The Ramones on This Day In History

This day in history: The Ramones played their farewell concert at The Palace, Los Angeles, CA on this day in 1996. Since the 1970's I have been a Ramones fan, yet I can't articulate why. They were basically a basic 3-chord bubble-gum pop-punk band, Their music wasn't really that great, and certainly not genius, it was just loud and fast, yet strangely influential. All of the 4 original members of the band are now dead, which seems so early and premature. All of the band members adopted pseudonyms ending with the surname "Ramone", although none of them were biologically related; they were inspired by Paul McCartney of The Beatles, who would check into hotels as "Paul Ramon".
The band is listed at number 26 in the Rolling Stone magazine list of the "100 Greatest Artists of All Time" and number 17 in VH1's "100 Greatest Artists of Hard Rock". In 2002, the Ramones were ranked the second-greatest band of all time by Spin, trailing only the Beatles. On March 18, 2002, the Ramones were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.. In 2011, the group was awarded a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1979 the Ramones hired record producer Phil Spector. "They didn’t know they were getting two producers: Nice Phil and Evil Phil. Nice Phil wore sports shirts and cracked corny jokes. Evil Phil wore a cape, dark glasses and was abusive and controlling. When an exhausted Dee Dee Ramone said he was going home one night, Spector reached for his revolver. 'You’re not going anywhere,' he said. The bassist replied, 'What are you going to do, shoot me? Go ahead. I’m leaving. Goodbye.'"~Mental Floss

This was one of several times that Phil Spector held someone at gunpoint.