Joey Ramone had the voice to launch a revolution, and that’s what he did back in 1974 with his black-leather-jacket-wearing “brothers” and their threechord blasts of punk sputum that glorified pre-Beatles rock filtered through their New York brand of irony. Against arena excess and disco novelty, the Ramones showed up sounding fast, sure of themselves, and completely uninterested in explaining why. Our kind of band.

By the time of this interview—recorded three years after the Ramones broke up—Joey Ramone was being asked, more by circumstance than curiosity, to look back. Rhino Records was assembling a Ramones box set, which meant he had to paw through old footage, old performances, and old situations he'd been able to avoid while the band was relentlessly touring. The process dragged him back to places he hadn’t wanted to go, stirring mixed emotions and fractured memories. He called it therapy, though he admitted he wasn’t sure it had actually worked. Still, when we talked, he seemed to have a new clarity about his life and the band.