Johnny was a punk. He was a streetwise superhero and a grown-up delinquent, a pouting New York rebel in his black motorcycle leather and perfect bowl haircut. That was the uniform, and he commanded the stage, not like a rock god, but as an invader - a noisy maximum minimalist on speedy electric guitar. Johnny Ramone was pure in that way, standing in his ripped jeans and playing no solos for 2,263 rock shows across the planet, to an endless swirling mosh pit of pumping fists and flying shoes. And for 22 years, it was great, it was like performance art, the pristine raging essence of rock 'n' roll, as Johnny led the mighty, immortal Ramones through a thankless rock revolution with no hit singles ever.

The Ramones were beloved and utterly overlooked in their time. They never got incredibly rich or incredibly famous, just incredibly influential, inspiring an endless wave of aggressive, happy music that, decades later, has delivered the likes of Green Day and Blink-182 for public consumption. The Ramones deserve the credit and the blame. It wasn't as if Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Tommy (or Marky) Ramone were a quartet of pinheads and idiot savants from Forest Hills, Queens, accidentally inventing punk rock through no fault of their own. This was a band with a plan for the ultimate future of rock, a band with its own art director, with a look and a logo, stripping the sound of rock/pop back to its bare essence. It was as high-concept as KISS or the Spiders from Mars: the Ramones as imaginary brothers who shared an imaginary name and matching leather jackets, like Elvis and Brando, or the infant Beatles of the Hamburg era.

Johnny was the foreman, the taskmaster and bean-counter, who never once indulged the group with a tour bus in the U.S., always traveling between distant gigs in a crowded, no-frills van. He played an unglamorous Mosrite guitar, just like the one he bought for $50 at the beginning of the '70s. And he was a punk-rock commander who wasn't even on speaking terms with his singer - something to do with a girl, Joey's dream girlfriend and later Johnny's wife (a permanent rift that ended only with poor Joey's death from lymphoma two years ago at age 49). And when the Ramones ended in 1996, closing their final tour at the ancient Hollywood Palace, Johnny had no regrets at all, no aspirations to be the aging rock star onstage.

He was free to do nothing, to retire to his humble suburban castle up in the hills between Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley, far from the streets of Queens. There he could watch old horror movies and vote Republican every time. Sex Pistol Steve Jones and Stray Cat Slim Jim Phantom were neighbors. You might have seen him around, at a restaurant or passing you in the lobby of the Wiltern Theatre in 2002 to see his friend Eddie Vedder perform a benefit show, still in that leather jacket and bowl haircut.

The fall of 2004 would have been different. He had plans. It had been 30 years since the birth of the Ramones. There was a dark but moving new documentary (Ramones: End of the Century) that Johnny was excited about, and also a far more upbeat DVD gathering of Marky's home videos from on and off stage (Ramones RAW). And there would be an epic return to the Palace (now renamed Avalon), via a September 12 anniversary celebration organized by Johnny himself, with Marky and C.J. Ramone set to perform with Vedder, Henry Rollins, X, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Rob Zombie, the Dickies, and Pete Yorn - all to celebrate the legacy of those eternally young and quirky Bowery boys in black leather and torn denim. But Johnny Ramone was dying.

Joey was already gone. So was Dee Dee, from a 18 tragic 2003 reunion with heroin, after seven years of being clean, and just weeks after the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Johnny didn't even smoke.

Now he was at home, his hair reduced to a gray crew cut, slowly growing back after chemotherapy for prostate cancer. "I'm pretty sick," he said over the phone, just a week before the Avalon party. And you could hear it in his voice, a weakness beneath the Queens brogue, still tough but weary after four years of fighting the disease. "I'm still here."

It was the day after the Republican National Convention ended back home in New York. He had watched it on TV, and you could hear his energy pick up at the very mention of it. Johnny was famously a Reagan man. And he liked to play it up, declaring at his Hall of Fame acceptance speech, "God bless President Bush, and God bless America." The ultimate punk-rock moment, a playful middle finger to the gathered music-industry crowd. "Almost everyone I know doesn't agree with me," he said without noticeable regret. "All my friends."

He was no caveman. He wanted Vice President Dick Cheney dumped from the GOP ticket and replaced by hometown hero Rudy Giuliani, but Johnny was a spectator in politics. He kept his distance. He wasn't about to strum "I Wanna Be Sedated" for the suits at $5,000 a plate. "Nowadays, all of these rockers all getting involved," he said with a vague sneer. "I think they should stay out of it."

