Last Sunday Joey Ramone, lead singer of the Ramones died of lymphoma, and so passed one of the originators of punk, the longest running fuck you in rock. He was a month shy of his fiftieth birthday—impressive longevity for the primal punk. The Ramones themselves had an amazing run— twenty-two years, from 1974 to 1996—and only then packing it in because of Joey’s illness and Johnny’s wish to hang up his rock ’n’ roll shoes. Pretty amazing for a group of dysfunctional teenagers who started a band without knowing how to play their instruments or even how to assemble the drum kit. "We tried to figure out some songs from records," Dee Dee recalled in Please Kill Me, "but couldn’t. I had no idea how to tune a guitar and only knew the E chord." Joey, unable to assemble the drum stool, spent their first rehearsal sitting on the spike.

It was the simple urge to lunge into it even if you had no idea what you were doing that propelled the DIY movement—a.k.a. the learn-while-you-play club. How to translate that rage to the stage? "I’d just sit with Dee Dee on the corner off of Queens Boulevard and insult people," Joey recalled of his pre-Ramone hobby. "That’s when I got kicked out of my house. My mother told me it was for my own good."

"The music had given him a way to construct his own alter ego," says Lenny Kaye, lead guitarist for Patti Smith and metaphysician of garage band blitz and crank "He was Jeff Hyman when he started out and when he finished he was Joey Ramone, rock godling."

"I’ve been reading the thousands of tribute messages to Joey on the internet," says Danny Fields, the Ramones’ original manager. "I’m printing out to give to his mother. You know that famous refrain of theirs, ‘Hey ho, let’s go’? Somebody had written, ‘Hey Ho, Joey Don’t go!’ and I just started to cry, thinking of all these kids saying, ‘You’re my hero, you changed my life, I love you.’ This was the most rejected teenager in the history of the world, the outcast of the neighborhood. When people saw Joey they unconsciously rolled the clock back in their heads, thinking, ‘If I was a mess at 14, can you imagine what this guy must have been?’ He couldn’t sit at any lunch table at high school because he was so weird. I mean even the other Ramones thought he was weird and they were weird." That’s just what they liked about him, according to Joey’s younger brother, Mickey Leigh: "I think Dee Dee and Johnny started liking Joey because they thought he was really sick. Anybody who was really sick was cool."

He didn’t do too well in school, had few friends, but when he got a set of drums after his bar mitzvah, that was it from then on. Always sickly and accident-prone, he was also given to taking things to extremes. Joey: "When I was hitching, I’d be completely decked out. I used to wear this custom-made jump suit, these pink, knee-high platform boots—all kinds of rhinestones—lots of dangling belts and gloves."

His mother owned an art gallery where he lived after getting thrown out of the house, among the racks of paintings and devised his own eccentric technique. Dee Dee: "He would chop up carrots and lettuce and turnips and strawberries and mix it all together and paint with them. His paintings were very good."

The Ramones functioned on the default system. Initially, Joey was the drummer and Dee Dee the lead singer, but since Dee Dee couldn’t play guitar and sing at the same time, there was a little problem. As the band rehearsed—in their fashion—the tempo got faster and faster—the soon-to-be-de rigueur frantic eighth-note punk chording—and Joey couldn’t keep up. Then there were the lyrics. What lyrics? Dee Dee: "Joey had written a few songs, one called ‘Suck You Buss,’ and since Joey knew the words, right then we knew he had to be the singer." The essential Hey, ho, let’s go philosophy.

"They were the reductio ad absurdum of rock ’n’ roll," says Lenny. "There is no best Ramones song—it’s all variations on a theme. The best song was the Ramones. ‘I Want To Be Sedated’ is their most recognizable song, aside from the ‘Hey, let’s go’ chant from ‘Blitzkreig Bop.’ The song is just what they happen to be playing at that moment. The Ramones sound that galvanizes people is pretty simple: verse, hooky chorus, little piece of guitar solo, and then out the back door."

One of the unfortunate ironies of the Ramones was that they got lumped with the Brit punk Anschluss. The Sex Pistols rape-and-pillage ’78 U.S. tour had the effect of stuffing all punk into the same box. Danny: "It was a residual effect from Malcolm McLaren’s fashion statement of getting Johnny Rotten to throw up in an airport in England which made the front pages. People look for shortcuts for anything that’s new. The sounds-like syndrome, the such-and-such-meets-such-and-such mentality. Overnight punk became noise-meets-vomit, and, once that’s out there, there’s no way you can pull it back."

The Ramones weren’t the Visigoths out to burn down Rome. They weren’t radicals in any political sense, they weren’t anti-Christs (just obnoxious, really, and actually pretty goofy). They sang at Mets games, fer chrissakes. All-American delinquents they were.

