IMHO the Ramones, along with Iggy and the Stooges and a few groups that no one remembers like Television, created punk. They rescued rock and roll from the excesses of the 70s. I mean, think about all the bombastic, overblown music that was being passed off as "Rock" in the mid-70s. The Ramones reintroduced the two-minute song, they brought humor and a sense of danger back to rock music as well. But perhaps most importantly, the Ramones were a bunch of regular guys who were by no means virtuoso musicians. They took rock music out of the hands of the technicians and put it back in the hands of the "folk," or at least in the hands of a bunch of kids who just wanted to make loud, noisy music in the best possible way. My first band, the Pungent Vegetables, was a Ramones/Clash/Sex Pistols cover band. I've been in about a dozen different bands since then, but I never have had as much fun as when I was a teenager singing "I just wanna have something to do" at the top of my lungs!