Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  So while John was at the front of the van telling Monte the Yankees were going to come all the way back from fourteen games behind the Red Sox, I was turning around and talking to Joey, not just to make him feel better but because I enjoyed it. We talked about which songs sounded great or not so great from the night before and maybe switching the order. About Blondie, the Cramps, the Sex Pistols, and Cheap Trick—one of Joey’s favorites. About a pretty girl in the audience. It kept our wheels rolling and was better than letting Joey count the number of stitches in the seat of the van.

  At the same time, I had to give John credit. He went about things in a professional way, for the most part. He had quit shooting dope years earlier. There was no rehab as far as I knew. He just understood he was going down the road to ruin, which is fine as an album title but not where you wanted to be as you pushed thirty and had a chance to make your dreams a reality.

  For most people in entertainment, being in a movie was one of those dreams, even if it was a B movie on a shoestring budget. We were back in New York August 11 through 13 to showcase the band for the director of a movie called Rock ’n’ Roll High School. Linda Stein and Danny Fields had been talking to a young guy named Allan Arkush, who directed independent teen-oriented comedies for the producer Roger Corman.

  There had been talk about calling the movie Disco High, but even with the countless millions made the year before by Saturday Night Fever with John Travolta, a lot of people both in show business and out were over it. Someone in A&R at Warner, which distributed the Ramones for Sire, told Arkush he should check out the Ramones. So he did.

  Arkush flew in from California, and Danny and Linda slapped us on the bill at Hurrah. Located on West Sixty-Second Street not far from Columbus Circle, Hurrah was not a typical venue for the Ramones. Aside from being in Midtown, the club was more of a new wave place and had television monitors all over the club showing music videos. We were on a bill with the avant-garde European singer Klaus Nomi and Lance Loud. Lance became louder than life in 1973 when he came out to his parents on the pioneer reality series An American Family.

  Arkush was a good guy. He was a little surprised to see us rehearse a few of the songs unplugged before the show, but that’s what worked for us. Tina Weymouth, the bassist from Talking Heads, was there, and so was Lester Bangs. Bangs was shooting the shit with Tina and being his usual no-holds-barred self, and Arkush seemed to be in awe, taking notes like he was a student in the New York campus of a rock ’n’ roll high school.

  I didn’t think Bangs had gotten a listen yet to Road to Ruin, but I hoped he liked it half as much as he liked my last band. Bangs had written, “The first real-deal punk-jazz mix I heard around this town came from the recently disbanded Richard Hell and the Voidoids, and mainly from their lead guitarist Robert Quine.”

  The unplugged rehearsal must have worked, because Arkush loved the show. We all went to CBGB afterward and then to Arturo Vega’s loft around the corner. Arturo did the lights and sold Ramones merchandise before and after every show.

  There was a big buzz in advance of the movie Animal House, about a bad-boy frat house battling the asshole preppy frat on campus. The movie starred John Belushi of TV’s Saturday Night Live and stood to rake it in at the box office. Allan Arkush was looking to capture some of that lightning in a small bottle. He told us he needed a band that had a defining look and sound that kids in this fictional high school could identify with. The plot involved one girl’s love for a band and her attempt to get them to listen to a song she’s written for them. When the band finally rocks the school, the conflict with the prudish principal escalates to the point where the police come in and the building is blown up. John heard this and said, “So, we gonna make this movie or what?”

  In September, Animal House debuted in theaters across the country, and people lined up around the block. Road to Ruin came out, too, opening at 103 on the Billboard 200. Not as strong out of the gate as the previous album, Rocket to Russia, but the reviews were promising. Writing for Rolling Stone, Robert Christgau said, “Like any great group, this one is always topping itself . . . ‘I Wanted Everything,’ ‘I’m Against It,’ and ‘She’s the One’ are as good as any they’ve ever done.”

