Back in 1972, a young Joey Ramone (then Jeffrey Hyman) sat in his Forest Hills, Queens, bedroom, trying to figure out how to play an acoustic guitar owned by his kid brother, Mitchell.
“He was really into Alice Cooper’s ‘I’m 18,’ so I taught him the chords,” Mitchell
(a k a Mickey Leigh) tells The Post. “Two days later, he had used the same chords to write ‘I Don’t Care’ and ‘Here Today, Gone Tomorrow’ [both of which were on the 1977 Ramones album ‘Rocket to Russia’]. Joey kept the guitar his whole life, but I only realized he still had it after he died in 2001. I cried when I saw it.”
That guitar is now one of the many artifacts on display just a couple of miles from Joey’s home, at the Queens Museum. The new exhibit “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go! Ramones and the Birth of Punk” opens Sunday, marking the 40th anniversary of their self-titled debut album, which helped to inspire a global wave of punk bands that continues to this day. The show collects clothing, instruments, and memorabilia associated with Forest Hills’ most influential sons, loaned by the likes of Leigh (who oversees Joey’s estate), former tour manager Monte A. Melnick, and the widow of guitarist Johnny Ramone, Linda.
“Johnny traded a lot of his stuff to collectors over the years,” she explains. “So I had to buy and trade some of them back, like the leather jackets on display. The Ramones had a really limited wardrobe — they didn’t have hundreds of jackets. They wore their clothes until they ripped, and then they threw them away, so there’s not a lot left.”
The band’s unified wardrobe, signature haircuts and guitar-based aggression has made a huge cultural impact over the past four decades, but the Ramones actually had few hits. Their debut album only achieved 500,000 sales (gold record status) in 2014, 38 years after its release.
“I run into people all the time who don’t know who the Ramones are,” says 61-year-old Leigh. “Maybe they’ll know ‘hey, ho, let’s go!’ [from ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’], because they heard it at a basketball game, but they won’t know who it is. That’s where the exhibit comes in. It’s my aim to spread and perpetuate their legacy.”
$8 suggested admission, free for visitors 18 and under. Wednesday to Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Queens Museum, NYC Building, Flushing Meadows Corona Park; queensmuseum.org