Joey Ramone and his punk rock antics will be missed.

Don’t let my long hair fool you, I’m not a hippie. I couldn’t have cared less when Jerry Garcia died. I guess I’m not much of a punk either, but last Sunday’s passing of Joey Ramone, singer for the New York-based punk band The Ramones, gave me pause. He didn’t go in true rock-star fashion, veins coursing with heroin or purple and bloated on a toilet. Rather, he quietly succumbed to lymphoma after a month-long hospital stay. Perhaps the reason he didn’t die like a rock star is because he wasn’t one—in fact, he was exactly the opposite. For this, he will be sorely missed among his peers and fans.

Pouring his impossibly skinny frame into faded knee-hole jeans and a black motorcycle jacket, Joey Ramone fronted (only because his drumming skills weren’t proficient enough) a group that waged a war against the decadence and opulence of the twin terrors of arena rock and disco. The Ramones (a pseudonym adopted by Joey and three other youths from Queens, New York) found their niche at CBGB’s (formerly a bluegrass/country western club located in the Bowery slum of Manhattan) in the mid 1970s. To say they were the seminal punk band wouldn’t be totally accurate—it is certain that they took their cues from early ’70s proto-punk acts like the New York Dolls and the Stooges. What they did was provide a blueprint of a musical sound and ideology that would resonate, no, shake the walls of clubs in places as far flung as Los Angeles and London, England.

Pop music needed the Ramones to slap it out of the mire of gonadal bullshit that it was drowning in. In a blended New York blue-collar worker/surfer accent, Joey belted out melodies and lyrics that were as beautiful and simplistic as anything Donna Summer ever sang. But it was the force with which they were delivered (aided and abetted by Johnny Ramone’s raucous riffing) that made Donna Summer, ABBA and just about anyone else for that matter sound like scared little kittens. Whereas arena rock had begun a steady decline into pomp and thirty minute, coma-inducing guitar solos, the Ramones sported tunes that barely clocked in at the two minute mark (in the early days, their shows consisted of thirty songs played in just under thirty minutes.) The Ramones never bloviated about driving fast cars or sleeping with “chicks”—in fact that was precisely what they were railing against. Through their sound and image, the Ramones stood in sharp juxtaposition to the mainstream pop world, and they inspired many other bands (The Clash, The Sex Pistols, etc.) to do the same.

Joey Ramone was never much to look at (if you have caught a glimpse of his face behind those sunglasses and mop of hair, you know what I’m talking about), but he was beautiful because he was the real deal. His image suited his music to a tee—honest, to the point and devoid of any semblance of pretension. That was music (literally and figuratively) to my fifteen-year-old ears and to the ears of countless other fifteen-year-olds.

Not much has changed in the twenty-five years after the Ramones first brought their blitzkrieg of three-chord bop to the Bowery in New York. Pop music is in the same state of mediocrity and materialism that it was back in 1976. To paraphrase Burt Bacharach: “What the world needs now is Joey Ramone” (I’m sure Joey would be disgusted if he knew I just did that). We need him now more than ever. From here on out, every time I turn on the T.V. and see Fred Durst’s perverted grin or Britney Spears’ lustily hollow eyes, I’m gonna run up to my room and crank “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” as loud as possible to remind me that pop music hasn’t always been this bad. God bless you, Joey Ramone. You will be missed.

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