Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  The Berlin Wall had started coming down earlier in the month. It wasn’t done all at once or because of a government decree. The people of both sides had just worn down the system. East Germany had been grudgingly selling “day passes” to its people to visit West Berlin. West Berlin was allowing trips in the other direction. German citizens from both sides started showing up with picks and sledgehammers and busting through the concrete. The guards had orders but just gave up. They probably would have joined in if they were off duty.

  When I visited the wall near the Brandenburg Gate, it was still serving its official purpose, but there were holes and cracks all over and more being made as I watched. People were hacking at the wall, smiling, taking pictures, and walking away with little concrete souvenirs. We were living in the true-life version of Martha and the Vandellas’ song “Dancing in the Street.” I walked over to a hole about a foot and a half in diameter and put my hand clear through to the other side. Someone in East Berlin—not more than two feet away—shook my hand. I shook it back. Two thoughts flashed through my mind. One was what an amazing way this was to experience history. The other was I definitely missed Dee Dee.

  We were back in Secaucus in the summer of 1990, this time for an appearance on The Howard Stern Show. Stern had rewritten the rules of talk radio in the 1980s and became the poster boy for the new term “shock jock.” Part of his reward was a weekend TV show on WWOR. Another reward was getting to hang out with some of his favorite rock bands, and the Ramones were one of them. We were Howard Stern fans, too. Whenever we did the radio or TV show, Howard would mention how much he looked like Joey, and he had a point.

  They ran a skit we had taped for the show. In it, Joey and I played golf with President George Bush. The Bush impersonator was top-notch, almost on Dana Carvey’s level. The president kept calling us Dee Dee, and we kept reminding him Dee Dee quit the band. Between drives with a 3-iron, Bush tried to recruit us to write a pro-war song to get the kids involved. The best we could come up with was “I don’t want to be buried in an Iraqi cemetery.” It was one time we really needed John’s help with lyrics.

  We had the whole crew laughing—Robin Quivers, Jackie “The Joke Man” Martling, Fred Norris, and the producer Gary Dell’Abate. For me, the most entertaining part was the interview that followed. Howard and Robin were really interested in our sobriety, and I gave them the Reader’s Digest version of my experience. Joey announced that he was seven months sober.

  I had seen enough not to believe it, but I wasn’t there to argue. Joey went on to explain that he never even had a real problem. He just enjoyed drinking and partying. He was sober on the road, he said, but found he was partying too much off the road. He didn’t need to enter a program like Marky. Instead, he just decided to stop. Howard and Robin didn’t challenge Joey on this. Instead, they told him he never looked healthier. I happened to think he looked white as a sheet. But even if I had wanted to offer a differing opinion, there was no time. The whole segment devolved into a pitch for Snapple.

  Unfortunately, life wasn’t as simple as a Snapple commercial. Two days before New Year’s, we were backstage getting ready to play a major show at the Ritz in New York. Two guys I had never seen before were hanging around Joey. One of them said, “Um, Marc, I hate to ask you this, but can you leave the room for a few minutes?” As if I didn’t know what for. As if this didn’t come straight out of an addict’s playbook. I left the room anyway.

  When I walked back in, Joey was wiping his nose and snorting. It was like a modern version of the old story where the king says he can’t stand to see his subjects suffer so he tells the guards to torture them in another room. This wasn’t The Howard Stern Show. I wasn’t going to let it go.

  “Joey, can I ask you something? Do you think I’m stupid?”

  “Why do you say that, Marc?”

  “Because it was obvious that you guys were using from the moment the two of them walked in here.”

  “I just figured you wouldn’t appreciate seeing that.”

  “Listen to me,” I said. “I’m your drummer and your friend, but I’m not your parent. I’m not an enforcer, and I’m not a babe in the woods. I’m not here to tell you what to do. It’s your life. It’s none of my business.”

  A few months later, though, I made it my business. Joey wasn’t any more eager to go to a meeting than Dee Dee had been a couple years earlier. Monte had all my respect for getting Joey out of his apartment over the years for shows. But on this day I deserved a tip of the cap for getting him out to go to AA. My MO was similar to before. I found a meeting on St. Marks Place, not far from his apartment. Joey was already complaining about it on the walk over. At least he wouldn’t be driving his car up on the front lawn.

