Seems End of the Century (see my review; it plays the Royal again in Toronto Jan. 17-18 and the Revue Jan. 19-20) is opening across the pond, and so the Guardian has interviewed the last original surviving Ramone: Tommy Erdelyi, who now plays in a bluegrass duo (?!?!) called Uncle Monk.

An excerpt:

Erdelyi is the only surviving original member of what may well be the most important rock band of the past 30 years: the inventors of punk; the quartet who changed music forever by opposing everything mainstream mid-1970s rock stood for; whose influence over subsequent generations has been so strong that their eponymous debut album, which inspired the Sex Pistols and the Clash, still sounds weirdly current 29 years after its release. "We were the first," he says. "People forgot that for a long time. In the 70s and 80s, they didn't know. A lot of other acts got much more publicity, more record company support, more radio play."

Tommy left the band in 1977, after their third and greatest album, Rocket to Russia, to concentrate on a career as a record producer. In the intervening years, he has come up with some stimulating theories about how the band's reputation has blossomed: "Even from the very beginning, the type of fans the Ramones generated were the kind of people who wound up running industry, who became professors and scientists. Our staunchest fans were always a little bit more on the outside, the type of people who didn't fit in with society. And once these people start running things, I think they started to inform the general public - 'Hey, by the way, the Ramones started it all.' That's when the general population started becoming aware of how special the Ramones were."

 

"Special" is something of an understatement. Alongside Tommy, the original line-up contained a heroin addict and sometime male prostitute (bassist Dee Dee), a frontman whose obsessive-compulsive disorder was so acute that he had to spend part of his teens in a psychiatric hospital, and the remarkable guitarist Johnny Cummings, who seemed to have transformed himself overnight from a violent teenage delinquent into a staunch right-wing disciplinarian. ...

As for the troubled adults who made up the Ramones, Erdelyi professes confusion. None of the deceased members reconciled before they died. When the band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, they sat at separate tables. Erdelyi made a speech about how he loved them all and they were truly brothers, but in End of the Century you can see the others glaring at him.

"I meant what I said," he sighs. "I thought of them as brothers. I just don't understand why there were no more efforts to make peace. The best way I can understand it is that these were very strange people with unorthodox interactions. It's fascinating, but really, it baffles me as much as it baffles you."