Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  So I took off the shirt, turned it inside out, and put it on again. Now Ronnie’s gorgeous eyes were staring at me, not him. I thought I saw Phil smile for an instant. It wasn’t much—just an upturn of one side of his mouth and done. I had shared wine with Phil many times and felt equipped to deal with him. If everyone in the room took the same approach, there was no reason it shouldn’t be smooth sailing.

  There wouldn’t be many people in the control room. Those were Phil’s rules. It would be just Phil, his longtime engineer Larry Levine, the three other Ramones and myself. No wives and girlfriends allowed, and no crew. Monte had driven us to Gold Star from the Tropicana and would drive us back later but was content to sit in a chair just outside the control room. He had other things to worry about and had taken enough shit from us on the road to last a dozen rock-and-roll lifetimes.

  The women at this point were Marion, Vera, Roxy, and Linda. Linda was Joey’s girlfriend. We discovered that fact when filming for Rock ’n’ Roll High School wrapped and Linda boarded the van to continue with the Ramones on tour. Joey hadn’t stepped inside yet, and Linda took a seat in the front row. John turned around and busted her in one second flat.

  “No, no, no, honey. You sit in the back.”

  “What do you mean?” Linda said.

  “We have rules here,” John said. “You’re with Joey. You sit in the back.”

  “Not for long,” Linda said.

  Even as she got up and moved to the rear, Linda was defiant. John was speechless. He opened his mouth halfway as if a string of words coupling rage and disbelief were on their way out, but their sum total was silence. He shook his head and looked around as if to point out that we were all witnesses.

  She was short, pale, and rail thin. But that’s where the similarities ended. Linda had a big mouth. She had an answer for everything. Joey seemed to love that about her. Shy and nonconfrontational as Joey was, Linda had enough chutzpah for the both of them. And when she went to battle with John, it was like Joey went to heaven. Still, she sat outside in the studio lounge with the other women. Butting heads with Phil Spector was out of the question.

  Just hanging out in the lounge at Gold Star was an honor. This was where it all happened—if not literally all, at least most of it. Phil Spector and Gold Star made magic together. The Ronettes recorded a string of Top Forty hits within these walls. Phil Spector gave birth to the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’ ” here. John Lennon, George Harrison, Leonard Cohen, Ike and Tina Turner—the list was long and the space on the walls too small to fit all the gold records produced within them. Gold Star’s résumé was largely Phil Spector’s résumé.

  It was also Larry Levine’s résumé. Larry was Phil’s engineer. He was there for the whole ride. When you heard the strings and horns blend in perfectly at the beginning of the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me,” it was Larry Levine’s finger on the fader. When you heard the pounding bass guitar on Ike and Tina’s juiced-up version of “Proud Mary,” it was Larry Levine mixing the miked speaker sound with the direct signal.

  Someone not only had to know exactly what Phil Spector meant when he shouted “Give me more bottom!” but had to actually give it to him. And fast. When Phil Spector created a wall of sound by cramming forty musicians into a tiny room, someone had to make sure every brick in the wall was where it was supposed to be. Like any good soldier, Larry Levine deserved combat pay once in a while, whether or not he actually got it. Like only some good soldiers, Larry was very gracious and professional. We were lucky he was here for the whole Ramones ride.

  The doorway leading to the Gold Star echo chamber off to the side was narrow. The walls in the main room consisted of thick cement plaster with heavy isolation forms. As we set up the drums, I was conscious of Phil Spector’s preferences. He leaned away from cymbals and hi-hats. He preferred to get his trebly percussion sounds from tambourines, maracas, or any other percussive instrument he could better control in the studio. Particularly with a cymbal, once there was a big crash on the drum tracks, the “wash,” or fade, of that crash overlapped everything and could easily get in the way of other sounds. The cymbal was next to impossible to scrub out when you were going back to work on the tracks.

