Johnny Ramone

LOU REED’S famous dictum that “One chord is fine, two chords are pushing it, three chords and you’re into jazz” might well have been the maxim of Johnny Ramone, the guitarist of the band that played punk rock before the genre was even named. For more than 20 years, between the Ramones’ formation in 1974 and their final split in 1996, Johnny Ramone stood stage right, legs spread, eyes down, hammering out some of the most influential chord sequences of the late 20th century. Blitzkrieg Bop, Sheena is a Punk Rocker, Rockaway Beach — the Beach-Boys-meets-buzzsaw sound of the Ramones was the genesis for the Sex Pistols and informed the entire germinating punk movement of the late 1970s. Yet the Ramones were perhaps the most famous and influential band to avoid chart success. In two decades of recording and touring, they rarely bothered the top 30, and not one of their albums went gold. Each song — Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, Teenage Lobotomy, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue and I Wanna Be Sedated — was a frantic, tuneful, two-minute aria that inspired punks, metallers, grungers, skaters and slackers right to the present day. When their contemporaries Green Day released the hit album Dookie in 1994, the music press reported that the band had already made more money than the Ramones had in their entire career. Yet without the Ramones it is difficult to imagine Green Day, the Offspring, Rancid, Blink 182, Sum 41 or any of the hundreds of other neo-punk bands recording today.

The four Ramones: Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee suggested, loudly, that the pomp rock of the Seventies — three-disc rock operas, Wagnerian obsessions, British folk myths and 16-minute guitar and drum solos — were no longer the thing. What you needed was a leather jacket, a pair of jeans, a guitar and a dumb look. Part of the band’s appeal was the Ramones chic; the sneakers, jeans and grebo haircuts; the notion that the lead guitarist had got into the game “to be the fastest guitarist on earth”. And they talked the talk with laconic style. Johnny Ramone commented: “I basically tried to play normal stuff. We didn’t sing about surfing or cars or girls because we didn’t surf, didn’t have cars and didn’t have girlfriends. So we wrote about sniffing glue and the boredom of suburbia.”

Johnny Ramone was born John Cummings on Long Island, New York City, in 1948. He was brought up on Chuck Berry, Elvis and the Beatles and began attending gigs in New York in the early Seventies by bands such as Slade and the New York Dolls. Like MC5 and the Stooges, these groups were unafraid to sound rough and ready, placing more emphasis on energy than technique. When Johnny was made redundant from the local construction company, where he worked as a steamfitter, he walked into the mail room to see Douglas Colvin, his co-worker and high-school friend. “Why don’t we fool around, get a band? he said. “Let’s get some guitars.”

Johnny was 25 when he picked up the instrument — a Mosrite, his signature guitar throughout his career. He worked on his stance in front of the mirror before playing a note. “I learnt how to play after I got the guitar looking right on me,” he said later. Tommy Erdelyi and Jeffrey Hyman (Tommy and Joey) came on board, and the band took its name from an early alias of Paul McCartney’s, Paul Ramon.

The Ramones began to play at CBGB’s, a dive club on New York’s Lower East Side that also started the careers of Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Blondie. Of an early gig, the club owner recalled: “They played 20 songs in 17 minutes without stopping.” This was a precedent. The first album, Ramones, was recorded in 1976. “We got signed to a deal for $20,000,” said Johnny, “we bought equipment and did an album for $6,500.” Once the needle was dropped, Johnny’s fuzzbox guitar ushered in the machinegun beat of Tommy’s drumming, then Joey’s “Hey! Ho! Let’s go!” — and Blitzkrieg Bop, now almost the Ramones theme tune, was born.

They followed it with Leave Home (1977) — “We were learning how to play a little better, how to have more variety in the songs even though it all sounds the same,” said Johnny — and then Rocket to Russia, perhaps their best album. It was the apotheosis of the Ramones approach: four chords (if that), incredibly catchy tunes, dumb singalong lyrics, slogans and a two-minute song limit. Playing live, the band managed often to condense even these concise pieces into half their album time. Ingenues at gigs were unable to tell where one song ended and the next began.

Not everyone loved the Ramones. Despite songs such as We Want the Airwaves, radio dismissed them. On an early tour, their manager remembered, he was accosted by a filling-station clerk as the band (in full Ramones regalia) milled around in the forecourt. “Mister,” he was told, “it sure is nice of you to take care of those retarded people.”

But they caught attention where it mattered. Bruce Springsteen is supposed to have written Hungry Heart (his first No 1) for the Ramones, but been persuaded to hold on to it by his manager. And when the band played in London in 1976, their audience included members of what would become the Sex Pistols and the Clash, all of whom were sufficiently struck to put together their own groups. The Ramones recorded 17 albums, among them Sixties cover versions and a collaboration with Phil Spector. In 1980 they had a minor hit with a rendition of the Ronettes’ Baby I Love You.

Though the band presented themselves as a family, there were long periods when none of them would talk to one another. Tommy Ramone quit the drums in 1978, to be replaced by Marc Bell (Marky), and at the end of the Eighties Dee Dee left, to be replaced by Chris Ward (CJ). Johnny was the strategist and money man in the early days; he economised by ensuring that the band travelled everywhere in one van, which during the Eighties had to be subdivided into four separate compartments. Johnny stole Joey’s girlfriend in the middle of the decade, which did not help matters. But their offhand professionalism onstage ensured that, if the albums declined in quality, the live show remained seminal.

Johnny Ramone acquired a reputation — unfashionable among the generalised leftism of the music world — as a staunch conservative. “I grew up Republican,” he said. “My family was the only Italian family in Queens that voted for Nixon instead of Kennedy.” And he remained a lifelong Republican: he tormented the legendary music writer Lester Bangs in 1979 by saying that Reagan would be the next president. When the Ramones were accepted into the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, his comment “God bless President Bush; God bless America” divided opinion. Yet, having practically created punk cool, Johnny stood in no danger of violating it. “He’s bulletproof among punks,” one fan said.

After a triumphant final night in 1996, the Ramones split and Johnny hung up his guitar. He had played some 2,250 shows, with between 20 and 30 songs a concert. He continued his lifelong love of horror and action films, of which he watched two a day. Joey Ramone died of cancer in 2001, and Dee Dee of a drug overdose the year after.

He was sanguine about the guitar style that had informed a generation of punk rockers. “My style became an art of how little effort I could put into everything,” he said. “Somehow, we appealed to all the misfits of society. A lot of kids went out and got guitars because of us.”

He is survived by his wife, Linda.







Johnny Ramone (John Cummings), guitarist, was born on October 8, 1948. He died of prostate cancer on September 15, 2004, aged 55.