Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  As in any studio, there were usually several people who smoked, so the butane lighters came out like it was the end of a concert. We went to the window facing West Fiftieth Street and it was almost completely dark out there, too. Windows, storefronts, streetlights—all dark. The only thing illuminated were the headlights of cars moving eastward along West Fiftieth. They looked like two-eyed zombies, and they were moving at zombie speed.

  There are plenty of things to do in the dark in plenty of places, but there is not much to do in a recording studio. Ivan and I were the first ones out. We took a couple matchbooks and made our way to the stairs and down and out onto the street. We were like kids in an amusement park. It was sweltering hot, and we wanted adventure. We decided the place to be was Max’s. It was a long walk from Fiftieth to Eighteenth Street, but it wasn’t like taking the subway was an option.

  While Midtown was filled with moviegoers, theatergoers, and tourists bewildered and polite, things got a little more dicey with every block south. On Forty-Eighth Street, there were a couple of looters running out of an electronics store carrying stereo components and laughing. At Forty-Second Street, a crowd was looting a men’s clothing store. These weren’t professional criminals. These were everyday pissed-off New Yorkers who saw an opportunity.

  There was glass everywhere. Faces were shadowy except when a car drove by and exposed everyone in their natural state. Once in a while, a bolt of lightning shot across the sky and for a second or two people were looting in broad daylight. Menacing voices bounced around corners, answered by other menacing voices who wanted to know where the getting was good. The victims were inanimate objects, not people. It was like a sci-fi movie about the end of the world. I felt alive and free.

  July ’77 in New York was also the summer of the Son of Sam. A crazed gun-toting killer was roaming around blowing away couples making out in parked cars. Unemployment ran high. Inflation ran higher. Sanitation pickups were optional and subway cars were canvases for graffiti. The future looked bleak. Blank. Scary. The people in my crowd wrote songs about it. But the strange thing was, here in the dark and the chaos, there was a sense of camaraderie that was normally missing.

  They had to let me and Ivan in at Max’s. Of course, they weren’t letting just anybody in. Max’s was now in survival mode. So what was normally a club in the entertainment sense was now a real club—either you belonged or you didn’t. The bouncer’s name was Moose, and of course he knew us. Moose was about six-foot-six and 240 pounds. Moose was an ideal defense against looting, and there was no rule against looting a club that was trendy. But Moose had help. Inside Max’s was the usual crowd, sitting in candlelight, drinking beer that was slowly warming. If you were a looter and managed somehow to get by Moose, you would have to go through these punks, too.

  We had a couple of beers at the bar. Someone with a portable radio told me that the lightning storm earlier in the evening had knocked out a couple of electric substations, and from there it was like a domino effect. The whole city was out with the exception of southern Queens, which got its power from the Long Island Lighting Company instead of Con Edison. The looting in the South Bronx and in poorer Brooklyn neighborhoods like Brownsville and East New York supposedly put the Lower Manhattan ruckus to shame. In the more dangerous neighborhoods, helicopters were flying overhead and viewing what looked like multiple blocks consumed by fire.

  But at Max’s, in a way it was business as usual. The club was usually open till almost dawn, at which time the blackout chaos would mostly vanish. So all Max’s had to do was push closing a little later and they were out of the woods. I could drink to that.

  Ivan and I left Max’s for Richard’s place around three in the morning. Facing Union Square Park, not far from where I was stabbed, was a Chase Manhattan Bank. The festivities were still going strong, and I wanted to be part of it the same way a kid in Coney Island wants to go into the fun house. I didn’t know how to crack a safe, but I knew the first step had to be getting into the bank. So I picked up a rock and threw it at the plate-glass window. It bounced off without leaving a scratch.

  I picked up another rock, a larger one, and threw it with the same result. Next, I grabbed a piece of two-by-four I found in a trash can, ran up to the building, and started slamming the window. Nothing. It was like whipping a mattress with a pillow. The bank guard on the other side of the plate-glass window stood up from his chair and waved me away. That’s about all he could do. There was no chasing in Manhattan tonight.

