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Just because the Joan Jett biopic The Runaways flopped (with only a $3.5 million gross) doesn’t mean that Hollywood is distancing itself from all seventies punk rockers. In fact, Fox Searchlight is quickly moving ahead with The Ramones, having recently hired Wesley Strick (who wrote the remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street) to pen a screenplay based on the band’s career. To get some unsolicited advice for Strick, we tracked down the last surviving member of the first (faux) family of punks, Tommy Ramone. Now 61, Tommy — the band’s first drummer, producer of its first four albums, and, later, manager — plays bluegrass-folk in a duo called Uncle Monk, and we found him in Kilkenny, Ireland. Some things never change: When we finally reached him, he was in the same bar he’d played in the night before.
What, we asked him, is the definitive Ramones vignette that would have to be in a band biopic? "We were riding in our van and we made a rest stop at this restaurant," recounted Tommy, "and after seeing us walk in, the owner of the place went up to our tour manager and said, 'It's so nice of you to be taking care of those retarded kids.' He was serious. That was pretty status quo at the time."