Hey! Ho! Let’s go again

Rick Rubin – a legendary producer in the music industry, cited by everyone from the Beastie Boys to Trent Reznor as a supremely inspirational, talismanic figure – regularly tells Johnny Ramone how much he loves his old band. Rubin, in fact, contends that The Ramones remain the greatest group to have struck a guitar in anger since a certain Liverpudlian quartet went their separate ways in 1970.

And as with The Beatles, there now remain only two living members of the group who were catalysts for what was unarguably one of the most important youth culture movements.

“We certainly didn’t start out to invent punk, or anything like that,” recalls Johnny Ramone, over a quarter of a century after his group instigated one of the biggest blips on the rock seismograph. “When we first got together, we thought, ‘We’re a bubblegum group.’ We were maybe delusional, but we were thinking our competition were the Bay City Rollers! We’re thinking, Bay City Rollers have ‘Saturday Night’, let’s write ‘Bliztkrieg Bop’’. We were just trying to write these normal pop songs, not trying to do anything crazy. Then eventually it dawned on us how warped we were!”

As events have subsequently proved, there was a willing audience for the gloriously demented rock ’n’ roll peddled by Joey and co.

The current tribute album to the band, simply titled Tribute To The Ramones, sees a formidable list of the music industry’s most powerful hitters lining up to pay their respects. It’s almost more instructive to look at the list of bands who, for one reason or another, didn’t make the final cut, including Motorhead (“it wasn’t as inspired as you would expect Motörhead to be,” explains Johnny), and Chris Cornell (“he had some sort of breakdown”).

“Tributes albums are pretty tricky territory,” Johnny continues. “People will ask why didn’t we have this band or that band on the record. I mean, I’m dealing with the record company, and a lot of money is involved in putting the record together – studio time and things like that. So I have to work with the label as constructively as possible. I approached my friends first, to get the thing off the ground – that was Rob Zombie, the Chili Peppers, Eddie Vedder and Marilyn Manson. So already, they’re saying, ‘This is a pretty impressive list of people.’ And people would call up and ask to be involved, or I’d run into people, like Paul Stanley from Kiss. It’s a hell of a thing to see that so many people are into it, y’know? It’s just a really nice feeling.”

The Ramones, of course, were graduates of the mid-’70s CBGB’s scene, that great flowering of musical talent which also gave us such legendary artists as Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith and Television. Surprisingly, Johnny insists they’re wasn’t as much interaction between bands as people might expect.

“Everyone was kind of the enemy, bands weren’t friends,” he remembers. “Like, Terry Ork (Television’s manager) was booking the groups, but he’d only give us Monday night, which was the worst night of the week, and he’d get Television the weekend gigs, usually opening for someone like Patti Smith. It actually had to get to the point where we’d built up such a following that they were forced to give us another night. There was a lot of competition between bands, and I maybe didn’t enjoy the whole scene as much as I should have.

“Like, Warhol is a classic example. He came down to a show one time, gave me a signed copy of his magazine – I just threw it in the garbage and walked away. I really wasn’t used to this, I just thought I was being surrounded by a bunch of freaks!

“Then years later, I was excited about meeting him on a TV programme we were both scheduled to do. But someone approached me and told me that he’d just been admitted to the hospital that day. I’d bought along a print to get it signed and everything, and then Andy Warhol died that weekend.

“I loved being in The Ramones and I thought we were a great rock ’n’ roll band, but, y’know, sometimes it’s only in retrospect you realise that they really were special times.”