  I made the usual introduction.

  “Hi, I’m Marc. I’m an alcoholic.”

  The other people at the meeting were fairly young and hip, and given the location that made sense. They told stories of how they were helped by friends, family, God, self-discipline, and self-respect. Some were stuck on this step or that. Joey was stuck in his seat sneering. On the walk back to his apartment, he avoided stepping on the cracks in the sidewalk and complained.

  “Look, Merk, I’m not into this God crap.”

  “No one’s telling you you have to be.”

  “Oh yeah, right,” Joey said. “That’s all I heard in there was God did this and God did that. What a bunch of shit.”

  “Joey, that was a few people—not everybody. It’s not about God in there. It’s not about religion. It’s about using whatever you can focus on to help you get sober. There’s no written rules. The Twelve Steps are guidelines. They’re suggestions. As time goes on, you learn what works best for you. And you learn from other people.”

  “C’mon, Marc, it’s like a cult.”

  “You’re totally wrong, Manny! That’s bullshit. A cult has a leader. Someone no one even questions. There’s no leader in there. Didn’t you notice that? It’s just people helping each other. It’s you and your sponsor figuring things out. It’s a program. If you can just deal with the program and deal with yourself, you can conquer a lot of your problems. But I guess you just don’t want to.”

  “I’m gonna stop on my own.”

  He did stop. Then he started again. Then he stopped. And so on. He was a recreational drug user and a dry drunk. Millions of people were. When he was dry, it was an addiction on pause. His attitude, anxiety, stress, and fears were still in full force. His overall train of thought was the same. I knew from experience that there was only so much you could accomplish by dealing with your addiction. What you had to deal with was life, on life’s terms. Without a change in approach and a real support system, you were always one bad day, one bad break, one bad conversation, one bad thought away from the next drink.

  Having a drink is not the same as selling a drink. In 1991, the Ramones were offered a good sum of money by the Anheuser-Busch Companies for the use of “Blitzkrieg Bop” in a Budweiser commercial. There was no conversation within the band as to whether to accept. We weren’t the Doors debating whether or not to allow General Motors to produce a jingle with the lyrics “Come on, Buick, light my fire.” The Ramones were capitalists. We had our capitalists from the right and our capitalists from the left, but we all spelled it with a capital C.

  Like a lot of Ramones songs, “Blitzkrieg” was loud, fast, and catchy, so we weren’t exactly dumbfounded by the offer. It didn’t take a lot of imagination to see a song like that helping sell beer to a bunch of guys on the couch watching football. But we were curious as to why now? The answers were hitting us in the face and in the eardrums every day. So-called grunge bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden were breaking. Hardcore and thrash bands like Biohazard and Anthrax were selling millions of albums worldwide. There was a buzz surrounding a Bay Area pop-punk band called Green Day.

  These sounds were beginning to take over MTV and even push their way into commercial radio. It was called “new” music, but very little of i
t was really new to us. In almost all of it, we could find bits and pieces and sometimes whole chunks of things the Ramones and our fellow punk bands were doing fifteen years earlier. Through some strange process of percolation and osmosis, the sound the Ramones helped pioneer and then stuck with out on a limb for many years was going mainstream.

  At the same time the mountain was coming to the Ramones, the Ramones were coming to the mountain. We had one more album to complete to fulfill our contractual obligation to Sire/Warner and decided it would be a live album. Loco Live was recorded in Barcelona, Spain, and included old, not so old, and new songs from the Ramones catalogue. Loco Live was recorded live, sort of. The live tracks were taken into a recording studio so that the guitar, bass, and vocals could be overdubbed. Essentially only the original drum tracks remained.

  Those drum tracks were faster than I would have liked. It wasn’t an issue of playing songs a little faster live than on the studio albums. This was a conscious decision being pushed by John, not just for Loco Live but also in our live shows, period. John’s argument was the Ramones had developed a younger audience who were also listening to hardcore and thrash. The Ramones had an incentive and even a duty to deliver the goods.

