KURT LODER KICKS off his piece "Dee Dee Ramone Remembered by Kurt Loder" by saying, "The Ramones, with their torn jeans, black leather jackets and walloping, supercharged riffs, were not only the definitive punk band (they created the classic form); they were also a great American band." Jesus, what a bunch of horseshit. Does everything today have to be a goddamn rally round the flag? You know if you rearrange the letters in that guy's name you get Elk Turd? Well there are a couple of letters left over, but still, can we please get past this "they changed the world" mantra about punk bands? You know what Dee Dee himself said about being a member of the Ramones?

In Please Kill Me he explains, "Rock and Roll on automatic sort of desensitized my rebellion. We just toured all the time, without a break for fifteen years.... The thing that was driving me crazy was playing that damn 'Pinhead' song every night.... I hated that damn song. The only good thing about it was that it came at the end of the show." What a disturbing quote. It's partly funny, but it speaks of the drudgery that music becomes for people who we all love and the whole industry enslaves. In the beginning they make music because they love making music, but fame and the inevitable money chase ruin everything. There are plenty of articles floating around right now about Dee Dee and the Ramones and the seminal influence they were and how they changed the face of music and all that shit. I say it sucks that Dee Dee had a drug problem he couldn't beat and that half the reason we all worshipped those guys is because they looked cool shooting up and now they're all dead.

After leaving the Ramones, Dee Dee tried to form a band with Stiv Bators, who was in the Dead Boys and is in fact now dead, and Johnny Thunders, who is also dead. That star-crossed matchup never got off the ground. A regrettable rap record under the pseudonym Dee Dee King followed. In the last couple years he took up painting, wrote an autobiography, and started a Ramones cover band called the Remains (later the Ramainz). In the late '90s he released a pair of solo records, one of which is brilliantly called I Hate Freaks Like You. It has a song titled "I'm Zonked, Los Hombres" and another one called "Why Is Everybody Always Against Germany," which is just a hilarious and great title for a song written by someone from Dee Dee's swastika-obsessed generation.

Many people who work and/or shop in high-priced used-clothing boutiques view the Ramones and their NYC '74-'77 peers as just short of deities for the way they looked, the songs they wrote, and the legendary acts of superhuman drug use they pulled off, not to mention the fact that they reminded the United States and later the world of what rock and roll in it's most undiluted form could do. I fall in this group of giddy nostalgia-worship and blind fandom myself.

Did Dee Dee want this? Did he want 50 million college kids who never sucked cock for dope to sing along to "53rd and 3rd" and consider it their own? Judging from interviews and the aesthetic of the early punk movement, probably not. The millions of us who bought All the Stuff (and More) are probably the last thing the disaffected youth of NYC's little-scene-that-could wanted. But there's no escaping the inevitable co-opting of ideas and trends. It's human nature. Or American nature anyway.