The New York borough of Queens is reclaiming the legacy of four native sons of Forest Hills – Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy – with a Ramones exhibition that comes after the 40th anniversary of the band’s self-titled first album. It was a key document in the development of punk as well as an album that neatly bookends the two decades of rock’n’roll that began with Elvis in 1956.  The exhibition, Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk, is a celebration of the band’s minimalist rock’n’roll, lyrical economy and downtown aesthetic.  Artefacts include Johnny’s Mosrite guitar, hand-drawn show flyers, T-shirts, badges and a reel-to-reel demo, complete with typed song titles and lyrics, their erstwhile manager Tommy and original drummer (Tome Erdelyi) sent out to record company A+R men to introduce the band. Part of the covering letter reads:  The Ramones all originate from Forest Hills. The kids there grow up either as musicians, degenerates or dentists. The Ramones are a little of each, their sound not unlike a fast drill on a rear molar.  “They wanted to be the biggest band in the world,” Linda Ramone, former girlfriend of Joey and later wife of Johnny said last week. “They wanted to be as big as the Beatles.”  In this respect, ambition and reality did not meet – The Ramones was only certified gold only two years ago and radio hits eluded them – but they garnered an enduring influence.  Related: Forty years of the Ramones: ‘They were the smartest dumb band you ever heard’  In a weak era for guitar rock, film of their famous 1977 New Year’s Eve show at London’s Rainbow Theatre, released as the album It’s Alive and projected here at the Queen’s Museum through 31 July, is a revelation; their leather biker jackets, sneakers and T-shirts, unsurpassed as uniform of the street, a second skin. Their adopted hometown venue, CBGB, with its ideal acoustics and filth, was removed from the narcissism of Warhol hangout Max’s Kansas City.  “I went head over heels for the Ramones and the Talking Heads” recalls Seymour Stein, head of the Ramones label Sire. “But what I liked most about the CBGBs was that it brought the focus back to New York. In the 50s it was the undisputed capital of music. Then there was LA, Chicago, Detroit, Memphis, and they all pulled away from New York. CBGB started to bring it all back.”  The exhibition includes more than 350 objects, from the band’s archives and those of Arturo Vega, designer of the band’s logo, stage banners and merchandising, and photographs by the first manager Danny Fields, who came out of the Warhol circle, Punk magazine cartoons of Jon Holmstrom and memorabilia from their long-serving tour manager Monte Melnick, including graphic T-shirts they made a central part of their look.  “They was a very strong contingent of visual artists around the Ramones,” explains show curator Marc Miller. “Tommy, the original drummer, was the one who pulled the group together. He had a really clear vision of four juvenile delinquents. They were arty but they were also real punks. It wasn’t like they were actors. They were the real deal, and that gave them authenticity. Tommy understood how to project them into the bigger world.”  Punk Magazine, in particular, found soulmates in the band. “They found their perfect muse in the Ramones. The comic book aesthetic with music coverage combined with Mad magazine, animated children’s cartoons, and writing songs that were almost cartoon parodies.”  To paraphrase Michael Holman of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s band Gray, the Ramones were trying to be as ignorant they could be in the smartest possible way. “They pared things down to greatest simplicity, and do as well as they could to find basic truth,” says Miller.  Perhaps truest marker of the punk ideal, says Miller, was that they were all individuals. “Johnny had an aggressive, angry streak; Dee Dee was bipolar with drug issues; Joey was obsessive-compulsive and spent time in a psychiatric institution as a child; and Tommy was the serious one who ended up playing mandolin in a bluegrass group.”  “Johnny’s parents didn’t send him to military school, he wanted to go to military school,” recalls Linda Ramone. “Dee Dee was German so he wrote these crazy lyrics. Everyone thought it was funny. Nobody wrote to be meaningful.”  Linda denies that Joey, her former boyfriend wrote KKK Took My Baby Away, about Johnny. Famously, the two never spoke again and strained relations between the two camps continued even after their deaths. The exhibition contains artefacts belong to Johnny and Joey, but organizers did not gain access to anything belonging to Dee Dee.  “There was a lot of frustration being a Ramone,” says Miller. “There was a long period where they felt they’d been short-changed, and there were animosities that must have made touring hell.”  The imminent institutionalization of the band – the show moves on to the Grammy Museum in Los Angeles – follows a growing acceptance of punk in academia and scholarship. The Punk Magazine archives are now at Yale, as are Danny Fields’s papers, and there’s a substantial collection of posters and ephemera at Cornell.  Related: Cover girls: the Ramonas, Iron Maidens and the rise of the female tribute band  This represents a remarkable turnaround. Three years ago the punk-fashion show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was widely panned. “The fashion people didn’t really understand what punk was,” says Toby Mott, a British punk and hardcore historian. “You can’t really latch it on to names – Vivienne Westwood is an anomaly – because it was a kind of street-art, a DIY culture that has nothing to do with money.”  The 40th anniversary celebrations place punk exactly where it should be. “It’s not a living culture,” says Mott. “It was a cultural highlight and deserves to celebrated and studied as such.”  While the Ramones were true to themselves, they also tired of the punk label, which became a hindrance. “The Ramones always had a playful side,” says Miller. “It was so much more aggressive in the UK with all the spitting and vomiting. They played it up with a grossness that wasn’t part of this scene. The Americans bands hated being spat on.”  Then the Sex Pistols’ shambolic US tour became a negative media frenzy and downward spiral that culminated in the deaths of Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious. “Punk suddenly became a dirty word here,” recalls Miller. “Sire even put out a press release saying: ‘Don’t call it Punk, call it New Wave.’ At that point in time, the Ramones would have preferred to be pop.”  Hey! Ho! Let’s Go: Ramones and the Birth of Punk is on at the Queens Museum from 10 April to 31 July
A new exhibition in Queens celebrates the history of a band that left an indelible mark on modern rock and New York City