Those last several weeks, he had been reliving the Ramones' near-endless roadtrip, watching the new documentary, a film weighted with celebration, revelation, and regret. Johnny fully embraced it, though the portrait of himself was not always flattering. By the time Henry Rollins came by to watch it with him in his living room, Johnny had seen it nearly 20 times. He accepted what it depicted - the troubled youth, the brilliant invention of the Ramones, the feuds, the fans, the commercial disappointments, the sad end. End of the Century sets the tone immediately, as Dee Dee, the mad songwriter-bassist and the original NYC punk rocker, admits on camera that any band would have been happy with what they had accomplished. Somehow, the Ramones were not.

"Dee Dee was a little hard on it," Johnny said. "It was a rock 'n' roll band, something you wanted to do all your life. It's not all fun, but you get to do what you want to do. You get to play a show every night for the fans. What's wrong with doing what you want?"

California Sun

"Wanna see Iggy tonight?"

Strange words for me in 1988. And the man speaking them was a spectacular specimen, a towering human question mark, smiling somewhere within that overgrown Prince Valiant shag, his narrow shoulders caught in a permanent shrug beneath a black motorcycle jacket. Somehow, I was hanging out with Joey Ramone, all of the Ramones, who were in Hollywood shooting a new video for an old punk-rock standard, "I Wanna Be Sedated." I was just a young journalist doing my first big story for the doomed original Creem magazine, spending a few days with my high-school heroes, documenting their equally doomed hopes of finally crossing over to an ambivalent public.

We never made it to Iggy's show that night. Joey and the others were tired from spending a full day on camera, lip-synching in slow motion as a crowd of costumed actors swirled crazily around them. Not that it mattered. Just the previous night, the Ramones themselves headlined the Hollywood Palladium, doing their frantic, primitive, euphoric punk-pop thing - a sound that owed at least as much to the ancient '60s pop of the Ronettes as it did to the explosive example of the Stooges and the New York Dolls. Songs began and ended so abruptly, they blurred together.

More memorable was the scene backstage an hour earlier. Johnny was getting into the right mood, standing in a sleeveless T-shirt, a small electric guitar in his hands. Dee Dee plugged a bass into a little practice amp, and Marky rattled his drumsticks against a packing case. The three of them gathered into a tight triangle beneath the bright fluorescent light. "One-two-three-four!" shouted Dee Dee suddenly, and the trio erupted with raw instrumental bluster, warming up for the night ahead. "No pictures," Dee Dee told me, grinning. "Trade secrets."

Down the hall, Joey had his own problems. In a small room all to himself, he was feeling the pressure of this important L.A. date, crushing his already fragile nerves. Now he was alone in the darkened room, rehearsing for his big moment, lunging forward with a microphone stand, miming in gloved hands and a Ramones T-shirt. He didn't get stage fright, but moments before showtime, Joey was still shaky. His bandmates waited just behind the stage as he frantically brushed his thick black bangs and touched up his pancake makeup. After one last pep talk from long-suffering road manager Monte Melnick, the others finally shoved him onstage, and Joey was once again the post-adolescent revolutionary crackpot, singing urgently of geeks and pinheads and cretins and glue-sniffing and love and sadness and sickness, both real and imagined.

Back in 1988, Joey and the band were just looking forward to the making of another album, while considering someone's crazy suggestion of asking Brian Wilson to produce. (They didn't.) A few days after the Hollywood video shoot, the Ramones were in a rented van, rolling toward a gig in Orange County. Melnick was behind the wheel.

The days when local police would greet the arrival of the Ramones and their fans with helicopters and billy clubs were mostly over. As were those long nights opening shows for the likes of Toto, Foreigner, and Black Sabbath, and being showered with empty whiskey bottles. Another threat to society somehow resolved. Inside the van, it was more like a sitcom.

"How much further, Monte?" Dee Dee shouted.

"Not far."

Dee Dee giggled, and sang: "You're an ugly mother, ho ho ho!/You're an ugly mother, you got to go!" He giggled again.

"How much further, Monte? How much further?" Dee Dee shouted, looking toward the driver's seat. "Keep your hands on the wheel!"

