THE RAMONES' FIRST gig, at an obscure Bowery club called CBGB's, drew five people and forever changed the New York music scene. Their first album took a week to record, crammed fourteen songs into half an hour, and changed the world. "We decided to start our own group because we were bored with everything we heard in 1974," Joey Ramone remembered. "Everything was tenth-generation Led Zeppelin, tenth-generation Elton John, or overproduced, or just junk.... We missed music like it used to be before it got 'progressive.' We missed hearing songs that were short, exciting, and…good! We wanted to bring energy back to rock and roll." The Ramones brought all that and then some, giving rock a new lease on life and millions of fans a reason to leave their rooms. "I wanna be your Joey Ramone," Sleater-Kinney's Carrie Brownstein sang on that band's second album. Well, who didn't? But there was only one Joey Ramone, and, like his songs, he was already perfect.

The Ramones started as a cover band that couldn't get through the songs it wanted to cover and ended up writing songs anyone could play. They stripped a gluttonous music down to its essentials, and what rock lost in frippery it gained tenfold in force and focus. The Ramones were not the first punks, but they were the first to realize that punk's savage energy could be harnessed and channeled through tight, AM-radio song structures. Never before had such intensity and attitude been propelled through such a narrow aperture, and the songs that emerged -- "Beat On The Brat," "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Teenage Lobotomy" -- were so perfectly proportioned that it was hard to imagine anyone having written them at all. Ramones songs simply were, and if individual Ramones didn't seem particularly worried about being smart, it was because the collective couldn't help but be brilliant.

And at the center of it all was an implausibly tall, ingratiatingly shy Jewish kid from Queens. Jeffrey Hyman began his career as a jazz drummer, and drummed briefly for the Ramones before taking center stage. For the next twenty-two years and 2,200 gigs, he led the band with a single-minded purpose that anchored its music in the original lineup's original vision. He never changed, and the band never got stale. Towards the end, Ramones were known to arrive at gigs separately, change into their Ramones clothes, play, change back into their street clothes, and leave separately, all without exchanging words with one another. No one who saw them could tell.

Joey Ramone sang about wanting to be your boyfriend, wanting to be sedated, wanting to live. But he died Sunday, after a six-year struggle with lymphatic cancer. "The cool way to end the Ramones," he told Spin in a final interview, "was when we still sounded totally great and vital." But the Ramones could never have been anything else. They remained alive as long as Joey did, and they died with him this week. We will miss both terribly.