Tommy Ramone RIP

Via Tim Broun, passing along Andy Schwartz's report.

http://theworldsamess.blogspot.com/2014/07/tommy-erdelyi-aka-tommy-ramone-rip.html

After everything else today I'm just numb. I don't think this will hit me until later. But the original quartet are now all gone.

Amazing, the finality of it. I wonder if there's even one other prominent band where everyone's gone.

Forty years ago.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RdyEEk5WrrI

Hendrix Experience are all gone

RIP. rock 'n' roll really is just a ghost now.

;_;

hey ho

;_;

hey ho

― set the controls for the heart of the sun (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, July 11, 2014 11:44 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Sad and bumming. Today sucks

RIP

There has been a thread about bands whose members have all died but it almost got ugly when StanM joined in. (btw, also, but not rock, Coil)

Bands formed in the 60s or later, with every single member dead

I'm too young to have seen Tommy Ramone play with the band. By the time I got to see them play Marky Ramone was already behind the kit. But that's not the point. The point is that the world has now lost every original cretin who crawled out of Forest Hills, Queens and started something so amazing and beautiful that it took decades for the rest of the world to catch up to them. And the world is a lesser place because of it. Goddammit.

I don't think this will hit me until later.

It's hitting me now. I fear later.

http://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-28275535

(the caption under the photo is wrong though)

wrong: in that 2002 picture, you've got Deedee (bass, original member), Johnny (guitar, original member), Tommy (drums, original member) and Marky (drums, replaced Tommy) - Joey, singer, the other original member, died in 2001.

awww man. RIP.

Man, that acoustic version of I wanna be your boyfriend up on Pitchfork, at the end, when he says "...that's off the first album of the Ramones. Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee..", then points up and smiles sadly. Teared me up.

The first couple minutes of this clip are great -- Tommy walking around the old neighborhood.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asV0CEiPPyQ

Also, the obits keep saying "drummer," but they out manager and producer.

They leave out ...

Not that I agree with all of his analyis, but there's some interesting stuff on Tommy Ranone in the "The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB's: A Secret History of Jewish Punk," by Steven Lee Beeber (Chicago Review Press

http://www.jewishjournal.com/books/article/book_reveals_secrets_from_the_patriarchs_of_punk_cbgbs

He was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1949, and his parents, both professional photographers, barely escaped from the clutches of the Nazis by hiding out with friends during the war. Most of Erdélyi's family perished in the Holocaust.

Fleeing from Soviet tanks and an increasingly anti-Semitic environment in Budapest, the Erdélyis immigrated to Austria and then on to New York. At the urging of Orthodox relatives, his parents enrolled him at a Chasidic yeshiva in the Bronx, where his ultrareligious classmates shunned him "as a goy," according Erdelyi, who later moved to heavily Jewish Forest Hills, Queens.

Ostracized twice because of his religion but for entirely different reasons, Erdélyi "began to think of himself as a perpetual outsider," Beeber writes.

The future Tommy Ramone found a safe haven, at least for awhile, in The Ramones, a group he created by personally drafting guys from the old neighborhood, including lanky lead singer Joey Ramone, whose odd looks appealed to him. Erdelyi even came up with the group's trademark leather-jacket-and-jeans outfit. Subconsciously, perhaps, he had recreated himself as a tough Jew, shedding the uncomfortable skin of the Jewish victim.

Ironically, Erdélyi found himself in a group whose two non-Jewish members shared a disturbing fascination with Nazism.

typing too fast without proofing...

I didn't know Johnny and Dee Dee were goyim.

RIP

Not a lot of things are perfect in this world, but the Ramones first few years was... Musically, image, songs, photos,logo, everything about it

This thread should be 10000 posts long by now. RIP Tommy Erdélyi. RIP Ramones.

I'm not one to quote Morrissey but I can't keep thinking of his song title, "Last of the Gang to Die" and I've never even heard the song.

gonna just repost Whiney's tweets because i really liked these:

Chris Weingarten @1000TimesYes · 6h
Tommy Ramone's right hand was the fastest working machine in rock circa 1978. California punks had to play totally new beats to up the ante.

Chris Weingarten @1000TimesYes · 6h
Peep the 'It's Alive" live album (12.31.77) for proof. Many future punks, from Green Day on down, would just half-time Tommy's hi-hats.

playing in a Ramones cover band or doing a Ramones cover set would be really fun for 3 guys and an incredible endurance trial for the drummer.

lol otm

Thank you for this thread, the beat that changed everything.

we usually just call him Ned.

playing the first album while I eat breakfast

good thing is their music sure makes it hard to be sad

Just before Tommy left the Ramones, they recorded It's Alive (1977-12-31) - which will forever be one of the greatest live albums ever.

Video footage of that gig only surfaced in 2007 on the It's Alive 1974-1996 double DVD :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=imf25Squ8ro

It's Alive was one of the first Ramones albums I got, so when I heard the studio versions of a lot of those songs they sounded so slow. How they all sustained that momentum through a whole set, I have no idea.

Ned is pretty great.

