* GENERAL INFO (2002/ 2009 OF JOEY)
* ARTICLE FROM NEW YORK TIMES BY JON PARELES
* INDUCTION ESSAY FOR THE RAMONES BY DR. DONNA GAINES
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME ANNEX NYC (NEW YORK, 2008)
* GENERAL INFO AND OPENING EVENT IN 2008
THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAMES:
THE LONG ISLAND MUSIC HALL OF FAME INDUCTION IN 2008:
* GENERAL INFO (2008)
GENERAL INFO:
Yeah, Ramones is officially in Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. 2002 was for Ramones first year of eligibility. The 17th annual Rock And Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony was held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York City on March 18, 2002. VH1 aired show on March 20 at 9PM. Eddie Vedder was it, who inducted the Ramones into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame. Eddie made a 20-minute induction speech, and appeared with a mohawk haircut and a Ramones T-shirt. You can find a big part of Eddie Vedder’s speech and Tommy Ramone's speech from my book Heaven Needed A Lead Singer: Fans Remember Joey Ramone.
It's so sad that Joey didn't live to experience that day, but we know how happy he is about it now, as he’s watching us from punk heaven.
The list of voters had about 1000 names. It has a lot of record company executives and music industry types like managers, agents, etc. The 2002 inductees were, in addition to Ramones: Chet Atkins, Isaac Hayes, Brenda Lee, Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers, Gene Pitney, Jim Stewart and Talking Heads. Chet Atkins was inducted in the side men category. Example Sex Pistols, Patti Smith, AC/DC were nominated, but not choosed.
Johnny, Joey, Tommy, Dee Dee, and Marky were inducted in a ceremony. CJ told, he will not be attending the induction ceremony, because he is not being inducted for lack of time spent in the Ramones. Apparently it's the band members being inducted and not The Ramones!!! This is so sad news, but rules are rules. We fans know how important member CJ was!
When The Ramones took the stage to accept the award, Johnny went first; he had a short speech, followed by Marky. Dee Dee’s speech was hilarious, and with punk brevity, said, "I'd like to congratulate myself and thank myself and give myself a big pat on the back". Joey's mother Charlotte and brother Mickey were also in the audience. Joey's award sat on the podium, unspoken for.
...After seven years, on May 14, 2009: Correcting any mistake always is. Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame stepped up to do the right thing. The re-presentation of Joey's award took place at the NYC Annex of the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame on May 14th at 3PM. Ramones manager Danny Fields, and Hall Of Fame president Joel Peresman presented the award. Tommy Ramone and Joey's brother Mickey Leigh accepted it behalf of our Joey.
In 2002, Green Day played at the ceremony the Ramones songs Teenage Lobotomy, Rockaway Beach and Blitzkrieg Bop.
The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and main museum are located on the shores of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Second Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame museum will be opened in Soho, New York, USA.
You can buy some great Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame items from Arturo.
Following is from New York Times article: "New Inductees Take Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Into the Punk Era" by JON PARELES, March 19, 2002.
Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam, introducing the Ramones, appeared with a mohawk haircut and a Ramones T- shirt. "They were armed with two- minute songs that they rattled off like machine-gun fire, and it was enough to change the Earth's revolution," he said. "Now it's Disney kids singing songs written by old men and being marketed to 6- and 7-year-olds, so some kind of change might have to happen again soon."
Mr. Vedder complained that C. J. Ramone, who replaced Dee Dee Ramone on bass from 1989 to 1996, was not being inducted along with the four original Ramones (Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy) and Marky Ramone, who replaced Tommy on drums in 1978. He also reminded the audience, full of music-business moguls, that the Ramones had never had a Top 10 hit, while their imitators became million-sellers.
"Something unusual is happening here tonight, and that's that this industry is playing some respect to the Ramones," Marky said.
Joey Ramone, the band's lead singer, died of cancer last April. Tommy Ramone said being in the hall of fame "meant the world to Joey." He added, "We really loved each other even when we weren't acting civil to each other. We really were brothers." Dee Dee Ramone, with punk brevity, said, "I'd like to congratulate myself and thank myself and give myself a big pat on the back." The band Green Day, a beneficiary of the Ramones style, played three Ramones songs, "Teenage Lobotomy," "Rockaway Beach" and "Blitzkrieg Bop."
