Ramones

In 1974, from New York to the world, a gang of misfits managed to become one of the most influential musical bands ever – The Ramones!

Johnny and Joey's band invented Punk rock, with simple, minimalist, and repetitive compositions, influenced by the rockabilly of the 1950s, to express a very specific generational "disease" - frustration.

America was a mess with a mixture between the prosperity brought by the post-war and, all the social and cultural issues and protests that were a constant at the time. This weird "smoothie" would later lead to the development of whole new unique teenage alienation that only needed a spark to explode. The Ramones would turn out to be that spark.

Tommy Erdelyi – an emigrant who escaped with his family from Hungary in 1957 during the Soviet occupation – met John Cummings at rock and roll high school in Forest Hills. In 1966, along with Tommy, Johnny began to play as a bassist in the Tangerine Puppets, a band inspired by the British pop standards and at the same time fueled by the anger of its own.

Doug Colvin, whom everyone called Dee Dee, grew up in Germany, where his father, a career soldier, was on a mission, but moved as a teenager to Forest Hills and then used music to get close to Tommy and Johnny.

The last member of the initial quartet is Jeffrey Hyman, a tall, skinny kid, who spent his time playing drums and collecting records. Jeffrey suffered from an obsessive-compulsive disorder, which resulted in internment at a psychiatric center.

The band was named Ramones and they all used Ramone as their last name as if they were part of a family. The name appeared as an inside joke about Paul McCartney of the Beatles that always registered himself in hotels under the pseudonym Paul Ramon :)

On the issue of business and money management, Johnny was the leader, while the compositions were in charge of Joey and Dee Dee.

Dee Dee, Tommy, Joey, and Johnny first played on CBGB on August 16, 1974, "they were all dressed in those black leather jackets. They did a countdown before every song... and it was just a ton of noise... Their look was captivating. They weren't hippies; they were something completely new." The basic clothing and visual code that characterizes the Ramones functioned as a metaphor for their musical attitude: unadorned, basic songs with the scars of the teen experience proudly exposed, in themes such as «Blitzkrieg Bop» and «Hey! Foo Lets Go!".

As far as Dee Dee was concerned, there was the pressure of endless touring, recording, and music writing. His destiny was a junkie life. Even when he was practically clean, one way or another his obsessive personality came to the fore. Just so you know, Dee Dee went through some different but equally disturbing phases. There was a time when his weapons collection became extremely numerous; a phase in which he collected watches and wore two on one wrist and three on the other. His dozens of tattoos were all done in a short period, so he wasn't tattooed ever again

With Dee Dee, it was all or nothing and that kind of personality allied with his mental illness resulted in him leaving the band and in his return to heroin addiction that would later culminate in his death by overdose in 2002.

The frictions within the group did not make life easier. Johnny was a confessed "control freak", adept at physically resolving any internal issue, often clashing with Dee Dee, the most unstable member of the group, mainly due to his intense drug use. Another big clash in the band regarded Linda Ramone, a beautiful woman that began by hanging out with Joey and would later fall for Johnny and even marry him. Joey reacted by writing " The KKK took my baby away", one of their greatest and most famous songs.

The band's last show would take place in the Palace, Hollywood, and it featured other great music-related names such as Eddie Vedder (Pearl Jam), Lemmy (Motorhead), and many others.

After 22 years of existence and 2,263 performances, the Ramones became synonymous with rock purity, a group that probably sold more T-shirts than records, exactly because the symbol they built became much more prevalent than their career itself.