  That reasoning sounded nice on paper but not quite as nice on a CD. A song like “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” speeded way up lost a lot of its soul. Joey’s phrasing suffered when certain words were squeezed in while others were squeezed out. It was not “Do You Remember Hardcore Radio?” Or as I reminded John, in the words of the great Chuck Berry, if you try to play it too darn fast, you lose the beauty of the melody.

  Even John’s guitar phrasing suffered. He couldn’t play true eighth notes with a downstroke at those tempos. No one could. But no one else even bothered to try. Hardcore and thrash guitarists were strumming faster, up and down. In a breakneck race to “keep up” on his own terms John was sometimes fudging fours by using a triplet and letting the third chord ring a little longer. I didn’t think we needed to put ourselves through the grinder.

  Whether it was John’s way or just the way of the future, something felt different in April when we got off the plane in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Like the name said, the air was good. So was the vibe. We were used to fans following us around here and there in twos and threes and small groups. In Argentina, a group of maybe three hundred was waiting for us at the airport. There were more kids hanging around the hotel, so the hotel staff had to work a little harder, showing us alternate exits from the building. The venue held about four thousand. We were playing more shows lately of that size in venues like the Roseland Ballroom in New York and the Brixton Academy in London. But these four thousand fans sounded more like fourteen thousand.

  It was more of the same in São Paulo, Brazil. The chants of “Hey Ho, Let’s Go!” were even louder than we were used to. They started well before the show and continued well after the second and final encore. The fans spoke primarily Portuguese, but when it came to singing out the lyrics to “Sedated,” “Sheena,” and “KKK,” their English was great. The sing-along wasn’t just an oldies show. They nailed songs like “I Believe in Miracles” and “Pet Sematary.” That proved a lot of things, among them that these kids were buying albums. And if the speed of the music cramped Joey’s phrasing a bit, it definitely didn’t bother the kids.

  We tried to take that spirit into the studio in early ’92 when we recorded Mondo Bizarro. It seemed like the timing was right and that our time had come. Nirvana had taken over the airwaves. Labels were signing bands just for wearing flannel and being able to pronounce the word Seattle. Green Day’s album Kerplunk was making a sound more like cha-ching. If we had somehow opened the door for these bands, we now wanted them to hold the door open for us a little longer so we could walk through a second time bigger, better, louder, and faster than ever.

  Some things would be the same as many times before. We had Ed Stasium producing. Dee Dee, who was wandering the city and the globe like an ex-punk messiah, had contributed three songs. We made a conscious effort to go back to a classic Ramones sound. What’s old is what’s new.

  Some other things were not the same. For one, we were no longer with Sire/Warner. Gary Kurfirst had convinced us to sign with his label, Radioactive, a division of Chrysalis. As a manager, Gary had secured us bigger venues. There was no argument there. But leaving Seymour Stein and Sire—even as a stepchild of Warner—felt more bitter than sweet. Seymour was an uncle to us, and one who let us do whatever we wanted in the backyard. He gave us the creative freedom that most artists could barely dream of. We were leaving that for something else, but who knew exactly what?

  The other issue was a lot more concrete. Gary was still and would remain our manager. One of a manager’s jobs—though a job he never bargains for—is to push the record label for the best possible recording situation and promotion. As good a manager as Gary was and as good a label president as he could be, could we rely on Gary to push Gary? Was there a fox anywhere born to guard a chicken coop? We would find out. While John and I wanted to stay with Seymour, Joey wanted to go with Gary. So did Gary. Case in point.

  The early favorite for a single was Dee Dee’s “Poison Heart.” Musically, it had the commercial appeal of an R.E.M. track but the lyrics read like a page from Dee Dee’s diary since he left the band to roam the streets. There were Dee Dee sightings on the Bowery, in West Hollywood, and across the Continent. In truth, he was involved with new musical projects like the short-lived Spikey Tops. But whatever else the Ramones represented to Dee Dee, they were also a payday, and we were glad.