  As Ivan and I walked away, I thought about how, given the right circumstances, almost anybody could do almost anything. My parents didn’t raise a vandal. But their son felt a lot of pressure and welcomed a release, even if it took a riot. I thought about how I probably couldn’t live this way forever. It was now July 14. The following day, I’d be twenty-five.

  If the record industry lived in a truly punk world, the Blank Generation album would have been released quickly. But Sire Records saw punk booming in the UK and was negotiating a major distribution deal with Warner Bros. Records. Deals took time. Meanwhile, Sire was sending us over to Great Britain to tour with the Clash, who were the new rage over there. We were thrilled to be a part of that. But we thought it was crazy and self-defeating to make the trip without an album to support. It was like showing up at Christmas empty-handed.

  The British Airways flight over was hell for Richard. He wasn’t used to going seven, eight hours or more without shooting up. It should have been a glorious trip. Instead, we watched Richard in withdrawal dashing to the bathroom and wondered when he was coming out.

  Our tour manager picked us up at Heathrow Airport outside of London. Richard was antsy in the car, and not because we were driving on the left side of the road. When we got into the heart of London and stopped at a red light, Richard jumped out and hailed a cab. He told us he was going to meet Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan and would catch up with us later. We all knew that meant he was going to cop.

  The Clash, the Sex Pistols, and the Damned were singing about downtrodden England, and they weren’t lying. Cities and countries don’t go downhill overnight, but we could see that’s where they were headed. Countless thousands of unemployed workers were on the dole. There were beggars on the street. Muggings and even random attacks were happening every day. There was a general bleakness. We could see it in the way people dressed and the way roads and bridges were slowly falling apart.

  We didn’t stay in London long. The tour would go for about three weeks and would trace a route that looked like a crescent on a map of the UK. The first leg would be the longest—getting all the way north to Scotland to play Dunfermline, Glasgow, and Edinburgh. From there we would work our way south through industrial cities such as Leeds, Newcastle, and Manchester in central England, and then down through towns in the south including Bristol and Southampton before ending the tour with two nights in London.

  Punk attitude and all, we weren’t thrilled on day one when our driver picked us up in a rented Volvo station wagon. The driver, Richard, Bob, Ivan, and I made five, and Richard’s habit made six. All our equipment was with us. Whatever we couldn’t fit in the back wound up on our laps. The Clash were somewhere in a legit van. After all, they were headlining.

  We had our first clash with the Clash in Dunfermline. As the opening act, we got to do our sound check first. The roadies set up my kit on the drum riser, and we worked out the sound levels. But somewhere between the Clash’s sound check and our first song, the Clash’s manager, Bernie Rhodes, told us we couldn’t use their riser anymore. I understood it from a technical standpoint. Once you and your roadies had a kit set up perfectly during a sound check, you didn’t want to move it off and back again. Sure, you could tell yourself you were setting it back up exactly the way it was during the sound check, but it was never the same under those rushed conditions.

  But from a personal standpoint, it pissed me off. It was not in the spirit of what we were trying to accomplish. It was more in line with the egoma
niac rock acts we were rebelling against. In any case, I was relegated to a spot in front of and below Nicky “Topper” Headon’s kit, but I played my ass off anyway.

  Just when we were dug in for a long, harsh, thankless tour, it turned into a blast. The kids in the audience loved our music and who we were. They seemed thrilled to have a real American punk band in their hometown, and they showed it by screaming, thrashing around, and moshing in front of the stage. We didn’t get the sense of being an opening act, like when some band with one song on the radio goes out there before Led Zeppelin at Madison Square Garden, and everyone’s getting a Coke and taking a leak. These kids were with us at the beginning, middle, and end of every song. They went wild for “Blank Generation.” The fact that they couldn’t go out and buy the album the next day felt like a kick in our collective crotch.

