Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  Jim Morrison was not just the lead singer and poet of the Los Angeles–based band the Doors. He was a cultural icon and troublemaker who liked to provoke audiences. The Doors produced records that mixed rock, blues, jazz, and the surreal into memorable songs that actually got a lot of airplay. But you never knew what Jim was going to do onstage. One minute he was writhing around on the floor, the next he was stopping the show cold in the middle of a song just to see how long it would take the audience to rebel. At Salvation, Jim’s drink of choice was Jack Daniel’s, of which he drank shot after shot. He was bloated and looking kind of heavy.

  I sat at the table just taking in the whole scene. I didn’t have a lot to say. I watched and listened to them talking about this song, that girl, and the other kind of grass. I thought it was weird that they kept getting up one at a time and heading to the bathroom. After a couple of beers, I got up and went, too—because I had to. There in the men’s room was Buddy Miles by the sink offering me a snort of cocaine. I passed and watched him do a few lines before we both went back to the table. I left around one in the morning, and it looked like Jimi and friends were just getting started.

  The next day at school, I told my friends where I had been and who I was with. They sort of believed the where. As for the who, they thought I was bullshitting, tripping, or both.

  The summer of ’69 was famous for the Apollo 11 astronauts landing on the moon and a half million kids landing on Max Yasgur’s farm in upstate New York to be part of the concert phenomenon known as Woodstock. Most of my summer of ’69 was spent in summer school. But I hung out at Parkside every chance I got. The rehearsals with Velvert and Scott had fizzled out, but I was getting into new things. The talk of Parkside that summer was a band called Dust. Bands typically played cover songs, but Dust wrote and played originals. They were a heavy-rock band along the lines of Cream but with a darker edge. Dust’s songs were usually faster and the lyrics darker.

  Dust was Gary Woods on lead vocals, Richie Wise on guitar and vocals, Anthony LaTorre on drums, and my old friend and bandmate from Uncles, Kenny Aaronson, on bass. Anthony was a friend of mine, too. We would cut out of school, go back to his apartment, and play drums. He had a double-bass setup like Ginger Baker’s. Dust also had another thing most local bands didn’t have: a manager. Kenny Kerner wasn’t just a guy hanging around Parkside. He worked for the music business trade magazine Cashbox. And he, along with Richie Wise, wrote lyrics. We all thought Dust was going somewhere.

  Parkside was like a club with no rules. We were all friends and sometimes traveled around the city like a pack of hungry musicians. For a fare of fifteen cents, the guys from Dust, myself, and a few others loved to take the subway to Forty-Eighth Street in Manhattan. Between Sixth and Seventh Avenues were about a dozen music stores, one after the other: Manny’s, Sam Ash, Alex Musical Instruments, We Buy Guitars. It was like we’d died and gone to rock-and-roll heaven. We would stare at all the new equipment in the windows and try not to drool. There were drums from Ludwig, Slingerland, Rogers; amps from Vox, Ampeg; guitars from Fender, Gibson, Hagstrom. There was enough equipment on those couple of blocks to outfit every band in North America.

  When you walked into any of the stores, you usually heard a half dozen guys sitting down trying out a guitar or a bass and playing the one riff they were comfortable with over and over again. The better musicians played various riffs and put on a miniconcert. The store managers were cool. They let all the noise happen at once even if nobody was actually buying anything. That was part of what made Forty-Eighth Street special.

  From there, we would usually get a hot dog with everything on it from one of the street vendors and then walk uptown to catch a live concert at the RKO 58th Street Theatre. These shows were hosted by Murray the K.

  But the shows he put together at the RKO were fantastic. They usually started around ten or eleven in the morning and went all day. As many as a dozen bands would be on the bill, with dance contests held between sets. Some of the bands were there because they had a current hit on the radio. Other bands were more established acts. Once, during Easter 1967, Cream and the Who were on the same bill, back-to-back. I was not quite fifteen years old at the time and sat in the audience in awe. Both bands were making their American debuts. They got to do only three songs apiece, and then were off the stage.

