The Ramones

Ramones were an American rock band often regarded as the first punk rock group.title=The Ramones
The Ramones were a major influence on the punk rock movement both in the United States and the United Kingdom, though they achieved only minor commercial success. Their only record with enough U.S. sales to be certified gold was the compilation album Ramones Mania. Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now cited in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone lists of the 50 Greatest Artists of All Time and VH1's 100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock. It wasn't until they made a brief tour of England that they began to see the fruits of their labor; a performance at The Roundhouse in London on July 4, 1976 (second-billed to the Flamin' Groovies), organized by Linda Stein, was a resounding success. Their Roundhouse appearance and a club date the following night�where the band met members of the Sex Pistols and The Clash�helped galvanize the burgeoning UK punk rock scene.url=query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B07EFDE1F31F934A25757C0A9679C8B63 The Flamin' Groovies/Ramones double bill was successfully reprised at The Roxy in Los Angeles the following month, fueling the punk scene there as well. The Ramones were becoming an increasingly popular live act�a Toronto performance in September energized yet another growing punk scene. title =A Canadian Punk Revival

Their next two albums, Leave Home and Rocket to Russia, were released in 1977

. Both were coproduced by Tommy and Tony Bongiovi, the second cousin of Jon Bon Jovi. Leave Home met with even less chart success than Ramones, though it did include "Pinhead", which became one of the band's signature songs with its chanted refrain of "Gabba gabba hey!" Rocket to Russia was the band's highest charting album to date, reaching number 49 on the Billboard 200. In Rolling Stone, critic Dave Marsh called it "the best American rock & roll of the year". The album also featured the first Ramones single to break into the Billboard charts (albeit only as high as number 81): "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker". The follow-up single, "Rockaway Beach", climbed to number 66�the highest any Ramones single would ever reach in America. On December 31, 1977, the Ramones recorded It's Alive, a live concert double album, at the Rainbow Theatre, London, which was released in April 1979 (the title is a reference to the 1974 horror film It's Alive).

Recordings turn more pop: 1978�1983

Tommy, tired of touring, left the band in early 1978. He continued as the Ramones' record producer under his birthname of Erdelyi. His position as drummer was filled by Marc Bell, who had been a member of the early 1970s hard rock band Dust and punk icon Richard Hell's backing band The Voidoids. Bell became Marky Ramone. Later that year, the band released their fourth album, and first with Marky, Road to Ruin. The album, coproduced by Tommy with Ed Stasium, included some new sounds like acoustic guitar, several ballads, and the band's first two recorded songs longer than three minutes. It failed to crack the Billboard Top 100. However, "I Wanna Be Sedated", which appeared both on the album and as the B-side of the single "I Don't Want You", would become one of the band's best-known songs. The artwork on the album's cover was done by Punk magazine co-founder John Holmstrom.

After the band's movie debut in Roger Corman's ''Rock 'n' Roll High School (1979), renowned producer Phil Spector became interested in the Ramones and produced their 1980 album End of the Century. During the recording sessions in Los Angeles, Spector pulled a gun on Dee Dee, forcing him to repeatedly play a riff. Though End of the Century'' was to be the highest-charting album in the band's history�number 44 in the United States, number 14 in Great Britain�Johnny made clear that he favored the band's more aggressive punk material. A stance also conveyed by the title and track selection of the compilation album he later oversaw: Loud, Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits. He later commented on working with Spector, "It really worked when he got to a slower song like 'Danny Says'�the production really worked tremendously. 'Rock 'N' Roll Radio' is really good. For the harder stuff, it didn't work as well."name=jrst> title =Johnny Ramone Stays Tough: Ramones Guitarist Reflects on Dee Dee's Death and the Difficult Eighties The syrupy, string-laden Ronettes cover "Baby, I Love You" released as a single, became the band's biggest ever hit in Great Britain, reaching number 8 on the charts.title=Joey Ramone Obituary

Joey Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone in concert, 1983
Pleasant Dreams, the band's sixth album, was released in 1981. The record continued the trend established by End of The Century, diluting the rawer punk sound showcased on the band's initial three albums. Slick production was again featured, this time provided by Graham Gouldman of UK pop act 10cc. Johnny would contend in retrospect that this direction was a record company decision, a continued futile attempt to get airplay on American radio. While Pleasant Dreams reached number 58 on the U.S. chart, its two singles failed to register at all.

