However, according to a new documentary, End of the Century, the Ramones' career essentially consisted of two decades of dysfunctional misery. Alongside Tommy, the original line-up contained a heroin addict and sometime male prostitute (bassist Dee Dee), a frontman whose obsessive-compulsive disorder was so acute that he had to spend part of his teens in a psychiatric hospital, and the remarkable guitarist Johnny Cummings, who seemed to have transformed himself overnight from a violent teenage delinquent into a staunch right-wing disciplinarian.
"Special" is something of an understatement. And once these people start running things, I think they started to inform the general public - 'Hey, by the way, the Ramones started it all.' That's when the general population started becoming aware of how special the Ramones were." Our staunchest fans were always a little bit more on the outside, the type of people who didn't fit in with society. In the intervening years, he has come up with some stimulating theories about how the band's reputation has blossomed: "Even from the very beginning, the type of fans the Ramones generated were the kind of people who wound up running industry, who became professors and scientists. Tommy left the band in 1977, after their third and greatest album, Rocket to Russia, to concentrate on a career as a record producer.
A lot of other acts got much more publicity, more record company support, more radio play." But there he is in the photograph, dressed in regulation ripped jeans and leather jacket - the drummer and producer then known as Tommy Ramone.Įrdelyi is the only surviving original member of what may well be the most important rock band of the past 30 years: the inventors of punk the quartet who changed music forever by opposing everything mainstream mid-1970s rock stood for whose influence over subsequent generations has been so strong that their eponymous debut album, which inspired the Sex Pistols and the Clash, still sounds weirdly current 29 years after its release. Nor would you readily associate any of them with Tommy Erdelyi, a bearded, greying 52-year-old sitting on Vega's sofa, who these days performs "old-time, string band and bluegrass" in a duo called Uncle Monk. They do not, it has to be said, look like the sort of people you would readily associate with a delicately pleasing fragrance. On his coffee table, there is perhaps the most unlikely merchandising opportunity of all: a Ramones scented candle, emblazoned with a picture of the quartet outside notorious New York punk club CBGBs in 1976. He has slapped the Ramones logo he designed in 1977 on everything imaginable: pillowcases, clocks, babies' bibs, vehicle licence plates, light switches and a terrifying-looking item called a barbell that you're apparently meant to stick through your tongue. If nothing else, the latter is testament to Vega's versatility. His Manhattan loft, on a street recently renamed Joey Ramone Place, is stuffed with memorabilia from his 21 years as the seminal punk band's graphic designer, T-shirt manufacturer and lighting director, as well as with the Ramones merchandise he now sells through his website. N o one could accuse Arturo Vega of being coy about his involvement with the Ramones.
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