  It turned out the Clash loved us, too. They weren’t backstage doing lines with groupies. They were watching, listening, and learning. We tried to do the same. Once we showed the United Kingdom what we could do—that we were the real deal—the tour became a caravan. The Clash and almost everyone in their scene were more into Americana than most Americans.

  The fans wore eagle and US pins on their leather jackets like the Ramones did. They loved James Dean, Jimmy Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and the whole Warner Brothers movie catalogue of tough guys. They wore Clint Eastwood buttons that said “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you, punk?” They had their own tough guys, of course, like the notorious Kray brothers from London. But as far as they were concerned, no one could touch the Gambinos, Luccheses, Columbos, and Genoveses of New York. All this somehow made Richard Hell and the Voidoids that much more authentic, and who were we to argue?

  The Clash were practically satirizing their own American obsession with the song “I’m So Bored with the U.S.A.” It was like any addiction—you couldn’t live with it, you couldn’t live without it. But the depth of that addiction didn’t fully register with me until I heard the opening measures of the Clash’s song “White Riot.” When I closed my eyes and listened to the fast, heavy downstroke, I thought I was at CBGB listening to the Ramones. Especially the “One, two, three, four” before each song.

  It was no accident. When the Ramones played at Dingwalls in London on July 5, 1976, members of the Clash, the Sex Pistols, and other upstart English punk bands turned out to take notes. Most of the guys left feeling discouraged. The Ramones blew them away with their overall tightness, attitude, and aggression. That was the same band, ironically, I had seen a couple years earlier having a more or less public rehearsal onstage. Now they were schooling British punk wannabes on English soil. It was the British Invasion in reverse. The Brits left Dingwalls that night vowing to work harder, and they did. Hearing those stories gave me a sense of pride.

  There was incredible energy when we took the stage in Manchester on October 29. Manchester was a rowdy soccer town, and on this night the volume was funneled into the Apollo. The moshing and stage diving were almost out of control. The attitude seemed to be split. A lot of kids looked like they were just there to have a good time. But a lot of them were almost warlike. You couldn’t blame them. All those years of school and no job. Then you’re trying to find an identity somehow, to come into your own. So you put on military boots, leather jackets, and studs only to find the establishment has gone from not caring about you to putting you down. So you dig in deeper. You mosh harder. You scream louder.

  In the middle of “Love Comes in Spurts,” it did. The Manchester kids started spitting at us. It wasn’t just one or two spits. It was a spitfest, and these kids had serious range. We had seen other crowds do it to the Clash, and we knew it was out of appreciation. But we didn’t like it. In New York, spitting at someone could get you killed. In Brooklyn, it could get your whole family killed.

  When a big English glob of saliva splattered on Bob’s bald head, the American Revolution was on. Bob yelled and jumped offstage and into the crowd, swinging his long, heavy Fender Stratocaster guitar. No amount of Valium could stop him. He was like Davy Crockett out there splitting logs. The three of us kept playing, hoping the tour and our careers would somehow continue. The strange thing was that while a few of the punks up front cut and ran for their lives, the crowd as a whole ate it up. They cheered like Manchester had scored a goal. Bob made his way back onstage, and as a tribute to his sheer balls, the spitting stopped.

  After Manchester we had all birthed some real punk folklore together, and everyone on the tour became even more like a band of brothers. Bernie Rhodes and the roadies would get drunk with us in the hotel lobby on Newcastle Browns. We put away boilermaker shots and had beer drinking contests. One afternoon in Birmingham, we climbed up the fire escapes of some row homes and hopped from roof to roof. As a rule, I stopped drinking a few hours before stage time, but after the show, I picked up where I left off.

  I always had a great time with Joe Strummer, Clash guitarist and vocalist. We would hang out in his hotel room and listen to Rocket to Russia, the Ramones’ third album, plus anything by Bob Marley or Peter Tosh. Joe took a liking to my Converse sneakers, so I yanked them off my feet and handed them over. I already had a few pairs of English sneakers in my travel bag. Joe and I would both leave the tour believing we were more punk than when it started.