+ I wanted to include this from same article
True to form, the punk-rock contingent caused some stir. Talking Heads, who broke up contentiously after making their last album in 1988, reunited for their first live performance in 18 years. Chris Frantz, the band's drummer, said, "I'd like to thank the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame for giving this band a happy ending."
The band brought Hilly Kristal, the owner of CBGB, onstage with them as they accepted their awards, and their three songs included eerily timely choices: "Burning Down the House" and "Life During Wartime."
Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame 2002 Induction Essay for The Ramones by Dr. Donna Gaines
(Picture of Joey Ramone, Dr. Donna Gaines and Bob Turano of Chum from site of Dr. Donna Gaines)
In the dark ages that preceded the Ramones, fans were shut out, reduced to the role of passive spectator. In the early 1970s, boredom inherited the earth: The airwaves were ruled by crotchety old dinosaurs; rock & roll had become an alienated labor - rock, detached from its roots. Gone were the sounds of youthful angst, exuberance, sexuality and misrule. The spirit of rock & roll was beaten back; the glorious legacy handed down to us in doo-wop, Chuck Berry, the British Invasion and surf music was lost. If you were an average American kid hanging out in your room playing guitar, hoping to start a band, how could you possibly compete with elaborate guitar solos, expensive equipment and million-dollar stage shows? It all seemed out of reach. And then, in 1974, a uniformed militia burst forth from Forest Hills, Queens, firing a shot heard round the world.
The Ramones' raw style resurrected the unholy spirit of rock & roll, renewing old-school aesthetics, paying tribute to the Fifties greasers, the bikers, the garage Mods. With their Tiger Beat boy names, ripped jeans, T-shirts, black leather motorcycle jackets and Keds (American-made sneakers only), the Ramones incited a sneering cultural insurrection. In 1976 they recorded their eponymous first album in seventeen days for $6,400. At a time when superstars were demanding upwards of half a million, the Ramones democratized rock & roll - you didn't need a fat contract, great looks, expensive clothes or the skills of Clapton. You just had to follow Joey's credo: "Do it from the heart and follow your instincts." More than twenty-five years later - after the band officially broke up - from Old Hanoi to East Berlin, kids in full Ramones regalia incorporate the commando spirit of DIY, do it yourself.
According to Joey, the chorus in "Blitzkrieg Bop" - "Hey ho, let's go" - was "the battle cry that sounded the revolution, a call to arms for punks to do their own thing." That message spread outward from the bowels of New York City to the U.K. and California, across Asia, into Latin America and Europe, instigating 10,000 new bands along the way. Lean, mean, clean, the Ramones had ushered in a glorious new age. The critics called it punk rock after the garage bands of the early 1960s. History was rewritten; bands like T-Rex, the Velvets and Dolls were reclassified as "prepunk." New sights, sounds, dress codes, art, attitudes and gender relations followed - girls could do it, too! Fans in the audience today became bands onstage tomorrow. Authenticity replaced virtuoso mastery as the central tenet of punk musicianship. The Ramones set the standard for a rising generation of alternative bands learning to balance cult credibility with mass appeal. From CBGB to Sleater-Kinney, Rancid and Green Day. Stripped down, with a streetwise anti-look, speed-pop raw aggression and darkly funny lyrics, the Ramones influenced genres from new wave to hardcore, speed metal and thrash. Infused the sensibilities of grunge, riot grrrl, foxcore and queercore.
