‘You want to play like him? You’ll break your hand’: 20 years on since the death of Johnny Ramone, the guitarist who changed rock

The second-most popular legend about guitarist Johnny Ramone — born John William Cummings — is that he represents the KKK in the band’s famous song The KKK Took My Baby Away. The theory — spread by the Ramones’ manager in the documentary End of the Century (2003) — centers on a drama that hit the band in the early 1980s, when Linda Daniele left her boyfriend, the vocalist Joey, to marry Johnny.

Despite the drama, the conflict did not put an and to the band. Johnny Ramone was worried the singer would leave the Ramones, but he reportedly sought his revenge via music, with the lyrics of The KKK Took My Baby Away allegedly making fun of the drummer’s right-wing beliefs — another point of friction in the band.

It’s a story that’s often repeated, even though drummer Marky Ramone and Joey’s brother, Mickey Leigh, denied the rumor. According to the two, the song is about Joey’s romance with a Black woman who disappeared.

For Johnny Ramone, however, the myth that most upset him was that the Ramones had little musical talent. “We got tagged as being a ‘three-chord band’ early on by critics who didn’t know how else to put us down. But most Ramones songs, even to the end, had more than three chords,” he writes in his posthumous autobiography, Commando (2012). Johnny died 20 years ago from prostate cancer at the age of 55. He was the third band member to die in a very short period: Joey died in 2001, Dee Dee, the bassist, in 2002, and Johnny in 2004. The guitarist only got to see the start of The Ramones T-shirt craze and the band’s spike in popularity. While he was the punk band’s guitarist, between 1974 and 1996, the group did not enjoy significant commercial success in the U.S.

Frequently named one of the greatest guitarists of all time — to the disbelief of musicians who favor virtuosity — Johnny Ramone developed a simple but unbeatable style based on barre chords strummed at breakneck speed. He could barely complete a solo, but the most seasoned guitarist would have struggled to have performed his technique live on stage.

“I don’t think there was a precedent. To those who thought any decent guitarist could play like Johnny, I remember a journalist once saying, ‘Oh really? You try it.’ Most of them would break a hand,” says Carl Cafarelli, author of Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation with the Ramones (2023), a collection of a series of interviews he conducted with the group in 1994, for their 20th anniversary.

Cafarelli points out that Clem Burke — the drummer from the hit band Blondie, who joined the band in the 1980s — only lasted two shows. “One time Johnny or Dee Dee said the Ramones played to the level of skill they had. Turns out it wasn’t that easy.”

More than his clashes with Joey Ramone and his ultra-conservative politics, Johnny Ramone is remembered for forging the sound that marked American punk, as well as alternative rock, noise and thrash metal. The guitarist — who was born to an Irish father and a mother of Polish-Ukrainian origins — is also remembered for the militant discipline he enforced on the band. Together with Tommy Ramone — the band’s original drummer —, Johnny analyzed hours of recordings to perfect the band’s performances. The band’s hectic live shows — which could include around 30 songs in just over 40 minutes — were rigorously timed. This was confirmed by Joe Strummer, the frontman of The Clash, in the 2003 documentary, where he said that the guitarist kept updating him how he was able to speed up the show.

“That’s one thing I learned from the Ramones: Slam! There’s that number... where’s the next one? Because people are watching, people have got things to do! It’s a busy world out there. Give it to them!” Strummer said, adding the guitarist had a “ruthless eye for how it had to be done.” “I bet he was a ruthless taskmaster,” he continued. “We learned a lot from the Ramones: how not to muck around on the stage.”

In his autobiography, Johnny Ramone confessed that there was a more pedestrian reason for why they played songs back to back at such high speed: at their early shows, they would fight over which song to play next, and there was no room for debate when the show was so fast.

