Joey Ramone, lead singer of the seminal punk-rock band the Ramones, died on Easter Sunday at the age of 49, a victim of lymphatic cancer.

Some of you may say, "so what"? Some of the readers of this paper have probably never heard of him. His contribution to modern music consisted of a bunch of albums full of extremely fast songs with only two or three chords, songs that would probably make anyone born before 1962 put their hands over their ears and yell "TURN THAT NOISE DOWN!"

To realize Joey’s contribution to pop music, you have to remember the musical landscape that surrounded us in the mid-seventies when Joey put together the Ramones. On one side, you had the neon and mirror-ball wasteland of disco. On another, there was the overblown and overproduced "art rock" of groups like Kansas and Styx. On a third side, you had the ultra-sensitive singer-songwriter material that started off okay with Jackson Browne but steadily declined until it reached its nadir with Dan Fogelberg. You couldn’t turn on the radio without having to face songs like "Disco Duck" or Terry Jack’s ghastly deathbed anthem "Seasons In the Sun." It was a bad time for those of us who cared about rock and roll.

So when a gangly lout in dark sunglasses and ripped jeans got up on the stage of a hole-in-the-wall club in New York and belted out songs like "Teenage Lobotomy" and "I Wanna Be Sedated", it was the kick in the butt that music had been sorely needing. Joey (born Jeffrey Hyman) formed the Ramones in 1974 because, as he once told an interviewer, "the bands we loved, the rock and roll that we knew, had disappeared. We were playing music for ourselves."

Joey was never teen-idol material like the Bee Gees or the Bay City Rollers. He was, to put it mildly, butt-ugly. His unruly mop of black hair (which was continually in his eyes) looked as if it had never seen a blow-dryer and had only a nodding acquaintance with shampoo. And his black leather jacket and permanent slouch made him look like the guy in high school you always tried to avoid in the hallway, the type of guy who was flunking shop.

As for the music: well, the music wasn’t exactly what you’d call complex. What it was most of all was propulsive. Everything was geared to create a sense of urgency, from Joey’s staccato, machine-gun repetition of lyrics ("Twenty-Twenty-Twenty-four hours to go…"), to bassist Dee Dee Ramone’s warp-speed bass to guitarist Johnny Ramone’s buzz-saw guitar attack.. Put some Ramones on the car stereo and I defy you not to speed.

It was the lyrics, however, that really made the Ramones what they were. The lyrics were, let’s face it, dumb. They weren’t just dumb, they were joyously dumb. They celebrated dumb. Joey wrote words like "Guess I'll have to break the news/That I got no mind to lose/ all the girls are in love with me/I'm a teenage lobotomy," and the mathematically challenged verse "it’s the end, the end of the Seventies/It’s the end, the end of the century…"

Some of the words were deliberately meant to shock. Lines like "Beat on the brat/beat on the brat/beat on the brat with a baseball bat, OH YEAH!" and "Now I wanna sniff some glue! Now I wanna have somethin’ to do!" were politically incorrect before that term was even coined. The only movie made by the Ramones, the B-movie classic "Rock N’ Roll High School" could never be played in these post-Columbine days, since the movie—and the title song—ends with the students blowing up the school. (No actual students were harmed in the filming).

The very outrageousness of the lyrics, however, clued you in on the joke. Joey hung onto the mike stand as if the band’s sonic assault were about to blow him off the stage and delivered lines like "The KKK took my baby away" with a total seriousness that, paradoxically, made them all the more hilarious. The Ramones were rock and roll made goofy.

What Joey Ramone and his "brothers" (none of whom, by the way, were actually named Ramone) did was remind us of what rock and roll music was meant to be: loud. Raucous. And most of all, fun. When I feel like taking myself too seriously, I put on a track like "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" or "Rock N’ Roll High School" and get stupid for a while. It’s like a vacation for your head. Try it sometime.

R.I.P., Joey. You will be missed.

Dusty Rhoades lives in Carthage, practices law in Aberdeen, and, if anyone in law enforcement is reading this, was just kidding about the speeding. Really.

COPYRIGHT 2001 BY JERRY D. RHOADES, JR.