Joey didn't seem to notice, and was mostly left free to talk excitedly about returning some of the old songs ("Needles and Pins," etc.) to the live repertoire. When the trip was over, the band gave me an autographed poster, complete with a half-eaten lollipop stuck to the back. My story never got published. Creem went under, though not for the last time. Eventually so did the Ramones.

They stopped in '96, released an album titled Adios Amigos, opened for Metallica on Lollapalooza, played that final gig at the Palace. There wasn't even a farewell party. Johnny just packed up his guitars and went home. Offers to reunite came almost immediately, but the scattered Ramones could not even consider them. Joey had cancer. Dee Dee OD'd, and finally Johnny got sick. He was diagnosed back in 2000, but few people knew about it until this year, when Marky told an interviewer that the guitarist was fading from prostate cancer, leading to a frenzy of press reports and online death watches. Johnny was unconscious through the whole thing.

It's Alive

Marky needs a ride to the gig. His wife will bring his leather jacket later, but I'm his ride to the soundcheck this afternoon at the Avalon. Two days of intense rehearsals were behind him, and he figures the night's 30th anniversary show will be his final Ramones-related performance.

"Thirty years, that's it, that's the pinnacle," he says, as we pull away from his Sunset Strip hotel. "It can't be better than this. And what's the sense? It's time now, I think, to let it rest after this. At a point, it gets diluted. I just don't feel in my heart, without Joey and Dee Dee around, that it's that genuine."

Marky still has great memories of his 15 years in the band, reflected in the high jinks and fan mania of Ramones RAW. There are shots onstage, in airports, and in rented vans, a weary Dee Dee moaning about wanting to go home. The footage dates back to the late '80s, before the bassist quit unexpectedly for a short-lived career as the rapper Dee Dee King. (He was replaced on bass by C.J. Ramone, a young punk and AWOL Marine.) "There was more fun than bad times," Marky insists. "Tell me of any band that doesn't have arguments, that doesn't disagree, that one girlfriend's taken from another guy. Shit happens, but we always managed to continue playing well. If there was more bad times than fun, we would have quit. That's the logic of it all."

At the venue, Ramones memorabilia is displayed upstairs in glass cases, recent history already entombed for future rock generations: Joey's rose-colored specs and leather gloves, Johnny's ripped jeans and trophy from the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. There is the first press kit, with Tommy Ramone's bold, ironic press release: "The Ramones are not an oldies group, they are not a glitter group, they don't play boogie music and they don't play the blues. The Ramones are an original Rock and Roll group of 1975, and their songs are brief, to the point and every one a potential hit single."

Backstage, friends and musicians slowly filter in to greet Marky, C.J., and Tommy. One shakes Marky's hand with a knowing nod. "John's not happening," Marky says. "He's in bad shape, can't even come to the phone hardly." He pauses. "Hopefully, he'll pull through."

DJ Rodney Bingenheimer walks in, wearing a vintage Rocket to Russia T-shirt beneath his suit jacket. Former Ramones manager Danny Fields kisses his hand. The bands rip through versions of Ramones songs for the capacity crowd; tickets had sold out within minutes of being put on sale, and were going for $200 on eBay. At the end of the night, the surviving Ramones are set to step onstage with a series of guest singers and guitarists. Pete Yorn is singing when a final bit of business takes place in the green room: Some girl's doubled over the bathroom sink from too much vodka, as Vedder changes into a yellow T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of Johnny Ramone in mid-song, legs spread apart, snarling above his guitar. Surfer Kelly Slater waits outside the door to take a piss. (Noting the sick woman inside, he says, "It somehow seems like it wouldn't be a Ramones show without something like this.")

Soon enough, Vedder and Rollins are fronting what's left of the Ramones, sing-shouting rapid-fire eruptions of Ramones tunes: "I Believe in Miracles," "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker," "Commando," "Blitzkrieg Bop." In just three days, Johnny will die quietly in his sleep, surrounded by some of these same friends and punk-rock comrades. But at this moment, it is all incredibly alive, just a facsimile of the original, but Ramones music just the same.

And here I am in the photo pit between the stage and the fans, taking a few pictures of this moment of celebration. Which is also when I feel myself singing along, to the crazy-beautiful lyrics of Dee Dee and Joey. And I never do that. But what can you do? What can you do?