Argentine journalist Marcelo Gobello agrees that Johnny played an essential role in the existence of the Ramones. “He was the one who managed the destiny of the band, especially after Tommy left. They were all quite difficult to handle, Joey with his obsessive-compulsive disorder, Dee Dee with drugs, Marky with his alcoholism… With his organizational vision, he established that ironclad discipline and kept the band faithful to its principles,” he tells EL PAÍS.

Gobello says that Johnny Ramone told him first that he was planning on leaving the band, an account that he published in the book Los Ramones: Demasiado Duros para Morir (or, The Ramones: Too Hard to Die). “He told me that it was going to be his last year, that he wanted to stop before he stopped being good and couldn’t give people everything they were giving him. He wanted to retire like a boxer, at a high point, instead of ending up in decline. I was sad, stunned, but I was proud that he chose to tell me,” Gorbello tells EL PAÍS.

Before they gained recognition in the United States, the Ramones had their Beatles moment in Argentina. “It was a crazy experience, they filled stadiums for several nights in a row,” says Gobello. “It’s more of a sociological study, but here rockers really appreciate authenticity. People connected because they saw that they were like them. Everyone loved the Ramones.”

Gorbello says he connected with Johnny Ramone over their shared love of B-grade movies. “He liked the cheesiest movies you can imagine. I recommended one called Blood in the Lighthouse [1960], he loved it, and we connected from there.” After retiring, Johnny Ramone planned to direct low-budget horror films — although that project never materialized — and he became friends with figures such as songwriter Rob Zombie and actor Nicolas Cage, who ended his 2006 remake of The Wicker Man with the dedication “For Johnny Ramone.”

The book Commando has an appendix titled “The Best of All Time According to Johnny Ramone,” which includes lists of the musician’s favorite horror and science fiction films, as well as his favorite Republican Party members (Ronald Reagan, whom he describes as “the best president of my lifetime,” being the first), baseball players, and books on Elvis. In another section, he evaluated each Ramones album: he gave no failing grades, and out of 14, five were outstanding.

Carl Cafarelli describes the guitarist as “very curious and surprisingly nice.” “I’ve heard credible accounts of how difficult and irritable (or worse) he could be, but they don’t match my experience,” he says. “He was very nice to me.”

Carferelli admits that he picked up on the tension between the singer and the guitarist, while Gobello writes in his book that the two had separate dressing rooms. The tensions lasted until the end: in his last interview, for Rolling Stone, Johnny said that he did not attend Joey’s funeral because he wouldn’t have wanted Joey to go to his either.

“All of these things weighed on me for our fans, who I imagined would not be happy to know that their favorite band despised each other,” the guitarist lamented in his posthumous book.

Gobello counters: “I found it very moving when Johnny, with Joey already ill, said that he would never go on stage again with the name Ramones. Beyond the problems they had, Joey was their singer. And they both loved the Ramones above all things.” Joey and Johnny were the only constant members of the group, from its founding in 1974, until its last concert in 1996.

In his final interview, published a month after his death, Johnny Ramone told journalist Charles M. Young that he never enjoyed playing with the band: “It must have been a lot of fun. But I didn’t know what fun was,” he said. “I played the show. I felt good if it went the way it was supposed to. If we weren’t good, it would bother me. Some of the records I knew weren’t great, and to me that felt like a sickness [...] I don’t know when it was fun. And then all of a sudden on the last tour, it was like, everyone is going to miss us? I thought everyone would forget us.”

Twenty years after his death, Johnny’s widow and Joey’s brother are continuing their loved one’s spat in a legal battle over the Ramones brand. Marky, the longest-lasting survivor (although not an original member), continues to tour and to spark controversy, most recently for his decision to cancel a concert in Italy after seeing the Palestinian flag on stage.

The Ramones, however, remain an important influence in the music scene: Blink-182 dressed up like the band in their reunion album; Sum 41 enlisted CJ Ramone (bassist from 1989 to 1996) for their farewell music video clip; and The Offspring are playing covers of Ramones songs on their current tours. In the end, the spirit of the Ramones has outlived its members.

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