I was 17 years old, working nights at the record department of Korvette's in suburban Illinois. It was Christmas season, 1976.

After peeling away the cellophane of the newly released "Ramones" album, I dropped the needle and played the entire record, front to back, full volume.

This event initiated what was to be the first in a remarkable series of job lay-offs.

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Joey Ramone, R.I.P.

(Bruce Pavitt is a founder of Sub Pop records.)

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Monica Kendrick:

All the damn time, in an allegedly iconoclastic (hah!) field like rock criticism, privately we ask ourselves: Why are our heroes heroes? Why them?

I sat up straight when I came across this passage, about his adolescence, in John Cale's autobiography, "What's Welsh for Zen?":

"I retreated into the luxury of my interior universe, which was filled with music. In my imagination I carved out a niche for myself among the artists, Beat poets and musicians on Manhattan's Lower East Side, where I was convinced that John Cage was at that very moment performing a rendition of his silent 'Four Minutes and Thirty-Three Seconds.' ... As I lay in bed and gyrated to the beat of Elvis cutting loose on 'That's All Right (Mama)' or dug the underground sound of Coltrane talking with his horn, what kept my heart alive was the knowledge that only 3,000 miles away, and five hours later that day, these people were actually doing the very things they were known for. They were alive! And soon I would join them, somehow I knew I would. I knew. I knew. I knew."

Fast forward a few decades, change some names, and substitute his nowhere town in Wales for my nowhere town in the Virginia mountains, and I could have written those exact words. I too had a long-distance love affair with faraway New York City, where Things Are Happening At This Very Moment and I'm Wasting My Life By Not Being There!!!

At 14 or so when the Ramones entered my life I was transitioning from thorough-going metalhead to diehard indie rocker, and although the CBGB scene was in fact nearly a decade past its peak, I knew, I knew, I knew, that someday I would be there, where Patti Smith would look at my poetry and tell me I had potential and I could go see the Ramones play every single night.

The Ramones, man ... They the one band that the odd handful of metalheads, punks and indie guys I knew could all agree on; no matter what your subcultural affiliation, it was impossible not to recognize that the Ramones were simply rock 'n' roll itself, distilled into an essence.

That was obvious to me in my parents' basement, seething with useless, outlet-less, trapped pubescent froth and boho-to-the-bone but stuck-in-the-Bible-Belt piss and vinegar, bouncing off the walls to "I Wanna Be Sedated": "Nuthin' to do/Nowhere to go-oh/I wanna be sedated," which was so right because if you listen to the music, it's not the least bit sedated, and these guys may want to be sedated but they know it ain't gonna happen.

And for me, with nuthin' to do nowhere to go-oh, I guessed I might as well be sedated for another bunch of years 'til I could finally blow that no-horse-town popstand and go ride those subway trains on the "Subterranean Jungle" album cover. Maybe even someday go ride around with the Ramones, who out of all of 'em seemed most like the guys you'd really want to eat pizza, drink beer, and get busted for speeding on the BQE with: real guys, tough but sweet, funny as hell, high energy, troublemakers full of attitude but truly lacking a genuinely mean-spirited bone anywhere in their collective body, guys to make any cynical girl's inner Riff Randall come shamelessly out to play, jumping around in spiked dog collar and bobby sox; the kind of guys your mother really would like down in her heart if she was the kind of mom who still remembered that she too had a bit of a wild side.

That's why those girl-group covers made so much sense and felt so right -- if there was ever a white male Ronnie Spector, it was Joey Ramone, and when a friend landed a boyfriend who looked a lot like him, she was justifiably proud and the rest of us duly envious. "Put me in a wheelchair/Put me on a plane" indeed. A plane to New York. Right now.

I never got to hang out with them, but I did see them play for the first time at 15 in a college auditorium in Radford. It was the show of shows, a full-body immersion in every type of feeling I wanted to have in my life forever. I wanted it to never end, and in some sense it hasn't. Even after they broke up -- final album, farewell tour, the whole bit -- people rarely referred to the Ramones in the past tense: they were not just a band, they were a force, an energy, an archetype that cannot cease to exist in the collective unconscious, even if the historical figure it's based upon might in the mundane world.

Nowadays I'm happy to be part of the music scene of Chicago, but I've never stopped loving New York from afar, nor has that terrible feeling of Things Are Happening There And I'm Stuck Here ever gone away completely. Right now, for example, I'm not really at my desk in Chicago: I'm in front of CBGB, crying and kneeling in front of one of the street memorials that spring up to acknowledge a community heartbreak; I'm leaving flowers and a hand-lettered sign with hearts and skulls on it that says "Goodbye Joey I Will Never Forget You." I'm 14 years old.

(Monica Kendrick writes for the Chicago Reader.)

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