Tommy Ramone was a founder member of the Ramones, the punk band whose raw aggression revolutionised the rock scene
Tommy Ramone, who has died aged 65, was the last surviving member of the Ramones, the New York punk band whose brand of primitive in-your-face energy helped to reshape the rock scene; in later years he cut an unlikely figure on the old-time bluegrass circuit.
It was Tommy Ramone (real name Tommy Erdelyi) who conceived the idea of forming the group in the early 1970s after he saw a concert by the glam rock group the New York Dolls. “It hit me: 'These are guys who can hardly play their instruments and they’re more entertaining than 90 per cent of the bands out there now who can play!” he recalled. “So I started thinking about some guys I knew in Queens.” The Ramones took their name from Paul Ramon, a pseudonym once used by Paul McCartney, each member adopting Ramone as their surname. Although Tommy began as the Ramones’ manager, he became its drummer when no one else proved capable of keeping up with their breakneck machine-gun tempi.
Pounding out songs such as I Wanna Be Sedated, Blitzkrieg Bop, Suzy is a Headbanger, Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue, and Beat on the Brat, the Ramones created a sensation in the summer of 1974 with a residency at CBGB, a seedy establishment in lower Manhattan. They divided opinion from the outset. Writing in the New Musical Express, Charles Shaar Murray found them “so funny... so tight and powerful that they’re just bound to enchant anyone who fell in love with rock and roll for the right reasons”. But a review in the Washington Post dismissed them as “the worst of the New York punk bands”, and accused them of insulting, posturing and staggering their way through “mindless” songs. In 1976 a Ramones gig at London’s Roundhouse is credited with kickstarting the British punk scene, inspiring the Sex Pistols, the Clash and dozens of others.
The band specialised in three-chord scatter-gun musical rampages, many of them corrupted versions of 1960s girl band bubblegum pop (including a punk version of the Ronettes’ Baby, I Love You), bashed out hell-for-leather at maximum volume with screaming vocals and distorted riffs underpinned by Tommy Ramone’s frenetic drumming. “Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses,” Tommy explained. In place of the overproduced pap that accounted for much pop output at the time, the Ramones offered raw teenage angst — a nihilistic, fortissimo snarl of rage.
In accordance with the anti-establishment image they projected, the Ramones were social misfits. The bassist Dee Dee (real name Douglas Colvin) was a junkie and sometime male prostitute; the singer Joey (Jeff Hyman) had spent time in a psychiatric hospital with OCD; while the guitarist Johnny (Johnny Cummings) was a teenage delinquent turned Right-wing control freak.
Tommy was the only relatively sane band member (Dee Dee once noted, contemptuously, that he cooked his own dinners), and without him the Ramones would probably never have got going at all. He is credited with creating the band’s distinctive look of ripped jeans, leather jackets and white trainers, and he wrote many of their most celebrated songs — including I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend and their best-known number, Blitzkrieg Bop, with its “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go” chant. In addition he produced the band’s albums when his colleagues were too non compos to function. “They would come in and do the basic tracks and the vocals, and then I wouldn’t see them for a month or two,” he recalled.
The Ramones’ first three albums — Ramones (1976), Leave Home (1977) and Rocket to Russia (1978) — came to define the sound of punk, but by the last of these Tommy Ramone had had enough and left the band “to keep my sanity”. His colleagues, he said, had made him feel “like I was losing my mind... Johnny was getting more and more power, becoming harsher and harsher... he could be really mean, and he was good at getting the other guys to side with him.”
Tommy Ramone continued to manage the group until 1984, producing their fourth album Too Tough To Die, after which he threw in the towel.
The Ramones soldiered on until 1996, but relations between its original members remained poisonous. Joey died from lymphoma in 2001, and when Tommy and the remaining original line-up were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they ignored each other. Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose later that year and Johnny Ramone from cancer in 2004. By the time the Ramones were given a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2011 Grammies, Tommy was the only surviving founder member.
He was born Tamas Erdelyi in Budapest on January 29 1949 to Jewish parents who had survived the Holocaust by hiding in friends’ houses. The family left Hungary during the uprising of 1956, moving to New York the following year. Tommy was educated at a school in the Queens district where he met Johnny Cummings and played with him in a high school garage rock band, the Tangerine Puppets. After leaving school he worked as a trainee engineer at the Record Plant studio, where he worked on Jimi Hendrix’s Band of Gypsys album.
After his stint with the Ramones, Tommy Ramone produced albums by groups such as the Replacements, Talking Heads, and Redd Kross.
In 2005, to the astonishment of many punk fans, Tommy Ramone returned to the performing music scene playing bluegrass and country banjo and mandolin as one half of Uncle Monk, an acoustic bluegrass folk duo with his partner, the guitarist Claudia Tienan. To the equal astonishment of the critics, he proved to have a good bluegrass voice and to be a fine instrumentalist. “There are a lot of similarities between punk and old-time music,” he claimed. “Both are home-brewed music .”
Claudia Tienan survives him.
Tommy Ramone, born January 29, 1949, died July 11 2014
