JOHNNY RAMONE
by Steve Miller

What the public didn't know about Johnny Ramone is that he cared.

Johnny cared about the people he may have not paid enough attention to during his life and he cared about anybody he might have inadvertently hurt along the way to creating music history.

''I didn't ever want to do anything to hurt anyone,'' he told me as we gathered notes for his upcoming memoirs, which we began working on in April. ''I was always doing the best with what I had.''

To begin the upcoming book, Johnny says something, which he dictated with succinct precision, as if he had been holding it in for the moment: ''I want you Ramones fans to understand that I would not play the way I play if I were not the person I am, and the Ramones would never have been the band it was without that.''

It seemed to be an apology of sorts, as if the person that he had been did not square with the person he grew into, who was a faithful husband, and, by all accounts, a very true friend.

Johnny would hate for his legacy to be ''whitewashed,'' a word he used when he read or heard something that glossed over the bad or negative aspects of an issue.

So to some, Johnny was a nasty, difficult person. Many have said as much, it's out there among the books and articles and video collections. Some of it is true. Some of it isn't. Some more of it will soon be out there for people to decide.

But from this vantage point, even in the throes of his illness, he was never brusque, never impatient. Listening back to the tapes of our many hours of conversations, he was at times strident and opinionated. Other times, he was tired, worn out by the sickness that he fought with such courage.

His illness had sapped some of his anger, he noted ruefully.

"It has changed me and I don't know that I like how,'' he said.  ''It has softened me up and I liked the old me better. I don't even have the energy to be angry. I liked being angry. ''

But he kept on and we kept on, daily phone calls and several weeks of meetings at his Los Angeles home. Sometimes he talked baseball. Sometimes he bitched about liberals. 

And he always understood his lot in life and how lucky he was to play music. And he was very grateful.

" There are people who really have to work for a living, they work in coal mines, they sweep streets, they collect garbage,'' he told me. ''It was taxing on the mind because of all the travel and there were certain pressures, but it was nothing like real work that most people do. I was very lucky.''

As Arturo Vega, the band's lighting man and art director for all of its 22 years, most aptly said, ''Johnny was the misunderstood Ramone. What he did was so basic and elemental that it was beyond the idea of liking him. People never like authority and that was what he had to exert in the Ramones. He was misunderstood because he was not the lovable Joey or the crazy punk Dee Dee.''

The Ramones were what counted for Johnny, more than himself, and bigger to him than any other entity in his universe. He loved that unit more than he loved himself.

When we worked through changes in the manuscript, Johnny would quietly chastise me if anything looked as if he were taking credit, due or not.

It was that selflessness that made the Ramones the giants they were. When Johnny recognized that a guitar part could be played better by someone other than himself, he stepped aside.

The guitar chord at the end of ''You're Gonna Kill That Girl'' was Tommy. Walter Lure and Daniel Rey played fills on some albums that, Johnny said, ''would've taken me longer to get down and even then they wouldn't have sounded as good.''

His leadership corralled the formidable individual talents of the Ramones and sent them from cult band during their existence to the mass acceptance of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2002.

''The Ramones were his band, he was always right and he's a bully, a real bully,'' said Danny Fields, the band's first manager. ''But always for the right reasons. His sense of justice was impeccable.''

Gary Kurfirst, who succeeded Fields in 1980, saw right away who ran the show. ''Johnny was the glue,'' Kurfirst said. ''They would work for three months straight, come home for two weeks and take one day off, then he made them go into rehearsal so they wouldn't lose their chops. I asked him how they could do that and he said it was like a basketball team, 'you have to practice or you lose it.' That was Johnny.''

The fans were his playground, the people who made it worth all his while. Johnny signed endlessly for anyone who requested.

''I started to see them when I was 16 they were one of my favorite bands,'' said Jose Theodore who is now all-star goalie for the Montreal Canadians. ''But when I was 17, me and my brother and a couple of friends when to see them in Montreal and we waited outside the venue and followed them to their hotel and when they got out of their van I asked them for their autograph. I told Johnny that I was going to play NHL hockey and they were all really nice.''

In the exchanges of fandom and partings, Jose gave his address to Gene the Cop, Johnny's friend who was traveling with the band.

''That Christmas, I got a card and it said 'Merry Christmas' and it was signed by Johnny,'' Theodore said.  ''With that kind of thing, and how nice they were, they taught me how to treat my fans.  I was just a kid and they treated me like that. Imagine.''

Johnny relished the attention and felt humbly honored by those fans.

''I always had that in mind, to treat people like I'd like to be treated,'' Johnny said.  ''I tell people who are becoming celebrities how important that is. I hope someone pays attention to that.''

Johnny was the tough Ramone, though, and nobody forgot about it. This was part of the reason for his remorse that was noted at the top of this page. He knew he knocked heads and he felt the tension he created in the band.

As for the money, well, Johnny was all about it. He watched his money grow with capitalistic glee as his career progressed, befitting his Republican status. He hated wasting dough and would scold others if he saw it going on. They stayed in cheaper hotels unless the promoter was paying.

And he was characteristically honest and unashamed about his quest for financial security.

When ''Blitzkrieg Bop'' became a music bed for a Bud Lite commercial, Johnny was ecstatic even as some cried sellout.

"I thought it was terrific. I liked seeing the commercial and I would get questions about how I could let them do it. It was the easiest money I ever made. It made the Bud commercial better. It would have been bad if it was a lame commercial, but I mean, beer, which is all-American. I thought it was good.''

Johnny departs as the purveyor of what is the most important musical movement of the 20th century, punk rock. It was born when rock music was still just breaking out of adolescence at the age of 20 or so.

The man who changed its direction was a 6-foot tall lightening bolt of wiry fury, a man who burst the sonic volume level with a frown and a Mosrite that was cranked to the heights, the man who influenced generations.

And the movement continues.

We sat in his living room one afternoon last month, several weeks after Johnny had narrowly escaped death via an infection he had developed related to his cancer. He was tired and we were about to wrap up a day of book talk.

But that mind, ever sharp, honed in on what is the substance of the parting chapter in the book, one in which he describes his battle with prostate cancer.

''We all have time limits and mine came a little early,'' he said to me, quietly, his eyes closing.

''But I've had a great life no matter how it turns out now. I've had the best wife, Linda, that I could ever hope to find and I've had such great friends that really care about me and would do anything they could for me.''

President Bush, speaking in eulogy of Ronald Reagan, who passed away in June and was one of Johnny's few heroes, said that the late president had ''principles that are etched in his soul.''

Johnny's own principle-riddled soul is finally resting. May his afterlife be as fruitful as his life was here with us.

- Steve Miller