All Revved Up and Ready to Go

First Joey, then Dee Dee, now Johnny. That leaves Tommy and C.J. How harsh. I'm still mourning Joey, for chrissakes.

They were all in their 50s. Joey and Johnny succumbed to cancer, the likely result of playing in so many smokey clubs and punishing their bodies for 25 years playing rock'n'roll that never let up. Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose, a cause that surprises not in its method but by its peculiar lateness in his life. Rock musicians with his taste in drugs either die early or kick the habit—and even then they require extensive rehab, if not a blood transfusion or two.

When I hear The Ramones on the radio these days—and the same goes for The Clash—they are sandwiched between newer artists of the post-Alternative mould, bands like Franz Ferdinand or Modest Mouse, bands with sharp pop sensibilities and tight chops; yet The Ramones, like The Clash, equally sharp and tight, sound yet more urgent. I'm usually in my car, so invariably I'll turn up the volume, roll down the windows and unconsciously step on the gas. So hearing that one of them is dead, like Joe Strummer, never mind that three of them are dead—a strange hollowness invades that energy, like watching footage of Al Carmichael run his 106-yard kickoff return...and cheering. Okay, maybe not that bad. Yet this distancing imposed by aging and the loss of a youthful hero makes any further fist-pumping feel a bit necrophilic.

But then, what's nostalgia without the limburger scent of death lingering in one's nostrils? It's not as if we thought The Ramones or our other punk gawds were actually immortal. Corruptibility, the inevitable deterioration of all things, most evident in the body as it ages—punk embraced these things as an aesthetic, the rare moment in youth culture when the young acknowledge not only their mortality but the brevity of youthful energy itself. All the more reason to be so urgent.