Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  We also got to hire our own roadies and technicians. These were friends from the neighborhood who had helped us move gear for free, set up for shows, and break down. It was a thankless job, and now we got to say thank you. J. R. Smalling was the guitar tech for both Richie and Kenny. He could straighten out the neck and get the string action perfect like he was born to do it. My drum tech was Max Blatt. Most people don’t realize that a drum set has to be tuned like any other instrument, except with drums it’s a lot harder. All the pieces in the kit have to sound good together.

  We started recording our first album in September 1970 in Bell Sound Studios at 237 West Fifty-Fourth Street in Manhattan. Even though the studio sounded like it was named after me, I was more at home in the basement. The building was an old industrial loft structure. The interior of the studio was very old and beat-up, with scuffed wood floors and peeling ceiling paint.

  One of the first things I noticed was the studio drum set, an old white shot-to-hell Rogers kit. Using my finger, I tapped at the toms, which were covered with a few strips of duct tape. They sounded dead. For a moment, I thought about bringing in my own customized set—the one I had just bought with the record company’s advance. But then I figured the people who ran the place had to know what they were doing, and who was I to start messing with it? Legends including Ray Charles, Buddy Holly, and Del Shannon had recorded here at Bell, and apparently it was good enough for them.

  With our limited budget, we used Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise as our producers. Harry Yarmark was the engineer. I adjusted the heights of the drums and cymbal stands but not much else.

  We had sixteen separate tracks going to two-inch-wide Ampex reel-to-reel tape. Five or six mikes were on the drums, two on the guitar, two on the bass. With a guitar or bass, one patch cord would go directly from the instrument to the board, while another channel was fed by the amp mikes. That way, the engineer could work with a clean signal plus a signal with a lot of overdrive and live feel. The balance between the two got worked out during the mixdown. There was also a microphone set up far from the instruments just to get the overall ambience of the room.

  Right off the bat, Harry had a problem with Richie’s and Kenny’s volumes. Ray Charles and Buddy Holly never pumped out anything like that. Of course, I was used to going part deaf for an hour here and a day there, but Harry looked shell-shocked. He told us we had to turn it down. We weren’t used to that—not in a club, not in the basement, and not even in the old apartment on Ditmas Avenue. “We have to play loud,” Richie explained. “We’re a hard-rock band.”

  Harry told us we could push the volume later when we mixed the tracks but that we couldn’t have so much distortion on the original signal. The microphones just couldn’t handle it, and we wouldn’t be able to work with it later. There was some bickering back and forth, and we finally settled on a volume that was too soft for us and too loud for Harry.

  Things rolled along better once we actually started recording. All the rehearsing paid dividends. Given the sixteen tracks, we could have afforded to make mistakes, but we didn’t make many. When we did the initial tracking, as the drummer in the band most of the weight was actually on my shoulders. The focus was on getting one really tight drum performance all the way through. Guitar, bass, and vocals could be overdubbed, or punched in, afterward, but that was usually not the case for the drums, which flowed continuously through the song and were recorded by multiple mikes. Of course, we wanted to get a live feel and not rely too heavily on studio tricks, so there was some pressure on Richie and Kenny as well.

  I was also very conscious of not speeding up or slowing down while playing a song. The tendency to speed up a bit during a live performance was sort of acceptable in that situation as the band and the audience got more into it. Not so for a record, which is for keeps and should be professional. But there was an extra complication for me: some of our songs were actually supposed to increase and decrease in tempo.

  A good example was the song “From a Dry Camel,” a ten-minute epic that provided the mood for the album and could have wound up the title track. “Camel” began eerily with an extended huge gong crash followed by a drum intro. The song started with a 6/8 time signature then launched into a superheavy three-minute sonic assault in 4/4 time. There was no metronome in the world to play this track to. I was the metronome. We were the metronome. I loved playing “Camel” for the sheer challenge.

