[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 147 (2001), Part 5]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages 6463-6464]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                    TRIBUTE TO THE LATE JOEY RAMONE

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. ANTHONY D. WEINER

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                        Thursday, April 26, 2001

  Mr. WEINER. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to recognize a constituent of 
mine and an icon in the music world who recently passed away. Joey 
Ramone, lead singer of the Ramones died after a long battle with cancer 
on Easter Sunday. Born Jeff Hyman in Forest Hills, Queens, he changed 
his name to Joey Ramone at age 23 and began stirring up the music world 
with what was to become known as punk rock. The Ramones were at the 
leading edge of the punk rock movement in the early to mid-1970s and 
spoke to a generation of adolescents looking to find their way through 
that decade.
  Many of my colleagues here in Congress may not be familiar with the 
music of the Ramones, or the impact they had on many in my generation 
and on music in general. The Ramones were everything a classic rock and 
roll band were not. They played short, simple songs. And they did it 
loudly. They abhorred convention but compared to many of the bands 
today, they did it with style. Irony, sincerity and humor ran through 
many of their simple lyrics. They poked fun at the latest fad, and 
often themselves, in a way that caused adolescents everywhere to nod 
their heads in agreement.
  The Ramones lasted an impressive 22 years. Their music helped spawn 
musicians who would go on to create their own styles of rock and grunge 
and rap-rock. At the heart of the Ramones was Joey, a notoriously shy, 
gangly, nice guy, who until his death, loved to visit the local clubs 
in New York and listen to the music he helped create.
  I would like to submit for the Record a story from the April 22, 2001 
edition of the New York Times which summarizes well, the life of Joey 
Ramone:

          A Star of Anti-Charisma, Joey Ramone Made Geeks Chic

                            (By John Leland)

       FROM his home in Queens last week, Monte Melnick remembered 
     a time the Ramones stopped for gas in rural Texas. It was the 
     early days of punk rock, and the woman at the gas station 
     gave the band the once-over: matching leather bomber jackets 
     and ripped jeans, dopey mops of hair, four guys taking the 
     surname Ramone. Mr. Melnick, who was the tour manager, feared 
     there might be trouble. Instead, the woman smiled at him 
     indulgently. As Mr. Melnick, 51, recalled, ``She said, `It's 
     really nice, you taking care of these retarded boys.' ''
       Joey Ramone, the gawky, geeky, lovable-loser singer of the 
     Ramones, died last Sunday of lymphatic cancer, never to be 
     underestimated again. His real name was Jeffrey Hyman; he was 
     49.
       As the music world celebrates the 25th anniversary of punk, 
     the band's imprint--its goofy fury and delinquent humor--
     echoes not just in the music of latter-day punks like Green 
     Day and Blink 182, but in the strain of self-aware, loser 
     comedy that has become the dominant adolescent rattle: ``The 
     Simpsons'' and ``South Park,'' pro wrestling and MTV's 
     blithely moronic ``Jackass.''
       Mickey Leigh, Joey's younger brother, who played in a band 
     called the Rattlers, described the Ramones as a reaction to 
     the Queens streets where the band members grew up. ``The 
     humor was inherent to Forest Hills, a Jewish neighborhood, 
     and to the small circle of rejects and misfits that we 
     were,'' said Mr. Leigh, who, like his brother, was bar 
     mitzvahed. (Several other Ramones were not Jewish.) ``We were 
     always on the outside, rejected by the girls--not by all 
     girls, but by the pretty ones, who preferred guys with cars. 
     Our protective shell was to shock people.''
       Picked on in Forest Hills, Joey made himself a star of 
     anti-charisma, fronting a band whose legend drew on failure 
     as easily as success. When my friends and I heard the Ramones 
     in the late 1970's, as underachieving college students, we 
     formed our own band--awful, but even at our lousiest, always 
     knowing. I like to think we were post-awful.
       A set by the Ramones was a furious race to the finish line, 
     blurring bubble-gum riffs and cartoon pathologies: ``Now I 
     Wanna Sniff Some Glue,'' ``Teenage Lobotomy,'' ``I Wanna Be 
     Sedated.'' What you came away with depended in large part on 
     how you took the joke.
       ``We thought punk rock was going to be the biggest thing 
     ever,'' said John Holmstrom, 48, a cofounder of Punk 
     magazine, which coined the name for the music. ``We thought 
     we were mainstream. It was a shock to everyone at CBGB when 
     one by one it didn't happen.''
       Charlotte Lesser, Joey's mother, always got the joke. Ms. 
     Lesser ran an art gallery and is a commercial artist. At 
     CBGB, the Bowery dive where the band got started, people used 
     to call her Mama Ramone, she said, adding: ``CBGB struck me 
     as too narrow, too crowded, and it had the worst bathrooms 
     you ever saw. But I always saw the whole thing as a funny 
     show.''
       The Ramones emerged just when the radical thrust in pop 
     music was turning in on itself Hip-hop whittled down disco; 
     punk trimmed rock `n' roll to its loud essentials.
       Writing about the Ramones and CBGB in The Village Voice in 
     1975, James Wolcott observed, ``No longer is the rock impulse 
     revolutionary--i.e., the transformation of oneself and 
     society--but conservative: to carry on the rock tradition.'' 
     For all their locomotive mayhem, the Ramones were 
     preservationists. Even the name harked back, to the days when 
     Paul McCartney, as a Silver Beatle, called himself Paul 
     Ramon.
       I think the impulse had much to do with age. Lou Reed, 
     punk's eminence grise, born in 1942, was able to sing of a 
     girl whose life was saved by rock `n' roll. For Mr. Reed, 
     whose childhood began before rock, the music bred 
     transformation, both personal and societal. Joey Ramone, born 
     in 1951, arrived as the shutter was closing on this 
     perspective. Punk was a last loud call to embrace these 
     moments of transition, when the world before rock became the 
     world after.
       For later punks, these moments were only hearsay. By the 
     time Kurt Cobain, born in 1967, took up the legacy of the 
     Ramones, the music could aspire to be alternative, but not 
     revolutionary.
       In his engagingly lurid memoir, ``Lobotomy: Surviving the 
     Ramones'' (1997), Dee Dee Ramone observed, ``A Ramones story 
     can't really have a happy ending.'' To the end, Joey lived in 
     a one-bedroom apartment in the East Village, originally 
     decorated by

[[Page 6464]]

     his mother but long since submerged in his accumulated 
     clutter. On good days he walked around the neighborhood in an 
     odd, obsessive-compulsive fashion, always walking past a 
     curb, then back to touch it before moving on.
       He became fixated by the stock market; the last great song 
     he wrote, said his friend Arturo Vega, the band's artistic 
     director, was a love song to Maria Bartiromo, the CNBC 
     business anchor.
       Last week, fans turned the doorway of CBGB into a shrine 
     and filled Internet message boards with tributes--a testament 
     not just to Joey but to the eternal loneliness of 
     adolescence.
       Mickey Leigh continued to ponder the deceptive complexity 
     of the Ramones' music. ``The intelligence was well 
     disguised,'' he said. Then he paused. ``Maybe there wasn't 
     that much intelligence.'' But there was, and warmth as well. 
     And for a still-growing legion of misfits, there is 
     community. As Joey sang, in a signature line culled from the 
     movie ``Freaks,'' ``Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept 
     you, one of us.''

     

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