I Dreamed I Saw Joey Ramone Last Night.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: Punk rock singer

The P.C. eulogizing of a punk rocker

The most famous case of body-snatching in the history of rock 'n' roll is that of Gram Parsons, the highly regarded singer and guitarist who played with the Byrds and the Flying Burrito Brothers and influenced the Rolling Stones and the Eagles, among others. Parsons, one of the fathers of country-rock, died from a drug overdose in 1973. Supposedly in fulfillment of the performer's dying wish, Parsons' road manager and a friend stole the corpse from Los Angeles, drove it to Joshua Tree National Monument, and tried (unsuccessfully) to cremate it.

A similar, if less literal, bit of grave robbing occurred soon after punk rocker Joey Ramone (nee Jeffrey Hyman) died from lymphatic cancer on April 15, at the age of 49. This time, it was not a body but a band's musical legacy that got boosted.

Joey Ramone's beautifully weird-looking body had barely gone cold when he was eulogized not simply as the vocalist for arguably the most influential band of the past 30 years but as a politically engaged performer whose progressive bona fides were every bit as undeniable as those of Sting, Bono, and Barbra Streisand. Indeed, within hours of shuffling off his mortal coil, Joey Ramone, known for singing songs such as "Cretin Hop" and "Teenage Lobotomy," had been resurrected as Joe Hill.

Forget that the Ramones made their reputation with songs that sketched an irresistible world filled with dumb and often explicitly anti-social fun. (The uninitiated can get a good sense of this from the titles of some of the band's signature tunes, which include "Beat On the Brat," "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," "You're Gonna Kill That Girl," "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," and "I Wanna Be Sedated.")

For some righteously left-wing critics, such anarchic, aimless pleasure must always, in the final analysis, give way to something deeper, something more serious. Ironically, it must give way to precisely the sort of pedantically earnest musical messaging that helped provoke punk rock--and the Ramones--into existence in the first place.

In death, Joey Ramone became "the punk who did not hide his politics," according to The Nation's Web site, a latter-day, leather-clad Pete Seeger dedicated to exposing the synonymous evils of Reaganism and apartheid. Writer John Nichols sloughed over the Ramones' early comic, Hogan's Herqes-level fixation with Nazi themes--evidenced by songs such as "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World," which...