RAMONES MILESTONES : The Ramones Just Played Their 2,000th Gig, but ‘I’m Never Conscious of My Age,’ Says Singer Joey, Now 41, ‘Because I’m Timeless’

Rock ‘n’ roll was settling into an adulthood of polished professionalism and seasoned expertise when the Ramones came along and started behaving like punks.

The band arrived in 1976 with “The Ramones,” a burp gun of an album that fired away in loud, fast, catchy bursts ranging in duration from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 minutes. The black and white cover showed the band members in front of a crumbling, graffiti-covered wall of brick and cement--four shaggy-haired, leather-jacketed New Yorkers who looked like hoods and geeks, not polished professionals.

On the 14 tracks inside, guitarist Johnny Ramone, drummer Tommy Ramone and bassist Dee Dee Ramone (everyone took the same adopted surname to underscore the band’s stripped-down simplicity and singleness of purpose, not to mention its sense of the absurd) hammered out primitive slabs of sound and smashed them against the era’s prevailing assumption that good music had to be carefully honed with mastery and skills that took years to cultivate. The unstated premise behind the Ramones was that rock should never be left in the hands of experts.

Joey Ramone, the singer, was a spindly stack of elongated bones and alarmingly pallid skin. His chesty-nasal bleat of a voice proved an apt conduit for the band’s deadpan humor. The Ramones’ songs were catchy platforms for the voice of put-down, put-upon, bored, shiftless and inarticulate youth, which stood up and declared its intentions:

Now I wanna sniff some glue.

Now I wanna have somethin’ to do.

or

Beat on the brat, beat on the brat,

Beat on the brat with a baseball bat,

Oh yeah, oh yeah, uh-oh.

“The Ramones” was a spark that lit the fuse of ‘70s punk rock. The band toured England in 1976, Johnny Rotten and many other disaffected young Brits came, saw, heard what you could achieve by being loud, raw and technically unskilled, and took it from there.

Go to a Ramones show today and you’re apt to find that not much has changed. Marky drums in place of Tommy, and C.J., not Dee Dee, sounds the rapid “1-2-3-4” count-off that typically marks the end of one frenetic number and starts the next. But if time stands still for the Ramones, milestones are passing.

They are celebrating their 20th year as a band. Young alternative-rock bands cite their influence, and some even write songs about them. Frank Black, the opening act on a tour that brings the Ramones to UC Irvine on Saturday, recently paid tribute to these punk mentors from Queens with a soaring ode called “I Heard Ramona Sing.”

Speaking over the phone recently from his apartment in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, Joey Ramone said he doesn’t dwell upon being an elder statesman of punk. “I’m never conscious of my age, because I’m timeless,” said the singer, who is 41. “You’ve just gotta keep yourself healthy and in a positive, optimistic state.” But he admitted that sometimes the passing milestones and the mounting tributes touch him unexpectedly.

“We just did our 2,000th performance on Feb. 9 in Tokyo. I usually just shrug it off, but it’s a major achievement and I feel really good about it in a way I didn’t think I’d feel. We’re a unique band. We have definite values and ideals we’ve always maintained, and people respect that.”

Huge sales have not followed from that respect: The Ramones have yet to score a Top 40 album or single in the United States, where they have always been a club- and theater-level attraction with a steady cult following (Ramone says they are a much bigger draw overseas). They recently released their 13th studio album, “Acid Eaters,” an all-covers collection that pays tribute to their own influences from the ‘60s.

The punk movement that the Ramones helped ignite, meanwhile, has turned into the lucrative business of alternative rock. As “alternative” music becomes the new arena-rock, it is not unusual to hear successful bands proclaim their punk roots, hoping to be seen as standing apart from a mainstream that, like it or not, now is carrying them along.

Ramone doesn’t appear to be jealous of younger rockers reaping the rewards of shifting tastes. He spoke enthusiastically of the Ramones’ recent slot on a Lollapalooza-type festival in Australia called the Big Day Out, which found them billed with such younger, hotter-selling bands as Soundgarden, the Breeders, Primus, Bjork and Smashing Pumpkins.