  Another favorite of mine was “Love Me Hard.” This was more of a standard rock song based on a relatively simple hook. But there was a lot of space within the hook for percussion and anything else we wanted to put in. The transitions were more about variations in the hook than in time changes, but this song was still a workout for me. I did long double-tom rolls and provided a strong percussive thread—more like a percussive rope—throughout the four-minute-plus piece. There was no letting up.

  No matter where you record, there are some universal elements. As in the basement demo that got us the record deal in the first place, at Bell Sound we would listen back to three or four initial takes of a song and pick the one that had the best feel. There were technical terms to describe what you were looking for, but in the end, you took the version that made you want to get off your ass and shout. On a really tight take, you didn’t hear individual instruments so much as one unstoppable, driving musical force. Once you had that, you had the foundation on which to build the rest of the recording.

  I knew the members of my band the way I knew my own drum set, but Kenny Aaronson still managed to impress me. In addition to playing bass guitar, he overdubbed parts for steel guitar, Dobro, and bottleneck guitars. These contributions gave the recordings a more diverse and sophisticated feel. The greatest bands in the world—from the Beatles to the Stones—routinely brought in top session players. We didn’t need to. Our session player was already in the band.

  We worked quickly. By the beginning of the third week, we were mixing down. The mixdown can sometimes take longer than the recording. Every instrument and vocal has to be balanced against everything else. We would listen over and over to a track and know that something was a little “out,” yet not know exactly what it was. Kenny Kerner and Richie had good instincts for knowing when to make a background vocal softer or bring up the hi-hat. The problem was that once you’ve listened to a song eight or ten times, you get numb and might not hear the song as a whole anymore. In that sense, it’s like anything else—you have to know when to take a break and walk away for a half hour.

  The last step in the process was mastering. Mastering is a series of sonic treatments that bring out the treble and bass more. It gives the recording a sheen, like taking a car to a car wash. More to the point, mastering makes the song radio ready. With any luck, that’s where our music was headed.

  The Beatles were so huge that they could put out an album with a blank white cover and watch it sell millions. A start-up band from Brooklyn didn’t have that option. We needed a cover that grabbed people’s attention and became one of the first bands to use skulls for this purpose. We used a stark brownish photo of three genuine skulls taken from the Mexican catacombs. The bodies attached to the skulls were fully dressed as if they had been left in the desert to waste. It was riveting and a little comical. The back cover featured a band photo shot by our friend Daffy. I had on my leather jacket and jeans. There was also a photo of a camel walking across the desert sands, a reference to our anthem “From a Dry Camel.”

  We now had an album “in the can.” But there was little time to celebrate because I still didn’t have my diploma. Graduation for the rest of the class was in June. As it turned out, you couldn’t get extra credit for landing a record deal, so I didn’t go to graduation. Between recording sessions, I was going to summer school, and after we mixed and mastered, I had to keep going, learning the stuff I was supposed to have read ages ago.

  I wasn’t exactly thrilled when I found out I would have to keep going to class right through September. I finally picked u
p my diploma in October 1970 in the principal’s office. It wasn’t much of a ceremony. I returned all the textbooks I owed, and they handed me the sheepskin. I didn’t feel cynical walking out of the principal’s office. I went home, framed the diploma, and hung it on my bedroom wall. It wasn’t a Grammy. But I was proud of it.

  Our self-titled album, Dust, was released in January 1971. Seeing it in the window of the independent record store across the street from Erasmus was a surreal moment. Even more surreal was the first time I heard it on the radio. Kama Sutra decided to release “Love Me Hard” as the first single. It was short and powerful, so it made sense. But when I heard it in my bedroom on WNEW-FM, it all started to hit me. It didn’t sound like me and my friends in a room putting together something to see what would happen. It sounded like a monster rock band booming out over the air. I thought about how many other people might have been listening across the New York metropolitan area at that very moment and had one more thought: Life couldn’t get any better.