Subterranean Jungle, produced by Ritchie Cordell and Glen Kolotkin, was released in 1983. Billy Rogers, who had performed with Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, played drums on the album's second single, a cover of The Chambers Brothers' "Time Has Come Today".first=Donna Subterranean Jungle peaked at number 83 in the United States�it would be the last album by the band to crack the Billboard Top 100.

Shuffling members: 1983�1989

After the release of Subterranean Jungle, Marky Ramone was fired from the band because of his alcoholism. He was replaced by Richard Reinhardt, who adopted the name Richie Ramone. The first album the Ramones recorded with Richie was Too Tough to Die in 1984, with Tommy Erdelyi returning as producer. The band's title="Bonzo Goes To Bitburg"
Retitled "My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg)", the song appeared on the band's 1986 album, Animal Boy. Produced by Jean Beauvoir, formerly a member of the Plasmatics, the LP was characterized by a Rolling Stone reviewer as "nonstop primal fuzz pop". Making it his pick for "album of the week", New York Times critic Jon Pareles wrote that the Ramones "speak up for outcasts and disturbed individuals". The following year, the band recorded their last album with Richie, Halfway to Sanity. The record was produced by Daniel Rey, formerly a guitarist with the late-1970s punk band Shrapnel. Richie left in August 1987, upset that after being in the band for four years, the other members would still not give him a share of the money they made selling T-shirts.From the film End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones Richie was replaced by Clem Burke from Blondie, which was disbanded at the time. According to Johnny, the performances with Burke�who took on the name Elvis Ramone�were a disaster. He was fired after two shows because his drumming could not keep up with the rest of the band. Marky, now clean and sober, returned.

Dee Dee left after 1989's Brain Drain, coproduced by Beauvoir, Rey, and Bill Laswell. title =Dee Dee Ramone Found Dead In Los Angeles He was replaced by Christopher Joseph Ward (C.J. Ramone), who performed with the band until their break-up. Dee Dee initially pursued a brief career as a rapper, adopting the name Dee Dee King. He quickly returned to punk rock and formed several bands, in much the same vein as the Ramones, for whom he also continued to write songs.

Final years: 1990�1996

After more than a decade and a half at Sire Records, the Ramones moved to a new label, Radioactive Records. The band's first album for Radioactive, released in 1992, was Mondo Bizarro, which reunited them with producer Ed Stasium.title=Overview Mondo Bizarro Acid Eaters, consisting entirely of cover songs, came out the following year.title=Overview Acid Eaters In 1993 as well, the Ramones were featured on an episode of The Simpsons titled "Rosebud", providing the music and voices for their animated versions.

In 1995, the Ramones came out with �Adios Amigos! and announced that they planned to break up if the album was not a hit.title=Overview �Adios Amigos! Its sales were unremarkable, garnering it just two weeks on the lower end of the Billboard chart.title=Chart History �Adios Amigos! The band spent the latter part of 1995 on what was promoted as a farewell tour. However, they accepted an offer to appear in the sixth Lollapalooza festival, which toured around the United States during the following summer.title=Intruder Alert! Intruder Alert! Marky Ramone After the Lollapalooza tour's conclusion, the Ramones played their final show on August 6, 1996, at the Palace in Hollywood. A recording of the concert was later released on video and CD as ''We're Outta Here!'' In addition to a reappearance by Dee Dee, the show featured several guests including Mot�rhead's Lemmy, Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder, Soundgarden's Chris Cornell, and Rancid's Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen.Schinder (2007), pp. 559�560.

