated wasting dough and would scold others if he saw it going on. They stayed in cheaper hotels unless the promoter was paying.
And he was characteristically honest and unashamed about his quest for financial security.
When ''Blitzkrieg Bop'' became a music bed for a Bud Lite commercial, Johnny was ecstatic even as some cried sellout.
"I thought it was terrific. I liked seeing the commercial and I would get questions about how I could let them do it. It was the easiest money I ever made. It made the Bud commercial better. It would have been bad if it was a lame commercial, but I mean, beer, which is all-American. I thought it was good.''
Johnny departs as the purveyor of what is the most important musical movement of the 20th century, punk rock. It was born when rock music was still just breaking out of adolescence at the age of 20 or so.
The man who changed its direction was a 6-foot tall lightening bolt of wiry fury, a man who burst the sonic volume level with a frown and a Mosrite that was cranked to the heights, the man who influenced generations.
And the movement continues.
We sat in his living room one afternoon last month, several weeks after Johnny had narrowly escaped death via an infection he had developed related to his cancer. He was tired and we were about to wrap up a day of book talk.
But that mind, ever sharp, honed in on what is the substance of the parting chapter in the book, one in which he describes his battle with prostate cancer.
''We all have time limits and mine came a little early,'' he said to me, quietly, his eyes closing.
''But I've had a great life no matter how it turns out now. I've had the best wife, Linda, that I could ever hope to find and I've had such great friends that really care about me and would do anything they could for me.''
President Bush, speaking in eulogy of Ronald Reagan, who passed away in June and was one of Johnny's few heroes, said that the late president had ''principles that are etched in his soul.''
Johnny's own principle-riddled soul is finally resting. May his afterlife be as fruitful as his life was here with us.
- Steve Miller
JOHNNY RAMONE: Rebel in a rebel's world
by Steve Miller
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
For 100 nights a year over three decades, punk-rock guiterrorist Johnny Ramone stood with his head down, face in an intense scowl of concentration, legs shoulder-width apart, hammering at his blue Mosrite with a blurry right hand. The cacophony was pure bliss, a white noise ringing that punched holes in all that was peaceful, shards of the power chords busting into little aural stars, like the lights you see when you smack your head, only in your ears.
It was such good, loud pain.
Johnny dropped his job as a construction worker in 1974 and held down stage right for 22 years as the guitarist for the most influential rock band of the last 30 years. The Ramones fertilized the punk-rock scene first in their hometown of New York City, then in England. Eventually - who knew? - that sound would form the chassis for what the corporate rock industry later dubbed "alternative" and, eventually, infiltrated top 40.
He was a rebel in a rebel's world, though. Johnny Ramone was a fiercely Republican-voting, NRA-supporting musician in a milieu that is remarkable for its embrace of all things left.
Johnny went worldwide public with his partisanship in 2002, when the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. At the microphone to give props to the people who made it all possible, he offered his own version of a Michael Moore moment.
"God bless President Bush, and God bless America," he said, clad in his trademark T-shirt, ripped blue jeans and leather jacket.
"I said that to counter those other speeches at the other awards," Mr. Ramone says in a phone interview. "Republicans let this happen over and over, and there is never anyone to stick up for them. They spend too much time defending themselves."
Johnny Ramone is at an easy point in his life, where "Blitzkrieg Bop" can be heard at sporting events as rev music and where the Ramones are widely cited as one of the most influential bands in the history of rock 'n' roll.
They never had a hit single, and none of their 14 original studio albums ever went gold. The Ramones did it because they loved it and had something to say.
"It was a job, and I was just doing my job," Mr. Ramone says now.
The Ramones were so far ahead of their time that Johnny Ramone makes more money each year, thanks to Ramones tunes used in advertisements, discerning record buyers paying their debt to history and the increasing number of Ramones reissues.
"I'm just honored that people still like us and people are still nice to me," he says, 55 years old and very retired in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Linda, and their three cats.