RIP

Not a lot of things are perfect in this world, but the Ramones first few years was... Musically, image, songs, photos,logo, everything about it

this.

i cant listen to the ramones these days due to emo connections (i may be the only person who breaks down in tears to the joyous noise of blitzkrieg pop), but damn, the evenings my wife and i got loaded and put on the ramones = happiest times.

thank you for the good times tommy.

r.i.p.

<3

https://fbexternal-a.akamaihd.net/safe_image.php?d=AQCf4eNM4GGQ2EeH&w=484&h=253&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.collapseboard.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2014%2F07%2FRamones-letter.jpg&cfs=1

yeah that's a great one -- here's the whole thing
http://www.cherrybombed.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ramonesbio1sdfsd.jpg

Oldest/Youngest/Handsomest/" "

oops
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BsVCKObIQAANNfH.jpg:large

Our Alice was sad, obviously. We went to a free festival in Caversham, and there were quite a few tribute t-shirts around.

Alice decided (and Amber agreed) they should watch Rock and Roll High School once again, in tribute. "But that's Marky, not Tommy" I said. To which Alice said "Tshh"

We have a set of bears that are meant to be the Ramones. The drummer is definitely more Tommy than Marky.

http://i.imgur.com/izDIrWT.jpg

^^^ wow.

Bravo, Tommy. Bravo, The Ramones. Thank You for getting the ball rolling.

sitting in a beer garden this evening, the jukebox in the pub was playing loud enough to be clear outside, a lot of 50s rock and roll, Elvis, Roy, Buddy Holly, suddenly the next tune up is "I Wanna Be Sedated"...fitted right in, smiley moment

Flansburgh memoriam: http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/07/12/tommy_ramone_died_they_might_be_giants_john_flansburgh_pays_tribute_to_longest.html

^^^ wow.

RIP

Really nice Flansburgh piece.

CNN was on at the gym and they were discussing this and kept showing clips of Marky. Whoops

i've been feeling kinda bad for marky, so many headlines saying 'the last of the ramones'. it's not like marky was cj or something. i get it, there's a finality here and it's hitting me harder than any of them except for dee dee's (dee dee was my fave), there's a real sense of 'wow, they're all gone' and that that moment is truly history now but i don't think what i'm feeling and what cnn is meaning in their headline is the same thing.

i had the hardest time over joey
but this is rough, no doubt

fuck off cancer

even CJ was in the band for 7 years, that's like a third of the band's lifespan.

In 1976, my friends and I were in our late teens and we were the glam kids of Pittsburgh. We loved Bowie, Lou Reed, Iggy, and the New York Dolls, so Creem and Rock Scene magazine were our bibles. And those magazines started mentioning a band out of New York called the Ramones, and we were intrigued. They dressed like hood rats! They all had the same fake last name! One of them seemed like he might be mentally handicapped! They were fun!
This was a band we could get behind. We just needed to hear them.
Everybody in this group of friends of mine who wasn't in college (that is, everybody except me) worked at the large downtown flagship store of the biggest local record store chain, National Record Mart. A couple of weeks before the first Ramones album came out, one of them got an advance promo copy of the record, and we all met up that night to listen to it.
We put it on. And almost immediately, and spontaneously, we all started jumping around and squealing and laughing and god, we were so happy that this music existed. The Ramones did not disappoint. They sounded exactly what we needed them to sound like.
We listened to that album at least 8 or 9 times that night.
A couple of months later, we found out that the Ramones were playing at a club in Youngstown, Ohio, which is a little over an hour's drive. It was a club we all went to often, and of course we went to see them. We met up with our friend Steve, who lived in Youngstown, and the guys in his new band. It was the first show the Ramones ever played outside of the greater New York area, and there were only a handful of people there other than all of us. We all knew the guy who owned the club, and Steve was dying to meet the band, so after the show, the owner took us all backstage to meet them. Steve started talking to Joey and Tommy about his band, and they told him that if they came up to New York, they'd have Hilly Kristal listen to them and maybe he'd book them at CBGB.
Steve and his band went up to New York a few weeks later and he called me as soon as he got home to say that, sure enough, Joey and Tommy had gotten Hilly to listen to them and they were gonna be playing at CBGB in a few weeks. And that was the beginning of everything for the Dead Boys.
So thank you Ramones, and thank you Tommy, for making music that made us all so happy, and thank you for changing my friends' lives.

awww...

Beautiful.

I listened to the 1st album three times in a row last night, there have been two perfect albums made in the history of rock music, this and "Pink Flag"... and what do they have in common? They're punk rock, that's what, so all you naysayers and revisionists can get tae fuck, PUNK ROCK RULED!

B-b-but Tommy Dadaismus, what about that one Big and Rich album? *ducks*

RIP tommy

listening to 1st album again. kind of forget how there's a network of references here that place it in a very specific moment... SLA... texas chainsaw massacree...

i wish he'd refrain from the pop psychology, but otherwise a nice tribute...

http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6157516/tommy-ramone-mysterious-heart-of-the-ramones-remembered-by-robert-christgau

would read a Sandy Remembers thread

^^^ this. Welcome aboard, Sandy!

http://www.myteespot.com/images/Images_d/img_TSBUis.jpg

Think this should be taken over to the "Ask Sandy" thread.

don't those usually have to be started by the asked poster in question

No

Ask Shakey Mo Collier

quality thread that one

tl;dr