  But it was enough to change my life. Ginger Baker of Cream and Keith Moon of the Who taught me in a few short minutes the outer limits of what drumming could be. Whenever I went back to the RKO, like my friends, I stayed through the very last show. You never knew when you were going to see the next Ginger Baker or Keith Moon.

  One day I was practicing the drums in our apartment on Ditmas Avenue, and my mother stepped into the room to tell me I had a phone call. If you’ve ever tried to tell a drummer in the middle of drumming he has a phone call, good luck. This call, however, was good luck for me. It was Kenny Kerner, who explained that Richie Wise felt that Anthony LaTorre’s drumming wasn’t cutting it. Kenny asked me if I would be interested in coming down to audition, and I said yes.

  Even though Anthony was a friend, I didn’t feel terrible about possibly taking his spot. If you were in a band and hoping to get anywhere, you had to have the best musician available on each instrument. There were exceptions to that, but rarely on drums. When you heard a band, and the drumming wasn’t up to par, even if you didn’t know much about music, you would say something was missing: excitement, professionalism—something. There was no hiding it.

  The other element that excited me about the audition was the opportunity to play original music. As much as I liked playing Hendrix, Cream, and Who songs, I needed to grow, and one great way to grow was to have to come up with your own parts while fitting in with the overall sound. It wasn’t automatic for everyone.

  The audition was a challenge. Dust songs had a lot of parts and transitions. One of my audition songs, “Chasin’ Ladies,” was a good example. There were several time changes, triplets, quadruples, and double-stroke rolls all in about four minutes. The drumming had to be on the money and powerful enough to stand up to the heaviness of the rest of the music without taking over. There were sections where the drum part was like a lead instrument and other sections where it was supporting the bass, guitar, and vocals. The drumming needed to move through all these phases seamlessly. But I had the advantage of knowing the songs from the shows and from generally having practiced my ass off. I thought I nailed it.

  Kenny Kerner called the next day and asked me to join the band. I had to learn the rest of the songs fast because we had a gig the following weekend. I thought we sounded good overall, but a couple of days later, Kenny Kerner told me that Gary Woods was asked to leave the band. That made sense to me. Richie Wise had a great voice, could pull it off while playing guitar, and was cowriting the songs. So Dust became a power trio in the spirit of Cream, Grand Funk Railroad, and Blue Cheer.

  We played a few shows at the Flatbush Terrace, a private hall we rented out ourselves, right around the corner from Brooklyn College, where my mother worked. We were so loud, she could probably hear us from her office. Maybe the most exciting thing about those first few shows as a trio was how much tighter we were getting musically. We could hear a definite difference from performance to performance. Rehearsals are a must, but when you know individually and as a band that you don’t have the option of stopping and going back over a part, you have to rise to the occasion.

  Scott Muni was a popular DJ with a distinct, deep voice who could be heard every day on WNEW-FM, another New York radio station setting the tone in progressive rock for the rest of the country. When Scott asked Kenny Kerner if Dust would play a free show for WNEW at the Prospect Park Bandshell, it was like being nominated for a Grammy and having homecoming rolled into one. The band shell was a short walk in the park from our home base, Parkside.

  The Prospect Park Bandshell was built in 1939 and had a postmodern sci-fi look to it: a white concrete shell within a shell within a
shell. At the center of all of it were the three of us, ready to perform for a couple thousand Brooklynites. For all we knew, this was the top of the mountain. My brother had a good friend with a Super 8 movie camera. Fred stood a few rows back zooming in and out as we did our sound check. The film was color, but the camera silent. That was fine. We knew what the songs sounded like anyway, and it was going to be a thrill to have a visual record of this big event and get to see what we actually looked like playing.

  I had a basic kit: bass, floor tom, snare, ride, crash, hi-hat. I wouldn’t need any more. All the pieces were painted red. I was in a sleeveless vest with no shirt underneath. My hair was now very long and flew all over the place when I did a big roll. Kenny Aaronson and Richie Wise also wore their hair very long. It was amazing how “long” became “not long enough” in the space of only about two or three years.

