RAMONES IN ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF
FAME
BACK
ROCK AND ROLL HALL OF FAME (CLEVELAND) INDUCTION IN 2002:
* 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.