“All the cool alternative bands,” he said. “It felt real good. We were real friendly with everybody and it was a lot of fun.”

He doesn’t think there is much point in young bands striving to acquire punk-ness as a credential if the spirit isn’t in them from the start.

“Nowadays it’s very trendy to say, ‘I want to be a punk band,’ and it’s very fashionable. To me, ‘punk attitude’ is a kind of (bogus) phrase. You have it or you don’t. It’s within you; it’s natural. Most of the bands that (affect) that attitude are phony and it’s a superficial thing.

“One person who really has it is P.J. Harvey. She just radiates intensity. That’s being genuine. It’s something you don’t conjure up. It’s within herself.”

For Ramone, who grew up as Jeffrey Hyman in the wealthy New York City community of Forest Hills, rock’s inner pull was strong early on. “When the Beatles came it changed my life, and I knew what I wanted to do.”

He started playing drums at 13 and entered Forest Hill High, which was a rock ‘n’ roll high school of sorts, numbering among its graduates Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, and Leslie West, the guitarist with the hard-rock band Mountain.

“I don’t have the most pleasant memories of high school,” Ramone said in a full-blown New York accent. “At the time it was rated one of the top 10 best schools in the country. I got suspended a couple of times because I was wearing sunglasses and long hair. They said I might hurt myself wearing sunglasses in the hallways.”

The Ramones began to take shape in 1974 when John (Johnny Ramone) Cummings and Douglas (Dee Dee Ramone) Colvin, guitar players from Forest Hills, recruited the young Hyman to play drums. “I didn’t know John, but I knew of him from hearing about his antics, pranks like throwing TVs off rooftops and stuff like that,” Joey recalled. “I’d met Dee Dee when I would go to see the New York Dolls at Kenny’s Castaways (a Manhattan rock club). When they asked me to play drums I wasn’t crazy about that idea (he had ambitions to be a singer), but I did it because I knew together we could do something great.

“At the time, Johnny wanted to be the fastest guitarist on Earth, which he has since accomplished,” Ramone continued. “The speed just kept increasing, and after a while I couldn’t handle the drumming anymore so they moved me up to being a singer.” Tom (Tommy Ramone) Erdelyi was a more experienced musician who was advising the band at that point. “We were auditioning drummers, and in those days everybody was very flamboyant, and we wanted a simple drummer like Charlie Watts. (Erdelyi) had never played drums in his life” but agreed to take over the job.

The Ramone brotherhood was Dee Dee’s idea. According to Joey (who might have been Jeffy Ramone had not Dee Dee started calling him Joey instead), the bassist had heard that Paul McCartney used to check into hotels under the assumed surname Ramone.

The band got its start playing at CBGB, the Bowery club that spawned such contemporaries on the New York underground as Talking Heads, Television and Blondie. “We were labeled punk rock by the press,” Ramone said. “We were totally alien to what everybody else was doing. We wanted to play music that excited us and was fun to play.”

He doesn’t claim that the band invented punk rock out of nothing. He readily cites the influence of bands that had emerged in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s emphasizing a rebellious attitude and a loud, ragged sound that prefigured punk.

“We stood alone, but we were inspired by and were fans of the New York Dolls and the Stooges and the MC5. We were big music fans and we absorbed everything. But we were starting from scratch and making our own rules on how to proceed.”

One rule passed early on called for band members to report for gigs in alert, unimpaired condition.

“The first show, we got a couple of six-packs to soothe the nerves, and it was kind of (messed) up. We realized that with the kind of music we play, with the intensity we play, you had to be straight when you’re playing it. If you want to do something else, do it on your own time.”

The Ramones have been criticized for sticking to their original concept and failing to go beyond the hard, fast, wall-of-sound approach. But Joey insists that the band has been flexible, and points to the occasional ballads and openly romantic pop songs that dot the Ramones’ discography (among them “Don’t Come Close,” a jangling, acoustic-based song from the 1978 album, “Road to Ruin”).

