Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  They got a little more than they bargained for. John, also of Irish descent, played big brother on the bus and asked them every question that popped into his head. Are you in school? What are you studying? What’s your favorite subject? What kind of job are you looking to get? What does it pay? What’s rent like over here? You would have thought he was at the post office.

  For every punk on the bus, there were fifty waiting outside the hotel. Each of the band members got a nice round of applause as we deboarded. The real applause, however, was saved for the women. It started when Marion stepped off with her long strawberry-blonde hair and black miniskirt. It continued when Vera followed with high leather boots and a black lace top. Roxy and Linda brought up the rear with an array of pink leggings and brightly painted, studded leather jackets. The kids went wild, transforming the bus steps into a fashion show runway.

  Not all of the kids were welcoming. Word was the skinheads had been attacking punks as well as each other in Dublin, and there had been some violence at past concerts. There was a local political push to ban rock concerts of any type at the Grand Cinema, the sixteen-hundred-seat converted movie theater where we were playing. The fans were frisked on their way into the show, which we definitely didn’t like. There was no trouble when we played. These were good kids looking to have a little fun. John could have told anyone that.

  There were two negative things about Ronald Reagan getting elected president of the United States. One was an agenda of letting corporate interests run wild while pulling a lot of the social safety net out from under the poor. The other was having to listen to John’s one-man band play “Hail to the Chief” for at least the next four years. I wasn’t sure which was worse. It might have been a three-way tie with our spotting John and Linda together in the Village all the time.

  Later in November, Bruce Springsteen released the single “Hungry Heart.” Sometime earlier, when Joey met Springsteen in Asbury Park, New Jersey, he’d asked Bruce to write the Ramones a song. “Hungry Heart” was it, and it had a classic rock and roll meets doo-wop feel plus a great hook that was perfect for the Ramones. But Springsteen’s manager, Jon Landau, had seen Bruce give away hit singles to Patti Smith and the Pointer Sisters and convinced him to keep this one. It quickly rose to number five on the Billboard singles chart.

  That wouldn’t have bothered us if we were getting airplay, but we weren’t. At least not much. We were the band almost everyone said they loved, but the radio time wasn’t there to back it up. So Joey wrote “We Want the Airwaves” as a direct shot at corporate media. He didn’t pull any punches, rhyming “programmer” with “hammer” and threatening to smash his own radio.

  We would be going back into the studio soon to record “Airwaves” along with a full album of new material. In the meantime, Joey was having health problems for reasons we could largely guess.

  Marion and I went to bed late on the night of December 8. No TV or radio—just music on the stereo. For us it was a quiet evening. In the morning, I heard John Lennon’s new song “Starting Over” wafting up through our ninth-floor bedroom window. I drifted in and out of sleep and heard “I’m Losing you,” another song off the new Lennon album Double Fantasy.

  I was now awake enough to realize it was coming from the record store downstairs at street level. The owner had to be blasting it out the window to be this loud this high up. I couldn’t understand it. The album was doing well and definitely didn’t need to be promoted this way. I grunted to see if Marion knew what was going on, and she didn’t. “Watching the Wheels” was next. Someone knocked on our door, and Marion got up to get it. I heard a neighbor’s voice. When Marion returned to the bedroom, she told me John Lennon had been shot and killed.

  The kind of depression I experienced over the next few days was supposed to be reserved for the death of family and close friends. Obviously, I was not alone. This was the harshest of all ways for millions of people to discover that John Lennon was family. He was a close friend. If you looked at a calendar, the seventies had ended a while ago, and the sixties were already ancient history. But they both ended for real right there, and along with it the little kid in so many of us that thrilled to a Beatles song. The music kept us young.

  Beyond that, this was personal for me as a New Yorker. Most of us were born here and made the best of it. John Lennon had picked this city out of a planet’s worth of cities and wore it proudly on his T-shirt. Where we took New York’s liberties for granted, Lennon fought to stay here. I understood that one insane man took his life, but on another level, I felt that New York City let him down.