The original band members grew up as disaffected boomers repulsed
by the legacy of peace and love. They were loners, outcasts in their
outer-borough middle-class apartment complex. Typical neighborhood guys,
bassist Dee Dee lived next door to Johnny, who played guitar, and Johnny
was in a band with Joey's brother, guitarist Mickey Leigh. Johnny knew
Tommy since high school - they had a band called Tangerine Puppets. After
graduation, Tommy got a job as a recording engineer, setting up
Performance Studios, a rehearsal space and showcase for early Ramones
shows, two-dollar cover, mostly friends. In addition to playing drums,
Tommy began coproducing, and after the Ramones' third album, Rocket to
Russia, he left the band to produce full-time. Dee Dee knew Joey as the
singer in a glitter band named Sniper, who performed at a Queens club
called Coventry. A free spirit, tall, shy and gawky, Joey seemed a most
unlikely rock star. When he hooked up with his band mates, he was selling
acrylic-dipped flowers in the Village and painting with vegetables. Like
Dee Dee and Johnny, Joey was alienated at home, at school and in the
neighborhood. In their early days, Dee Dee and Johnny sat on rooftops
killing time, getting wasted, looking for cheap thrills. "Now I Wanna
Sniff Some Glue" was Dee Dee's deadpan dead-end kids' one minute,
thirty-four second ode to the pleasures of solvent abuse. Joey claimed the
song was just a goof: "We were really just writing about teenage
frustration." As Johnny explained, "We couldn't write about girls or cars,
so we wrote songs about things we knew." The Ramones were their fans - outcasts, frustrated suburban youth who played stickball, worked at odd jobs and checked out shows at Flushing Meadow Park. Johnny and Dee Dee were obsessed with war movies. Johnny had spent two years in military school; Dee Dee grew up in Germany on a military base, an army brat. Fiercely patriotic, the two collected war memorabilia and hated hippies. They rode the subway to shows, carried their guitars to rehearsals in shopping bags. Legend holds that in the early 1970s, when Johnny first saw the New York Dolls perform, he took one look and declared, "Hey, I can do that!" The rest is U.S. cultural history.
The Ramones took their name from Paul McCartney's alias - Paul Ramone - when his band was called the Silver Beatles. Like most kids stranded on the wrong side of the bridges and tunnels of New York City, the Ramones knew heaven was just a train ride away. So they hopped the subway to Manhattan and eventually found a home on the Bowery, at CBGB. At first, people wondered if they could play at all, but that wasn't the point; their twenty-minute sets of rapid-fire, under-two-and-a-half-minute songs earned them a recording contract before any of their contemporaries, except Patti Smith.
You had to be sophisticated to realize they weren't d-u-m-b. But if you took them too seriously, you'd miss the point. Joey's clipped words made people wonder if he was serious or just spoofing. He deployed an eccentric phrasing that was wholly unique, a mix of regional Queens dialect and Britboy bastard inflection. Dee Dee and Johnny never smiled; they stood onstage with their legs spread apart, stoic, staring psychotically at their instruments. Sometimes Johnny's white guitar turned totally red; he played with such ferocious fury his fingers bled. Joey sang with the same twisted intensity that lacerated Johnny's hand. Sometimes Dee Dee's bass lines soared past at the speed of light. Their minimalist aesthetic was rooted in Dee Dee's Queens logic: "I think rock & roll should be three words and a chorus, and the three words should be good enough to say it all."
The Ramones' songwriting reflected their obsession with popular culture and all things American - pizza, Carbona, Coney Island, Burger King, chicken vindaloo, surfing, horror movies and soda machines. They helped us laugh at our dysfunctional families, psychotherapists, politicians and piss-poor social skills. Above all, they upheld a belief in the emancipatory promise of rock & roll radio: the Top Forty seven-inch vinyl, three-minute hit single. Unlike the snotty urban art crowd, they loved television, baseball, comic books and cartoons. Joey wrote "Chain Saw" after seeing Chain Saw Massacre, rhyming massacreeeeee with me. Johnny's "I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement" was an ode to all the B-movie horror flicks he loved. Likewise, "Pinhead" was a cooperative effort inspired by the 1932 horror film Freaks.
Over the course of eighteen studio and live albums, and more than 2,250 shows, the band remained accessible and local. As Joey explained, "Our fans played a major part in the whole thing. I remember meeting certain artists I admired and them being real obnoxious. That wasn't how I wanted to be." Brooklyn boy Marc Bell, an acclaimed drummer for Richard Hell and the Voidoids, Dust and Wayne County, replaced Tommy on drums in 1978 and became Marky Ramone. The son of a longshoreman turned labor lawyer readily embraced the band's ethic of inclusion. Marky said the most important thing he learned from being a Ramone was "how to treat people right, you know, don't act like a rock star, just be yourself. . . . I hate rock stars." Through it all, the band upheld the primacy of the fans, the importance of the kids, the purity of band-fan relations. Of the people, by the people, for the people.
Over the years, the Ramones worked with Phil Spector, starred in Roger Corman's 1979 movie Rock 'n' Roll High School and wrote the title track to Stephen King's Pet Sematary. American popular culture spawned the Ramones; today their legacy permeates it. Today you'll hear them at football stadiums, as crowds cheer "Hey ho, let's go," and on film soundtracks ranging from The Royal Tenenbaums to Jimmy Neutron.