  For that reason, Phil Spector would physically remove Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine’s cymbals. In the back of my mind, I thought about the trouble that approach would cause the Ramones. We had a style. I had a style. That style could be tinkered with but not sabotaged. Going to the crash cymbal was automatic for me. It was automatic for the band. When it felt right, I reached for it like a runner taking a deep breath. Fortunately, the issue never came up. Phil’s main suggestion was to put a towel over my snare drum to get a dry sound, and I agreed.

  I played to a click track, as I always did in the Ramones. I never did it with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, because that music was largely about rhythmic feel and included multiple changes in time signature within a given song. Sophisticated programming would have been required to match a click track, and all that effort would have hurt the songs anyway. But Ramones songs were perfect for the click track: 4/4 and 2/4. I knew if I could play along perfectly with the click, the band would sound that much more solid and tight. Phil Spector agreed. And John liked the savings in studio costs.

  I played the songs one after the other. Through the glass I saw Phil pound the console a couple of times, but it was no big deal. I couldn’t hear any of it in the headphones just like I couldn’t hear what looked like Phil’s occasional yelling at Larry. Other than my own drums and the scratch tracks, all I heard most of the time in the “cans” was Phil hitting the “Talk” button and saying “Try it again.” Usually by the third or fourth take, he would yell, “That’s it! That’s the one!”

  Usually I knew what he meant. The difference between a passable take and a keeper was often just a matter of energy. That was a subtle difference on some songs. On “Chinese Rock,” the heroin saga Dee Dee had written with Richard Hell, it wasn’t too subtle. Phil Spector pumped his fist into the air at the end of the second take, and all I had to do was let the microphones record the quick natural fade-out of the hit on the snare.

  Phil listened closely and agreed when I suggested we use Rototoms on “I’m Affected” and “This Ain’t Havana.” Rototoms could actually be tuned—by rotating the head—which I thought would work well with the big sound Phil was looking for. There were certain pitches that resonated more depending on the degree of echo. It wasn’t like Road to Ruin, where the bottom heads of the drums were off and I was just looking for a big thud.

  Day five was nothing like days one, two, three, or four. Phil had a concept in mind for the opening chord of “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” The opening chord to the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” was an F with a G added, played on a Rickenbacker 12-string electric guitar. Producer George Martin had George Harrison strum the chord hard and let it ring out for a few seconds. There was incredible sustain on those notes, and it became probably the most famous, identifiable chord ever to introduce a rock-and-roll song. The very first time the world heard that chord, everyone knew that whatever followed was going to be great. In that vein, Phil wanted John to let his opening chord ring. John wanted to wring Phil’s neck.

  We lost count of how many times Phil had him play it. We lost track of time itself. It had probably been over an hour. But like Chinese water torture, an hour could seem like a lifetime. The drip-drip-drip of this torture was consistent enough to cause madness. John would stroke down on the G and stand there scoffing while it rang. He looked down at his Keds sneakers, then rolled his eyes up toward the ceiling.

  Meanwhile, Phil shook his head, pounded the console, and motioned with his finger to do it again. He did a shot of Manischewitz and tossed a Dixie cup into the garbage can. Phil muttered a few things, but he wasn’t yelling. Neither was John. That was too bad. The silence was deafening. It was a cold war, and we all wanted someone to fire a harmless little shot to break
the tension. Even better, we wanted Phil to yell, “That’s it! That’s the one!” But it never came. It was hard to know for sure, but it seemed like Joey enjoyed it.

  Phil reached for his gun. Dee Dee sat up straight. Joey stopped grinning and put down his Coke. We knew what we knew, or at least we thought we did. Phil had pulled a gun on Leonard Cohen in this same room. Phil had fired a shot off in the studio during the recording of John Lennon’s album of classic cover songs, Rock ’n’ Roll. Now he would have Johnny Ramone make history even if he had to kill him.

