ROCK 'N' ROLL LOSES ITS TOUGHEST SOLDIER

People have long joked about rock 'n' roll being dead, but, as of last week, it may have finally happened. On Wednesday, September 15, Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone, 55, died in his sleep at his Hollywood Hills home, after a five-year fight against prostate cancer. He's the third casualty among the original four Ramones: Lead singer Joey was taken by lymphatic cancer in 2001, and bassist Dee Dee overdosed in 2002.

He never smoked cigarettes, rarely drank except for an occasional beer, and never used drugs, other than an occasional joint. He played sports and lived healthfully. Still, Johnny was the last of a rare breed: a true rock 'n' roll rebel. His band was synonymous with a special era in music - late-'70s New York - when punk was brand-new, CBGB was the hip nightspot, and the Ramones' peers and rivals included Blondie, Talking Heads, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, and various other now-legendary acts. The band came to epitomize New York as much as West Side Story, the Statue of Liberty, and the Twin Towers. But, like the Towers, the Ramones crumbled to the ground.

Beyond being one of the greatest rhythm guitarists ever - he turned the downstroke from a method to a style to a way of life - Johnny Ramone was a strict disciplinarian, whose military-like leadership was the primary reason the Ramones became icons, lasting 22 years and managing to scratch and claw their way into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, finally gaining respect from "the man" after a quarter-century of being crapped on by the mainstream. Joey was the band's heart, Dee Dee the soul, and original drummer Tommy the mentor, but Johnny was the sergeant, leading the group into battle after battle, onstage and off. It was he who controlled their destiny.

Johnny perfected the classic rock-guitarist stance that every band worth a damn imitates to this day: legs spread, tight jeans, Converse sneakers, leather jacket, low-slung guitar, snarling lips, eyes like bullets. Dee Dee did all the drugs and was the cute one, and Joey was the popular one, but Johnny was the pulse and the power that amplified the Ramones. His chainsaw guitar defined them as much as Joey's tender-hooligan crooning and the group's dopey-brilliant slogans ("Hey, Ho! Let's Go," "Gabba Gabba Hey," etc.). In one word, Johnny Ramone was cool.

The Ramones' road map careened into Hollywood on several crucial occasions. Their 1976 Hollywood concert debut at the Roxy is widely regarded to have kick-started the L.A. punk scene (just as their Roundhouse gigs in England later that year provided the catalyst for the U.K. punk scene, influencing the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and all those blokes). They shot their classic B-movie Rock 'n' Roll High School here, and recorded End of the Century with legendary producer Phil Spector. They played their last gig ever in Hollywood - at the Palace (now Avalon) on August 6, 1996 - right after Johnny moved here. Soon after, Dee Dee also moved to L.A. and became a fixture around town before his accidental overdose. And now Johnny has gone to sleep for good here, too.

"Isn't it strange that, for such New York people, a lot of the Ramones and their peripheral people either ended up dying here or living here?" muses local music journalist Harvey Kubernik, who was present when the band recorded Century.

Why did Johnny move to L.A.? Well, for the same reasons any tourist gives in to the palm-tree-lined delights of Tinseltown: sunshine, no snow, friendly people, and a nice house in the hills if you've got some scratch. You know, to kick back. Johnny and his wife, Linda, simply wanted to get out of New York and have some fun in the sun. And they did.

Johnny's spread in the hills had a garden, an Elvis room to house his memorabilia of The King, and a horror-movie room to display his posters and toys. After years of being ignored by radio and MTV, and suffering weak record sales as a result, the Ramones had finally made some money. Their vast catalog of great punk tunes was exploited in television commercials as well as on TV and film soundtracks. Tribute albums popped up, bands covered their songs, they appeared on The Simpsons, and every critic and hip rock act cited them as the torchbearers of modern rock 'n' roll: the Beatles, the Stones, and the Ramones. They had finally made it ... ironically, long after they broke up. But Johnny was happy.

In L.A., he couldn't walk 20 feet down the street without being recognized and approached for autographs. When he hung with fellow celebs, like pals Vincent Gallo, Rob Zombie, and Nicolas Cage, he got the most attention. After all, who the hell cares about some so-so actor when Johnny Friggin' Ramone is in the house? Every rock star was humbled around him. Every actor wanted to schmooze with him. Finally, he started to understand how Joey must've felt in New York, where the gawky frontman had a street named for him - the corner of Second Street and the Bowery is officially dubbed Joey Ramone Place - after he died. Johnny liked the attention. It was a welcome change for a guy who was basically a loner all his life.

"Johnny is a mystery. He has different personalities," Tommy once said. "He's a contradiction."

Born John Cummings on October 8, 1948, in Long Island, Johnny was raised in nearby Forest Hills, Queens, by his supportive mother and no-nonsense construction-worker father.

