Dee Dee was out of it the whole time that movie was being made. He originally had three lines of dialogue, but they cut it down to one because he couldn’t remember them all. “Oh boy, pizza.” He got that one out after about forty takes.
I did mine: “We’re not students, we’re Ramones.” That was my film debut. Later, Vincent Gallo got me a role in a really bad movie, Stranded.
I was under a lot of stress. I would have my girlfriend, Cynthia, there visiting, then Rosana, who I was still seeing, would come in when I sent Cynthia home.
We filmed the concert sequence for the movie at the Roxy. It took eighteen hours to get the five songs done. They had three audiences come in over that period, a morning one, an afternoon one, and a night one. They charged the afternoon and night crowds to get in, I think three dollars for afternoon, five dollars for night. And we didn’t get any of that. I think I let that one slip by me. Like I said, I was under a lot of stress.
When Rock ’n’ Roll High School came out that May, I thought, “Well, this could be trouble.” Critics liked it, though. I was still afraid to see it, but finally, when it premiered in New York at the 8th Street Playhouse, I snuck into the theater after the place was dark and sat in the back row. People there loved it. The movie was better than I thought it would be.
When Linda got in the van for the first time during that West Coast tour, I told her, “You sit in the back row,” and she turned to me and said, “Not for long.” I thought, “What is this, this girl answers back to me?” Joey told her not to say anything, but she did anyway. I thought it was kind of funny. Sometimes, I would take both shotgun and the first row. I would handle the radio. It was baseball games during the season, and Rush Limbaugh to piss everybody off.
When we got back to New York, there was some tension over Linda. She was with Joey, and I was with Cynthia, but we would all get together and do things. I liked Linda. She was smart, and she looked great, the kind of girl I liked. I was just happy to be around her.
We would torment Monte in the worst ways. Monte was a very good sport, and he did a fine job. He was never great, but he was good. He put up with us; he took care of Joey, and he put up with us. But he was so fun to play tricks on because he’d get so angry. I mean, if we did something to Joey or Dee Dee, they would threaten to quit the band. You could prank Mark, and he wouldn’t care. I think he even liked it. So we had to do it all to Monte. He really was our whipping boy.
One time, we rented a van where you could control the radio from both the front seat and the first row of the van, but Monte didn’t know it. Mark and I figured it out, and Mark was sitting in the first row of the van seats, and I would say, “Change the channel, Monte.” He’d reach over to change it, and the channels would go crazy all across the dial because Mark was changing the channels.
I would say, “Monte, what are you doing? I want to listen to that station,” and he would try to change it, and every time he put his hand near the radio, Mark would switch it really fast all over the dial. So we said, “Monte, it must be a magnetic field; it must be from your ring, or your bracelet or your watch.” And he would take it off, and the radio would be fine. Then he’d put them back on, and the radio would do it again. He had no idea what was going on. When he returned the van, he complained that the radio was messed up.
Another time, we got a gay porno mag, and there was a photo spread of some black guy. We signed it, “Hi Monte, thanks for the nice time last night, From Dick Black.” At the hotel, we told Monte that there was a guy named Dick Black who was looking for him, and Monte said, “I don’t know any Dick Black.” So we whipped this picture out and handed it to him. The record company reps were standing there, because we wanted to do this in front of somebody. They walked away really fast. I think they were disgusted. We never cared.
When there was a record company person to meet us backstage or at the hotel, if they got to me first, they’d ask me who to look for and I’d say, “Oh, Monte Noodnick. Just call him Mr. Noodnick.”
So Monte would be greeted with “Are you Mr. Noodnick?”
Then there were the less creative pranks. We would put honey on his briefcase handle, honey on the driver-side door of the van if he was driving. We would secretly hang signs on his back at the airport that said, “I’m gay and I take it up the ass” or “I have the AIDS bug up my ass.” So he’d be walking around the airport with this sign on him and wouldn’t even know it.