He sold his guitars and amps when the Ramones finally got out of the van after 2,263 live shows.
L.A. is 3,000 miles from Queens, N.Y., where he was raised as John Cummings, but he is never far from his legacy. People still know him when they see him, even though he disputes his own celebrity.
"I really can't believe that my career has gone like it has," he says. "I don't need much more money, and I thought that when I retired that nobody would want to talk to me anymore. Then I did, and people still want to talk to me." He pals around with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder and John Frusciante from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, tooling about in his black Cadillac DeVille, "a good American car," Johnny says proudly.
He is an avid film buff, and he watches two flicks a day - sci-fi, horror or anything intense - and his private collection numbers 4,000.
He reads mostly books on film and baseball. He still buys music, "old rock 'n' roll, '50s is my favorite," he says. "I also get some early '70s stuff, punk stuff, but I think I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel now." He won't play any Ramones, but Linda does.
"Constantly," he says, with a weary resignation.
"Yeah, the first five albums," she says. The two click on politics though.
"I grew up a Republican," she says. "My family was the only Italian family in Queens that voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy."
Johnny was driven right by a youthful revulsion against, um, face-ism. "It was in 1960, the Nixon-Kennedy election," he says, recalling his first inclination toward the right. He was an only child of Irish heritage in a working-class neighborhood. Families on his block voted left, pro-union. "People around me were saying, 'Oh, Kennedy's so handsome,' and I thought, 'Well, if these people are going to vote for someone based on how he looks, I don't want to be party to that.' "
For his news now, he hits the Drudge Report and Newsmax.com, Fox News' "Hannity and Colmes," and "The O'Reilly Factor." He listens daily to Rush Limbaugh and Michael Medved. In L.A., people spend a lot of time in their cars, and he uses that time to educate himself, he says.
His list of favorite Republicans should humble the Republican National Committee, or at least get him invited to a GOP fund-raiser: Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, Charlton Heston, [actor and close friend] Vincent Gallo, Ted Nugent, Messrs. Limbaugh and Hannity, Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Wayne and Tom DeLay.
He relishes agitating his left-wing peers - and has since the band started in 1974.
"Oh yeah, they really get upset," Johnny says. "I remember in 1979 doing an interview for Creem magazine with [famed rock and roll scribe, now deceased] Lester Bangs and telling him that Ronald Reagan will be the next president. He was really mad that I liked Reagan, who was the greatest president of my lifetime. So I turned it around on him and asked to see his commie card. In fact, ever after that, I would ask him for his card. I think he had one, really."
The other day, when Stray Cats bassist Slim Jim Phantom was complaining about his tax bill, Johnny reminded him that the charges would be higher if President Bush hadn't gotten his tax cuts passed. "I told him he needs to vote Republican to keep his taxes lower ... and donate to President Bush's campaign," he says.
"I try to make a dent in people when I can," he says. "I figure people drift toward liberalism at a young age, and I always hope that they change when they see how the world really is."
He has found few allies in show business, but one stands out as a fellow renegade and conservative: Mr. Gallo, an actor, director and musician. "What's radical about saying you are for the poor?" Mr. Gallo, 41, demands. "Johnny Ramone has never been like that. He is incredibly authentic as both a musician and a person. I respect him not because we agree on a lot of things but because he is an individual." They bonded over [former New York Yankees star pitcher] Ron Guidry, cinema and politics.
Not that Mr. Ramone's friends must pass an ideological litmus test. He still holds ideological hopes for the relentlessly liberal Mr. Vedder. When the Pearl Jam singer impaled a mask of Mr. Bush and slammed it to the stage at a Denver concert on the heels of the Iraq invasion last April, Johnny Ramone let him know that he thought it was a stupid move.
"I got serious with him and told him that he was alienating people," Johnny says. "And I got him to see the point." When Johnny Ramone tells you something is uncool, well, it is.
Harnessing chaos, humor and danger, the Ramones created the template of the rock 'n' roll revolution that was punk rock.
