Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,576

This is the grave of Tommy Ramone.

Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1949, Thomas Erdelyi was lucky to have been born at all. His parents were Jews who had survived in the Holocaust because they had friends who successfully hid them. Most of the rest of his family were exterminated. The family stayed in Budapest until the 1956 crushing of the dissent movement by the Soviet Union. They had supported greater freedom for themselves and their country. So they fled at that point and ended up in the United States. They lived in Forest Hills, Queens.

Erdelyi started playing in local bands as a teenager. He was a little garage band with his buddy John Cummings, who would later be known as Johnny Ramone. Erdelyi graduated from high school and went into music production. In fact, he was one of the people working as an assistant engineer on Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys album in 1970.

In 1974, Cummings and some other friends wanted to start a new type of band, something that would throw rock and roll in your face in short bursts of noise that would be both catchy and harsh at the same time. Erdelyi was still friends with the other guys and since he knew something about the industry, he helped them out. As the band was shaping up, the bass player couldn’t handle it. One of the other guys, Douglas Colvin, hopped over to bass, starting calling himself Dee Dee Ramone, and then convinced the other guys to do the Ramone thing as well and then the band became Ramones. Erdelyi was just going to be the manager. But as it turned out, he was the only one in the band who could play the drums well enough to actually keep up with the music. So they asked him to join and Tommy Ramone was born.

Tommy played with the band for its foundational four years, until 1978. It’s almost hard to imagine how transformational this band was. I think we too often think of punk as a late 70s thing, and it was, but really these early bands were starting right in the midst of the overblown prog era. And even the non-prog bands were full of pretension, from The Who’s ridiculous rock operas to Led Zeppelin’s massive bloat (and I like both of these bands!). For a bunch of New York weirdos to just take rock back down to its most distilled essence, barely care about playing the instruments properly in an era where rock gods were thinking of themselves as instrumental prodigies, and then expressing themselves, being loud and dumb but not really that dumb and actually kind of smart, I mean, it was a brilliant move that obviously changed the musical world. It wasn’t just Ramones of course, but they were at the forefront–the avant garde if you will.

And since Tommy was more of a professional in the music world than the rest of the guys, he did more than just play the drums. He wrote too, including “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” and “Blitzkrieg Bop,” two of the really great songs. Tommy would later discuss the scene that led to those songs and the band and he noted the intellectual nature of it. They had their influences too–New York Dolls, Lou Reed–and even as they were reinventing rock and roll, they were of their time as well and hardly rejected the bands that others might find silly or pretentious (I mean, they are doing this about the same as Lou is doing Metal Machine Music, which for whatever you want to think of that project, is certainly a statement about ART).

Tommy was the true architect of the band. It’s hard to say how the band could have survived without his doing the work to actually get a band together and keep it together. He was in charge of rehearsals and really the entire concept of their look and bearing was mostly his. As Marc Bell, who as Markie Ramone would eventually take over behind the drums when Tommy left the band in 1978, “He was the authoritative figure in the group. He was the original manager. He’s the one who called everyone up to come see the Ramones at CGBG.” The one thing about Ramones–like a lot of American punk–is that it was less political than British punk. We all know the politics of some of the Ramones were, uh, not great, though from what I can tell, Tommy was more apolitical than anything else. But do I prefer Gang of Four? I do, both in terms of sound and message. However, do I get the individualistic ethos of Ramones? Absolutely, as a good American, how could I not?

Tommy really did get tired of being in the band, especially being on the road, and so when he left in 1978, it was on good terms. Not surprisingly, the albums weren’t as good after this, though that might have been the case anyway. Still, Ramones, Ramones Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, and Road to Ruin are four outstanding albums. Of course, it’s not as if Subterranean Jungle and Pleasant Dreams are bad albums at all either. Plus, Tommy was still involved with production, which was always his first love anyway. He also produced The Replacements’ Tim and Redd Kross’ Neurotica.

Later in life, Tommy played with his partner Claudia Tiernan in a bluegrass-folk duo, which is slightly amusing at one level, but actually completely sensible at another given the long connections between the American punk scene and other forms of American folk music.

Tommy died in 2014, of bile duct cancer. He was 65 years old.

Kind of amazing that Tommy was the last of the original Ramones to live.

Let’s listen to some Ramones because that should happen every day of our lives.

Tommy Ramone is buried in New Montefiore Cemetery, West Babylon, New York.

If you want this series to visit other legends of American punk, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. GG Allin is in Littleton, New Hampshire (ok, this I need to visit) and Johnny Thunders is in Queens. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.