by Marky Ramone
On Sunday evening, February 9, 1964, my mother called Fred and me into the living room to watch the Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show. The buildup was going on all week with the Fab Four landing in New York and giving press conferences, imitating Elvis, and joking about their long hair—which wasn’t even that long. When they appeared on the black-and-white TV screen in our living room, it felt like things were changing right before our eyes. There was electricity in the air you couldn’t exactly describe, but it was impossible to be sad. It took about two minutes to get through the first song, “All My Loving,” and the girls in the studio audience were hooked. The country was hooked. I was hooked.
The next morning, I started to comb my hair down in front like the Beatles did. My brown hair wasn’t long enough for real bangs, but I figured in a few weeks it would be. John, Paul, and George were great, but I wanted to be Ringo. Sitting back behind the drums, pounding away, and giving the music all that power and rhythm was something I wanted to do. It was something I knew I could do.
There was no drum set in the house, but that didn’t matter. At any given moment, I would be tapping my hands on the kitchen table, thumping on pillows, playing with a knife and fork like they were drumsticks. My mom would constantly ask me to please stop banging. That would work for about five minutes. Riding on the subway, I would listen to the rhythm of the steel wheels on the tracks and tap along with it on my legs.
Around my twelfth birthday, my parents got me my first snare drum. It was a cheapo Japanese piece but better than a table and utensils. I convinced my parents to take me for some lessons at a local place called Bromley’s Music. Bromley’s wasn’t much of a music school. It was basically a drum set in the basement of someone’s house. The instructor taught me how to hold the drumsticks military style and some rudimentary techniques like flams and paradiddles. After about three months, I didn’t think I was getting much out of the lessons and I stopped showing up. What I really needed was my own drum set.
A few weeks later, my parents took me to Milton Arfin’s music store on Church Avenue, where they bought me a very basic drum set. The deal was they wouldn’t get me anything expensive until they were convinced I was going to stick with the drums. The kit consisted of a bass drum with a single tom mounted on it, a hi-hat, and a ride cymbal. Of course, I already had a snare.
The new kit was a Zim-Gar brand with the logo printed on the bass drum head. That wasn’t going to cut it, because Ringo used Ludwig drums. So I wrote to Ludwig and asked them to send me a large sticker. When the Ludwig sticker came in the mail, amazingly, I immediately stuck it over the Zim-Gar logo. Right below it I spelled out The Beatles in black electrical tape.
I spent almost every spare moment practicing the drums, which were set up in the small bedroom I shared with Fred. I had a small phonograph with only one speaker, and I would listen closely to the drum parts on my favorite songs. By concentrating, I could figure out the bass drum patterns, off-time beats, rolls, accents. By the time the Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night opened in theaters in the summer of ’64, I not only had maybe a dozen Beatles songs down on the drums but also was playing along with other British Invasion groups like the Rolling Stones and the Dave Clark Five.
Fred’s reaction to the Beatles and the British Invasion was to take up guitar. So my parents made another trip to Milton Arfin’s and bought Fred a starter Harmony electric guitar and a small Fender Princeton Reverb amplifier. Fred’s early favorite band was the Dave Clark Five. But Fred soon gravitated to the blues, which led him right to the Rolling Stones. Before they got into writing most of their own songs, the Stones were covering all sorts of old blues numbers. Fred also liked the surf music pioneers Jan and Dean.
By this point, our room could barely contain the bunk bed, the drum set, and the Fender Princeton Reverb amp, let alone the noise we made—especially when Fred and I played together. So everyone in the family was really glad when we were able to move into a three-bedroom apartment. Even better, the apartment was on the first floor of the same building we had lived in for years at 640 Ditmas. We were twelve years old, in junior high school, and needed our own space personally, and now musically, too.
My new room faced the alleyway on the side of the building where the super kept the garbage cans. It was hard to ignore the smell of tossed-out banana peels and grease wafting through the window, especially during the hot summer months. But it was a small price to pay for having my own room—my own studio. The more I played the drums, the less I noticed the stench.