  Then it did. To promote the album, Neil Bogart got us some shows opening for Alice Cooper. Alice’s third album, Love It to Death, was released just after ours and was climbing the Billboard charts. The song “I’m Eighteen” was all over the radio and was Alice’s first big hit. The main riff was a slow, deliberate ascending scale in E. The lyrics were direct and simple: “I’m in the middle without any plans / I’m a boy and I’m a man / I’m eighteen.” I was eighteen. And I liked it.

  Alice Cooper’s tour was mostly midsized arenas: four, five, six thousand. To us, it could have been Woodstock. The venues were nearly packed, and we delivered about a thirty-minute set while some people were still filing in or were out at the concession stand getting a beer. We played near the front of the stage, because behind us in the dark was all the gear and special effects for Alice Cooper’s outrageous stage show. But lots of people in the audience stopped what they were doing and watched. The applause and cheers grew louder after each song. We were not just a commercial on TV providing a chance to go to the fridge and get a sandwich. We were worth listening to and were winning over the fans gradually.

  It would have been worth playing those shows just for the opportunity to see Alice Cooper. Rock was changing, and with Alice, it was happening right before our eyes. Alice Cooper was theater. With his wild hair, dripping black makeup, and long frocks, he looked like he had stepped out of a horror movie. He would walk out midset with a boa constrictor wrapped around his neck. One wrong move, and the blood supply to his brain would be cut off, but from the looks of it, the snake may have been afraid of him.

  There was press all over the place. If there was any theater in rock before Alice, it was connected mostly with British bands. The English had a long tradition of theater, and it showed up in seminal albums like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper and the Who’s rock opera, Tommy. The song “Fire,” recorded in the UK by the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, was usually performed with the frontman in a devil’s costume and horns literally in flames. But theatrical rock wasn’t an American thing, until now, and Alice Cooper was taking it to a level meant to shock. It definitely worked.

  By the time we got off the road for a short break and went back to Brooklyn, the Dust album had made it to the Cashbox Top 100. The kids I went to school with were either still in school or were living in the neighborhood. And now they all wanted to be my friend. Guys who used to want to start a fight with me to prove a stupid point to themselves—or to their parents—now wanted me to sign an album cover. Or they wanted tickets to a show. Or to find out what life was like opening up for Alice Cooper. I dug it. I talked to everyone, including the ex-greasers. But I did draw a line.

  One day on Flatbush Avenue, I ran into one of my old teachers. He wasn’t the worst teacher I’d had. More like average. Unfortunately, average meant busting my chops from time to time over the usual things: my long hair, my jeans, and my inability to focus in class. He loved making me climb the ropes to see me burn my hands on the way down. My hair was longer now than ever, but apparently it wasn’t hard to recognize me.

  He shook my hand and congratulated me. I said thanks. He was beaming and knew all about the album hitting the charts and us opening for Alice Cooper. He actually named cities we played. It was like he’d stopped reading Popular Mechanics and got a subscription to Rolling Stone. That was flattering and a little amusing, so I opened up and told him how we were going back on the road soon and that I managed to get my diploma at the end of the past summer. Without skipping a beat, he asked me if Dust would consider playing a benefit concert to raise money for the school. I did consider it. It took about two seconds.

  “Why should I do anything for this school after the way you all treated me for years?”

  He just turned and walked away. I didn’t feel a pang of regret. Not a day went by in school when at least one teacher didn’t single me out for being different, a weirdo, or a bad student. They might have thought—he might have thought—the put-downs were part of the job, but they never considered the effect any of it had on me. It made me uncomfortable, angry, and even less inclined to work hard at school.

  Maybe even more important, not one of the teachers believed in me or encouraged me to develop the real talent that I had. Anytime I told one of them my goal was to play music professionally, all they could do was roll their eyes and tell me it was never going to happen. So coming back to do a benefit was like making a statement that it was all right, and it really wasn’t all right.