  I didn’t believe it for a second. Phil walked a few paces to his right and laid his .38 down on the wooden end table alongside the console. The .45 came out next. The firearms were even less likely to send anyone to rock-and-roll heaven on that end table than they were in their holsters, but the other Ramones apparently didn’t see it that way. Dee Dee looked at me as if to say, “Should we run for it?” I shook my head back as if to say, “Give me a fucking break.” John was frozen on the other side of the glass. But Phil walked back toward Larry and gave John the signal to play. The faucet was dripping again.

  The water torture itself had the sustain John’s chord lacked. Something was needed to stop the insanity, but what? A power failure like the one during the Voidoids sessions during the summer of ’77 would have been nice, but blackouts rarely came when you needed them most. Maybe Larry Levine would come up with a technical solution. Maybe John would break a string and we would move on to something else. Anything else.

  Relief came as it often does: in the form of two LA prostitutes. They walked in one after the other, following George Brand. One hooker was a bleached blonde wearing red spandex and a tight, low-cut silk blouse. The other had dark hair and an olive complexion with a body wrapped in denim so tight that if you opened a button, she might pop like a balloon. Both hookers wore fur coats. It was eighty-two degrees on this May afternoon in Southern California.

  Our producer followed George and LA’s finest out the control room door. Phil’s drill was to disappear into a side office and return ten or fifteen minutes later as if he had been to the men’s room. We didn’t know exactly what to call this kind of break, so we called it lunch. The control room door flew open. It was John.

  “You all saw that. He was going to fucking shoot me.”

  “Yeah, right,” I said. “In your dreams.”

  “Well,” John said, “let him shoot me. It’ll be better than going through this shit anymore.”

  “You saw him pull out those guns, Marc, didn’t you?” Dee Dee asked.

  “You’re overreacting,” Joey said. “He didn’t point them at anyone.”

  “He was getting ready to use them,” Dee Dee insisted.

  “Remember, those are heavy guns,” I said. “You expect him to carry them around in the studio all day?”

  At that point, Dee Dee told us the same story he had told us several times over the last few days. While we were at the Beverly Hills mansion, Phil had a talk with Joey in a room upstairs. Dee Dee and John thought Phil wanted to take Joey away from the Ramones and produce him as a solo act. That didn’t make any sense, especially with Seymour Stein paying Phil Spector a lot of money to produce the group. More likely, Phil was interested in getting the best and biggest vocal sound possible on the album and wanted to give Joey kind of a pep talk.

  In any case, Dee Dee, who like the rest of us was drinking all afternoon, wandered upstairs to find Spector. According to Dee Dee, at that point Phil, maybe thinking Dee Dee was an intruder, burst out of the room with his .38 drawn. Dee Dee claimed they had a few words and then Phil pointed the gun at Dee Dee’s heart and told him to go back downstairs to the living room.

  It wasn’t impossible that it happened this way, but I didn’t actually see it, and it was unlikely. And I had to consider the source: Dee Dee, who fantasized the way other people breathed. It didn’t make him a reliable witness, but it made him a great songwriter.

  In the control room, after hearing this, I told the other guys not to obsess over the guns, the yelling, the pounding, or the retakes. We were going to walk away with a great album. I also told them to remember where Phil was coming from and not to take it personally. When he was in high school, he was grabbed by a bunch of bullies and beaten severely, after which he swore he would never be a victim again.

  “He probably fucking deserved it,” John said.

  Phil was in a good mood when he walked back into the control room. The LA hookers were worth their weight in gold. Maybe platinum. Phil was very cordial with John and had Larry adjust the guitar amp setup in the echo chamber to do tracking for “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” Phil, John, and Larry got a lot done over the next thirty minutes or so until the door to the control room opened and Monte walked in. I saw Phil’s mood sour a little right away. Monte wasn’t supposed to be in the room except at the end of the session when it was time to drive us back to the Tropicana.

  “I need to talk to John for a minute,” Monte said.

  “We’re in the middle of something.” Phil shot Monte a nasty look. But Monte proceeded into the main recording room and fished John out. They left together through the control room. Phil was now visibly angry. Whatever personal triumph there was for him in working smoothly with John for a short while had now dissolved to disgust, and Larry was right in the line of fire.