Even then, though, Johnny's conservative side showed. When the band wanted to record "Chinese Rocks," a song co-written by bassist Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny disapproved of the reference to a strain of dope that was prevalent at the time.
Ditto when the other guys in the band came up with "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg," a tune disparaging Johnny's beloved Mr. Reagan. (Sample lyric: "You're a politician / Don't become one of Hitler's children.") Both times, he lost. After all, a band is a democracy.
"But I really enjoyed upsetting them," Johnny says of his former bandmates. "They called me the Rush Limbaugh of rock 'n' roll one time in a Village Voice interview. But, hey, they were just old hippies." Two are dead now: Singer Joey succumbed to cancer in 2001 and Dee Dee to a heroin overdose in 2002. Longtime (but not original) Ramones drummer Marky still plays around in the underground scene.
Like so many other right-wingers. who are fed up with the media establishment, Johnny tunes in to the radio every day for some roiling rhetoric and to the Web for some news that doesn't seem to make the local newspaper.
"Hey," he says, perusing Newsmax.com as he speaks on the phone, "what's going on with these illegal aliens now?"
... ok this last one... is written by Jed Davis....
The whole story of Johnny Ramone is right there in the guitar. In the cracked and mottled paint, the dented neck, the slashed body, the beat-up pickguard held on by a half-dozen mismatched screws.
Johnny played this guitar from 1977 to 1996. Here, slip it on. When you sling the strap over your shoulder, the guitar freefalls right to your knees - stopping with a jerk just when you think it's gonna crash to the floor.
There's only one way to reach the strings of a guitar slung so low: spread 'em like you're getting arrested. You have to be a delinquent to feel comfortable playing this instrument.
Sit down for a second and hold the guitar up for a closer look. First thing you notice is the paint job, or the lack of one. Two decades of sweat have eaten away the white finish down to the bare wood - wood that is nicked, scratched, bashed and slashed. Never repainted, never sanded, never restored.
Check out the pickguard - it looks like a slab of armor sliced from the breastplate of a vanquished black knight. Like it's survived the bloodiest of battles to fight another day. Each screw that holds it on has a different color and head; some of them barely fit in their assigned holes.
But Johnny's fingerprint is an indentation in the neck where it meets the body - when you see that, feel it, you know this guitar could have belonged to only one man. It's scalloped out, carved completely concave as if by a thousand years of elemental force. Of course, twenty years of downstroke is more powerful than anything God or Mother Nature could ever muster.
In the Business Of Rock, guitars are smashed to shit every night. Everybody from the Windmilling Stratolegend to the Latest Petulant Poseur Trying Desperately To Look Badass has consulted the BUSTING UP AN AXE chapter of the Rockstar Handbook. What is singular, and incredible, about Johnny Ramone's Mosrite Venture is that it arrived at its condition simply by being played. And played. And played.
The thing is held together with spit and bubblegum. Which tells us two things:
1. This guitar meant nothing to its owner, who treated it like a Craftsman tool - determined to run the fuckin thing into the ground before he'd even think about replacing it.
2. This guitar meant everything to its owner, who maintained his trusty axe through two decades of punishment and considered it irreplaceable to the end.
Does one of these statements really disqualify the other? Can't they both be true of a guy who played guitar every night of his life... but never practiced? Who gained a following of millions by ignoring trends and public opinion? Who helped save rock and roll by dismantling it?
Eh, maybe neither is true. Maybe Johnny just didn't want to spend any money on a new guitar. One thing is crystal clear, though: this is the instrument of a man who refused to give up when things were bad, and refused to sell out when things were good.
Anyway... the guitar is in your hands, right? Play something. How about "Blitzkrieg Bop"? Go on, you can do it. You CAN do it, that's the whole point. Downstrokes are sufficient - you don't even need to hit the strings on your way back up. Just don't you dare solo. Johnny's watching.
- Jed Davis.