Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,826

This is the grave of Johnny Ramone.

Born in Queens in 1948, John Cummings grew up there. He had a bad relationship with his disciplinarian father and Johnny wasn’t going to respond well to that. He preferred rock and roll to sports and his father hated that. He was sent to a military academy for awhile and that didn’t stick. He was in some early rock and roll bands, including with his friend Tamás Erdélyi, known as Tommy. He trained as a plumber, his father’s profession, and worked some at it when he had nothing else going on. But he was still very much a rock kid and wanted to play.

In the early 70s, Cummings had a job as a dry cleaning delivery guy and while doing that, met a guy named Douglas Colvin. They became friends over their shared love of rock and roll, such as The Stooges and MC5 and the rest of that Detroit scene. They decided they could do that too. They bought guitars, got Tommy in there to play the drums, as well as a guy named Jeffrey Hyman. They created their own signatures names as The Ramones. Colvin became Dee Dee. Cummings of course became Johnny.

The Ramones first performed in 1974 and recorded their now classic debut in 1976. The critics loved it; the audiences didn’t. But those who heard it found it super influential and they were at the cutting edge of the New York punk scene. Once again, one cannot overstate the importance of this band. While on a personal level, Gang of Four is more my thing from the punk era (give me those jagged guitars and Marxist lyrics, just straight into my veins), Ramones were more important. They were better and more consistently good than the Clash (sorry, it’s true) and far better than Sex Pistols. Sure, they didn’t have the politics of the angry British punks, but their anger about basically nothing but shit jobs in a shit city during a shit life did speak to an awful lot of people’s experiences. Somehow, it’s typically American that this expression would find no solace in any kind of organizing or vision for a better future, but rather drugs and nihilism.

In any case, while Johnny was not the songwriter here or the singer, he was the spirit of the punk guitar. He also had perhaps the best aesthetic judgement of any of them–keep it loud! In fact, one of Johnny’s real contributions to the band’s history was personally selecting the tracks on Loud, Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits, which got rid of any soft shit and focused on “Blitzkrieg Bop” and “Beat on the Brat” and “Judy is a Punk” and the like. He could barely play guitar and that didn’t bother him at all. He hated solos anyway, and really given the wankery of the prog dudes of this era, who can blame him? Can you imagine hearing Yes and not thinking, JFC give me Ramones to cleanse my soul of this dreck? Of course given the readers of this site, the response is going to be to pull out Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play for the 3000th time and especially listen to the story of the hare who lost his spectacles, clearly the peak of what rock and roll is supposed to be about. Johnny was also the band’s stalwart. Some of the other guys drifted out over time, but what was Johnny going to drift out to? He knew he didn’t have anything else. He didn’t want to have anything else. This was his life. And that’s fine.

About the band itself, well, you can’t beat it really. Those records are so great, especially the first five or six. And to be fair, most bands didn’t have 5 or 6 great records in them period, especially back then when musical tastes changed so quickly (unlike today, when music is stuck in an endless loop of the 60s and 70s dominating thanks to Boomer nostalgia and the profits of those songs being played endlessly for young folks) and of course the drugs and partying also got in the way of consistently good albums. It’s really a great run and if Johnny wasn’t the songwriter of this stuff, well, it’s not as if the songs were really that important anyway. And what Johnny provided in spades was the attitude. Now, that attitude could lead to stupidity, such as nearly dying during a fight with Sub Zero Construction’s Seth Macklin in 1983 that led to emergency brain surgery. Supposedly, Ramones’ next album Too Tough to Die was named after his recovery from this. But Johnny wasn’t a real bright guy generally, let’s be honest.

Unfortunately, Johnny was a complete reactionary politically, one of the only rockers who openly identified this way. No one ever accused the man of being particularly bright and he seems to have embraced Reagan and other right-wingers as part of a dumb rebellion against the norm that continued his whole life. It’s not as if he acted that responsibly generally as he aged. When Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, Johnny made sure to thank George W. Bush in his speech.

Johnny also dabbled in movies. He was in Rock n’ Roll High School with the rest of his band in 1979, which was a great bit of casting. He was also showed up in an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast, one of the most delightfully weird shows ever created and which included a soundtrack from the astounding guitarist Sonny Sharrock, making the whole thing even weirder.

Things got not great in the band when Johnny married Joey’s ex-girlfriend Linda. They stayed together as a band but personally hated each other and when Joey was dying of cancer, Johnny refused to visit or call him. Possibly Johnny might have been a bit more forgiving if he knew he didn’t have long left himself, but who ever really thinks of that when they are in the 50s? But in 1999, Johnny was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He fought it off for a long time, but it finally got him in 2004. He was 55 years old.

Johnny Ramone is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Hollywood, California. Or maybe he isn’t. It seems that his ashes are not under that gravestone, but rather are with his wife and this is just a cenotaph. Well, whatever, it works well enough for a grave post. Evidently, this thing–which is kind of awesome and kind of a monstrosity and certainly no paragon to taste but it’s the Ramones so who cares about taste–was planned by Johnny himself. Rob Zombie paid for it. Among the speakers at its opening were a bunch of musicians and Nicolas Cage, because why the fuck not. It’s not as Cage hasn’t planned for his own incredibly tasteless graveyard memorial!

As mentioned above, Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. If you would like this series to visit other members of the Rock Hall, most of whom as I recall did not thank George W. Bush in their induction speeches, you can donate to cover the require expenses here. Garth Hudson is buried in Woodstock, New York and Bessie Smith is in Sharon Hill, Pennsylvania. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.