  I let in a friend at the door for a couple drinks of our own. He told me to look out the window because on the sidewalk below was a shit-faced Wall Street–type businessman in a three-piece suit with an attaché case. He was sprawled out facedown. It was time to spread the yuletide cheer. I took a plastic garbage bag, filled it with water, and tossed it out the window toward the businessman. It landed on him and burst, making a sound like a car tire exploding. He was so bombed, he didn’t even move. I knew what that was like.

  14

  THE M&M BOYS

  The Ramones sandbox was getting harder to play in. John and Joey had both dug in deeper. When they pissed in the sandbox, we all got wet. Our trip up to Ithaca, New York, on February 28, 1981, was the last show scheduled until July. We would be taking a break to record our next album, Pleasant Dreams, and then resume an intense touring schedule once the record was released.

  Everyone in the van wanted to be released as we traveled north along Route 81. The Ramones women took a rain check on this dreary trip. I caught a little sleep in the first row but woke up and started a conversation with Joey about a couple of movies I wanted to see once we had a little time off the road. Altered States, a sci-fi flick about schizophrenia, was at the top of my list. Joey had heard great things about Martin Scorsese’s new film, Raging Bull.

  Our guitarist wasn’t exactly a raging bull, but he wanted to charge whenever I talked to Joey. That’s how bad it had gotten. After I mentioned to Joey how Robert De Niro had gotten himself into amazing shape for the movie, John sneered.

  “So now you’re his friend?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “What’s wrong with that?”

  “If I have to tell you . . .” John shook his head and looked out the front window.

  He didn’t have to tell me. In John’s world, I had to choose between the two of them. I was never going to live in a world like that even if I happened to be stuck in the sandbox. Joey wasn’t much better. When I hung out with John, Joey gave me dirty looks. He didn’t elaborate, but I knew he disliked John to the point where my talking to him seemed like a betrayal. Joey would then give me the cold shoulder. That might last a day or two. I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, and sometimes I just put my head back on the damned seat and went back to sleep.

  Sometimes I had to play messenger. Like most messengers, I didn’t want to get shot. Monte was a messenger, too. The reality of a band on the road is that sometimes the guitarist has to tell the lead singer about a change in the set list. And sometimes the lead singer has to approve that change. Though our guitarist and lead singer were sitting in the same van, they needed an intermediary for something as simple and easy as that. The thing about insanity is that when you’re around it long enough you become part of it. So after awhile, carrying messages back and forth in the van like a foreign envoy seemed really normal.

  Just north of Binghamton, we pulled off of Route 81 to stop and eat at one of our favorite Cracker Barrels. This one looked like the rest, with the long country porch and wood columns with sway braces. But they cooked a mean plate of chicken and mashed potatoes at this outpost. On the way in, just before the porch, Dee Dee picked up a beetle and told me there was fifty bucks in it for me if I made this my appetizer.

  “We’re not doing this now,” Monte said.

  Maybe we were and maybe we weren’t. With the whole band watching, I took the beetle from Dee
Dee in my right hand. It was sluggish but not quite dead. I noticed right away it had a few little bumps stuck to it, which I identified as eggs.

  “They’re actually called larvae,” Joey said.

  “Go for it, Marc,” Dee Dee said.

  I thought about it. I had an iron stomach. How bad could this really be? Jet-setters paid thousands to eat caviar, which was just a bunch of fish eggs. And here, in front of Cracker Barrel, someone was paying me.

  “Forget it, Marc,” John said. “Not before the show. You could get really sick.”

  “I’m sick just thinking about it,” Monte said.

  John flicked the beetle off my hand and it fluttered to the ground. I would have to settle for something on the menu.

  We always got stares when we ate out, and this afternoon was no exception. People would look, look away, and look back again. On this day, a nice elderly couple a few tables over had trouble with the looking-away part. That sort of thing, for lack of a better word, usually egged us on. We kept talking about the beetle and the larvae and how maybe it was still waiting outside, hoping to be dessert. Joey was tapping away with his fork.