We had a voice box that, whenever you turned it over, would say, “Fuck you, asshole.” So when we’d get to a tollbooth to pay our money and Monte would say, “Thank you” to the attendant, we’d put the thing behind Monte’s head, and it would say, “Fuck you, asshole.” It was hysterical, good Ramones humor. The same thing every time, but we always laughed. We shared a sense of humor on things that would not be funny to other people.
We got pulled over by the cops a few times, and it was usually Monte driving. They took Monte to jail one night after a show in Michigan. We pulled into the hotel parking lot, and the police followed us in. We all got out, and they started in with Monte. It was for something ridiculous like going through a stop sign. We just walked away, laughing, as they put him in the car and took him to the station.
We were pretty safe, though, since we had a radar detector. And when we had my pal Gene the cop travel with us, he could get us out of any trouble. Gene would get out and talk to the police, have us sign a photo, and we’d be on our way. He’d talk police-talk to them and show them his badge. He’d come back and say, “I offered them some donuts.” Monte hated it when we had trouble. But he stood up pretty well under pressure.
If I yelled at him, it was nothing. I forgot about it five minutes later, but he may not have. It was the same with anyone working with us. I always forgot about it. I don’t think I ever really got mad at him. Monte did a good job. Not a great job, a good job. Who am I kidding?—he was a sloth. We’d have trouble with Joey and sometimes Monte would just take care of him. I felt he neglected us. Joey would get a special meal and we would get crap, and the crew would get crap, and that just wasn’t right.
But most of the time he made sure we were taken care of while we traveled, and we were never really uncomfortable. He was great about hotels, too. No Hyatts or whatever; it was Holiday Inns, just like those old rock bands like the Who used to stay at. Unless the promoter was paying.
We loved eating at Cracker Barrel, and Monte found out that we could eat free if we gave whichever one we were at an autographed picture. So we would pull up, Monte would go in with a signed photo, and we got our food. We also liked County Line BBQ in Austin and Cajun food in Louisiana, and we’d go to Dairy Queen all the time. I would purposely buy a large chocolate shake, drink a little bit, and give the rest to Mark. He would be on a diet, so I’d just drink a little, then give it to Mark and watch him drink the rest of it.
Mark was disgusting, though. He had no manners. He didn’t even use utensils. One time we were sitting in Cracker Barrel and somebody at the next table had left half his meal there. So we said, “Look, Mark, that guy didn’t finish his meal. There’s a good meal sitting there.” Mark gets up and goes over to the table and says, “You think it’s okay?” and eats the rest of this guy’s meal.
As crazy as things were getting, we knew we had to have some kind of breakthrough at this point. It was 1979, we had been out there for five years, and we had no hits. It was time to do something. That happened to be something irrational. Phil Spector.
We tried to bond with Spector. We watched the movie Magic at his house one night, and we’d go out to dinner with him. One night, Grandpa Al Lewis from The Munsters even came over. He’d be okay with us, but he was very abusive to everyone else around him.
He loved Joey and treated the rest of us like we weren’t there. He called us “Joey and the Ramones.” It seemed that Joey was trying to get some control, and this was helping him achieve that. Phil was calling him aside, talking in whispers to him. Even when we were all there,
we were kept in a separate room. Joey was going along with it.
Joey and I did not get along well after this … well, at all, really. It was the Spector album that seemed to change things. The situation with Linda and I becoming close friends didn’t help, but there was already a problem.
Spector had been after us for a while, since almost the first time we came to L.A. He would say, “Hey, you want to make a great album?” We were trying to avoid him, but we knew we needed a break. Right from the start, he was abusive to everybody around him, except us. I could see right from the first day that this was not how I was used to working. He was painfully slow, and I could envision this taking forever. I didn’t want to be living in a hotel for two months doing a record.
He would make us think we were going to change studios every day, so we never knew where we were going in advance. At the end of each session he’d say, “I’m not sure what studio I want to use, so call me tomorrow and I’ll let you know where we’re recording.” Each day, we’d have to call to find out where to go, but we never moved. We’d be at the same place every day, Gold Star Studios. We’d call and he’d say, “Okay, we’ll be at Gold Star.” Yeah, that’s what we thought, since that’s where our equipment was set up, but for some reason he always wanted us to think we might move. I don’t know if it was drugs, paranoia, or what. He was crazy.