  I thought the cartoon by John Holmstrom on the cover, showing the four of us with leather jackets and very blue blue jeans against a backdrop of amps, drums, and a gritty city skyline, was good. But Joey and Dee Dee didn’t like it. They objected to being depicted as cartoon characters because they thought it suggested the band itself was a cartoon. They complained the drawing was amateurish. But there was no reason to argue about it. The cover, like the album, was a done deal. The album was going over big in Europe, and we were booked for a twenty-two-city tour of the Continent.

  9

  A LONG WAY BACK TO GERMANY

  Joey counted squares on the flight over to Helsinki, Finland. The fabric on the back of the seat in front of him was patterned in squares, and while most of us read a magazine or tried to get a little sleep, Joey had to know the number of squares. Then check it. Then check it again.

  The trip out to JFK Airport was, in some ways, like the start of any Ramones tour, whether one show or a dozen. Monte called Joey around eleven in the morning and told him it was already one in the afternoon and he’d better get his ass moving or we were going to be late. This was standard operating procedure. If Joey could tap everything in the loft with a sense of extreme urgency, we might only be forty-five minutes late instead of an hour and a half.

  Monte’s time upstairs getting Joey ready was a pain in the ass for most of us but a window of opportunity for Dee Dee. Once the van was parked, Dee Dee had time to walk a few blocks to Ninth Street and Third Avenue to cop. The dealers stood on the sidewalk in plain view.

  A tour bus met us in Helsinki. It was September 5. Around two in the morning, there was a glow in the eastern sky otherwise known as sunrise. Joey almost needed the sunglasses he always wore. The latitude was about 60 degrees north, and even though we were more than a month past the summer solstice, there wasn’t much darkness at any hour. The air was a little cool and very crisp. We were about as out of New York as you could be. I felt energized, but it was time to go to sleep.

  In the early afternoon, we drove around Helsinki, which is a sparkling flat town of both modernistic concrete buildings and four-hundred-year-old log houses. We picked a restaurant, and I was the only Ramone not complaining about the food. I loved exotic food, especially if it was well prepared. I loved to cook whenever I had the chance. So I ordered some of the standard things on the Finnish menu—cabbage rolls, smoked fish, and mushroom soup—and I dove right in. Dee Dee had at least half a clue, having spent most of his childhood in Germany. John called the cuisine weird Nordic crap. Joey just stared and nibbled on a meatball. “Hey,” John said. “Do they have a McDonald’s in this town, or what?”

  If the Finnish kids were any indication, we were headed for a great tour. Helsinki punks spoke better English than some of the New York punks and hung around the hotel. Just outside, two spike-haired guys in their late teens pulled off their leather jackets and asked Dee Dee and me to autograph their arms. They wanted the autographs large and clear and explained that by the end of the day the signatures would become permanent tattoos. As we signed, more kids came over, including young women with features too good for a mosh pit. We signed albums, T-shirts, more arms, and a few breasts, and would have done it till the sun went down, which wasn’t till about ten.

  The venue held about two thousand people and was packed. I felt the same boost in energy as during the Voidoids’ visit to the UK a year earlier, only double. It was ridiculous how many Ramones songs these kids knew the lyrics to. It wasn’t just the first three albums. They knew “Sedated,” “Something to Do,” and “I’m Against It.” These songs had been out all of a few days. Like the kids outside the hotel told Dee Dee and me, they were starved for a new Ramones album and now they had one. They were glad we were still doing what we were
doing and not watering it down or going disco like a lot of other bands. There were a few minor changes. Road to Ruin had a couple of small lead guitar parts. But we weren’t jumping on anyone else’s bandwagon except our own.

  We did an encore of “Sheena,” and then another one of “Rockaway Beach,” and that was it. But Joey had as much trouble leaving a stage as he did leaving a room. As in most venues, a curtain separated onstage from offstage. We had all exited through it, but now Joey was reentering, just barely. He poked his big head of hair and sunglasses through the opening in the curtain, then a long skinny jean leg. It was just part of an endless ritual for Joey, but the Finnish wanted another big finish. There would be no third encore. Two of our roadies, Big Matt and Little Matt, grabbed Joey and started breaking down the stage. Next stop: Stockholm.