"My mom always treated me like I was like a star," Johnny told me for On the Road with the Ramones, the book I cowrote with longtime Ramones tour manager Monte A. Melnick. "I was her only kid. My father would get on these [tangents] about how he never missed a day's work. I broke my big toe the day before I had to go pitch a Little League game, and he's going, 'What are you - a baby? What did I do, raise a baby? ´´ 20 You go play.' And even though my toe was broken, I had to go pitch the game anyway. It was terrible. ... I'm glad he raised me like that, but it would always be [that way]. Then I went to military school, and in military school you couldn't call in sick."

But after military school, Johnny became a hoodlum. "I had a two-year run," he recalled. "I'd go out and hit kids and take their money and rob everybody's pocketbooks. Just being bad every minute of the day. It was terrible. ... I don't know what my problem was." He thought it was funny to do mean things. "If I found a television set sitting in the garbage, I'd take it up to the rooftop, watch for someone walking down the block, and drop it in front of them. I also found a way of stopping the elevator ... I would wait for an old lady to get in, and stop the elevator. They'd be yelling and pushing the alarm, and I would keep them there." But he eventually tired of these antics, which would later become the stuff of legend.

"My favorite Johnny story was that he brought a bag of rocks to the Beatles' concert at Shea Stadium to throw at them," laughed D Generation's Howie Pyro in a recent interview. "He sat there and threw rocks at the Beatles! That's the most punk-rock thing I've ever heard in my life."

"At about 20 years old, I stopped drinking and doing drugs, got a job, and tried to be normal," Johnny said. He decided to apply the little rock 'n' roll knowledge he'd picked up in his high school band, the Tangerine Puppets, to a new project under the tutelage of slightly older pal Tommy Erdelyi (soon to be Ramone). "His parents wanted him very much to not be involved with music," Tommy noted. "They wanted him to be a baseball player. They thought music was effeminate or wasn't at all American. His sense of American patriotism and right-wing thinking comes from his parents, from identifying with his father."

Tommy got Johnny to form a band with fellow hoodlums Douglas Colvin (Dee Dee) and Jeff Hyman (Joey), and the Ramones were born at Performance Studios, where they rehearsed under the watchful eye of soon-to-be road manager for life Melnick, a.k.a. the fifth Ramone. Their influential albums married pop and punk into a revved-up style all its own, led by Johnny's thunderous guitar assault, a sound somewhere between a neutron bomb and a glorious car wreck. His buzzsaw rhythm wallop was the shot that started the race, the bugle cry that led the brigade, the spark that lit the fuse. The Ramones changed everything. Only Nirvana has had as much impact ... and they were all diehard Ramones fans.

When the Ramones' roller coaster ended (with drummer Marky and later-era bassist C.J. in tow), the interpersonal relationships had deteriorated terribly. Johnny and Joey were particularly estranged over a love triangle that had Johnny eventually marrying the love of Joey's life, Linda Danielle. Yet, through the acrimony, they carried on. But the band was considered a job - one in which the coworkers hardly even spoke to each other.

"Johnny was a hard-nosed, no-nonsense kind of guy," confirms Melnick. "He didn't like hanging out or socializing at the shows. He wanted to get in and out. He was there to work, not to party." Still, after a quarter-century of work, even Johnny Ramone wanted to relax.

"I'm content doing nothing now," he told me last year. "Once every few weeks, I pick up the guitar for five minutes to strum around. It would be embarrassing to continue playing those songs. Unless you can get that same response, and be as good as we were, there's no point to it." He never wanted to be onstage past his prime. "I would have stopped in 1980 if I could have afforded to," he said. "I was looking to do it for five years, become the biggest band in the world, and stop. That was my goal. I was a failure."

He recalled telling his friend, Pearl Jam leader Eddie Vedder, "'Boy, I wish I sold the records you've sold.' He said, 'But you have all the respect.' I still feel shorted in a way. I get the respect, but, at the same time, when I started in a band, I wanted to sell records. I didn't want to compromise to sell records, but I wanted to sell records." Not that he cared so much about making money. "I just want people to realize that we were good."

After the Ramones split up, Johnny swore he was through with rock 'n' roll forever. But old habits die hard, and he soon turned up on stage with Pearl Jam, Metallica, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and even on Slim Jim Phantom's Elvis tribute album. He also had a cameo in the 2001 indie film Stranded. Everything seemed perfect ... except for one nagging pain: the prostate cancer. He spent the last few years in and out of treatment, and for a while it looked like he would beat it. But over the past six months, things took a turn for the worse, and chemotherapy wasn't doing the trick. Now, of the original quartet, Tommy is the last Ramone standing. (Ironically, he's the eldest.)

"It wasn't always easy working with Johnny," Melnick admits. "He could be a hard and harsh taskmaster, but in the end his drive was the glue that fastened this group together. They were a one-of-a-kind band. People look at the Ramones and think it's so easy, but they don't realize what's behind all that. There's a discipline. Johnny [was] the one responsible for that."

Control. It was a key factor in Johnny's existence. Johnny Ramone is a legend because John Cummings set out to be one. Through hard work, perseverance, and dedication - and against all odds - a delinquent from Queens helped create the foundation punk rock was built on, becoming one of the most famous, influential musicians in the world. He steered the ship. He cracked the whip. He made it happen.