Danny: "When Joey started writing songs they were real songs, but people in radio had a hard time recognizing them as such because they came and went so fast and the entire lyric was ‘I don’t wanna go down to the basement, there’s something down there I don’t wanna go down to the basement, there’s something down there.’ Which says a great deal, but it’s not a Cole Porter show tune or a Paul Simon narrative. His songs were punctuations, expressing irony, regret, love, affection, fear. He loved most of all the girl groups, that was his number one love—the Shirelles, the Ronettes, the Chiffons, "My Boyfriend’s Back." He really liked the Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, groups that had songs, because the Ramones were a song-oriented group. They got it all down in two minutes and ten seconds or, mostly, less. ‘Life is a gas, life is a gas, life is a gas,’ that’s a song. It was all there. It was a vocabulary of expressions that redefined what a song was and got things back to the ‘sha-boom, sha-boom’ kind of songs they loved. But they got thrown in with the Sex Pistols and they were among the least deserving and most unfortunate victims of that misconception. Stupid people thought their songs were stupid, smart people thought their songs were smart and the morons at AM radio didn’t see them as songs at all."

Of course you can see why those dolts at AM radio got a little confused when you come to a lyric like:

Sitting here in Queens
Eating refried beans
We ain’t got no friends
No Christmas cards to send
Daddy likes men,

Even a deejay as hip as Vince Scelsa had a hard time with it. At Joey’s funeral he talked about getting the pre-release, white label test pressing of the first Ramones album. He’d heard so much about it, how they were going to change rock ’n’ roll, and he put it on the turntable for three songs, picked up the needle, and on the air threw the record across the room. Then he said he took it home with him that night, listened to it over and over and over and saw the light, and he apologized on the air the next day.

Lenny: "What made the Ramones great was they loved pop music. They weren’t out to tear down the Brill Building, they were out to celebrate it in a style that was the root cause of rock ’n’ roll. They converted it all into three-chord power songs. What made them more than just a fast, loud band was that they were melodic and romantic in a way that most punk rock avoided because it was too sappy. The Ramones enjoyed being saps. That’s why their songs stick in the memory so much, because even though they played it like the dictionary definition of punk—those down-stroke eighth notes and the pop chants and their topics—glue sniffing and so on—they framed all that in these very poppy, hooky forms that were embracing instead of rejecting. They didn’t want to destroy! pacify! They wanted to clap the Brill Building songwriters on the shoulder, buy ’em a beer, invite ’em to the club and get ’em jumping up and down. It’s a very sweet story."

And then there was the look—leather jackets, ripped blue jeans, and ripped T-shirts—which the Sex Pistols et alia absconded with lock, stock and snigger. Another of punk’s ironies is that this style was borrowed from the gay hustler look, a life Dee Dee, who had been a hustler on that windy corner, recounts in "53rd and 3rd."

In a 1988 press bio Joey said: "We decided to start our group because we were bored with everything we heard in the early 70s—there was nothing to listen to anymore. Everything was tenth generation Elton John or just junk. Everything was long jams, long guitar solos. We missed hearing songs that were short and exciting...and good! We wanted to bring energy back to rock & roll."

The forbidden power of punk comes from its ability to jack into series of taboos and blow the circuits using the most direct current possible. And it all began with the Ramones.

Danny: "I don’t want to be pretentious, but I’d compare the Ramones effect on rock ’n’ roll to the Zen challenge to empty out. Get the people out of the lobby of the hotel, and see what the lobby looks like when there’s nobody in it. Or let the water run down the drain, and see what the basin looks like. That’s what they were trying to do with music. It can’t have more than three chords, it can’t have more than twelve words."

And, hey, they made it into the pantheon. Their first self-titled album—recorded in two weeks for $6,000—moved along just like one of their sets and got picked by the New York Times as one of the most significant albums of the 20th century; not just rock ’n’ roll albums, mind you, but up against Toscanini’s Aida, Miles Davis Bitches Brew, and the original Oklahoma cast album.

Joey had been diagnosed with lymphoma in 1995. His doctors had managed to stabilize him on chemotherapy, but he broke his hip at the end of the year in that blizzard we had before New Year’s. Because of the antibiotics they now had to give him, they had to take him off the chemo and they never got him back.

Lenny: "I got the news on Sunday night. I had to write something about Joey for the Voice by the next morning at noon, so I stayed up really late to write it, and then around three AM I went out because I was a little agitated and wound up in some bar on Avenue A with these wacky girls. It was a CD jukebox where you can play everything on a record and they had a Ramones Greatest Hits, so we played about 20 R songs and jumped around and danced. I was just amazed at how many great songs there were. I knew every one, and it’s not as if I go home at night and play Ramones records. I was amazed how immediate they were, how I could remember every move and every hook. When I woke up three hours later with a slight hangover and the thought that I had to finish this article in half an hour, I felt fulfilled in a strange way."

Danny: "He was very sweet, ironic, self-deprecating, optimistic, and, except for a Top 40 hit, I would say he got everything he wanted out of life."