Rock World Mourns Passing of Icon Joey Ramone

by Susie Davidson Advocate Correspondent

Sunday, April 15 was a sad day for punk rockers of all ages.

  Joey Ramone, 49, born Jeffrey Hyman, passed away at 2:40 pm following a 6-year battle with lymphoma in a New York hospital, with his mother, Charlotte Lesher, brother Micky and other family members and friends at his side.  He had just listened to the U2 song "In a Little While."  The funeral was held at the Schwartz Bros. Funeral Home, Queens.

  Joey Ramone grew up in Forest Hills, an overwhelmingly Jewish Queens neighborhood.  His mother was an artist and art collecter, and his father owned a transport company.  His grandmother worked in a large store where he would go to play its piano and sing; she gave him a drum kit when he was 13.   Although his mother encouraged his schooling and study, he was always an outcast. Ultimately, he found his true place in the seminal rock band The Ramones, which he formed in 1974.

  The group, which lacked musical training, unleashed a three-chord barrage of stripped-down, primal rock and roll on the music world. In leather jacket and rose-colored shades, he projected a ubiquitous image of scruffy, geeky chic.

  Rebelling against the glamorized, more symphonically orchestrated rock music which had become the norm, Joey Ramone and his cohorts led the way back to a simpler, shorter, more urgent sound patterned after 50's and early 60's stars.  They subsequently influenced an entire genre of "do-it-yourself" punk music which, according to Ramone in a 1988 interview with Terry Gross of Fresh Air, was merely an attitude and not particularly tied to a certain time frame.

  "Buddy Holly was a punk.  Elvis Presley, Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison... I think JFK was a punk.  It's a state of being."         "When we started out," he told Rolling Stone in 1999, "we were our own island.  There was us and Fleetwood Mac, or us and Journey, or 'Disco Duck.'"        

Along with Patti Smith, Television, the Talking Heads, Blondie and other groups, they began their career at the Lower East Side's CBGBs. Their 1976 European tour is credited with launching the punk rock era as the Sex Pistols, Clash and other bands liked and reproduced what they saw.

  Underneath Ramones' offbeat exterior, he was viewed as a kind soul and socially conscious person who wrote "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg" in an angry response to President Reagan's visit to a Nazi SS graveyard.

  The cult status of the group, which released 11 studio albums, is legendary. 

Their fame in Argentina and Japan was likened to that of the Beatles.  The Offspring and Green Day named children after them. Nirvana and Pearl Jam rose from their aegis.  Bruce Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" for them.  Spin Magazine named the Ramones one of the seven greatest rock bands of all time.  Joe Strummer, Joan Jett, Exene Cervenka, Rob Zombie, the Go Go's and many others have been voicing tributes.

  "They were my first real influence," the Beastie Boys' Adam Horovitz recalled.

  The Ramones had disbanded in 1996 after their final album, "Adios Amigos."