  I ate fast, but no one ate as fast as Monte. Maybe he thought the faster he ate, the less time we would have to prank him. That strategy wouldn’t work this time, since I had already smeared maple syrup on his briefcase handle. All that syrup made me hungry again, and I noticed at the next table someone had left without touching a stack of blueberry pancakes. So I got up and helped myself. I did this once in a while, but I never ate leftovers if someone had already taken a bite. I had to draw the line somewhere.

  When the band finished eating and walked out of the restaurant, Monte was already waiting out front warming up the van. When we got in and took our seats, Monte told us he had finally gotten some of the credit he deserved. The nice elderly lady had approached him in the parking lot and told him what he was doing was absolutely wonderful.

  “Aren’t you the nice man who’s with those mentally disabled boys?”

  “Yes,” Monte said. “Yes, I am.”

  “They’re lucky to have you. You’re very good with them.”

  There was no denying that. We didn’t know where we’d be without him. He made us a better band. In fact, tonight this mentally disabled group was performing for Cornell—an Ivy League institution.

  Graham Gouldman wasn’t the Ramones’ first choice to produce the album Pleasant Dreams, but he was Sire’s choice and that was that. Graham Gouldman might have had something to say about second choices and second chances. As a nineteen-year-old in the English group the Mockingbirds in 1964, he submitted a song called “For Your Love” to the band’s label. Columbia Records turned it down, but when the Yardbirds recorded it the following year, it became a massive breakthrough hit. The song also took on a life of its own in a different way, prompting Yardbirds’ lead guitarist Eric Clapton to leave the group in favor of more bluesy, less pop-oriented music.

  More recently, Graham Gouldman was a founder of the band 10cc, who produced such pop hits as “I’m Not in Love” and “The Things We Do for Love.” In the mid- to late seventies, there were stretches of weeks, even months, when you couldn’t go an hour without hearing one of those songs on your local light-rock FM station. That’s what Sire wanted for the Ramones.

  We wanted that, too, but on our own terms. Joey and I were very happy to be working with Graham. That was less the case for Dee Dee and John. John wanted a return to the raw punk sound of earlier albums and was afraid that Pleasant Dreams would become Phil Spector, part two. There was no chance of that, and not just because no other top-of-the-line producer in the world packed a .38. If there was a similarity in the approach, it was just that we were going for a big, clear sound. For all we knew, the second time could be the charm.

  In March, when we loaded into Media Sound on West Fifty-Seventh Street in Manhattan, I had good memories from when we recorded Road to Ruin in the same studio. Media Sound was once the Manhattan Baptist Church, and the acoustics in what was originally the sanctuary were huge. The state-of-the-art studio was built in the late sixties with the help of young financiers John Roberts and Joel Rosenman and caused a buzz in the music industry. Roberts and Rosenman were soon asked to build a second studio, this one in upstate New York. Those plans morphed into a giant outdoor festival: Woodstock. When you thought big and pursued your ambition, big things happened even if they were nothing like plan A.

  Graham was easy to work with. I liked to think I was easy to work with, too. I was getting comments about my drinking, but I came into the studio sober and ready to go. The drum sound was powerful and tight, the way I liked it. I had my tracks done in less than four full days.

  There was obviously a lot of work left to do after the drums were done, but I didn’t hang around for much of it. Russell Mael from the innovative band Sparks was scheduled to come in and sing background vocals. So was Debbie Harry. So were Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson from the B-52’s. But I didn’t feel like hanging around the sandbox drama on my best behavior for weeks just for a cool highlight here and there. After my part was done, I basically shut off everything in my brain that had anything to do with the band. I had heard Joey was scheduled to go back to England to work on vocals at Strawberry Studios, where Graham Gouldman had produced so many hits in the sixties. My thought was Bon voyage.

