Photo by Mark Weiss

Another day, another delivery of Ramones wear to the East Village home of Arturo Vega, the band's former lighting director and art coordinator. (He designed their eagle insignia.) "More merchandise," Vega says with a resigned smile, ripping open a box containing new T-shirts featuring the faces of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy. In his apartment, Vega, who still consults on the group's products, shows off his work: officially licensed shower curtains, pillows, and bar stools. On his laptop? Photos from surf-and-skate apparel company Hurley's recent launch party for its new line of Joey Ramone clothing -- T-shirts and board shorts featuring the late singer's praying-mantis frame and black-waterfall hair.

Board shorts? Furniture? Bathroom supplies? The Ramones may have disbanded in 1996, but the retail presence of the most iconic of American punk bands is far from sedated. At Impact Merchandising, which markets Ramones-themed gear in the U.S., co-owner Andrea Howard ranks the band among its top three sellers -- behind the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd. "If they gave out awards for merch," says Robert Arce, who handled Ramones goods from '98 through '05, "the Ramones would have a platinum T-shirt on their wall." And the most recent addition to this cottage industry -- the Hurley clothing -- highlights the squabbles that belie the band's longtime brotherly image.

The fact that the Ramones never had a gold, much less platinum, record during the band's lifetime only makes the merch situation more unusual. The old wisecrack that the Ramones used to sell more garb than music remains pointedly true. According to Nielsen SoundScan, the band's best-selling CD of 2007, Greatest Hits, moved fewer than 40,000 copies. In contrast, Arce estimates that 1.5 million Ramones T-shirts have been purchased since their breakup. Basic black tees are only a starting point; the band's handlers have pushed the branding to the limit, signing off on Ramones-endorsed skateboards, action figures, flags, and artificially distressed Converse sneakers. "It's not like anyone set out to turn this into a brand," says Dave Frey, a manager who handles Joey's estate. "A lot of it is people saying, 'I think we can sell shower curtains.' Or lunch boxes. Is that okay or not? I don't know. We just try to do what makes sense."

From their earliest days, the Ramones hawked homemade shirts at their shows. When they broke up, it as only natural for Joey and Johnny, the two sole original members by then (and co-owners of the band name), to launch a more formalized company to compensate for the absence of touring revenue. Sales slowly picked up, and then exploded after Joey's death from lymphatic cancer in 2001. The day after his passing, according to Arce, one prominent teen-clothing retail chain, previously lukewarm to the group's goods, placed an order for 10,000 Ramones tees. The subsequent demise of Dee Dee (from a drug overdose, in 2002) and Johnny (from prostate cancer, in 2004) grew the brand even more. "It's sad but true; their deaths brought more interest to the Ramones and made the band bigger," says Linda Ramone (née Cummings), Johnny's widow and co-owner of Ramones Productions. Or, as Legs McNeil, co-author New York punk oral history Please Kill Me, puts it: "As soon as they died, they became the new Doors."