Fred had a friend in the building who soon turned him on to the Blues Project, with Danny Kalb on guitar, and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, with Mike Bloomfield on guitar. I was moving in a slightly different direction. In the spring of 1966, the Who released the album My Generation. An earlier Who single, “I Can’t Explain,” was a tight, melodic four-chord song. But it was the title track of the album, “My Generation,” that really grabbed me. The chords came on fast, hard, and powerful. And drummer Keith Moon was doing things I had never heard before. Not even close.
The drumming style was manic and all over the place to the point where it was almost confusing. He added wild drum fills right over the top of the music and accents at parts of the verses and chorus no other drummer would ever have thought of. The weird thing was, it all worked. Moon’s drumming made the songs more exciting but never completely took them over. I went right back to the drums and started experimenting with some of these techniques, putting in as many hours as I could.
As a thirteen-year-old self-taught drummer, I felt I was good enough to start a band. Kenny Aaronson was a bass player my age with a Fender bass and an Ampeg B-15 amp. He had the same musical influences as I did and was developing into a good player. The problem was, he lived twelve blocks from my building. But Kenny did what he had to do, carrying the bass in one hand and wheeling the amp in the other across streets and up and down curbs over a half mile to get to my building. He became the other half of the rhythm section.
The guitar player lived a block or two away. The vocalist was my friend Steven Bakur. We would all pile into my room after school. Between the drums, guitar, and bass amps, and a separate amp for vocals, we were packed in, and the room got smaller once we cranked it up. Because we were on the first floor, there was no one to complain in the basement below because there was no apartment there. The people above us weren’t so lucky. We got a few complaints but not nearly as many as we thought we would. It had to be a pretty cool apartment building. My parents were very supportive, making sure we had enough to eat and letting us know when it was too loud even for them.
We called ourselves the Uncles, a tribute to the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which was based loosely on the James Bond spy movies. Because we were getting ready for a show—our first ever—for the student government at Ditmas Junior High, we were allowed to rehearse a few times in the school auditorium after class. It was my first time on a stage, and it was a thrill. With no bodies in the audience to absorb the sound, it bounced off the walls and made everything louder. We weren’t in my bedroom near the garbage cans anymore.
At our first show, I was a little nervous, and I think the other guys were, too. As ten, twenty, fifty kids filed in, I knew rehearsal time was over. If we sucked, there would be nowhere to hide the next day. At the same time, we were excited, and as the show grew near, for the most part I wanted to show people what we could do.
Our set included “My Generation” by the Who and “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Rolling Stones. The rest of the set was mostly Top Ten hits from bands like the Animals, the Beach Boys, the Searchers, and Jan and Dean. A few minutes in, I noticed that we had a tendency to speed up a bit. That was a natural reaction to the excitement of playing live. It could start anywhere, with a guitarist speeding up first, then the bassist, and so on. As far as I was concerned, it was up to the drummer—to me—to keep the song on track and lead rather than follow. I did it the best I could that day under the circums
tances.
The kids at Ditmas liked us. It was not a typical experience for me. I could see right away there was newfound respect from the guys, the girls—and yes, even some of the teachers. That included some of the tougher male teachers who had fought in World War II and were not your obvious fans of rock and roll. But drumming—whether it was jazz, big band, or even rock and roll—was a very physical thing that clearly took some real strength and coordination. It was something they could relate to. They looked at me a little differently from that day on.
The Uncles got to play a few of the dances at Ditmas and a few private parties around the neighborhood. Our home base was the Jewish Center on Ocean Parkway between Ditmas and Eighteenth Avenues. This was the same place where I went to Cub Scout meetings with Pack 27 when I was eight or nine, with the same kids who were now coming to see the show. They were saying, “Wow, look at Marc up there. He can really play.” I was very comfortable around the Jewish Center. There was such a rich history of entertainment in the Jewish culture. If you weren’t a musician, actor, or comedian, you had an uncle who was.
