by Marky Ramone
It turned out that Lester Bangs loved Dust. More than that, he was a fan. He told us so. He could quote “Stone Woman” and “From a Dry Camel.” He compared us to a couple of literary figures I had failed tests on in school. From what I understood, Lester Bangs hated anything pretentious, especially in rock and roll, which was supposed to be the answer—young people’s answer—to anything and everything in the world that was fake. Dust, to him, was the real thing. It was honest. It was three guys dressed as themselves, being themselves, putting out a huge, raging sound, and saying if you don’t like this, it’s not our problem, ’cause we like it. He called us three young punks.
Lester Bangs was actually a nice, down-to-earth guy. But he had no style, was overweight, and needed a shower badly. He must have seen a little of himself in us, because we got a three-page article in Creem magazine saying we were the next big thing. Rod Stewart was on the cover.
Touring wasn’t all about headlining, encores, and rave reviews by world-famous critics. One night between shows, Kenny Aaronson and I figured we would get back to the hotel room a little early and actually get some sleep. When we opened the door, a putrid smell hit us in the face. It was like someone died in there, but as far as we remembered, everyone the night before left the room alive.
We had been out getting a few beers and we were pretty buzzed. Too buzzed to feel like combing the room for the source of the smell, but not buzzed enough to ignore it for long. So we looked around: the bathroom, the closet, the garbage pail. Then Kenny hit pay dirt. Someone had made a shit right in one of the dresser drawers. We laughed. Sometimes you just had to take some shit.
In the late summer, we had some time off, and I had the phone number of a nice girl named Jill, someone I’d met when we played St. Louis. She told me to come visit her when I had the chance and that her mom’s house was huge with plenty of room. So I booked a flight out of JFK Airport and flew to St. Louis. She drove me back to the house, and we got settled in. I hadn’t eaten much that day, so we thought it would be a good idea to drive over to the nearby supermarket to pick up some beer and food.
We were halfway down the bread aisle when a voice came crackling over the store’s PA system. It wasn’t for a special on Twinkies. It was the manager informing the patrons that a tornado was reported heading in our direction. He instructed us to lie facedown on the floor. Everyone else in the store, including Jill, did it immediately without complaints or confusion. They seemed used to it. It was their “duck and cover.” In Brooklyn, we had blackouts, gang fights, and sanitation strikes, but no tornadoes.
I was down on the floor staring at the sawdust, with only Jill to hang on to. As the wind picked up speed, I looked up and noticed that both doors and all the windows were wide open. I thought about getting up to shut them all, but then I thought again. The wind suddenly picked up, and not by a little. It was tenfold. Cans, bottles, and boxes flew off the shelves like in a horror movie. Glass shattered on the floor, and we covered our eyes while getting pelted with Ding Dongs, Rice Krispies, and Crisco. Ceiling tiles flew like paper plates, and a fan came crashing down. We covered our heads with our arms. I hoped we didn’t become a couple of the items getting swept away into the Midwest plains.
The wind died down and then disappeared almost as fast as it started. The whole episode felt like an hour, but when I looked at the Coca-Cola clock that, miraculously, still hung on the wall, it had been more like three minutes. I was shaken, while Jill and the other customers got up and brushed themselves off matter-of-factly. The aisles were piles of rubble and Cheez Doodles. No one seemed hurt, and Jill suggested that we find a store that wasn’t directly hit to pick up the beer. As we walked out, I asked her why the store owner left the doors and windows open. She explained that was to let the wind pass through the building instead of allowing pressure to build up inside the store. If they remained closed, the building might have lifted right off its foundation. Everyone who lived there knew the drill.
As we drove off, we could see the tornado heading toward the horizon, receding from us like a pillar of fire in the movie The Ten Commandments. The sky was a combination of dark purple and black. Out of all the strange sights I had seen on tour, this was the strangest.
Back in Brooklyn, Dust was outgrowing my parents’ basement. It didn’t seem to us that we were playing louder than before the tour, but maybe Cobo Hall had made us deaf. The doctor who lived next door complained to my mother, and my mother told us to turn it down. We did, but the volume slowly crept back up, and the doctor was getting sick of it. Meanwhile, my mother found a marijuana plant growing in the backyard. Since I never planted it, my guess was that someone else did it as a prank. The plant was near the fence, and someone must have tossed the seeds through the chain links. Whoever did it, my parents had had enough, and we had to find another place to rehearse.