  The bass player, Paul Simonon, always carried two fake .45 Colt revolvers with him. We liked to duel in hotel lobbies, backstage, wherever. We stood about ten paces apart, counted down, and drew. I won about two-thirds of the time, but as an American kid growing up in the fifties and sixties, I had the benefit of seeing all those Westerns.

  As the tour drew closer to the end, I minded the location of my drums less and appreciated Bernie Rhodes more. He was a good businessman and was old-school, hands-on. He was with the band from the beginning, and you got the sense he would be there at the end. He wasn’t some kid with a rich dad and connections. In that sense, Bernie reminded me a little bit of Led Zeppelin’s Peter Grant, someone who could be your best friend or worst nightmare. If you got in the Clash’s way, you would pay. He wasn’t just a fanboy.

  Rock critic Lester Bangs traveled with the Clash. It was where he belonged. After bemoaning the massive sellout of stadium rock bands—with their insufferable guitar triplets and ten-minute indulgent drum solos—to the lecherous money-grubbing formula-driven major labels, Lester took up the punk cause. In an article titled “Free Jazz/Punk Rock,” he wrote, “I don’t give a good goddamn if somebody can barely play their instruments or even not at all, as long as they’ve got something to express and do it in a compelling way.”

  Bangs thought it was fortunate, even a privilege, that he got to see musicians evolve musically from hard rock and heavy metal to this new music and actually make a go of it doing what he liked—what we both liked.

  The truth was, we all felt privileged. That included even Richard, particularly after shooting up. We didn’t really care who wore what pin first or figured out that a voice cracking at the right time can be cool. We liked a good song, and we liked to make a statement whether it was simple, funny, sarcastic, or outrageous. Uncool as it sounded, we were really happy to be making a living for the time being with these little quirky bands we started in basements and rat holes. And we were excited to see people digging it.

  In London, back where we started the tour, we were now better off. We were part of a fraternity. Not a fraternity that took pains to exclude people—one that took in everybody, especially if they had a problem with the way things worked, or didn’t work. And with that very sensation coursing through our veins, Joe Strummer and I walked into Bob Quine’s hotel room. Bob was older and liked to get to bed earlier than the rest of us, so he bunked alone. On either side of the Atlantic, there was no rule in the rock-and-roll tour manual against opening a door that wasn’t locked. But there should have been.

  Bob was on the edge of the bed with his pants around his ankles, getting a blow job from a groupie. She couldn’t have been more than eighteen. In the
light and the moment, Bob looked downright middle-aged. Joe and I had an honest reaction, which is not to say it was an ideal one. We laughed our asses off. “Bob Quine” and “blow job” were not words we thought we would ever use in the same sentence. The whole thing looked more like an experiment than a sexual act.

  The more we laughed, the more the girl screamed, ending the blow job not just for the night but for the tour and for all time. Bob’s reaction was to throw anything he could find—shoes, socks, keys, loose change—at us. We were lucky he didn’t play his Strat while getting blown.

  We played the final night of the tour on November 15 at the Music Machine in London. The building, a three-story Victorian constructed at the turn of the century, was at one time called the Hippodrome. It had a long and great history of English entertainment and now we were part of it. Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols was in the audience and made a play for some hometown applause by jumping up onstage with us to sing a cover of the Stones’ “Ventilator Blues.” The plodding, growling R&B number was right up his alley. But Johnny was like the guys in the Clash: well studied in the art of being pissed off in public but very well mannered in private.

  The London crowd loved it. We did an encore and the spitting started. Even Bob took it. What were we going to do? We had a good thing going. We just needed to get home, get some sleep, and get some airplay.

  Blank Generation was released in late November 1977. The first time I heard the title track on WNEW-FM 102.7, it was sandwiched between “Cold as Ice” by Foreigner and “More Than a Feeling” by Boston. It sounded like a bunch of punks had broken in and taken over the station, then got busted. Or maybe Scott Muni’s spike-haired nephew was hanging out in the studio and pulled a little prank.