Joey Ramone refused to speak to Johnny Ramone for 20 years
Whether it was the Roman power struggle of Caracalla and Geta, or the Britpop brotherly squabbles of Oasis, sibling rivalries have been pretty constant throughout history, and the music industry in particular has always been full of them.
In the realm of punk, though, the biggest sibling rivalry concerned Joey and Johnny, the two unrelated leather-clad punks of the Ramones.
Although the Ramones weren’t quite as fraternal as their band name would suggest – taking inspiration from the alias Paul McCartney often used when checking into hotels, Paul Ramon – they certainly had enough conflict and argument within their ranks to rival that of a real family. Seemingly, being in a band together for two decades, playing dingy, rat-infested clubs like New York’s CBGBs, doesn’t do much to alleviate tension within a group.
Throughout their illustrious tenure, the Ramones saw multiple members come and go, some more acrimoniously than others. For the most part, though, the conflict at the heart of the band centred around frontman Joey Ramone and guitarist Johnny Ramone.
Two famously disparate personalities, with the guitarist a hardline Republican and his bandmate a little more liberal in his leanings, the pair were so at odds with each other that they stopped speaking to one another during the early 1980s.
That silent resentment continued to brew until the punk icons finally split for good in 1996. A conflict that is enduring and intense cannot simply stem from mere political differences; there was a much deeper reason why the pair found themselves at odds. As it turns out, that reason went by the name of Linda Marie Daniele.
During the late 1970s, while the Ramones were in Los Angeles filming their cult classic film Rock and Roll High School, Joey started dating Linda Daniele, and the frontman quickly became infatuated with the redhead. Unfortunately for Joey, Johnny Ramone similarly fell in love with Linda, and during the early 1980s, she broke off the relationship with Joey to start seeing his bandmate.
Inevitably, that caused something of a rift between the two musicians, so much so that Joey began writing songs like ‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’ about the incident. Perhaps if Johnny and Linda had only engaged in a brief fling, it would have been easier to forgive that betrayal, but as fate would have it, the pair ended up getting married in 1984, and they remained together until the guitarist’s death in 2004.
What’s more, the pair’s increasingly close relationship meant that Linda was in and around the band quite a lot during their countless tours and recording sessions, which did little to alleviate the issue for Joey. Rather than even attempting to make amends with his bandmate, though, the frontman decided it was simpler to just never speak to him again, and Johnny wasn’t overly put out by that arrangement.
Ideally, of course, you wouldn’t have to be in a band with somebody with whom you are not on speaking terms, but, bizarrely, the Ramones managed to make it work for over a decade, although it is difficult to claim that their material didn’t take quite a steep nosedive during that time.
