Tommy Ramone, Mysterious Heart of the Ramones, Remembered by Robert Christgau

The linchpin moment came when Dee Dee proved too intense a vocalist to sustain a set and was replaced by cymbal-bashing drummer Joey. Tommy thought the simplicity of the band's attack required something much cleaner than Joey's choppy style – "eight-notes across, with the `one' on the bass and the `two' on the snare, fast and consistent." So when the drummers who auditioned wouldn't stop with the fills and rolls, he climbed behind the kit and found he had a knack for it. And when the more technically accomplished Marc Bell replaced him, the new guy was surprised by how hard Tommy's style was to duplicate.

"I played about five or six hours a day until I learned the whole live set," Bell recalled around the time of Johnny's 2004 death. "After a while I realized how not to overextend my energy, because to play at that tempo for an hour-and-a-half, you could lose a lot. So I could see it was easier playing from the wrists and fingers instead of the arms."

Tommy quit the band in 1978 because he couldn't take life on the road with the three volatile geniuses who all dressed the same and all made trouble in different ways. Johnny was a taskmaster, Joey was OCD, Dee Dee bipolar and then some.

In the words of Johnny's wife Linda, who was initially Joey's girlfriend Linda: "Tommy was having a breakdown and they laughed. Because that's what they did. He told them he was having a breakdown and they all just laughed, everybody laughed at everything."

But Tommy hung in there to school Marc Bell and co-produce "Road to Ruin" anyway. And somehow the band outlasted its four-album flash-in-the-pan, generating more first-rate records than their maddest fans had dreamed possible and becoming tireless road dogs who regularly thrilled the proletarian fan-base that some, Johnny especially, had always thought they deserved.

For nearly two decades, Johnny and Joey practically never spoke. Markytook five years off for alcoholism. Dee Dee quit to become a rapper in 1989 (it didn't work). But Tommy always stayed in touch. He came back to produce their finest post-'70s album, 1985's “Too Tough to Die.”  He also produced the Replacements' “Tim” and Redd Kross' “Neurotica,” and formed a bluegrass duo called Uncle Monk with his longtime partner Claudia Teinen. But though he tried never to miss a New York Ramones show, neither Johnny nor Joey was an easy guy to remain close to.

When the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, Tommy was grizzled and bearded – the other three sported the same dark bowl cuts the Ramones had made a uniform in 1974. Neither Johnny nor Dee Dee mentioned Joey, who had died a year before. Tommy and Marky both did.

Tommy never badmouthed his old bandmates. The Ramones, he believed, were "one of the few bands that was an equal part of four." The Ramones, he reflected, “were dangerous people, who came up with brilliant creative ideas. In my dealings with them I tried to harness as much of the brilliance, but a lot of times I got burnt." In 2011, he said: "I think about them all the time. They are all always present in my consciousness -- in my daily life, they're always with me.”

Tommy deserves to be remembered with equal affection and respect.