Spector treated the Paley Brothers terribly. He’d make them stand outside our room in the studio, and I’d say, “Come on in,” but Spector wouldn’t let them in. Somehow Seymour Stein had pushed them on Phil. He said, “You can have the Ramones, but you have to do a song for the Paley Brothers too.” It sure wouldn’t have been fun to be in the Paley Brothers. They were about to cry.
And he’d scream at the engineer, Larry Levine. He would go into another room all the time, and stay in there for a while. He never ate and never slept. We suspected he was doing cocaine. We tried to get along with Phil, and he would be polite to us but so horrible to everyone else. Even our crew. One day, our soundman, John Markovich, came by, and Phil started in, “Who the fuck are you? Why are you here?” The same thing over and over, for half an hour. We said, “Phil, this is our soundman. Why are you doing this?” But he wouldn’t stop. “Who do you think you are anyway? You’re nobody.” It was awful how badly he could treat people.
After a couple of days, I reached the breaking point. He had me play the opening chord to “Rock ’n’ Roll High School” over and over. This went on for three or four hours. He’d listen back to it, then ask me to play the same chord again. Stomping his feet and screaming, “Shit, piss, fuck! Shit, piss, fuck!” over and over. I couldn’t take it anymore. So I just said, “I’m leaving,” and Phil said, “You’re not going anywhere.” I said, “What are you gonna do, Phil, shoot me?” If he had, I wouldn’t even have given a shit at that point. I just wanted to get out of there.
So here’s this little guy with lifts in his shoes, a wig on his head, four guns—two in his boots and one on each side of his chest—and two bodyguards. After he shot that girl, I thought, “I’m surprised that he didn’t shoot someone every year.” But if he would have shot any one of us, it probably would have been Dee Dee. Somehow, he irritated him even more. Dee Dee drove him crazy; and Dee Dee didn’t like Phil either. He would complain that Dee Dee would show up stoned; meanwhile Phil would be drunk.
Then, on top of dealing with the stress of working with Phil, on Saturday, May 5, only five days after we’d started recording, I got a call at noon that my father had died. I was devastated. Seymour Stein called me with his condolences, and I said, “At least it’s my ticket out of here.” My dad’s death happened so fast. He was sixty-two, and it was a heart attack.
My parents had moved to Hollywood, Florida, in 1976. I went to New York first, then to Florida, then back to New York, then back to Los Angeles to continue recording the album. It was a time where I was lost, and it was almost surreal. Any time death gets that close, it does something to you. It was so shocking. Whenever I’d think about it afterward, for a long time I’d get very upset. I was very close to my father. I idolized him. My two biggest heroes were my father and John Wayne. Anytime I was on the phone with my mother I made sure to talk to him. I always wanted to please him, and to make sure I wasn’t a failure. He was a tough guy, and I wanted to live up to his expectations. I had to get back to business, though, after the funeral. I was just going through the motions for some time.
When I got back to Los Angeles on May 11, I thought it was really nice that Linda came with them to pick me up at the airport. I felt like everyone in the band didn’t like me at that point, and I knew they didn’t want to come, but Linda did. Monte, Linda, and Joey came to pick me up. It meant a lot to me that she came, and I always remembered that.
The album End of the Century turned out to be good, but we didn’t have a hit. I think it got played on around 120 radio stations, while the others were played on around 35. It charted in England, number eight or something, but who cares about England? We were American. It did have the worst thing we ever did, “Baby, I Love You.” And it was my idea to do a Spector song.
I had suggested we cover “(The Best Part of) Breakin’ Up.” But Phil decided on “Baby, I Love You,” and brought in an orchestra to play on it instead of us. It was more like a Joey solo single now. And that was something Phil had been encouraging for a while, saying things off to the side like, “It’s all you, Joey.” So Dee Dee and I flew back to New York, and Joey was glad we were leaving. A week later, they tracked “Baby, I Love You”—without the Ramones. None of us played on that song, not even Mark. Phil decided to use a session drummer instead.
