In the mid-1970s, Joey Ramone, whose real name was Jeffrey Hyman, had a disgusting mess of a head of hair and wore colored sunglasses. He was so thin he didn't seem to have a chest, a butt or knees. And he didn't sing so much as bleat.

He was a rock star.

If you were a rock-loving youth in America's dreadful Sun Belt in the mid-1970s, the Ramones gave you your first taste of what a sensation was. They didn't know how to play their instruments! Were they rock, really? They were dumb! They were Nazis!

They were an affront to everything our heroes -- Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd and Bruce Springsteen -- stood for.

The band's first record, "Ramones," was a puzzle: Churning, uninterrupted guitar playing. A bass player who did nothing but hit the root note. And a singer with an impossible deadpan drawl of a voice who sang about death and drugs with virtually no nuance and could get excited only when the prospect of sniffing glue was mentioned.

It took a while, but over time it became apparent that "Ramones" was a well-disguised piece of rock criticism. (Once seen this way, in fact, it became a blisteringly didactic one.) Rock songs, the band argued, forcefully, don't need to be much longer than 1:48. They should be funny, except when they were serious. (Ramones songs were both.) The Beatles and the Beach Boys and Chuck Berry, the band lectured, were great artists, but so were the Bay City Rollers.

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Three chords, Johnny Ramone, the group's guitarist, posited, were perhaps one too many.

And ballads were out.

These points raised difficult questions for a 15-year-old. The Ramones were, proudly, dumb; so why did they make us think? Why did they call themselves pinheads? Maybe ... they weren't! Maybe ... the song meant something else. Maybe ... they mean people who sing rock songs are pinheads!

Therefore, Rod Stewart is the real pinhead. Q.E.D.

When the first Ramones records were released, high school friends and I would sit in one of our rooms, huddled around the stereo. (Parents would yell if we turned it up.) We tried to parse the lyrics, the sounds, the meanings. We didn't know much about pop history, but we could sense the sendups -- "You're Gonna Kill That Girl," the title a slap at the Beatles's "You're Gonna Lose That Girl"; the indolent drawl with which Johnny sang the thing a slap at the indolent Mick Jagger.

Once we figured out the Zen of it, the world looked different. Bands like the Eagles and the Who sounded weak, Pink Floyd sounded mannered, Zeppelin almost flatulent. The Ramones seemed to understand all of that, even as they chipped chinks in the armor that would later allow for the blow that, while it did not kill the beast, made its mortality plain.

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