Sep 16, 2:09 AM (ET)
CHRIS T. NGUYEN
LOS ANGELES (AP) - Johnny Ramone, guitarist and co-founder of the seminal punk band "The Ramones" that influenced a generation of rockers, has died. He was 55.
Ramone, who had been fighting a five-year battle with prostate cancer, died in his sleep Wednesday afternoon at his Los Angeles home surrounded by friends and family, said the band's longtime artistic director Arturo Vega.
"He was the guy with a strategy. He was the guy who not only looked after the band's interest but he also was their defender," Vega said in a telephone interview from New York.
Ramone, whose birth name is John Cummings, had been hospitalized in June at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
Johnny Ramone was one of the original members of the struggling Ramones, whose hit songs "I Wanna Be Sedated" and "Blitzkrieg Bop," among others, earned them an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.
Johnny Ramone co-founded "The Ramones" in 1974 in New York along with singer Joey Ramone, bassist DeeDee Ramone and drummer Tommy Ramone, who is the only surviving member of the original band. All four band members had different last names, but took the common name Ramone.
Joey Ramone, whose real name is Jeff Hyman, died in 2001 of lymphatic cancer. Dee Dee Ramone, whose real name is Douglas Colvin, died from a drug overdose in 2002.
Clad in leather jackets and long black mops of hair, the group started out in legendary New York clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City, where they blasted their rapid-fire songs.
Since its debut album in 1976, the band struggled for commercial success, but they left a formidable imprint on the rock genre. Though they never had a Top 40 song, the Ramones influenced scores of followers, including bands such as Green Day and Nirvana.
Even Bruce Springsteen was moved. After seeing the Ramones in Asbury Park, N.J., Springsteen wrote "Hungry Heart" for the band. His manager, however, swayed him to keep the song for himself and it became a hit single.
The band had encounters with other big names, including producer Phil Spector, who collaborated with the band in 1980. During the session, the late bassist Dee Dee Ramone said Spector pulled a gun on the band.
"The Ramones had it rough," said Vega, who's worked with the band for 30 years. "The band almost had to be protected from people who were taking advantage of them. There was never any money made."
Johnny Ramone changed that by demanding more money for performances, but still kept a close watch on the band's budget; Vega recalled how Johnny Ramone would insist that the band drive nonstop between Boston and New York for shows instead of spending the night in a hotel.
In addition to his financial conservatism, the guitarist was politically conservative - the late Ronald Reagan was Ramone's favorite president, Vega said.
Fans have remained loyal to the Ramones, and the Ramones over the years have been loyal to their fans. In 1979, while shooting scenes for the film "Rock 'n' Roll High School," the Ramones - ignoring the director's order - played a concert-length session for fans who had paid to be extras, Vega said.
"The Ramones never ever lost their image, their aura of being the ultimate underdog, the voice of the angry young man," Vega said.
A tribute concert and cancer research fund-raiser was held Sunday in Los Angeles to celebrate the band's 30th anniversary. It featured performances from Los Angeles punk band X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Henry Rollins and others.
Along with his wife, Linda Cummings, Johnny Ramone was surrounded at his death by friends, including Pearl Jam rocker Eddie Vedder, singer Rob Zombie and others. Other friends who gathered at his Los Angeles home included Lisa Marie Presley, Pete Yorn, Vincent Gallo and Talia Shire.
He is survived by his wife and his mother, Estelle Cummings. He will be cremated during a private ceremony.
It all began innocently enough, as it does for me most every day, in Clifton, NJ. My biggest concern was how to squeeze a stop at the bank into my usual morning sojourn to the train station. Having done that, I hit Mary Ann's Deli on Clifton Avenue, where the owner knows me not by name, but by my order: cinnamon-raisin bagel with cream cheese, bottle of Poland Springs,
Daily News. He looked into his bagel bin without my asking, shook his head and offered: "I got a raisin bagel with butter already made."
"Aw, what the hell," I replied. "They can always unclog my arteries later." This prompted a good-natured exchange about what's supposedly good or bad for you; first it was no eggs, no butter, no coffee, then it was no margarine, no decaf, and go ahead and have those eggs. "All depends on who's payin' for the study," chuckled the deli man, whose name I don't know, either, except to say that it's probably not Mary Ann.
"Only thing that doesn't change is what happens if you step in front of a bus," I remarked, allowing that having butter on my bagel today, regardless of the results of the myriad studies or who funded them, probably wouldn't kill me.
As I looked for parking near the station, I noticed the particularly lovely brunette I see most mornings, headed for the train. Today was the day I decided to talk to her, to say more than just hello. I noted which car she was getting on, followed her lead, and occupied the bench directly across from her.
