Punk Rock Revolutionary: The Legacy of Joey Ramone

You read the obituaries. He died before his time from cancer last year, a former member of a music-altering, fashion-setting rock quartet that is still influencing music years after its breakup. Despite his low profile in recent years, his death struck his fans on a deep, personal level.

George Harrison? Well, sure. But it also describes Joey Ramone.

Ramone, born Jeff Hyman, was the frontman for the Ramones, the New York band that upended the music-biz applecart in the mid-’70s with something called punk rock.

Much as Harrison’s death sent ripples through the now-calm waters of the ‘60s generation’s collective consciousness, Ramone’s, last April at age 49, jolted the children of the punk revolution, who placed flowers at the door of his old haunt CBGB the way their elders would later on the Beatles’ Hollywood Boulevard star.

But while Harrison’s final music has yet to surface, Ramone’s last recorded testament comes out Tuesday. “Don’t Worry About Me” is more than a curiosity or a sentimental send-off. The record is a surprise in many ways, from its musical range to its emotional depth. If the Ramones were passing out pep pills on the street corner, so to speak, Joey, older and on his own, is serving a full-course meal.

You might expect Joey Ramone to do a Stooges song (he performs “1969” here), but who would have guessed that he’d begin an album with the utopian Louis Armstrong hit “What a Wonderful World”?

To deliver the unexpected was one of the singer’s goals when he started the project a couple of years after the Ramones’ 1996 breakup. For all the freedom punk rock afforded others, the style eventually became a straitjacket for Joey, who chafed under its constraints as the Ramones soldiered on for two decades.

“Joey liked bands that challenged and changed,” says Daniel Rey, a longtime friend and collaborator and the new album’s producer. “He was a big fan of the Who, and they did rock operas.”

So when Joey got out on his own, there would be keyboards and instrumental solos. He’d pile on the dynamic shifts, glimmering textures and backing vocals. There would be introspection and grown-up takes on spirituality and the state of the world.

There would also be the lymphoma, diagnosed in 1994 and the subject of the album’s one angry rant, where Joey tersely repeats such lines as “sitting in a hospital bed ... I want my life ... “

But even that wrenching song--”I Got Knocked Down (But I’ll Get Up)”--comes with an upbeat subtitle. That optimism, along with a vulnerability and sweetness, are the album’s defining characteristics.

Where the Ramones got a laugh from cartoonish violence, Joey grapples with the real thing now, perplexed by news of kids killing kids and blowing up schools. He seems displaced, a decent guy who can’t quite figure out what’s going on these days: “It’s a different world to me and I just don’t understand.”

A frequent side effect of mature perspective is dull music, but Ramone hasn’t lost a step. His sob ‘n’ throb approach to “Wonderful World” is a reminder of vintage Ramones crossed with Sex Pistols, and the rest of the album frequently bursts with the exhilaration of someone rediscovering a youthful purpose.

In part it’s a tour of his inspirations, from the New York Dolls swagger of “Stop Thinking About It” to the pure Who homage of “Mr. Punchy,” with its la-la-las and oooo-oohs and playful call-and-response chorus.

But the most distinctive track is “Searching for Something,” the story of a woman’s spiritual quest, which takes her from New York City to an ashram upstate and then to India.

With that subject matter, and with its whiff of “My Sweet Lord” in the acoustic guitar arrangement, the song can be heard as a kind of bridge between Ramone and Beatle.

Modest Expectations for the New Album

As much as it departs from his past, and as modest as Sanctuary Records’ commercial expectations are (the independent label’s director of marketing Meg Harkins says the company is shipping “a couple hundred thousand” copies internationally), Joey’s solo album extends one of rock’s most colorful story lines.

The Ramones were formed in 1974, when Hyman and three Forest Hills neighbors donned leather jackets and torn jeans and adopted their shared surname. Like some kind of misfit superheroes, Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy Ramone were ready to take on the world with songs a minute or two long, all introduced by Dee Dee’s shout of 1-2-3-4.

Alongside such peers as Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith and Television, they made a Bowery dive called CBGB the sudden nerve center of a revolution that would bring down the wall between fans and musicians.

When disaffected working-class kids in England got wind of the Ramones’ beat and ‘tude, punk rock assumed the weight of political combat, and elsewhere the music evolved into nihilistic posturing.

But the Ramones’ rebellion was remarkably benign--a plea to loosen the neckties and rediscover the freedom and lift they had felt in the music of Phil Spector, the Beatles, the Who and the Kinks. Two of Joey’s greatest thrills would come when Spector produced a Ramones album, and later when Joey produced a record by Spector’s ex-wife, the Ronettes’ singer Ronnie Spector.

The Ramones’ strategy has proved a durable one, still serving as a blueprint for such current hit acts as the Offspring and Blink-182. In an interview during the Ramones’ farewell tour in 1996, Joey was asked about the many young bands that were earning a good living recycling his band’s recipe, and he had a firm reply.

“There’s nobody as good as the Ramones, never will be.”

The comment underscored a couple of things. Although the Ramones’ attack seemed simple to the point of primitivism, it wasn’t that easy to pull off, as many a wannabe punk band discovered. That precision and regimented force were the products of a rare determination and discipline, and its offbeat humor wasn’t easily duplicated.

But the statement also had a tone of defiance and defensiveness. Joey felt the Ramones never received the respect they deserved, and one of the saddest ironies in in his story is that eight months after his death, the Ramones were voted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

They’ll be inducted March 18, and later in the year, the Columbia-affiliated DV8 label will release a tribute album to the Ramones with a lineup that includes Eddie Vedder, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Offspring and Green Day.

They certainly didn’t get that kind of respect at the beginning, at least beyond the formative punk-rock world. I remember one day in the mid-1970s when an acquaintance came by the office to ask why the paper was devoting so much ink to punk. He was in the music publishing field, an admirer of song craft and traditional musical virtue, and he all but trembled as he complained about all this attention going to “a guy who can’t sing and looks like a fly!”

Of course looking like a fly was one of the many cool things about Joey Ramone, and his goofy, endearing singing was perfect for such lyrics as “beat on the brat with a baseball bat, oh yeah” and “gimme gimme shock treatment,” in a way that, say, Michael Bolton’s or Christopher Cross’ wouldn’t have been.

It all added up to the detonation that rock music, trapped in the dead-end of disco and corporate rock, desperately needed.

The band’s blend of B-movie imagery, Mad magazine humor and holy gibberish was simultaneously funny and trenchant, a genuine expression of youthful frustration and alienation borne by a sound that carried solace and solutions. Fans got the joke, but that didn’t diminish the music’s ability to help them through an increasingly chaotic and uncertain world.

In his new role, Joey remains a guide for his contemporaries as they begin creeping toward the unthinkable: middle age. From the great beyond, he’s reassuring them that they can still rock hard, and still telling them to follow their heart instead of rules.