This weekend marks thirteen years since the Ramones released their swan song recording, “Adios Amigos.”

The last few years of the Ramones’ existence almost played out like the final repetitive years of a creatively bankrupt TV sitcom called “Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!,” now reduced to paring down familiar notes to their broadest, most applause-garnering catchphrases. Joey and Johnny had been Ramones for 21 years by the time “Adios Amigos” was released, but they hadn’t spoken to each other in roughly a decade. Drummer Marky Ramone now wore a Ramones wig both onstage and off. Dee Dee Ramone had left the band shortly after they’d recorded the album “Brain Drain” in 1989, and been replaced by snotnosed former U.S. Marine Corp upstart C.J. Ramone for the band’s final three studio albums. (In Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s seminal oral history “Please Kill Me,” a burned-out Dee Dee explains his irritation with the band’s constant touring: “We had a roadie who weighed 300 pounds—his name was Bubbles, and he would dress up in a pinhead dress and pinhead mask. But he was so fat that when he would jump on the stage, the whole stage would shake, and the mike where I was singing would come banging into my mouth. I hated that damn song.”)

Despite the group’s deserved reputation as three-chord pioneers of punk-rock, Joey had always aimed for the band to be potentially radio-friendly pop in the tradition of bands he loved while growing up, only with lyrics that celebrated malaise, glue-sniffing, circus freaks, and Texas Chainsaw Massa-crees. On the Ramones’ 70’s albums, they covered light, sunshiny tunes from the likes of the Ronettes, Jackie DeShannon, Bobby Freeman, and the Rivieras. Joey’s affinity for 60’s girl groups and surf-pop oldies pinnacled in the band’s sixth album “Pleasant Dreams”; the first of the Ramones’ albums not to feature any covers, it nonetheless replicates soaring Shangri-La’s harmonies and Tragic Car Crash Requiems in songs like “Don’t Go,” “7-11,” “Come On Now,” and “She’s A Sensation,” resulting in the Joey-est collection of bubblegum the band ever recorded and the most underrated album of their catalog. Still, Johnny was quoted as saying, “I knew, going in, that this was not going to be the type of album I wanted. It really could have used another two or three punk songs.”

By the time Dee Dee had one foot out the door several years later, the band was covering songs like the Doors’ “Take It As It Comes”; a turn towards darker, more psychedelic and experimental covers resulted in the Ramones’ filler-laden, next-to-last album “Acid Eaters,” with versions of songs by the Animals, Love, CCR, The Who, The Troggs, and others, including a Jefferson Airplane cover with backup vocals by, inexplicably, Traci Lords. It was a polarizing release for the band’s fanbase. Although C.J. provides one of the brighter spots on the album with a cover of Bob Dylan’s “My Back Pages,” he has also candidly admitted that “Acid Eaters” probably should have been a six-track EP instead.

Two years later, “Adios Amigos” was conceived as being the Ramones’ final studio album unless it became a runaway record-shattering hit. Sales did nothing to change their plans to disband, but seeing as the back cover depicted the band members bound before a Mexican firing squad, they likely saw this coming. (Why this image wasn’t used on the front cover in lieu of wacky sombrero-clad dinosaurs is anyone’s guess.)

Listening to it today, “Adios Amigos” has its occasional moments of rawness but seems slightly fragmented. It’s a fun listen for completists and certainly the best album the band released in the 90’s, but it’s also clearly the product of a band tossing in whatever little they have laying around. Johnny receives absolutely zero songwriting credits and Joey receives only two (including the wistful “She Talks To Rainbows,” filled to its rafters in tie-dyed Donovanesque imagery and one of the better songs on the album; it would be covered by Ronnie Spector in 1999).

At this point, even Marky was writing songs for the first time in his Ramones career, resulting in the agreeably buzzsawing track “Have A Nice Day,” the closest the album comes to reclaiming the band’s 70’s sound. Still, the band needed a skilled songwriter just as badly as their expat Dee Dee needed a couple of bucks. For this, six tracks of the album’s thirteen were penned by Dee Dee. One of these, “It’s Not For Me To Know,” may be the best original composition on the album.

Perhaps due to criticisms over the Ramones’ psychedelic cover band identity crisis of “Acid Eaters,” one of the two covers on “Adios Amigos” is a punk-roots version of Johnny Thunders’ “I Love You.” The other cover is of Tom Waits’ “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”—more soaring and poppish than the original, less boots-stompin’ and Cookie Monsteresque — a welcome introductory track that segues into three consecutive Dee Dee-penned tunes, the first two of which are covers from his indifferently received solo efforts. Dee Dee himself provides a few vocals on the album’s closing track, “Born To Die In Berlin,” bleating in Deutsch in an unlikely telephone-headset effect that renders the cameo literally phoned-in (HA! HA! HA! HA! HAWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!).

C.J. handles vocals on four songs while a weakened Joey handles the rest at a slower tempo than in his CBGB’s glory days. C.J.’s voice is fine but less distinctly snarly and croony than Joey’s; it’s easy to imagine a 1995 contemporary like Scott Weiland singing “Scattergun.” C.J. also handles vocals on Dee Dee’s completely superfluous “Cretin Family,” a thematic fusing of several early Ramones songs that mostly just sounds like 1983’s “Psycho Therapy.”

Of course, there is an added appreciation for this premeditated farewell release and its heavy contributions from Dee Dee, due to the ensuing deaths of Joey, Dee Dee, and Johnny between Easter of 2001 and Labor Day of 2004. Despite the turmoil among his bandmates, Joey was not a frontman known for giving up, and this gives “Adios Amigos” a certain dignity. There is a poignant moment in the 2003 documentary “End of the Century: The Story of the Ramones” when longtime band friend Arturo Vega explains that, three days before succumbing to a prolonged bout of lymphoma, Joey refused to be fed through tubes because he was afraid it would affect his vocal chords. It was reportedly C.J. who’d recommended that Joey cover “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up” for “Adios Amigos,” and it was an inspired choice. Joey Ramone wanted to grow up even less than Tom Waits did, right down to the Chuck Taylors.