  When I thought about it later without getting agitated, I wondered what life would have been like if they had built me up instead of knocking me down. Maybe I would have been a better student and an even better musician. I definitely would have played the benefit.

  Sharing whatever success we had felt better, and that’s what we tried to do. Our roadies started out as our friends. Coming back from Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware, on the bus back to Brooklyn, we partied all the way up I-95 as the sun rose. These were guys who helped us for nothing when there were twenty or thirty people in the audience. Now they got paid with two or three thousand people in the audience.

  Kama Sutra also hired a young photographer named Bob Gruen to document the band before, during, and after a few of our shows. Gruen had followed the Grateful Dead and a few other well-known bands in the past year or so and was starting to make a name for himself. His specialty seemed to be black-and-white shots that captured the band in its natural element. We were definitely in ours.

  The next big leg of our ’71 tour was the Midwest. It wasn’t a set lineup of bands every night. Different label acts were crisscrossing the country at any given time, and tour managers along with the record companies were always making phone calls to get their band a good slot here or there. Sometimes you got a date at the last minute because another band had to cancel.

  Typically, we played on bills with other rising hard-rock acts such as Wishbone Ash or Uriah Heep. Sometimes we played with an older, more established act like John Mayall, who with his band the Bluesbreakers in the sixties had catapulted some of the greatest young British guitarists into the mainstream. One of them, Eric Clapton, had just finished recording a sort of reunion album with Mayall, Back to the Roots.

  We were stunned when we found out Dust would be headlining at Cobo Hall in Detroit. No bus—the record company flew us in. Cobo held twelve thousand people, probably more with festival seating. It was a large, circular concrete building along the Detroit River. With Windsor, Canada, right across the narrow river, it was the closest we had ever come to playing another country. More important, it was like a coming-out party for Dust. The place was packed, and we could feel as much volume coming from the fans as we were putting out.

  When you’re headlining, you get the full benefit of the best lighting and the best sound the venue has to offer, so if you don’t deliver as a band, you can’t fall back on excuses. Fortunately, we got to do two encores. The hall lights went dark, and many of the fans flicked their lighters and hel
d up the flames. The arena looked like a sea of lights, and the crowd chanted “Dust! Dust! Dust!” After the second encore, arena management turned on the big houselights, which meant no third encore. We were a little relieved. We were starting to write songs for a second album, but most of them weren’t ready yet. We were running out of material.

  We were like celebrities in both Detroit and St. Louis. After the shows, the hotel was party city. Hotels that booked a major rock act knew what they were getting. The band had multiple rooms together on the same floor. Adjoining rooms usually had doors that opened from one room to the next. Members of other bands, fans, groupies, and press people flowed freely from room to room, as did beer, pot, and harder drugs. Dust stayed away from dust. And cocaine and heroin. We avoided the hard stuff but couldn’t control what other people did. Food fights would break out, and a couple of TVs magically found their way down to the sidewalk below. The hotel just submitted a bill to the tour manager and called it a night.

  In the morning—or more like the early afternoon—we would meet with the press or visit with the top local FM-station DJs, who talked up the band, had fun with us in the studio, and ran contests giving away tickets to people who called the station. We were treated like royalty. There was a buzz. The Midwest was definitely Dust territory. It was impossible to know exactly why, but this part of the country seemed to go for hard, loud, and musically challenging rock.

  It was in Detroit that well-known rock critic Lester Bangs caught up with Dust for an interview. Dust was just getting known, but Lester’s reputation preceded him. Bangs was maybe the one and only person writing about rock who was bigger than some of the acts he covered. Not only wasn’t he afraid to skewer a band in print, he seemed to enjoy it. He called Black Sabbath a pathetic Cream wannabe. He called Paul McCartney a snob. He called the Jefferson Airplane a bunch of radical capitalists. Even the MC5, a proud product of Lincoln Park, Michigan, and a unit known for being on the cutting edge of both politics and hard, raw sounds, Lester Bangs cut to shreds. What chance did three kids from Brooklyn have?