Aftermath and deaths

's daughter.
On July 20, 1999, Dee Dee, Johnny, Joey, Tommy, Marky, and C.J. appeared together at the Virgin Megastore in New York City for an autograph signing. This was the last occasion on which the original four members of the group appeared together. Joey, who had been diagnosed with lymphoma in 1995, died of the illness on April 15, 2001, in New York.

In 2002, the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, which specifically named Dee Dee, Johnny, Joey, Tommy, and Marky. At the ceremony, the surviving inductees spoke on behalf of the band. Tommy spoke first, saying how honored the band felt, but how much it would have meant for Joey. Johnny thanked the band's fans and blessed George W. Bush and his presidency, Dee Dee humorously congratulated and thanked himself, while Marky thanked Tommy for influencing his drum style. Green Day played "Teenage Lobotomy" and "Blitzkrieg Bop" as a tribute, demonstrating the Ramones' continuing influence on later rock musicians. The ceremony was one of Dee Dee's last public appearances; on June 5, 2002, two months later, he was found at his Hollywood home, dead from a heroin overdose.url=query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07E4D9143DF934A35755C0A9649C8B63

End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones, a Ramones documentary, was released in theaters in 2004. Johnny, who had been privately battling prostate cancer, died on September 15, 2004, in Los Angeles, almost exactly as the film was released.{{cite web|author=Sisario, Ben

The Ramones were inducted into the Long Island Music Hall of Fame in 2007. That October saw the release of a DVD set containing concert footage of the band: ''It's Alive 1974-1996'' includes 118 songs from 33 performances over the span of the group's career.

Conflicts between members

Tensions between Joey and Johnny colored much of the Ramones' career. The pair were politically antagonistic, Joey being a liberal and Johnny a conservative. Their personalities also clashed: Johnny was a military brat who lived by a code of self-discipline, while Joey struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Johnny, who was fascinated by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler, would sometimes torment Joey with anti-Semitic remarks.Beeber (2006), p. 121. In the early 1980s, Johnny "stole" Joey's girlfriend Linda, whom he later married. As a consequence, despite performing together for years afterward, Joey and Johnny stopped speaking to each other. Johnny did not call Joey before the latter's death in 2001, but said in the documentary End of the Century that he was depressed for "the whole week" after the singer died.

Aside from this central conflict, Dee Dee's bipolar disorder and repeated relapses into drug addiction also caused significant strains. Tommy left the band partly in reaction to being "physically threatened by Johnny, treated with contempt by Dee Dee, and all but ignored by Joey". As new members joined, payment methods and image representation became matters of serious dispute. The Ramones' style was in part a reaction against the heavily produced, often bombastic music that dominated the pop charts in the 1970s. "We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard," Joey once explained. "In 1974 everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos.... We missed music like it used to be." Ira Robbins and Scott Isler of Trouser Press describe the result:
cquote With just four chords and one manic tempo, New York's Ramones blasted open the clogged arteries of mid-'70s rock, reanimating the music. Their genius was to recapture the short/simple aesthetic from which pop had strayed, adding a caustic sense of trash-culture humor and minimalist rhythm guitar sound.Isler and Robbins (1991), p. 532.

As leaders in the punk rock scene, the Ramones' music has usually been identified with that label, while some have defined their characteristic style more specifically as pop punk and others as power pop. In the 1980s, the band sometimes veered into hardcore punk territory, as can be heard on Too Tough to Die.

On stage, the band adopted a focused approach directly intended to increase the audience's concert experience. Johnny's instructions to C.J. when preparing for his first live performances with the group were to play facing the audience, to stand with the bass slung low between spread legs, and to walk forward to the front of stage at the same time as he did. Johnny was not a fan of guitarists who performed facing their drummer, amplifier, or other band members.

