So you probably already heard about Tommy Ramone over the weekend, I suppose. It’s interesting to note that the stature of The Ramones has apparently increased in recent years to the point where even the squarest of mainstream news sources were compelled to cobble together a tribute. (And rightly so, of course.)

It’s not been a great year or so for The Best Bands of All Time, has it? No more Stooges left, even if it looks like Iggy is set to live through a nuclear winter, Lou Reed’s passing puts a big full-stop on the story of the VU, and now The (original) Ramones are 100% gone – the recording of that first album is now lost to living memory, secondary sources only, not much closer to us than the Boxer Rebellion or Napoleon’s exile. It’s almost eerie, the totality with which these four guys – of whom Tommy was the oldest, at 62 – have met their maker in untimely fashion.

Those scanning a canned obit in the Sunday papers and shrugging it off with “oh, drugs, rock stars blah blah blah” may wish to recall that DeeDee was the only Ramone to die from the results of drug abuse, and indeed the only one who ever suffered from such problems to a noteworthy extent. Tommy by contrast always seemed pretty healthy and sensible guy (I particularly like DeeDee's admiring comment in his autobiography, that Tommy was the only member of the band who was able to buy meat and potatoes and single-handedly cook himself dinner, as if that was some ability completely beyond the ken of the others), and he hadn’t even toured with the band since the late ‘70s. Bile duct cancer isn’t the kind of thing that zeroes in on bad boys in leather jackets – like the vast majority of cancer deaths, it’s just random, and sad, with no ill-informed talk of fate and lifestyle guilt needed.

Though he was only officially ‘Tommy Ramone’ for a few years, Thomas Erdelyi always seemed like a great guy. Here are but a few of the things he did, beyond setting the template for punk rock drumming for decades to come.

1. Like most truly great bands (I suppose?), each member of the original Ramones line-up was an integral part of the whole they created. Their contributions can be chopped up equally, more or less – 25% each – and I have no time for bickering arguments about who was the more or less important among their number. Remove any one of them and the entity we know as “The Ramones” would not have existed. Tommy, as those who even remotely care will no doubt be aware, was the *organiser* - the guy who did pretty much everything to make the band happen during their first few years together. Booking practice, getting equipment, convincing the others that their songs were actually good and that being in a band was worth doing, booking gigs, recording demos, recording the albums, random managerial duties… you name it. Seems likely the others would never have got past the ‘pissing about on a Saturday afternoon’ stage without his input.

2. He also wrote ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, and provided the initial draft for ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, so surely that alone makes his life worthy of celebration.

3. The production on the first album – what can you say in the face of such utilitarian rock n’ roll genius? Bass on the left, guitar on the right, drums in the middle – no worries. Back when I was a teenager and a friend first lent me a Ramones tape, he told me that they’d recorded it that way because that’s where the amps were placed in the studio, and they put all the mics in the middle. I don’t know whether or not that’s true, but it’s a good story. I seem to recall reading that, having hired this big, empty studio for the band to record in, Tommy and Craig Leon just figured it all out from scratch, doing whatever seemed to work. It’s definitely got that sound about it – a straight, functional document of the band playing, figured out piece by piece with no external meddling or extraneous sounds whatsoever, and the results will live forever.

Whereas other good ‘70s punk records tend to present a dense, mad racket or a riot of screeching blather (which is great, don't get me wrong), ‘Ramones’ has a pure minimalism to it that sometimes seems closer to ESG or Young Marble Giants, and that, at the time, must have sounded completely new in rock music – everything on show with zero flash, instantly understandable and copy-able to the kids back home. It is this sound, as much as the simplicity of the songs and the performances, that lent ‘70s punk its WE-CAN-DO-THIS-TOO, ‘levelling of the land’ effect. How many bands across all sub-genres in your record collection might never have been formed if teenagers across the world hadn’t put this on, and realised they could play along?

4. And, just a few years after he was scratching his head over where to put the mics, ‘Road To Ruin’, also recorded by Tommy, takes the complete opposite approach - a big, classic, professionally produced rock record that just sounds AMAZING. I have an original pressing of this one on vinyl, and I am consistently stunned at how brilliant it sounds compared to other records of its era – such a bright, bold, monolithic sound, exhilarating but also quite nuanced, with all these lovely touches on the slower songs. As much as I usually tend to fall on the side of the lo-fi in my listening preferences, this is a perfect example of a band taking a big step up in fidelity and totally winning. Purely from an emotionally neutral, audiophile POV, I think it totally buries the subsequent album they recorded with Phil Spector, which has got to tell you something.

5. By contrast, I continue to think that the albums Erdelyi later recorded for The Replacements (‘Tim’ and ‘Pleased to Meet Me’) sound absolutely *terrible*. In fairness, it’s difficult to gauge how much of this was his fault, as I can’t imagine that working on major label albums in the mid ‘80s for a notoriously unreliable and inebriated band was exactly the most conducive environment for quality music recording. At least he got his groove back for Redd Kross’s ‘Neurotica’ in 1987, which I seem to remember sounds pretty great.

So, there ya go. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you to raise a glass to Tommy Ramone, but maybe raise another one to Tommy Erdelyi whilst you’re at it, and ponder what we might have missed out on without his contribution to the past 40 years of rock n' roll.

Labels: deathblog, The Ramones, Thomas Erdelyi, Tommy Ramone