"Hey, how ya doin'?" she smiled.
"Good. Did you have a good day yesterday?" And off we went: She talked about her "long" Monday, and I mentioned that I was a part-time musician, and I'd taken a vacation day so I could drop off demo CDs at places where I'd hoped to land gigs. My weekend had been spent performing at the Jersey Shore; hers had been spent in Atlanta, visiting her brother who plays cello in a symphony orchestra.
Then the commute to Hoboken settled into routine; she drifted off into her paperwork, and I into my newspaper, and all was a little bit better than it had been before. I barely noticed when, shortly after our stop in Kingsland, a cell phone rang a few rows ahead of me and a young blonde woman answered it. "Oh, yeah, I can see it," she said, as she craned her neck to look out the window. After a few minutes, she hung up the phone and announced, "My friend just called to tell me that a plane crashed into the World Trade Center."
We all clamored to get a look. The tower closest to us, which from our distance looked to be about the size of a matchstick, had smoke billowing out of some of its upper floors. My first thought spilled out of my mouth: "Must not have been a very big plane." A guy across the row smirked.
The brunette turned to me, her jaw agape. "I wonder if it was a commercial plane," she said.
"You work down there, don't you? I never see you on the PATH to 33rd Street."
"Yeah, I do work down there," she responded.
"I'd imagine the World Trade Center trains won't be running."
"Well, I usually take the ferry anyway."
And so, as usual, we parted ways at Hoboken. The World Trade Center trains were indeed shut down, but my 33rd Street line was still running. I found a seat, put on my DiscMan and disappeared into the music on a CD I'd burned, filled with new songs I'd hoped to learn for my upcoming weekend gigs. In what seemed like no time we had reached our final stop, and I trudged along with my fellow commuters to make my connection to the F train, which I took to Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street. Then, to get back above ground, I climbed the stairs to the street and hopped on the M42 bus that would take me down to Second Avenue and my office.
As I got on the bus, I wondered how many people knew about the plane crash. Turned out everybody knew. A guy apparently reading news items on his Palm Pilot said, "Oh, my God, chunks of concrete are falling from the building onto the street."
"Yeah, I saw the smoke from my train in Hoboken," I chimed in.
"Two planes crashed -- one into each of the towers," said a woman standing next to me.
"So it looks like it's terrorists?"
She nodded. "I'm here from Iowa -- I just want to go home." I could sense she was a bit more than half-joking.
"Hey," I said, suddenly compelled to defend New York somehow. "This kind of thing happened in Oklahoma City, so it could happen anywhere."
"Anywhere there's a federal building, anyway," another man offered.
"That's true," said the woman, seeming somewhat chastened.
Finally, the bus stopped at Second Avenue, and I walked toward 43rd Street for my usual giant cup of Dunkin Donuts coffee. I saw an elderly woman, obviously nervous, come out of the building that houses the Israeli embassy to ask questions of a female cop who patrols the area from a tiny booth stationed outside. "Yes, it's true," said the policewoman. A few strides away, a Dunkin Donuts employee was staring down Second Avenue. I turned to see a huge plume of smoke, some 50 blocks away, but large enough to give it the appearance of being much closer.
I got my coffee, crossed the street and headed for my building. Outside, a security guard muttered something about how we should "bomb all those motherfuckers," and a co-worker cautioned, "It's not a great day to have an office with a window."
On the elevator, strangers who barely acknowledge each other most mornings were chatting up a storm. Someone mentioned Oklahoma City; another reminded us of our close proximity to the United Nations.
I got off on the eighth floor to find several radios blaring the latest details. "This is fucked up," said Paul, an art director from Long Island. "I don't even know what I'm doing here."
"I'm a wreck," howled Amanda, the diminutive stand-up comedian who works in production. "I live down there. I saw the whole thing!"
Once in my office, I added my radio to the chorus. I learned that the craft that had hit the first tower was a hijacked commuter plane. Next one of the towers was collapsing into itself. A collective shudder swept across the eighth floor. A now-constant stream of police cars, ambulances and fire trucks screamed through the neighborhood.
"Jesus, we're right across the street from the Israeli embassy, and the U.N. is only a couple of blocks away," someone exclaimed.
Minutes later, word came that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon.
I began to field phone calls, e-mails and instant messages from my friends in Jersey, all expressing concern for my welfare. Through those exchanges I learned that the second of the twin WTC towers had also collapsed, and that another commercial plane was apparently headed toward the White House at a very high speed, with the Air Force in pursuit and poised to shoot it down.