In the ‘80s, the band began to write more serious-minded anthems including “Bonzo Goes to Bitburg,” a declaration of anguish and ire in 1986 over Ronald Reagan’s controversial visit to a German military cemetery (the issue was whether Reagan should have paid tribute to the memory of an enemy’s fallen troops, especially when some of them had been part of the SS, the corps that created so many innocent corpses in its role as chief operative in the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities).

“To us, it was a kind of slap in the face to America, politically motivated (expletive),” Ramone said. “It was total disrespect, kind of a forgive-and-forget thing. Well, you don’t forget the Holocaust.”

The Ramones play their anthems in concert. But don’t look for them to try any slow stuff, or to toy with new arrangements of old nuggets. “Should we do (an oldie) as a reggae song, a hip-hop song?” Joey asked rhetorically. “We know what’s good. A lot of bands go on to butcher themselves and it’s almost a goof. We know better. You don’t tamper with perfection.”

The “Acid Eaters” collection doesn’t tamper radically with the ‘60s sources the Ramones honor, including songs by the Who (“Substitute”), the Animals (“When I Was Young”), the Rolling Stones (“Out of Time”), Jefferson Airplane (“Somebody to Love”) and Bob Dylan (“My Back Pages,” sung by C.J., who replaced Dee Dee in 1989).

“It was a treat for ourselves,” Ramone said of the all-covers concept. “Pete Townshend came down and sang backup vocals on ‘Substitute,’ which for me was one of my ultimate highs. He and Iggy Pop are my two last surviving heroes.”

Ramone says that fans who come to shows to slam-dance to the band’s single-minded onslaught of the hard and the fast might be surprised at some of his own musical interests.

“I’m very broad-minded about what inspires me and influences me. I like Neil Young. I’m not really crazy about his loud stuff; I like the folk stuff. I love the song he wrote for the ‘Philadelphia’ soundtrack. It’s one of the most beautiful songs I ever heard.”

Ramone also has been getting into the music of Woody Guthrie over the past year or so, having struck up a friendship with the folk music pioneer’s daughter, Nora. And he has done some extracurricular singing outside the Ramones in settings that are far from punk rock.

Last year he appeared on a tribute album honoring the avant-garde composer John Cage. He recently joined General Johnson, the trebly-voiced singer from the early-’70s soul band Chairmen of the Board, to record an R&B; version of the Ramones’ song “Rockaway Beach.” Ramone also is moonlighting on a recording project with his younger brother, Mickey Leigh, who previously fronted a band called the Rattlers.

What he’d really like to do is a solo album, but he says that Johnny Ramone and the band’s management have vetoed it.

“It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a lot of years,” he said. “My album would be totally non-conventional, like a smorgasbord.”

The two remaining original Ramones never have gotten along smoothly, according to Joey.

“There was always a friction between me and John, like between Daltrey and Townshend. We don’t really hang out; we’re business partners. But when it comes to the band, we’re on the same wavelength. We want what’s best for the band.”

With 2,001 performances behind the Ramones as they embark on their U.S. tour (the show at UC Irvine will be number 2,006), Joey thinks the band has a chance to make it to 2,500--or about 5 more years at its going rate. He doubts the Ramones will be around for a 3,000th gig.

After 20 years, it would be only natural if he found himself struggling to deliver the excitement promised in the trademark cry that led off the Ramones debut album: “Hey, ho, let’s go!”

“Sometimes I feel that way before the show,” he said. “But when I’m up there I never feel that way. We have the best fans in the world, die-hard loyalists. It’s not like you’re playing a show; it’s like this hysteria out there. It’s always that way, and that’s all you need.”

Who: The Ramones.

When: Saturday, March 12, at 8 p.m., with Frank Black.

Where: Crawford Hall, at Bridge Road and Mesa Road at UC Irvine.

Whereabouts: Take the San Diego (405) Freeway to the University Drive exit, go south to Campus Drive and turn left. At Bridge Road, go right. Crawford Hall parking is on the left.

Wherewithal: $21.

Where to call: (714) 856-5000.