Johnny Ramone R I P

[mr. sparkle]

Johnny Ramone, a founding member of pioneering punk act the Ramones, died yesterday afternoon (Sept. 15) at his home in Los Angeles. He was 55 and had been suffering from prostate cancer for some time. The guitarist was born John Cummings in New York on Oct. 8, 1948. He is the third of the quartet's original members to have died in the past four years: vocalist Joey Ramone (real name: Jeffrey Hyman) succumbed to lymphatic cancer in 2001, while bassist Dee Dee Ramone (real name: Douglas Colvin) died from a drug overdose in 2002. The fourth original Ramone, drummer Tommy (real name: Thomas Erdelyi), left the band in 1978.

So long Ol' Boy....

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....more

[mr. sparkle]

The Classic Pose!

[Thanatos' embalmed botfly]

bugger.

[Charles]

Darn it, you posted the image I was going to rotate in as my new avatar.

Alas, Johnny was the least likeable Ramone, a Republican and virulent conservative who worshipped Reagan and wrote love songs to his favorite shotgun. He bickered with DeeDee constantly and was part of the reason DeeDee left the band, and a big part of the reason why the Ramones hated to tour. Johnny was formerly in a hippie band called "Tangerine Puppets" back in the 1960s, which was exactly the kind of music punks were trying to wipe out. Here's a pic of Johnny from 1966:



On the other hand, there's a story that when Johnny was a kid, he brought a bag of baseball-sized rocks to a Beatles concert and threw them at the band, so I guess he did have some hidden virtues.

[Ol Dirty Gaijin]

"We couldn't write about love or cars, so we sang about this stuff, like glue-sniffing. We thought it was funny. We thought we could get away with anything," Johnny Ramone once said.

Live hard, rock hard.