  Pleasant Dreams was released in July without much fanfare and without a single in the US. The album quickly peaked at fifty-eight on the Billboard LP chart. Criticism was mixed, with the common denominator that it was too clean a sound to really be classified as a “punk” album. One of the harshest critics was our own guitarist, who felt the Ramones had let down their punk fans a second time in a row. But our collective cage wasn’t that rattled by any of it. We had definitely been down this road before, and it wasn’t the road to ruin—literally or figuratively.

  My own reaction wasn’t mixed. I loved the sound, and I loved a lot of the songs. “It’s Not My Place (In the 9 to 5 World)” sounded radio ready, even if radio wasn’t willing. I loved the Bo Diddley feel of the drums and the change to a straight beat in the break, which gave it the sound of an early Kinks or Who song. Motown and Wall of Sound imprints were all over “Don’t Go,” “You Sound Like You’re Sick,” and “She’s a Sensation.”

  At the same time, there was plenty of darkness in the lyrics for anyone who bothered to listen. “The KKK Took My Baby Away” was an ode to a young black woman Joey had befriended when he was institutionalized as a teen and who one day just disappeared. Dee Dee’s “All’s Quiet on the Eastern Front” was an insomniac’s twisted love song to New York penned by someone who definitely had his share of sleepless nights. And beneath the doo-wop of “This Business Is Killing Me” was Joey’s unapologetic lament about the life we were in: It was literally making him a sick, sleepless train wreck running around trying to please everyone. As if Joey didn’t have enough problems.

  Not one of us was having many pleasant dreams. But we knew what came next—wall-to-wall touring to support the album. It was time to run around.

  Lunchtime on August 7, I made sure to sit near the front window of the Howard Johnson’s right down the block from the hotel we were staying at in Austin, Texas. We were finishing a swing through the Lone Star State before a day off to drive all the way up to Denver. The coffee I was sipping was helping with my hangover, but what I was seeing out the window was not. Joey and Dee Dee were arguing. I couldn’t hear what it was about through the thick plate glass. It was very animated, like a Ramones silent movie.

  But I had to keep looking out the window because Aaron Cohen was going to show up any minute. I had gone through first through ninth grade with Aaron, who was now living in Austin. I thought it was great that he had followed my career through Dust, Wayne County, and the Voidoids, right through my transformation to Marky Ramone. When he reached me on the phone, he was looking forward to catching up. He sounded excited, which was flattering but nothing new for Aaron
. He was a hyper kid. Of course, so was I, but between the two of us, I was always the one telling him to chill out, and that really said something. Aaron also had a lazy eye, which didn’t help a lot with his social life.

  Things were gearing up outside between Joey and Dee Dee. They weren’t in full Ramones regalia. Joey had on his prescription sunglasses, but otherwise just jeans and a striped, collared shirt. Dee Dee was wearing jeans and a wifebeater shirt that might have been more fitting for John. They were waving their arms around and making heated points right in each other’s face. I hoped no one identified them as Ramones, because this was a scene.

  Into this chaos walked Aaron Cohen. I waved from inside the Howard Johnson’s, but his lazy eye didn’t see me and his good eye was on Joey and Dee Dee. By the time I saw what was about to happen and waved my own arms, it was too late. Aaron Cohen walked straight into the plate-glass door.

  It was a powerful but dull thud. It shook the door but not enough to give Aaron much of a break. He bounced off and fell backward, stunned. I bolted from my table and ran out. So did a waiter and a couple of customers. Aaron was on his back and a bloody mess. His nose and forehead were badly cut, and he was out of it. I put my hands behind his head to make sure he didn’t bang it again, and a manager came out with a towel and a pitcher of water. I heard someone say they were calling an ambulance.

  “Take it easy, Aaron,” I said. “You’re gonna be okay.”

  When we were in grade school, they used to give us these worksheets that featured a drawing and a caption that said “What’s wrong with this picture?” The idea was to find something that was out of place. It wasn’t hard to spot in front of the Howard Johnson’s. What was wrong with this picture was that Joey and Dee Dee were still going at it.