Neil Bogart wanted us to start work on the second Dust album, so in late ’71 we loaded into A&R Studios in Radio City. The less than satisfying sound qualities of the first album were stuck in our heads even as we roamed the country playing to large audiences. It wasn’t like we bitched and moaned about the sound the whole time. It was just a stray comment here and a thought there about a guitar sound on this song, or a snare sound on that song. We had a running checklist, and we really wanted another crack at it.
Going to A&R Studios was a great start. Located in Manhattan on the corner of Fifty-Second Street and Seventh Avenue, A&R was founded in 1958 by Jack Arnold and legendary producer and product of Brooklyn Phil Ramone. The original studio was a few blocks away on West Forty-Eighth Street. Much of the recording equipment there was put on wheels so it could be relocated quickly from room to room. It was in the old building that Ramone produced Frank Sinatra, jazz great Stan Getz, and folk standouts like Peter, Paul and Mary. It was also in the old building where in 1963 Bob Dylan sang “The Times They Are A-Changin’.”
The new home of A&R was a large brick four-story square building. In the few years since relocating, it served as the studio for Paul Simon, Aretha Franklin, Rod Stewart, Stevie Wonder, James Taylor, and countless other superstars of the music world. The Allman Brothers had just recorded there over the summer. Compared with Bell, A&R was much nicer, better equipped, and more professional looking. The performance room was a lot larger, and once we were loaded in and started getting our sound up, we discovered it was also a lot more alive sonically, with a brighter, more powerful tone.
There was no excuse for doing anything less than a stellar job on this album. We had a bigger budget. We had more rehearsal time beforehand and had developed great chops not only from practice but also from all the priceless experience playing on the road. Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise were producing again and had spent weeks riding around on the tour bus ignoring the beer, pranks, and distractions in favor of discussing how they would approach the second album. We even had photographer Bob Gruen documenting the entire album-making process.
Just as the times were changing in 1963, they were changing again as we moved into 1972. Politically, the outcry to end the war in Vietnam reached a peak. Women’s rights, gay rights, and all sorts of human rights were at the forefront. Musically, things were changing rapidly as well. Rock was getting extremely diverse, breaking into subgenres, each with a record label or two or three trying to cash in on it. Lester Bangs had warned us that corporate people already had a complete takeover planned.
As for Dust, we had been like a sponge, traveling around, playing, listening, meeting people, and soaking in just about everything that was going on around us musically—then putting it back out through our own fingers, feet, and throats. That became even more apparent as we began listening to the initial tracking.
“Learning to Die” featured fast riffs and even faster guitar leads, with playing at moments that sounded a bit like Alvin Lee of Ten Years After. “All in All” was influenced by the new Who album Who’s Next, with power chords, funky breaks, and Kenny Aaronson doing a good John Entwistle, with the b
ass taking the lead at times and blowing the doors off. “Suicide” was Black Sabbath influenced, based on a heavy riff. “Ivory” was an instrumental in 5/4 time, with a thunderous drum intro launching into a sonic exploration that reminded some people in the room of the Edgar Winter Group. Kenny’s bass prowess allowed him to match Richie’s guitar licks on this run or that.
But it was on the tracks “I Been Thinkin” and “How Many Horses” that you really heard the changes and diversity. If not outright country songs, both were heavily country influenced. We didn’t sit down one day and say we had to write country songs. It was just in the air. The Byrds had drifted in this direction, and former members Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman took it a step or two further in the band the Flying Burrito Brothers. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young were probably half country. The second side of Led Zeppelin III was a twenty-two-minute, largely acoustic, folk experiment that left a lot of critics pissed off that they didn’t get to hear the next “Whole Lotta Love.”
We were happy with what we heard coming out of the Altec Voice of the Theatre studio monitors. I made sure to use my own drum set with absolutely no tape over any of it. As producers, Richie and Kenny had moved from feeling their way around the recording process to having set techniques that clearly worked. There was a nice mix of clean and powerful on the individual tracks. The music sounded crisp rather than muffled. Kenny and Richie were able to jump from hard rock to country mixes and back again fairly easily, taking notes all over the place on the sound levels.
The project was a tour de force for Kenny Aaronson, who not only had risen to the top of his game as a bass player but also, at the age of nineteen, handled the steel guitar parts like a seasoned professional. Somehow, he just kept getting better.
The album took four and a half weeks to record, a little longer than the first album but still relatively quick in an era when budgets were expanding and timelines were getting dragged out. The album was titled Hard Attack, which described some but certainly not all of the music within. The cover art was a painting called Snow Giants by artist Frank Frazetta depicting three Vikings swinging large blades at each other high atop an icy mountain.