Visual imagery

The Ramones' art and visual imagery complemented the themes of their music and performance. The band members adopted a uniform look of long hair, leather jackets, t-shirts, torn jeans, and sneakers. This fashion emphasized minimalism, which was a powerful influence on the New York punk scene of the 1970s and reflected the band's short, simple songs.Colegrave and Sullivan (2001), p. 67. Tommy Ramone recalled that, both musically and visually, "we were influenced by comic books, movies, the Andy Warhol scene, and avant-garde films. I was a big Mad Magazine fan myself."

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The band's logo was created by New York City artist Arturo Vega, a longtime friend who had allowed Joey and Dee Dee to move into his loft.McNeil and McCain (1996), p. 211. Vega produced the band's t-shirts, their

I saw them as the ultimate all-American band. To me, they reflected the American character in general�an almost childish innocent aggression.... I thought, 'The Great Seal of the President of the United States' would be perfect for the Ramones, with the eagle holding arrows�to symbolize strength and the aggression that would be used against whomever dares to attack us�and an olive branch, offered to those who want to be friendly. But we decided to change it a little bit. Instead of the olive branch, we had an apple tree branch, since the Ramones were American as apple pie. And since Johnny was such a baseball fanatic, we had the eagle hold a baseball bat instead of the Seal's arrows.

The scroll in the eagle's beak originally read "Look out below", but this was soon changed to "Hey ho let's go" after the opening lyrics of the band's first single, "Blitzkrieg Bop". The arrowheads on the shield came from a design on a polyester shirt Vega had bought. The name "Ramones" was spelled out in block capitals above the logo using plastic stick-on letters. Where the presidential emblem read "Seal of the President of the United States" clockwise in the border around the eagle, Vega instead placed the pseudonyms of the four band members: Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy. Over the years the names in the border would change as the band's lineup fluctuated.

Influence

The Ramones had a broad and lasting influence on the development of popular music. Music historian Jon Savage writes of their debut album that "it remains one of the few records that changed pop forever." As described by Allmusic critic Stephen Thomas Erlewine, "The band's first four albums set the blueprint for punk, especially American punk and hardcore, for the next two decades." Trouser Press's Robbins and Isler similarly write that the Ramones "not only spearheaded the original new wave/punk movement, but also drew the blueprint for subsequent hardcore punk bands". Punk journalist Phil Strongman writes, "In purely musical terms, The Ramones, in attempting to re-create the excitement of pre-Dolby rock, were to cast a huge shadow�they had fused a blueprint for much of the indie future." Writing for Slate in 2001, Douglas Wolk described the Ramones as "easily the most influential group of the last 30 years."

The Ramones' debut album had an outsized effect relative to its modest sales. According to Tony James, a member of several seminal British punk bands, "Everybody went up three gears the day they got that first Ramones album. Punk rock�that rama-lama super fast stuff�is totally down to the Ramones. Bands were just playing in an MC5 groove until then." The central fanzine of the early UK punk scene, ''Sniffin' Glue'', was named after the song "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue", which appeared on the debut LP. title =Punk Fiction The Ramones' first British concert, at London's Roundhouse concert hall, was held on July 4, 1976, the United States Bicentennial. The Sex Pistols were playing in Sheffield that evening, supported by The Clash, making their public debut. The next night, members of both bands attended the Ramones' gig at the Dingwall's club. Ramones manager Danny Fields recalls a conversation between Johnny Ramone and Clash bassist Paul Simonon (which he mislocates at the Roundhouse): "Johnny asked him, 'What do you do? Are you in a band?' Paul said, 'Well, we just rehearse. We call ourselves the Clash but we're not good enough.' Johnny said, 'Wait till you see us�we stink, we're lousy, we can't play. Just get out there and do it.'" Another band whose members saw the Ramones perform, The Damned, played their first show two days later. The Ramones' two July 1976 shows, like their debut album, are seen as having a significant impact on the style of many of the newly formed British punk acts�as one observer put it, "instantly nearly every band speeded up".

