We started getting the nuances. The Ramones were an underground band playing underground music with a big-beat sound, the vocals mixed friendly and high. They weren't trying to be obscurantists or art victims; they were pop-meisters. They wanted their lyrics to be heard and wanted to have a hit single. They even wrote one. "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker" was its name, and the fact that it was laughed off the American charts is beside the point.

Soon after, the band was writing ballads, good ones. The Ramones' third and fourth albums, "Rocket to Russia" and "Road to Ruin," in their own way, are as good as, say, "Beatles VI" or "Surf's Up," take your pick, and have songs that are played, today, more than 20 years later, with surprising regularity on rock radio. And everyone knows now that the Ramones invented punk in its most ferocious form: After them came the Pistols, and the Clash, and X-Ray Spex, and Joy Division, and X, and ....

Seven or eight years after we'd first heard the Ramones, one of those same high school friends came to visit me at college. We'd both read about, but hadn't actually heard, a mysterious single the group had released in Britain -- a sonic blast of a song, it was said, called "Bonzo Goes to Bitburg." This, too, was confusing. By then we knew things about the Ramones we hadn't before: that the early Nazi imagery was just a passing idiocy, but that Johnny was a Republican who had voted for Reagan. Politics for a band this dumb was obviously a minefield.

But Joey had turned up, oddly, on the "Sun City" single, and then there was an odd track on "Too Tough to Die" called "Howling at the Moon"; if you read it right, as I think I did, you could picture a paranoid Joey railing against a nightmare onslaught of guns and corporate power: "There's no law/No law anymore/I want to steal from the rich/And give to the poor."

Odd thoughts from the Ramones. Anyway, late one night, we found the single in a Berkeley, Calif., record store -- a heavy 12-inch import that cost more than I could afford. It was after midnight when we got home, and since my roommates were asleep we were suddenly transported back a lifetime: sitting late at night, the turntable spinning, ears close to the speakers. We heard a revved-up guitar roar, then an almost Springsteenian change-up.

And then what sounded like a fucking glockenspiel.

What came next was a cry of betrayal. Disgust rose from Joey's voice as he dissected a few seconds of image on the TV news: an American president laying a wreath in a cemetery where SS officers lay buried.

They, too, were victims, the president said.

I didn't need to be told about Reagan at that time, but as we listened to Joey's pained, pleading voice, as we heard Johnny lob guitar bombs and as we were swept away by the Spectorian, rushing production, we marveled again at the Ramones' capacity to surprise.

And Joey finally found ferocity, howling his way through the group's greatest song and his greatest vocal performance. The Ramones were never as dumb as they looked, but they weren't geniuses either. But listening to Joey think his way through that particular political act in that particular song is a lesson in moral education that any of us can learn from.

Joey Ramone wasn't the band. He had Johnny, for several years at once the best and worst guitarist in the world, by his side, and a smart guy named Tommy Erdelyi playing drums and helping produce the early records.

Still, there's a legend near the tomb of architect Christopher Wren that applies to Joey Ramone as well: If you would see his works, look around you. He faced the truth where he found it and kicked a generation, hard, in the ass. I was part of that generation, and one of the things Joey Ramone taught me was that I didn't have to wait around for him to surprise me again.

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