Hollywood Forever Cemetery — Johnny and Dee Dee Ramone

Johnny Ramone and Dee Dee Ramone are both buried at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles — at opposite ends of a small lake in the Garden of Legends section, as if even in death the tensions that characterised their relationship in the band required some distance to manage. Johnny Ramone (John Cummings) died on September 15, 2004, from prostate cancer, at age 55. Dee Dee Ramone (Douglas Colvin) died on June 5, 2002, from a heroin overdose, at age 50. Between them they defined the Ramones' sound: Johnny's strict, rigid, down-stroked guitar and Dee Dee's bass and primary songwriting providing the musical and compositional engine of the band.

Johnny's grave is marked by a bronze statue of him playing guitar, installed by his widow Linda. He was a conservative Republican and an uncompromising personality who ran the Ramones as a musical dictatorship and was largely responsible for the band's discipline and longevity — they recorded 14 studio albums and played more than 2,200 concerts in 22 years. Dee Dee was the opposite: volatile, addicted, brilliant, the source of many of the band's greatest songs including 'Chinese Rocks' (co-written with Richard Hell) and 'Teenage Lobotomy'. He had quit the band in 1989 and pursued a troubled solo career before his death.

Hollywood Forever is one of Los Angeles's most distinctive cemeteries — adjacent to a film studio, containing the graves of Rudolph Valentino, Jayne Mansfield, Bugsy Siegel, and dozens of other Hollywood figures, and functioning as an active cultural venue with outdoor film screenings and concerts. The presence of two Ramones in the Garden of Legends, amid Hollywood's famous dead, is a faint irony: four kids from Queens who played fast and cheap and died slowly in expensive states, surrounded in the end by all the celebrity they had never much wanted.