Then, someone in the office announced that the police had closed down Second Avenue and they seemed to be evacuating the Israeli embassy. A newscaster declared that every airport in the country was closed, and the entire continental United States was now a "no-fly" zone. People started reaching for their carry-alongs as if to head for the street.
"To go where?" I blurted out. "The subways are all shut down. Nobody can get in or out of Manhattan."
"All I know is, this is not the safest neighborhood to be in right now," said Travis, the nervously smiling photo editor.
"Are we safer in the street?" I wondered aloud. I thought about it for a few seconds, and then told my friends on the phone and the Internet: "I'm getting the fuck out of here."
Down on the sidewalk, a few of my co-workers discussed whether we should wait things out at a bar. We looked across the street and instantly realized that the two adjacent restaurants were not going to be opening today. In the face of danger perceived or otherwise, all solidarity went out the window, with most people splintering off to head west on foot.
I began a solo exodus up 42nd Street, my headphones tuned to the news radio. My idea was to find the building that houses the advertising agency where my friend Kerry works; I had been there a couple of times, and I remembered that it was somewhere in the upper Thirties near Herald Square.
The sidewalks were flooded with pedestrians, some nervously exchanging information with friends, others merely commiserating, and still others, like me, wandering alone and dazed, with only a lukewarm clue as to their destination. There were lines at the pay phones and ATMs, and people trying desperately and repeatedly to get calls out on their cell phones.
At certain points along the way, the sound in my headphones grew louder and took on more bass; I'd slip them off to find a crowd of people gathered around a boom box or a car with its doors open and radio blasting, listening to the same station I had tuned in.
We were all hearing accounts from people who had seen what had happened, or worse yet, had been in or around the trade center and had experienced the horror first-hand. A tearful man was lamenting the uncertain fate of a co-worker from whom he had become separated.
I started to become angry, but for all the wrong reasons at first. Why had I been allowed to come into the city this morning in the first place? When the hell where they going to let me out? And then I focused on the real issue: I was angry that there existed a group of terrorists brilliant enough to hatch such an elaborate and sophisticated plan, skilled enough to carry it out, and crazy enough to believe they were doing it on orders from God.
And furthermore, I was angry that my country had been caught napping.
I spent two separate quarter-hours trying to find Kerry's office, wrapped around another half-hour of aimless wandering, before I gave up. I wanted to sit in Greeley Square and sip a bottle of something strong while waiting for the PATH trains to start running again, but the only liquor store I could find was closing its gate at the very minute I arrived. The bars in midtown were all full, at least in terms of seats, so I made my way over to a fast-food place that was relatively uninhabited and reacquainted myself with the bill of fare offered by Roy Rogers, which had all but abandoned my neck of the woods in the past five years. Throwing caution to the wind, I ordered regular Coke instead of diet, supersized my order, and loaded up the "fixin's" on my quarter-pound cheeseburger. Life's too short, I muttered to myself.
After polishing off my purposely unhealthy lunch, I managed to get a call out on my cell phone to the voice mailbox of my ex, with whom I've been at odds for more than a year, to say that while I don't always like her very much, I will always love her, and I wanted her to know it in case something random and senseless prevented me from making peace with her.
And then I thought about the people who had worried enough about me to try to get in touch with me at work and make sure I was okay. I told myself that when I got home (where, as it turned out, I had a half-dozen voice mail messages from other concerned friends and family members), I would write about this experience, and at some point I would let them know how I feel about them. So, to all of those special people in my life: I made it home okay. Thank you. I love you.
Back out in the street, I ambled over to Greeley Square for what must have been the 10th time, to find the same huddled mass waiting at the top of the stairway to the PATH station. The yellow police tape blocking it had been removed, and people were filtering up the stairs, but no one seemed to be going down them. I decided to brave it for the rest of us, but once down there I found the station locked down tight, with still no prospects for catching a train back to Jersey.
Returning above ground, I heard something on the radio about free ferry service running from the pier on West 30th Street. I was six long blocks and three short blocks away, and though my legs were aching and my bag was growing increasingly heavy, I decided that I just had to get off this island, so I started to walk...slowly. All along the way, the sounds of tragedy continued to fill my head via the radio. A huge throng was assembled outside Penn Station, the kind you only tend to see when the Knicks or Rangers are in the finals at the Garden, only this time, they were anxiously waiting, as I had been, to get the hell out of Dodge. A handful of them had heard the same report I had and began to head toward the pier. I felt as if we were all sharing a relatively well-kept secret.