We didn’t play only the Jewish Center. We played wherever and whatever was available to us—churches, parties, people’s basements. I was happy being appreciated for what I wanted to do, and I was always trying to develop. I was a big fan of drummer Hal Blaine, who was a member of the famous Wrecking Crew, a group of California studio musicians who always worked with Phil Spector and played on more Top Ten hits than anyone could count. If you were listening to Nancy Sinatra, Elvis Presley, the Beach Boys, the Ronettes, or Simon and Garfunkel, you were probably listening to Hal Blaine.
I got to the point where I could tell in under a minute if Blaine was playing on a given record. He had a very distinctive style with signature off-the-beat drum fills, and that style stood out even more at the end of a song. I was constantly committing these musical elements to memory and using them where it made sense.
Part of being in a band for me was looking the part. I grew my hair out like the Beatles. By 1965, that meant kind of shaggy hair with bangs. By 1966, that meant an inch or two longer. I wore Beatle boots, and suits that looked a bit Beatle-esque. I looked sharp for a kid in junior high school, which definitely helped attract the girls.
But my look had its downside, too. Some of the teachers at Ditmas gave me a hard time about it. My gym teacher, Mr. Gross, was an ex-marine in his late thirties. He picked on a lot of the guys in the gym class for any number of reasons, including not being able to drop down and give him forty push-ups. It was as if he had never left the marines. In his mind, he was still a drill sergeant preparing a bunch of fourteen-year-old string beans for the Korean War. Of all the guys, he really singled me out. I did every last push-up, sit-up, and chin-up he called out. But it was never enough.
One day, I was walking down the hallway wearing a tie loosely around my neck, when out of the blue came Mr. Gross, who was completely bald. He looked like Mr. Clean minus the earring. He grabbed me by the arm and marched me into his office. I thought fast about what it was I had done but honestly couldn’t think of anything. Gross slammed the door, turned to face me from about a foot away, and started yelling at the top of his lungs. “I’ve had it with you! You don’t pay attention in class. You’re disruptive. Do you think that just because you don’t want to be here that you have the right to ruin things for the other students?”
“I’m not ruining anything for anyone. You’re ruining it for me.”
I was ready to argue some more when Gross started poking me in the chest. I was surprised, and when I pushed his hand away, he reached back and slapped me a couple of times across my face. I used everything I had to control my temper, but when Gross’s open palm made solid contact with my cheekbone, I lunged at him with my head down. The next thing I knew, I was seeing stars. He had hit me hard in the back of the head. It was all I could do to stay on my feet and pretend to listen to the rest of his tirade.
When I got home, I gave my father the blow-by-blow. He just sat and listened very calmly, asking a few questions here and there. I was not called into the dean’s office the next day at school, and that was a relief. My dad was home from the docks early that afternoon. He had taken a half day off to pay Gross a visit. In the same office where Gross had knocked me almost unconscious, my dad called him a sadistic bastard and said that if he ever laid a hand on me again, it would be the last thing he ever did.
Mr. Gross never bothered me again, but a few of the other teachers kept putting me down in class. It was my hair. It was my clothes. It was my attitude. Some of the other students went after me, too. There was tension between the kids who dressed like it was still the fifties and those of us who were changing with the times. I wasn’t the only target. But I was target number one.
I was glad junior high school was almost over. The one thing that made the final few months livable was my first real girlfriend. Alyson and I started going out in April of ’67. I would walk her home every day after school, and we would hang out whenever we could. She came to some rehearsals. Just a few more weeks and I would not only be out of Ditmas Junior High but we would have the whole summer together.
Then she broke the news. For a moment, I thought we were breaking up. Instead, Alyson explained that her parents had a bungalow up in Connecticut and were making her spend the whole summer with them. That was better, but not much better.
