Greatest Band

Ramones were an American punk rock band that formed in the New York City neighborhood of Forest Hills, Queens, in 1974. They are often cited as the first band to define the punk rock sound. Despite achieving only limited commercial success, the band was a major influence on the 1970s punk movement in both the United States and United Kingdom.

All of the band members adopted pseudonyms ending with the surname "Ramone", although none of them were related. They performed 2,263 concerts, touring virtually nonstop for 22 years. In 1996, after a tour with the Lollapalooza music festival, the band played a farewell concert and disbanded. By 2014, all four of the band's original members—lead singer Joey Ramone (1951–2001), guitarist Johnny Ramone(1948–2004), bassist Dee Dee Ramone (1951–2002) and drummer Tommy Ramone (1949–2014)—had died.

Recognition of the band's importance built over the years, and they are now mentioned in many assessments of all-time great rock music, such as the Rolling Stone list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" and VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock". In 2002, the Ramones were ranked the second-greatest band of all time by Spin magazine, trailing only the Beatles. On March 18, 2002, the original four members and Tommy's replacement on drums, Marky Ramone, were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In 2011, the group was awarded aGrammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

The original members of the band met in and around the middle-class neighborhood of Forest Hills in the New York City borough of Queens. John Cummingsand Thomas Erdelyi had both been in a high-school garage band from 1965 to 1967 known as the Tangerine Puppets. They became friends with Douglas Colvin, who had recently moved to the area from Germany, and Jeffrey Hyman, who was the initial lead singer of the glam rock band Sniper, founded in 1972.

The Ramones began taking shape in early 1974 when Cummings and Colvin invited Hyman to join them in a band. The initial line-up featured Colvin on lead vocals, rhythm and bass guitars, Cummings on lead guitar, and Hyman on drums. Colvin, who soon switched from rhythm guitar to bass, was the first to adopt the name "Ramone", calling himself Dee Dee Ramone. He was inspired by Paul McCartney's use of the pseudonym Paul Ramon during his Silver Beetlesdays. Dee Dee convinced the other members to take on the name and came up with the idea of calling the band the Ramones. Hyman and Cummings became Joey and Johnny Ramone, respectively.

A friend of the band, Monte A. Melnick (later their tour manager), helped to arrange rehearsal time for them at Manhattan's Performance Studios, where he worked. Johnny's former bandmate Erdelyi was set to become their manager. Soon after the band was formed, Dee Dee realized that he could not sing and play his bass guitar simultaneously; with Erdelyi's encouragement, Joey became the band's new lead singer. Dee Dee would continue, however, to count off each song's tempo with his signature rapid-fire shout of "1-2-3-4!" Joey soon similarly realized that he could not sing and play drums simultaneously and left the position of drummer. While auditioning prospective replacements, Erdelyi would often take to the drums and demonstrate how to play the songs. It became apparent that he was able to perform the group's music better than anyone else, and he joined the band as Tommy Ramone.

The Ramones played before an audience for the first time on March 30, 1974, at Performance Studios. The songs they played were very fast and very short; most clocked in at under two minutes. Around this time, a new music scene was emerging in New York centered on two clubs in downtown Manhattan—Max's Kansas City and, more famously,CBGB (usually referred to as CBGB's). The Ramones made their CBGB debut on August 16, 1974. Legs McNeil, who cofounded Punk magazine the following year, later described the impact of that performance: "They were all wearing these black leather jackets. And they counted off this song... and it was just this wall of noise... They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new."

The band swiftly became regulars at the club, playing there seventy-four times by the end of the year. After garnering considerable attention for their performances—which averaged about seventeen minutes from beginning to end—the group was signed to a recording contract in late 1975 by Seymour Stein of Sire Records. Stein's wife, Linda Stein, had seen the band play at CBGB; she would later co-manage them along with Danny Fields. By this time, the Ramones were recognized as leaders of the new scene that was increasingly being referred to as "punk". The group's unusual frontman had a lot to do with their impact. As Dee Dee explained, "All the other singers [in New York] were copying David Johansen [of the New York Dolls], who was copying Mick Jagger... But Joey was unique, totally unique."

Tensions between Joey and Johnny colored much of the Ramones' career. The pair were politically antagonistic, Joey being a liberal and Johnny a conservative. Their personalities also clashed: Johnny, who spent two years in military school, lived by a code of self-discipline, while Joey struggled with obsessive-compulsive disorder and alcoholism. In the early 1980s, Johnny "stole" Joey's girlfriend Linda Daniele (who later became Linda Ramone), whom he later married. As a consequence, despite performing together for years afterward, Joey and Johnny stopped speaking to each other. Johnny did not call Joey before the latter's death in 2001, but said in the documentary End of the Century that he was depressed for "the whole week" after the singer died.

Aside from this central conflict, Dee Dee's bipolar disorder and repeated relapses into drug addiction also caused significant strains. Tommy left the band partly in reaction to being "physically threatened by Johnny, treated with contempt by Dee Dee, and all but ignored by Joey". As new members joined, payment methods and image representation became matters of serious dispute. In 1997, Marky and Joey got into a fight about their respective drinking habits on the Howard Stern radio show.

As leaders in the punk rock scene, the Ramones' music has usually been identified with that label, while some have defined their characteristic style more specifically as pop punk and others as power pop. In the 1980s, the band sometimes veered into hardcore punk territory, as can be heard on Too Tough to Die.

On stage, the band adopted a focused approach directly intended to increase the audience's concert experience. Johnny's instructions to C.J. when preparing for his first live performances with the group were to play facing the audience, to stand with the bass slung low between spread legs, and to walk forward to the front of stage at the same time as he did. Johnny was not a fan of guitarists who performed facing their drummer, amplifier, or other band members.

Sources : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ramones