  We played for about a half hour and came off great. There was no problem for me playing in front of so many people. I was consumed by the drums and what I was doing. There was not much opportunity to sit up and look around. The music was that challenging. But when I did manage to take it all in, what I heard was a band quickly coming into its own.

  I had known Kenny Aaronson for years and always respected his ability to hold down the rhythm on bass. But somewhere along the line—maybe only in the past few weeks—he started playing lead bass. At times I thought I was listening to John Entwistle of the Who. You had to be talented to fill all those open spaces in a three-piece band tastefully, without smothering the music. But you had to have something else, too: confidence. That confidence was developing right before our eyes and ears.

  As for Richie Wise, he was about eighteen going on twenty-eight. You could hear that what I was trying to do on drums—soak up playing from the best out there and make it my own—Richie was doing successfully on guitar. When you closed your eyes, you could hear a wail from Jimi Hendrix, a measure from Jimmy Page, a bluesy arpeggio from Eric Clapton, a power chord from Pete Townshend. And he did all that while singing like a slightly higher-pitched version of Grand Funk Railroad’s Mark Farner. Doing either was a triumph. Doing both was a miracle.

  After the Prospect Park Bandshell, Kenny Kerner booked us aggressively at clubs in the Village at venues including Cafe Au Go-Go and Cafe Wha? These were obviously much smaller shows in terms of audience size but in some ways even more important. These clubs were where it was all happening. Cafe Wha? was a seedy little corner place that already had a rich history dating back to when Manny Roth founded and ran the club. Allen Ginsberg was reading his Beat poetry there in 1959, when the idea of a gay man talking frankly about his sexuality would have sent the average American running for the hills. In the early sixties, Bob Dylan played long, thoughtful acoustic sets at Cafe Wha?, sometimes singing lyrics he had written down on a notepad just an hour before.

  As for Dust, we wanted to blow the doors off the place. The room looked like the sixties, with black lights and groovy Day-Glo psychedelic posters. And it smelled like the sixties, with pot smoke coming out of every crevice in the place. But musically we were pushing into the next decade.

  No one was pushing their way into the show. The place was about half filled. That was okay. We delivered the goods on “Stone Woman,” “Goin’ Easy,” “Love Me Hard,” and a few of our other originals. By the last song, everyone in the room was standing. They loved “Loose Goose,” and we did an encore.

  As we broke down our equipment, individual members of the audience came up to us, patted us on the back, told us we rocked, and offered us beer, pot, or whatever we wanted. One of those guys was John Cummings, who told me he was a guitar player from Forest Hills, Queens. He was in his early twenties and thought we were about the same age as him. When I told him we were actually a few years younger, he couldn’t believe it. He thought the musicianship was incredible. To top off our night, we were paid $30 each, which was a lot for a club gig.

  My paternal grandfather retired in 1969, and he and my grandmother decided they’d had enough of the cold New York winters. When they moved to Florida, instead of selling their house in Brooklyn, they let my parents take it over. The timing couldn’t have been better for me. Dust was newly formed, and we needed a place to rehearse. My parents, as always, were very supportive and told me we could play in the basement during the day, when they were at work.

  We literally moved into the basement. Unlike a rehearsal studio, where you usually paid by the hour and had to use whatever beat-up amps and drums were already there, Dust got to customize our new home. Kenny brought in two Acoustic bass amps. He was more than welcome to keep them there, but sometimes he chose to wheel them both back to his apartment, which was twelve blocks away. Richie brought in two full 100-watt Marshall stacks. Pete Townshend of the Who was the first guitarist to start stacking Marshall cabinets one on top of the other to provide a kind of crunching sound. Just about everyone followed, and stacking Marshalls became the centerpiece of the new hard-rock sound and a point of pride for bands everywhere. The more the merrier—and the louder.