  We flew into Sweden for three dates and then to Germany for two more. But once we landed in Hamburg, we had a bus for the cities on the Continent. That was what the contract with the promoter called for. The bus driver was friendly and the bus was like a punk party on wheels. At the same time, the driver warned us about the different checkpoints between countries, and some of those weren’t as friendly.

  We went through lots of those checkpoints on the way to West Berlin. One was controlled by the US. Another by the Soviet Union. Another by East Germany. We were driving along a no-man’s-land known as the Helmstedt-Berlin autobahn. It was hundreds of miles long and surrounded on both sides by fences, walls, hills, and basically anything that would make you think twice before trying anything funny. There was no tour guide, but every one of us was a baby boomer who sat through endless hours of high school history classes teaching us about the aftermath of World War II. We were now driving through that aftermath.

  When the war ended and the Allies and Soviets split up Europe, the great city of Berlin became an island. Germany was divided into east and west, but Berlin remained free even though it sat far to the east of West Germany, deep in the heart of what was now Communist-controlled East Germany. In between West Germany and this last outpost of freedom was the road we were on now, stretching like an umbilical cord of rock and roll. At the other end of it, we were told, and crazy as it sounded, were thousands of Ramones fans.

  It wasn’t a lie. They were out in throngs. Berlin—the west part, at least—was festive. It was like a remnant of the Weimar Republic, with cafés and little opera houses still surrounded here and there by the ruins of war. The young Berliner Ramones fans had invaded the hotel. There was beer, pot, grimy streets, and leather-jacketed punks. For us it was like home. For Dee Dee, it really was home.

  Dee Dee was born in Fort Lee, Virginia, but grew up in Germany until the age of fifteen. His father was an American soldier stationed in Germany after World War II. Dee Dee’s mother was a German woman who might have met her GI Joe husband in a bar or a dance hall. The couple moved around a bit, but Dee Dee spent most of his childhood in Berlin. Unfortunately, his father’s alcoholism led to his parents’ divorce, and Dee Dee, his sister, and his mother immigrated to the musical mecca of Forest Hills, USA, in 1966.

  We didn’t know much about Dee Dee’s German childhood. Evidence of it would pop out at odd times, like when he counted off a song. Most of the time it was “OneTwoThreeFour!” but once in a while it was “EinsZweiDreiVier!” That came out of his mouth randomly, and it wasn’t like the curiosity was going to make us stop playing “We’re a Happy Family” to ask “Why now?”

  Dee Dee’s childhood was like a riddle. Sometimes the answer was another riddle. No one could make complete sense out of “Blitzkrieg Bop,” but the image painted by the lyrics “shoot ’em in the back now” was as dark and SS as the title suggested. The song, with its cry of “Hey Ho, Let’s Go!” by now laid claim to being a global punk anthem. It was a bit unintelligible and ran on like Dee Dee’s everyday thoughts and sentences. Meanwhile, the Road to Ruin song “It’s a Long Way Back” asked more questions than it answered. The storyteller sat waiting, perhaps in Germany, for a phone call that never came. It was a single haunting verse repeated. It said a lot. It said a little.

  Dee Dee hated the Nazis. That didn’t make him unique among American citizens, but neo-Nazis, like any insane radical group, will believe whatever they want to believe. The afternoon before our Berlin show, a local TV reporter was interviewing Dee Dee in the lobby of the hotel. Dee Dee transitioned from English to fluent German and back again like it was verse-chorus-verse. It freaked us out. The reporter kept asking him about his time in Vietnam until Dee Dee put a stop to it like the Tet cease-fire.

  “I can’t talk about it. It’s too painful. But, you know, we’d like to sell some albums over there and do a tour.”

  Dee Dee had never been there. But the reporter was duped and relentless. Instead of jumping to the next topic, he did a blitzkrieg. “This was, of course, a completely immoral war perpetrated by America. That is no longer a matter of debate. That is an established fact. So as you wear US military pins, how in your mind do you justify America’s involvement in that atrocity known as Vietnam?”

  Marion’s eyes nearly rolled out of her head, and we all shot the reporter a glance like he was a moron shooting a howitzer in a glass house. I had to say something.

