Johnny Ramone: After witnessing an early Ramones rehearsal, fellow New York musician David Johansen laughingly told guitarist Johnny Ramone, who has died of prostate cancer aged 55, to give up immediately: his band were so inept as to be beyond hope. It is difficult to imagine what modern rock music would sound like had he taken the New York Dolls' vocalist's advice.
Despite, or because of, their technical shortcomings, the Ramones may well have been the most important rock band of the 1970s. Their defiantly reductive approach - songs such as Sheena Is A Punk Rocker lasted two or three minutes, rarely used more than three chords and never contained guitar solos, which, anyway, Johnny Ramone could not play - changed rock music for ever, offering the first recorded proof of the punk dictum that a band with even the most rudimentary abilities could make innovative, wildly exciting records.
The extent of their influence is almost incalculable: everyone from the Sex Pistols and the Clash to current boyband, Busted, owes the Ramones and their music a debt.
Johnny Ramone was born John Cummings, the son of a middle-class Long Island family. He later moved to Forest Hills, Queens, where his neighbours included Douglas "Dee Dee" Colvin, a teenage heroin addict and sometime male prostitute, and the equally troubled Jeffrey "Joey" Hyman, who had spent time in a mental institution.
Initially, their friendship was based on a shared taste for alcohol and solvent abuse, but in 1974 Cummings bought a guitar with the proceeds from his job as a construction worker; the trio formed the Ramones, with drummer Tommy Erdelyi, and changed their surnames accordingly.
The band were inspired equally by the noisy, basic rock'n'roll of the Stooges and the New York Dolls, unfashionable 1960s bubblegum pop and the early albums of the Beach Boys and the Beatles. Their name came from a misappropriation of Paul McCartney's original stage name, Ramon.
Their image - tight T-shirts, ripped jeans, leather jackets - was borrowed from the teenage hustlers with whom Colvin occasionally worked. Their songs reflected either the aimlessness of suburban adolescents - a life of boredom, punctuated by comic books, horror films and cheap drugs - or daringly turned Hyman's struggle with mental illness into a string of cartoonish jokes: I Wanna Be Sedated, Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment, Teenage Lobotomy, Cretin Hop.
Those who saw their early live performances at the Manhattan club, CBGBs, frequently compared the Ramones, not to other music, but to an elemental force.
"You were hit with this blast of noise. You physically recoiled from the shock of it, like a huge wind," remembered journalist Legs McNeil. No other band played as fast: in an era when progressive rock bands played two- or three-hour concerts, marked by costly lighting and sets, and extensive virtuoso soloing, the average Ramones show lasted 18 minutes.
Their eponymous 1976 debut album featured 14 tracks in less than half-an-hour, as did its follow-up, Leave Home.
Ignored or mocked by the US rock mainstream, they were enthusiastically received by England's nascent punk movement. While they never gained commercial success in America, they had a string of UK top-40 singles, including the top-10 hit Baby I Love You. Their third album, Rocket To Russia (1977), honed their sound to perfection, but was to prove their artistic zenith.
Subsequent attempts to broaden their appeal with ballads and glossier production fell flat, as did their starring role in Roger Corman's 1979 film, Rock And Roll High School. Sessions with producer Phil Spector were artistically unsatisfying and scarred by personality clashes - Dee Dee Ramone later claimed that Spector had pulled a gun on the band - but yielded their biggest-selling album, End Of The Century (1980).
During the 1980s and early 1990s, they released a string of unsuccessful albums, though they remained a popular live attraction.
After the Ramones broke up in 1996, Cummings sold his guitars and amplifiers and announced his retirement. In recent years he became best known for his right-wing political views: a lifelong Republican, he expressed admiration for Richard Nixon and Rush Limbaugh, and used the band's 2002 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to make a pro-George Bush speech.
None of this did anything to harm the Ramones' legacy. Once openly reviled as incompetent, the music contained on their first three albums has become a cherished part of America's cultural heritage.
After Joey Ramone's death from lymphatic cancer in 2001, a street in New York was renamed after him, while a New York Times poll voted the band's debut one of the 20 most influential albums of the 20th century, alongside works by Miles Davis, Billie Holiday and Elvis Presley.
Ramone is survived by his wife.
Johnny Ramone (John Cummings), born October 1948; died September 2004