E Pluribus Unum. The Ramones always called themselves an American band, patriotic, goofy, innocent and too tough to die. Individualistic yet inclusive, eccentric yet populist, the Ramones stood firm, in perfect paramilitary formation, a uniformed assault team, a well-disciplined fighting army. They became one of the most prolific, hard-touring bands in the world. Their all-for-one, one-for-all work ethic prevailed over self-interest or ego. After Dee Dee left the band in 1989, C.J played bass with edgy vitality and great humility. The former U.S. Marine said, "I tried not to look like I'm taking someone else's place, but go up there to do my job and entertain people."
When the band broke up in 1996, the members pursued solo projects - cool new bands, art shows, memoirs, novels, spoken-word tours, films and albums. Tragically, at age 49, Joey Ramone passed away on April 15, 2001, following a lengthy battle with lymphoma. Joey's worldview is evident in his posthumous solo album, Don't Worry About Me, in the upbeat momentum of songs like "What a Wonderful World" and "I Got Knocked Down (but I'll Get Up)." Today the former high school reject is a personal hero. By just being himself, "the King of Punk" gave teenage outcasts everywhere something to believe in, an alternative to killing themselves or blowing up the high school.
The Ramones have given us many brilliant anthems to hang our dreams on. Whether by land or by sea, the Ramones never forgot their primary purpose - to be true to their fans. When they played, we knew they did it for us. They never wavered, never betrayed our faith. Their impact on popular music, their influence on youth subculture cannot be measured in the banal, quantitative language of market shares, chart positions and radio airplay. Like the proud-standing Militia of Lexington who fired the shot that sparked the American Revolution, the Ramones of New York City changed history.
Essay in loving memory of Joey Ramone.
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME ANNEX NYC (NEW YORK, 2008):
So The Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame and main museum are located on the shores of Lake Erie in downtown Cleveland, Ohio, USA. Second Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame museum was opened in Soho, New York, USA on December 2, 2008. It is named Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Annex NYC.
Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Annex NYC has Johnny Ramone's Mosrite guitar, Bruce Springsteen's 1957 Chevy and feature a number of different exhibits, including one with New York City sites that have musical significance. The front awning and cash register of the recently closed club CBGB will also be on display.
- Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame Annex NYC is OK, but small. The long awaited New York room with the CBGB installation is not very well done. Opening party was a lot of fun and cool, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein from Blondie doing an acoustic set, wrote Ramones creative director Arturo Vega for me.
Also in that opening event were for example Tommy Ramone, CJ Ramone, Johnny's wife Linda Ramone, Ramones producer Daniel Rey, Jimmy Destri (Blondie), Dave Mason (Jimi Hendrix, Traffic etc.), Les Paul and Darryl McDaniels (Run DMC).
The exhibit feature an interactive map of musically significant Manhattan locations such as Studio 54 and the landmarked Chelsea Hotel, whose guests and residents have included many famous artists and musicians including Dee Dee Ramone and the Sex Pistols' Sid Vicious.
GENERAL INFO OF LONG ISLAND MUSIC HALL OF FAME INDUCTION IN 2008:
The Long Island Music Hall Of Fame is different organisation than Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.
Long Island Music Hall of Fame was incorporated in 2005 and it gives the Long Island Sound Award to musical performers who have contributed to Long Island's musical heritage. Long Island is an island located in southeastern New York, USA, just east of Manhattan. The decision of the Hall to define Long Island, Brooklyn, Queens etc. in New York, so it is not nationwide award.
The Long Island Music Hall Of Fame had first induction award ceremony on October 15, 2006 and second at Garden City Hotel in Garden City, NYC, USA on October 30, 2008.
Tom Needham, Vice Chairman of Long Island Music Hall of Fame, wrote to me in advance that Chris Frantz and Tina Weymouth from the Talking Heads/ Tom Tom Club will be there to present the award to Tommy, Marky and CJ Ramone. That also did happen. Ramones tour manager Monte Melnick wrote that Tommy and CJ Ramone attended event. They spoke for Johnny. Monte had the privilege of accepting the award for Dee Dee Ramone. Joey's brother Mickey Leigh accepted award for his brother Joey and Carmine Apice (Vanilla Fudge) accepted award for Marky. Arturo Vega was also at the ceremony.
Other artists being honored include Public Enemy, LL Cool J, Eddie Money, Neil Diamond and Blue Oyster Cult.