  In the basement, I set up every piece I had, perfectly arranged, so that I would want to be down there every opportunity I had, whether the rest of the band was there or not. It wasn’t a very large basement, and part of the space was taken up by the boiler and the hot-water heater. We were crammed into a twenty-foot-by-twenty-five-foot area, with enough gear to play a small auditorium. By the time we were done rehearsing, my ears were always ringing. One time when we were bringing up Kenny’s equipment, we noticed a fine white powder coating the hood of my parents’ car parked in the driveway. We realized it came from the stucco from the exterior of the house. We had played so loudly, we brought the house down, literally.

  We didn’t always play at maximum volume. When we wrote new material, it was critical that we could hear every part clearly and stop to go back over something. Usually Richie would strum the basic chord progression at low volume and sing over it. If he didn’t have lyrics written, he would just make up whatever he needed to develop the idea. I would just hit the snare to keep time. Once there was a song structure, Kenny would quickly follow the chord changes and come in on bass.

  Each time through the song, there was a little more detail, a little more sophistication. We would try different tempos. We knew the right one when we didn’t have to think about it anymore. As our familiarity with the song grew, I would add accents, and Richie would extend the guitar solos where it felt needed. It sometimes took less than an hour to have the full song polished. We had chemistry.

  In the late spring of 1970, Kenny Kerner told us the band was ready to be shopped to record labels. That would require a good demo tape. We didn’t have a lot of money to go to a professional recording studio, so we set up a studio in the basement. A friend of ours, Daffy, lent us his mixing board and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Everything was done in-house. Kenny Kerner and Richie served as our producer and engineer.

  They placed a single microphone in the room to get a preliminary sound. We played our instruments individually and then together. Kenny and Richie would check the sound on headphones and each time move the microphone this way or that: closer to the Marshall or farther away. Closer to the bass drum or back it off. This took a couple of hours. When something was miked closer, you got more power but also more distortion. Kenny and Richie had a certain sound in mind and worked well within the obvious limitations.

  Kenny hit Record, and we ran through a song. If it felt good, we would listen back. If it didn’t, we would go right to another take. If a take was obviously no good, we would rewind and go back over the tape. There was no point in wasting tape. When we did a great take, we all knew it. But sometimes Kenny Kerner would have us do one more just in case we hadn’t “peaked” yet.

  The tape sounded surprisingly powerful considering it was done in my grandparents’ basement. I expected to hear a combination of rejections along with maybe a few comments on what the labels were looking to hear. But Kenny go
t the tape into the hands of Neil Bogart at Kama Sutra/Buddah Records, and Neil really liked what he heard. We were offered a record contract for two albums. I was just shy of my eighteenth birthday.

  3

  . . . TO DUST

  Kama Sutra had been started in the early sixties and was known more for lighter music and bubblegum rock. The Ohio Express, with “Yummy Yummy Yummy,” and the 1910 Fruitgum Company, with “Indian Giver,” were typical of that category. But the label also had great bands like the Lovin’ Spoonful. What Kama Sutra did not have was a single hard-rock band, or anything, for that matter, sounding remotely like Dust. But we didn’t give it much thought. We were three kids from Brooklyn who made a tape in the basement and ended up with a major label recording contract.

  Our advance was small by record industry standards but big by the standards of three guys looking to buy equipment on Forty-Eighth Street they had been drooling over for years. The advance was to pay for recording expenses, but the band could keep money left over. We spent our leftover money up front.

  Richie bought more Marshalls, effects pedals, and better guitars. Kenny bought a few more Acoustic bass amps. When I hit Forty-Eighth Street, I was truly a kid in a candy store. I bought a whole new Ludwig kit with an oversized bass drum. John Bonham of Led Zeppelin was using a twenty-six-inch-diameter bass drum, which helped give him that massive bottom sound that felt a combination of a war drum and an earthquake. In the spirit of one-upping the best in the business—at least on the equipment side—I had a twenty-eight-inch bass drum custom made. To go with it, I bought two twenty- by eighteen-inch floor toms, a fifteen- by fifteen-inch rack tom, and a small arsenal of Paiste crash cymbals and hi-hats. I was ready to roll with the best of them. But my grandparents’ house would probably be declared a disaster area.