For more than 20 years, the Ramones never let up, giving all they had every time they stepped on stage. On Aug. 6, 1996, after 2,263 shows, it all came to an end at the Palace in Hollywood, Calif.

“I can tell you that it’s coming to an end,” singer Joey Ramone told Billboard back in 1995. “All good things come to an end one day. I got very mixed feelings about the whole thing, because on one hand, there’s nothing better than the Ramones. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of resistance, a lot of crap, a lot of frustration and a lot of politics.”

The writing had been on the wall as cracks within the band kept getting larger. Never able to break into the “big leagues” in terms of sales, the band chugged along but fewer and fewer were taking notice. Despite the obvious influence the Ramones had on “Generation X”-era era rockers like Nirvana, Green Day and others, to the kids of the era, they were old news. By the mid-’90s, the end was inevitable. MORE