The Uncles played their last show at a club on St. Marks Place in Greenwich Village called the Electric Circus. The club was situated in an old town hall and ballroom carved out of three very old four-story brick row homes. Just a few months before our gig, the place was taken over by new management, renamed, and decorated with a large modern dance floor, sofas, strobe lights, and projector screens all over the place. The four of us played our usual cover tunes okay, but we were definitely not the main attraction. On the screens, there were psychedelic images that were constantly morphing. The club had circus acts like jugglers, fire-eaters, and trapeze artists. It was hard to compete with that unless I was going to pour kerosene on my drumsticks and light them.
2
FROM DUST . . .
The summer of ’67 was being called the Summer of Love. But my girlfriend was away, and my band was split-up. Neither of those things changed what I loved: the drums. I had a lot of time on my hands to focus on learning more and getting better. There was an enormous amount of new and exciting rock music coming onto the scene literally every day. And the music was changing almost as fast as the screens at the Electric Circus.
The Jimi Hendrix Experience with Jimi Hendrix on guitar was unlike anything anyone had ever seen or heard. Jimi thrilled people with his wild look and playing guitar behind his back and with his teeth. At the Monterey Pop Festival in California, he lit his guitar on fire like he was performing a sacrifice. But when you closed your eyes and just listened, the real force of the music came through. It was blues and rock and soul reinvented, stretched to their absolute limits and beyond till they were transformed into almost a new kind of music. The guitar was a weapon or a divining rod as much as an instrument. This guy was so good that the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were his biggest fans.
But I was listening to the drums as much as the guitar. Maybe more. Mitch Mitchell, a white guy from England, played with the soft touch of a veteran black American jazz drummer but provided a solid foundation for the power of Jimi’s screaming guitar. Mitchell applied that light touch and offbeat fills to accent Jimi’s raunchy guitar rather than compete with it. Listening closely during the summer and discovering new bits and pieces for myself was a great experience for me.
Cream was another three-piece band—a power trio—lighting up the airwaves. Eric Clapton came from a heavy blues background with the Yardbirds and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. But with Cream, it was blues, jazz, and heavy rock creating memorable songs with great hooks and always a few subtle surprises when you listened a second, third, and fourth time. My ears were on the drummer, Ginger Baker,
who was truly a full leg in the tripod. Baker played the drums as a complete instrument, with each piece of the set involved. You never got the idea that he was just keeping time, although he was certainly doing that, too.
Meanwhile, the Beatles reinvented themselves again, this time with Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that was not a collection of songs but a concept album that told a bunch of stories of dealing with everyday life. With so much orchestration and so many complex arrangements, it was clear the band had moved beyond rock and roll. The Beatles stopped playing live, and you wondered if an album like Sgt. Pepper even could be played live. Ringo’s drumming was in the mix but more as part of a percussion arrangement. Even the Beach Boys, known for clean-cut songs about love and surfing, had released an experimental but very successful concept album called Pet Sounds.
Out west in San Francisco, another scene was emerging. Bands like the Grateful Dead, the Jefferson Airplane, and Quicksilver Messenger Service were performing free concerts in the street, where LSD was handed out and young people, dressed in togas and flowers, danced like they were sleepwalking in a ballet. Any given song could go on for a half hour, and the music featured weird guitar feedback and formless drum solos. The point of at least some of this music seemed to be to enhance the effect of the drugs rather than to create a song that was memorable on its own.
I wasn’t into the whole San Francisco music scene. There were good songs here and there, but in my opinion, the English bands had far superior musicianship. I couldn’t understand how anyone could put LSD or any other hallucinogenic crap in their bodies and risk a nervous breakdown, brain damage, or suicide. I tried LSD once and wanted out less than halfway through my “trip.” A beer, a shot of whiskey, or even a joint served a purpose: to loosen you up a bit and get you beyond just thinking about whatever was bothering you that day. Hallucinogens made you someone else.