Then we got to the jacket issue. When we took the pictures for End of the Century, at first every photo was taken with our leather jackets on. Then someone said, “Let’s take some pictures with the jackets off.” I said, “What for?”
The jackets were part of the Ramones. I went through three in our career. One was stolen in Holland, one in Florida, and the last one I gave to Vincent Gallo. So it was out of character for us to be photographed without the jackets, even then.
They said they were doing it just to change things up. I never thought they’d use those photos. Still, I should never have agreed to take the picture without the leather jacket. That day, I had a red T-shirt on. The pictures came back, and the band outvoted me, so we used the shot with the colored T-shirts for the album cover. It was two against one; Joey and Dee Dee against me. Mark didn’t get a vote at that point because he wasn’t an original member. They said, “Let’s get rid of the leather jackets. The jackets are why we’re not getting played on the radio.” The photo on the inside sleeve, with the jackets, that was supposed to be the cover. I was mad when I got voted down. I think the picture changed our career.
The whole thing stressed me out. There was a power struggle going on, and at that point, they were voting against me on everything artistic. There were a lot of problems starting with End of the Century. Basically it was the first real album without Tommy. Even though he didn’t play on the album before, which was Road to Ruin, he’d still produced it, and he was involved.
After End of the Century came out, it was apparent that we weren’t going to get all that we’d thought we would. It is a disappointment to this day. Everything came into focus at this point, and I realized our future. My motivation was pretty pure, I think. I used to think about getting bigger just so we could do more fucked-up songs, get to that point where we wouldn’t even have to think about what anybody else told us and we could be as sick as we wanted. It was the opposite effect, really. Get bigger so we can be more twisted. No wonder we never went gold. Chasing some kind of commercial success is more like just sitting there ready to give up.
I would never have put out something like a hit song just to have a hit if it wasn’t in our style. I would have had to live with that for the rest of my life, and I don’t think I could look myself in the eye after I did something like that.
I
didn’t really like the albums that much anyway after Road to Ruin. Even with that one, they picked the wrong song for the first single, “Don’t Come Close,” which sounded the least like us. They couldn’t pick “I Wanna Be Sedated”?
Same thing with End of the Century. “Baby, I Love You” was not a single. I really thought that was the end of our career. I thought that the idea behind singles was to have something the kids could relate to as far as the band went. You think they’re gonna come to the show and wait for us to play “Baby, I Love You”? If that had been big, we’d have disappointed a lot of fans who came expecting to hear it. I guess I’ve always thought of us primarily as a live band too. I thought our live show was great.
And I had a hard time really talking up some of those later albums, especially in the early eighties. When we did press for a new album, I’d hear Joey tell people, “This is our best album yet,” but I never thought that. I knew some of them were lame. Joey was never ready to accept that we were not going to have a hit single in America. I have no idea how he could think that something we did like Pleasant Dreams, with Graham Gouldman from 10cc, would be our best album yet. I mean, this is a producer who had no idea what we were about, a guy who told me to turn down my guitar when we got into the studio because it was humming.
If I did an interview after the release of a particularly weak album, I would say straight out that I didn’t care for the album. I said it, and the label never said a thing to me. They knew there was nothing they could tell me. I would tell the truth.
We made a management change shortly after the End of the Century album. We started talking about it in 1979, and finally, after about a year, it was time. It was no reflection on Danny. We had to try something else, I guess. I felt bad; I didn’t really want to change managers, because I liked Danny a lot, and I didn’t want to blame him for our lack of success. But again, just like with the jackets on the cover for End of the Century, I was outvoted. Some names were floated, like Dee Anthony and some other bad choices. I thought I might be able to convince Joey and Dee Dee to change their vote if Danny got a new partner, but he wouldn’t.
Commando Page 8