Ramones concerts and recordings inspired many musicians central to the development of California punk as well, including Greg Ginn of Black Flag, Jello Biafra of Dead Kennedys, Mike Ness of Social Distortion, Brett Gurewitz of Bad Religion, and members of The Descendents. Canada's first major punk scenes�in Toronto and in British Columbia's Victoria and Vancouver�were also heavily influenced by the Ramones. In the late 1970s, many bands emerged with musical styles deeply indebted to the band's. There were The Lurkers from England, The Undertones from Ireland, Teenage Head from Canada, and The Zeros and The Dickies from southern California. The seminal hardcore band Bad Brains took its name from a Ramones song. Later punk bands such as Screeching Weasel, The Vindictives, The Queers, The Mr. T Experience, Beatnik Termites, and Jon Cougar Concentration Camp have recorded cover versions of entire Ramones albums�Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, Road to Ruin, Pleasant Dreams, and Too Tough to Die, respectively. The Huntingtons' File Under Ramones consists of Ramones covers from across the band's history. The Riverdales, made up of former Screeching Weasel members, have emulated the sound of the Ramones throughout their career.

The Ramones also influenced musicians associated with other genres, such as heavy metal. Metallica's Kirk Hammett has described the importance of Johnny's rapid-fire guitar playing style to his own musical development. Mot�rhead lead singer Lemmy, a friend of the Ramones since the late 1970s, mixed the band's "Go Home Ann" in 1985. The members of Mot�rhead later composed the song "R.A.M.O.N.E.S." as a tribute, and Lemmy performed at the final Ramones concert in 1996. In the realm of alternative rock, the song "53rd and 3rd" lent its name to a British indie pop label cofounded by Stephen Pastel of the Scottish band The Pastels. Evan Dando of The Lemonheads, Dave Grohl of Nirvana and Foo Fighters, and The Strokes are among the many alternative rock musicians who have credited the Ramones with inspiring them.

The first Ramones tribute album by multiple bands was released in 1991: Gabba Gabba Hey: A Tribute to the Ramones features tracks by such acts as The Flesh Eaters, L7, Mojo Nixon, and Bad Religion.title=Overview Gabba Gabba Hey: A Tribute to the Ramones ''We're a Happy Family: A Tribute to Ramones (2003) is the best known Ramones tribute album, with artists such as Green Day, Kiss, The Offspring, Red Hot Chili Peppers, U2, Metallica, and Rob Zombie (who also did the album cover artwork). Green Day members have gone as far as naming their children in honor of the band. Billie Joe Armstrong named his son Joey in homage to Joey Ramone, and Tr� Cool named his daughter Ramona.

Members

Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Colvin) � bass guitar, vocals (1974�1989)
Johnny Ramone (John Cummings) � guitar (1974�1996)
Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Hyman) � drums (1974), lead vocals (1974�1996)
Tommy Ramone (Thomas Erdelyi) � drums (1974�1978)
Marky Ramone (Marc Bell) � drums (1978�1983, 1987�1996)
Richie Ramone (Richard Reinhardt) � drums, vocals (1983�1987)
Elvis Ramone (Clem Burke) � drums (1987)
C. J. Ramone (Christopher Joseph Ward) � bass guitar, vocals (1989�1996)

Discography

Studio albums

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Ramones (1976)title=Discography�The Ramones
Leave Home (1977)
Rocket to Russia (1977)
Road to Ruin (1978)
End of the Century (1980)
Pleasant Dreams (1981)
Subterranean Jungle (1983)
Too Tough to Die (1984)
Animal Boy (1986)
Halfway to Sanity (1987)
Brain Drain (1989)
Mondo Bizarro (1992)
Acid Eaters (1993)
�Adios Amigos! (1995)

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