  “Censorshit” was Joey’s answer to Tipper Gore and the PMRC, who had been labeling albums for several years. The most quotable line was “Ask Ozzie, Zappa, and me. We’ll show you what it’s like to be free.” It was good company to be in, even if Joey had to point it out himself. They were like an unholy trinity of rock and roll.

  Joey’s most memorable and hummable track on the album might have been “Touring,” a tribute to surf music left over from Pleasant Dreams eleven years earlier. It reminded us of the Beach Boys’ “Shut Down.” The hook was “Touring, touring, never boring.” That was why I took my camera along.

  I also took my notebook. When I wrote the lyrics to “The Job That Ate My Brain,” I was probably thinking of every job anyone ever had that on one hand they loved but on the other hand drove them a little crazy—like the job I had. The sci-fi title was in keeping with the finest Ramones tradition. In fact, the music itself could have been dropped in pretty easily to any of the early Ramones albums. I wanted to see more of that on Mondo Bizarro, but I was just one voice.

  The cover song on the album was “Take It as It Comes,” from the Doors’ first album. We got an able assist on the keyboard from Joe McGinty. There were lots of ways to do a cover, but basically only two ways—your own way or the original artist’s way. Ours in this case was a fairly faithful version. We took it as it came. Joey did his best Jim Morrison, which was pretty good. It was the older, fatter, rough-throated Jim Morrison. Joey had been taking that approach more frequently both live and in the studio. He wasn’t just the singer on “Rockaway Beach” anymore. And it wasn’t much of a stretch.

  Joey was getting a little fatter. Not like Jim Morrison circa L.A. Woman, where if you gave the Lizard King an axe he could have passed for a lumberjack. Joey was getting a little porkier around the hips. It was the same thing that happened to Dee Dee for the same reason.

  As a medical diagnosis, OCD had been around for many years. As an FDA-approved drug, Prozac had been around for only a few years. What was even newer was prescribing one to treat the other. Psychiatrists were handing out Prozac prescriptions like they were Lotto tickets. The results varied, but in Joey’s case, they seemed to be good. He was less moody and more outgoing. He seemed to be drinking less, though we couldn’t be completely sure. He even displayed less tapping and fewer reentrance problems. His mondo had gotten a little less bizarro.

  Monte, of all pe
ople, deserved the break. Joey had moved into a one-bedroom apartment that opened up on the same floor as his studio. The new view included the large old-fashioned dial clock atop the Consolidated Gas Company Building on Fourteenth Street. That meant a ploy Monte had used for years was now, for all practical purposes, obsolete. On his way over for a pickup, Monte would tell Joey the current time was an hour or two later than it really was. Joey now had a local landmark to know otherwise. But Monte now had Prozac.

  20

  HELLO, WE MUST BE GOING

  No one second-guessed Gary Kurfirst when he sent us down to South America in September to promote the just-released Mondo Bizarro. It was four consecutive shows in Buenos Aires, one in São Paulo, one in Rio de Janeiro, concluding with two shows up “north” in Mexico City. Nirvana, our fourth cousin once removed, had virtually taken over North America. Mondo Bizarro had some decent reviews, and Dee Dee’s “Poison Heart” had topped out at a respectable number six on the Billboard Modern Rock chart. As in the previous eleven Ramones studio albums, there was no single runaway hit. It felt as if for a moment we had been suckered into believing it could still happen for us so late in the game. But at the same time, it really didn’t matter. We were home. Sort of.

  Saying South America was our home was no insult to our roots. It was just the way we felt at that very instant. How could we feel any different? We were greeted like returning conquerors. The kids at the airport were greater in number than before and held up more signs. The kids at the hotel were more determined and better at eluding security. In between the airport and the hotel, fans chased our van—sometimes in cars, sometimes on foot. And we hadn’t played a note yet.

  “Hey Ho, Let’s Go!” was the international phrase for a Ramones encore. They were like the code words for getting into an after-hours club. In Buenos Aires, we got the “Hey Ho” from the get-go. It echoed like thunder off the back wall of a twenty-thousand-seat soccer stadium. Even with a natural amplification of twenty thousand, we could pick up the Spanish accent. It was still more apparent when they chanted the band’s name—“Ra-mon-es . . . Ra-mon-es . . .”