“I’m very grateful”: The 2000 song Joey Ramone was listening to when he died
It’ll likely surprise even longtime fans as to the number Joey Ramone exited this world to back in 2001.
Arguably the essential pioneer of punk, along with his namesake Ramones, it can’t be overstated just how strikingly different and dizzyingly exciting their sped-up garage attack landed way back when, first taking the CBGB stage in 1974. As Reo Speedwagon and Styx ruled the airwaves, Joey and the gang looked back past the counterculture’s initial promise back to the Hot 100 hits of his youth, the British Invasion, girl-groups, and bubblegum pop spiked with the Stooges for a sorely needed counter to rock’s premature midlife crisis.
The songs were fantastic in both attitude and effortless execution, ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’ and ‘Judy Is a Punk Rocker’ spinning with irreverent cool and an intoxicating counter to the day’s bloated rock excesses with their two-minute burn throughs. Along with the leather jackets and ripped jeans, Joey himself cut a wholly contrary presence among even the nascent punks, tall, gangly, with a wholly distinctive face, and singing in his strangely muted but powerful vocal style. There was no frontman at the time like him.
It’s well-covered lore of punk’s supposed quashing of the stale rock dinosaurs and prog wizards, but Ramones and the new wave really did pull the rug from underneath a bloodless Woodstock hangover and, for the most part, stodgy disco that felt far removed from rock’s plugged-in flash bang from 20 years earlier. Once Ramones arrived in 1976, few pop fans were paying attention, but to the intrepid few, their debut landed with seismic force, helping spark the ignition of rock great upheaval in a short time, despite scant commercial fortunes.
Jump to 1995, as Ramones were nearing their end, and Joey was hiding a private lymphoma diagnosis kept secret until the revelations came out after a broken hip from a fall. Deteriorating while in hospital care, Joey soon died from his downturn on March 19th, 2001, at New York-Presbyterian Hospital at 49 years old. Passing away at 2:40pm, Joey’s family and The Dictators bassist Andy Shernoff both confirmed that Joey was listening to U2’s ‘In a Little While’ in his hospital room.
It hadn’t been long out. Doing the radio rounds as a promo-only from 2000’s All That You Can’t Leave Behind, ‘In a Little While’ was just the latest of a long list of love songs frontman Bono had written for his wife, Ali, centred around a clean guitar line from The Edge and smattered with U2’s then penchant for glossy electronic sheen over their ‘back to basics’ approach after the previous decade’s jump into all-out dance rock. The two had been friends since the Ramones opened for U2 in the Zoo TV days, Joey reportedly an admirer of their anthemic rock songbook.
The fact is, when humans are at their most vulnerable and faced with their own mortality, a cynical sneer is hard to muster. Of all the numbers he could have scored his departure, from New York Dolls to Iggy Pop, U2’s humanist and paean to love and its high elevations into spirituality may well have offered the soothing company he needed, an intimacy with his work not lost to Bono.
Joey would be buried in New Jersey’s New Mount Zion Cemetery, and U2 would introduce ‘In a Little While’ at the Boston show of their Elevation Tour to honour the Ramones singer’s legacy. Jump to 2014, and following the subsequent deaths of both Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone, U2 dropped 2014’s ‘The Miracle (of Joey Ramone)’ as a further celebration of the punk pioneers’ personal and cultural impact.
“I’m very grateful U2 wrote a song about my former friend and bandmate Joey Ramone,” second drummer Marky told MTV at the time. “Joey would have been honoured. It is well-deserved.”
