The Ramones borrowed a Beatle's alias and played songs under two minutes
Four friends from Forest Hills, Queens, none of them related, all took the surname Ramone, lifted from a stage name Paul McCartney used in the Silver Beetles days. Their songs rarely lasted two minutes and their early sets ran about seventeen. They sold modestly, yet helped launch punk on two continents.
The lineup kept rearranging itself at the start. Douglas Colvin, who became Dee Dee, began on guitar and vocals, but could not sing and play bass at once, so Jeff Hyman, first hired as drummer, stepped out front as Joey. Joey could not drum and sing either. Their manager, Tom Erdelyi, kept demonstrating the songs on the kit for auditioning drummers until it was obvious he played them best, and he joined as Tommy. John Cummings became Johnny, the sole guitarist.
They first played for an audience on 30 March 1974 and debuted at CBGB that August, returning seventy-four times by year's end. Legs McNeil, soon a cofounder of Punk magazine, remembered black leather jackets, a count-off and a wall of noise, nothing like hippies. Sire Records signed them in late 1975, and the debut album, recorded for about $6,400, came out in April 1976. Critics raved, but it stalled at number 111 and neither single charted.
Britain responded faster. A show at London's Roundhouse on 4 July 1976, followed by a club night where they met members of the Sex Pistols and the Clash, energised the young UK punk scene, and dates in Los Angeles and Toronto did the same there. Rocket to Russia reached number 49 in 1977, and Rockaway Beach, at 66, became their best US singles placing ever.
They kept going through lineup changes, playing 2,263 concerts over 22 years and making fourteen studio albums before a farewell show in Los Angeles in 1996. Honours came later: induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, their first year of eligibility, and a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2011. By 2014 all four founders had died.
Source: Ramones