Along the way, I thought about the annual Labor Day party I'd recently attended. Every year, my friend and host, Carl, is in charge of "The Name Game." Each person gets a sticker placed on his or her back containing a secret identity, and we each determine who we are by asking a series of yes or no questions: Real? Fictional? Living? Dead? Man? Woman? This year, Carl, knowing how impatient I sometimes get about the game, perversely assigned me an obscure character from pop culture. Several people read my name tag and said, "I have no idea who that is." Still, somehow, I managed to rack up enough clues to figure it out: I was "Snake Pliskin," the guy played by Kurt Russell in the film,
Escape From New York. The coincidence made me chuckle.
When I finally got near the pier, a guy who appeared to have no official standing whatsoever was playing Answer Man (a trend which became a continued annoyance for the remainder of the day). He told us there was a five-hour wait there for a ferry, and we'd have more luck if we headed down to 23rd Street and the Chelsea Piers. I wearily followed the pack.
Once there, we were told that Spirit Cruises was offering free service to Weehawken, where there would be shuttle buses waiting to take us to the Hoboken terminal. The line was long but moved fairly quickly, and as we boarded the ship, dubbed The Spirit Of New York, I mused that it was the first Hudson River cruise I had ever taken. As we made our way across, several people told stories about having been in or near the World Trade Center during the disaster, and having walked for two-and-a-half hours to make it to the pier. It became clear to me that my day had been easy; I had been at worst inconvenienced, and was never in any real danger. As I looked around at my fellow passengers, it occurred to me that we were all like war refugees, being herded out of harm's way on a boat called The Spirit Of New York, on a day that the spirit of New York had been crushed. As if he'd picked up on my telepathy, a man to my right remarked: "This is what it's like in Jerusalem all the time."
As we disembarked at Lincoln Harbor in Weehawken, another loud un-official was bellowing that there were no shuttle buses to Hoboken terminal, and no trains or buses running in or out of it. Although this was in direct conflict to everything we had been told in Chelsea and what was being reported on the radio, most of us (myself included) foolishly took his word for it and began to walk toward Hoboken. (I later learned that, had we waited and not listened to this imbecile, we would have eventually found everything he said to be false.)
The terminal was something like 20 blocks away, but I motivated myself by deciding that I would cut the trip into two parts by stopping at the Goldhawk, a bar owned by a few of my associates. As I slowly made my way on foot yet again, a group of people came up behind me, one of them a black woman talking very loudly about someone who had tried to tell her to be calm. As they passed, I saw that she was covered head-to-toe in dust, and was wearing a triage tag and a paper breathing mask. Apparently she had been on the 82nd floor of one of the twin towers and had managed to escape with her life down a stairway. "Those motherfuckers were all tryin' to tell me to be calm," she yelled. "You're in that situation, there's no way you're gonna be calm. You get the fuck out of there as fast as can."
Another total stranger pegged me as a fellow commuter and stopped to swap war stories about how each of us had "gotten out." What's the equivalent of Hoboken in Israel, or Bosnia for that matter, I wondered to myself.
At the Goldhawk, roughly 10 young men sat drinking beers, their eyes glued to the TV screens, while a couple more oblivious types played a noisy, sports-oriented arcade game on the other side of the room, punctuating the reports from CNN with a recorded voice saying, "Hi, I'm Pat Summerall." Ah, well; they did offer us some leftover pizza, of which I was happy to partake, so at least they served some useful purpose in the midst of this miserable experience.
An hour later, filled up on Guinness and pizza, I decided it was well past time to get home to Clifton, so I paid my tab and headed toward Washington Street with the hope of finding a cab or bus that would get me to the terminal. This was accomplished surprisingly quickly, and soon I was just a few blocks from my destination, albeit snarled in traffic. After a while, I figured I had already walked about five miles over the course of the day, and another few blocks wouldn't kill me, so the driver graciously let me off the bus at what was definitely not a designated stop.
I headed down Washington toward the terminal, and when I turned the corner I saw what was causing the traffic jam: People were staring gap-jawed across the Hudson at what had been the site of the World Trade Center. The twin towers, which had become commonplace to us, but served as an awesome spectacle to millions of tourists over the past three decades, had suddenly been erased from the urban landscape. They had been replaced, for now, by a pile of rubble and a huge funnel cloud of smoke; later, presumably, it would become a vacant lot, soon to be transformed into a memorial for the as-yet-untold thousands who gone to work on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and were never coming home. We can surmise this because Oklahoma City had already set a horrifying precedent, but the destruction by terrorists of what was once the tallest building in the world, a monument to New York City that loomed large on both sides of the Hudson, has egregiously raised the bar. Its conspicuous absence will repeatedly drive home the words that had been on the lips of the thousands of people I encountered during my six-hour stint as a war refugee: From this day forward, life will never be the same.