  “So, how do you justify the German involvement in World War II?”

  “Yeah, you guys were like . . . satanic,” Dee Dee said. “You were practically the Antichrist.”

  The show was a lot easier to get through than the interview. The German youth, born in the fifties and sixties, were there to have a good time, and they had it. There were about fifty thousand American soldiers still stationed in West Germany, and there could have been five hundred at the show. Throw in about fifteen hundred screaming, dancing, stomping, beer-guzzling German kids, and you had the real “Blitzkrieg Bop.” There was sweat dripping off the ceiling. Dee Dee counted off in German and threw in a few slogans in the mother tongue. We didn’t know what he was saying, but the crowd did and went crazy. Dee Dee could have milked it a lot more, but that wasn’t what the Ramones were about, in any language.

  The spitting was getting out of control. It was like Normandy without the bloodshed. The German punks were accurate to the point where I could no longer hide behind a Paiste cymbal. They were launching wet V-2 rockets. The promoter in Ronneby, Sweden, had given us T-shirts that said “No Spitting—we’re Americans,” but we weren’t wearing them, and if we had been, they’d be drenched in saliva. So Joey told the crowd, “Come on, fucking cut it out.” Most of them listened. We earned that. The rest of them stopped when Dee Dee said something in German. It was a good time to give orders.

  And to follow them. Mehr! Mehr! Mehr! We understood the concept of more as much as Dee Dee did. The spitting was as forgiven now as the Battle of the Bulge. Our third and final encore was “It’s a Long Way Back,” which brought the house down like the Allies took down the Axis. As a band, we had nothing left. It was a long way back to the hotel.

  We had the next day off before we’d have to get back on the bus and head to Belgium. Dee Dee and I were in the hotel lobby getting ready to do some sightseeing while John was giving the promoter a hard time in a way that only John could. He was a big collector of miniature Nazi soldiers and a huge autograph collector, and no autograph outside of Moses or Jesus was a bigger score than Adolph Hitler’s. The day we checked in, John asked the promoter if he could help him get the Führer’s signature. The answer was “Nein.” The promoter looked at him like he wanted to line up John in front of a firing squad. Germans didn’t deal in the memorabilia of bad memories. Weapons were one thing, but some things were verboten. So on this morning, using an American weapon John had mastered, he needled the promoter.

  “Can you get it, or what? I told my friend back home I was getting it, and he’s gonna raise a furor!”

  Dee Dee and I walked along Tiergartenstrasse. He had exactly four things on his mind—copping, drinking, German prostitutes, and Nazi weapons. He rambled about all of them almost int
erchangeably. When he talked about being a child and picking out artifacts from rubble-filled lots in this same city, I knew he wasn’t talking about the prostitutes. He would sift through bricks and shards of glass and find bullet shells, knives, medallions. They all had a place in his collection.

  As we walked, I noticed Dee Dee’s posture. It was very straight with his head up and shoulders back. It didn’t jibe with being a rock-and-roll musician. It didn’t jibe with very much of anything Dee Dee did or said. When I met his father at a show back in New York, I saw the same pose, and I saw it now as American soldiers passed us right here on Lennéstrasse. Like the shells, knives, and medallions, it was part of Dee Dee’s inheritance—a hodgepodge of stuff rolled up into a true American character.

  Part of the Ramones’ legacy was people all over the world thinking we’d fought in Vietnam. It wasn’t just the reporter in the lobby. You could see where they were coming from. We looked rough, wore bits of military hardware, and took a tough stance in some of the songs. Most important, we were all draft age at the time. That was the situation for all our friends born in the late forties and early fifties. We just got lucky.

  I wasn’t the luckiest or the unluckiest. My draft lottery number was seventy-seven—not low enough to get called first, not high enough to sleep easy. My dad and I had talked about it. He was against the war, which was not a typical position for a longshoreman, but very little about my father was typical. His reasoning was clear—the best way to fight communism was to provide good jobs and opportunity at home, not to overrun a small country halfway around the world. Besides, he had two sons who could get killed.