  “Don’t ride the fader! Don’t ride the fader unless I tell you to!”

  “Okay, Phil. I got it.”

  “Not okay! What part of ‘Don’t ride the fader’ do you not understand?!”

  The control room door opened again and Monte stepped in. I was braced for Phil to savage Monte for sending him into a tailspin.

  “I have some bad news,” Monte said. “John’s father died.”

  We called it a day.

  John’s father had died of a heart attack. It was a complete shock. He was only sixty-two. It was obviously very sad. He had recently retired and moved with John’s mother to Florida. There was such a thing as the American Dream, and there was also the American nightmare. The nightmare was to spend your entire adult life doing hard labor in return for a few golden years and then get shortchanged. I had seen it many times before, and it wasn’t going to be me if I could help it.

  When we saw John in the lounge a minute later, he was pale, numb, and shell-shocked. One bookend to his life was John Wayne, and the other was his father. He idolized his dad. He was always trying to please him, to prove himself. Even in the Ramones. And now he was on his own.

  John was gone for a few days. He had to fly from Los Angeles to New York to see family, then from New York to Florida for the funeral. Phil used the studio time to work on bass parts and vocals. Working with Dee Dee seemed to stress out Phil even when the bass sounded great. The annoyance jumped a couple of notches when we worked on “Chinese Rock.” I thought the song was coming out okay. Joey liked it. Dee Dee, of course, loved it. And Phil went through a lot of Manischewitz and Dixie cups.

  When John came back, he looked worn-out and not just from jet lag. He had flown a triangle around the country to put things in order, comfort his mother, and be strong for everyone who came to the funeral. He had no time to even begin sorting out what his father’s passing meant to him. But beneath the bags under John’s eyes was a little smile, which he explained to us. Linda had gone along with Monte a few days earlier to drop John off at the airport. And today she had also gone with Monte to pick him up.

  All of this was anything but expected. Not only was Linda Joey’s girlfriend, she and John seemed to be in perpetual conflict. Whatever the dynamics, John was touched that someone would care enough about him to go along, especially with no obligation to do so. John seemed to believe he had alienated the rest of the band, and of course there was some truth to that. So Linda’s gesture meant even more.

  We weren’t sure if it had something to do with John’s return when the following day Phil Spector asked us all to enter the control room at Gold Star to hear the playback
of “Rock ’n’ Roll High School.” The most unusual aspect of the request was that it included everybody—wives, girlfriends, and crew. Maybe it was Phil extending an olive branch. Maybe he just wanted to prove to us how great the album was turning out under his direction. Whatever the case, we were glad to get a chance to hear progress.

  The couches in the control room were stuffed with bodies. Monte sat next to John Markovich, our sound man. The control room was usually off-limits to both of them. The last time John Markovich had stepped inside, Phil shouted, “Who the hell is he? Get him out of here!” Phil Spector didn’t seem impressed when we told him repeatedly Markovich’s vocation. If anything, it got him more pissed off. As for Monte, he was allowed entrance only to inform band members of a parent’s death. And even then . . .

  Phil hit the “Play” button on the main tape machine. We heard John’s one-chord intro, which sounded not quite up there with “A Hard Day’s Night” but pretty good nonetheless. Next, we heard the drums, then guitar, a bit of Joey’s vocals, and then Phil stopped the tape and rewound. We figured there was a technical problem. Phil hit “Play” again and let the tape run before stopping at about the same spot and rewinding again.

  Phil said nothing, and we asked nothing. He went through the cycle a third time, then a fourth, then a fifth. I looked quickly at Marion, who, with Phil’s back turned, shook her head a bit. I knew that look as well as I knew anything. It meant What the hell is going on here?

  I really didn’t know. It seemed a little hostile, maybe toward John. Maybe Phil was trying to point out how the chord needed still more sustain. Or maybe he was showing us that all the hard work had paid off. I wasn’t sure. The only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to hear the whole song and so did everyone else.