That trio on the icy mountain wasn’t Richie, Kenny, and me. We got along fine. But Hard Attack did not come out of the gate strong when it was released in September ’72. Neil Bogart was looking for an immediate hit, and there was none. We played a few shows to support the album, but there was little of the momentum and buzz from the first LP, and we could feel the wind going out of the sails.
The relationship between the label and the band was strained, but that strain wasn’t routine. Changes were happening at Kama Sutra, and they actually involved members of the Dust team. Neil Bogart was planning to start a new label and was talking to both Richie and Kenny Kerner about producing some of the bands he was working with. One group was the already established Gladys Knight and the Pips. Another was four ambitious guys from the outer boroughs who wore makeup and called themselves KISS. They played shows in the New York area but were unsigned as of yet. Meanwhile, Kenny Aaronson was starting to work with other bands and doing session work.
Dust never officially broke up. There was no formal meeting or conversation. It just ended. It made sense. There was no pressure to support a record that didn’t produce a hit. Kenny Aaronson had emerged as a prodigy. We could see that Richie Wise and Kenny Kerner had talents that went way beyond the ability to make one or two records with a single band. Meanwhile, I had, along with everyone else, learned a lot since the summer of ’69. But I had to figure out what was next for me.
4
THE DUST SETTLES
A few years had passed since my friend Bruce and I had come to blows over Alyson in front of Erasmus High School and I wound up being strip-searched. It seemed like even longer than that. At the time it felt like getting knifed in the back. By 1972, with recording, touring, and now a band breakup under my belt, I saw the whole episode for what it really was: a short break in my sex life, and the kind of thing that happens every day to friends in high school. Bruce was still dealing hash and assorted other substances, but he had a legitimate day job as a bike messenger.
Bruce and I talked about the past and decided to bury the hatchet. After we hung out a few times, it was as if the whole thing never happened. We both wanted to move out of our parents’ houses and decided to split a small basement apartment on Avenue O and East Nineteenth Street in Brooklyn. The apartment had a separate entrance along the side of the building, down a ramp, and right next to a couple of big green garbage bins. It was just like home.
The rent was $100 a month. Not only wasn’t I sure what I was going to do with the rest of my life, I didn’t know where I was going to get my monthly $50. There were no royalties coming from Kama Sutra. Apparently, sales from the two albums were not enough to pay back the advances. So Bruce got me a job as a bike messenger in Manhattan. To make it worthwhile, we would pick up multiple packages at the main office and try to deliver to as many places of business as we could in one run. It was chaotic on the streets of New York. If you biked in the middle of the street, you could get hit by a moving car. If you biked nearer the curb, you could get creamed when someone opened the door of a parked car. You had to run red lights and avoid buses, pedestrians, hot dog carts, and insane cabdrivers.
But I liked it overall. It was good exercise, unsupervised, and paid okay on a good day. Conditions were horrible when it rained, but I stuck with it. Then winter approached and the job became unbearable. Biking into the wind at thirty miles an hour on a thirty-degree day meant a windchill factor of about zero degrees. And when it snowed, the job went from unbearable to impossible. So after a few months, I hung up the bike.
My next job was stock boy at the Waldbaum’s supermarket on Ocean Avenue and Avenue Z, which was near the apartment. The salary was around minimum wage, so while I could just make the rent, I rarely had money for food. Some days I ate just one meal. Other days I didn’t eat at all. I was down to 140 pounds and looking gaunt.
I was looking for a band with a hard edge, hopefully one that was doing something a little different from the mainstream. I knew the New York Dolls from hanging out at Nobody’s, the most happening place on Bleecker Street in the early seventies. It was basically one big room with a bar and large tables in the back. There was no VIP room. Everyone was welcome, but at any given moment, rock gods might walk in: Jimmy Page, Robert Plant, Pete Townshend, or anyone else you could think of. During the summer, the action from Nobody’s spilled out onto Bleecker Street at all hours of the night. The club was kind of a home base for the New York Dolls.
The Dolls wore makeup, high heels, and women’s clothing, as the name suggested, and were tagged as a pioneering glam band. If you closed your eyes and listened, they sounded a little like a rough New York version of the Stones. The blues and R&B influences of performers like Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson were front and center. The lead singer, David Johansen, made sure of that. Throw in the girl-group sound of the sixties, and you had the Dolls. Their first gig was Christmas Eve 1971 at the Endicott Hotel, a homeless shelter. Their first big break came in 1972 when Rod Stewart flew them out to open for him at a concert in London. But while overseas, the Dolls’ drummer, Billy Murcia, passed out and drowned in a bathtub due to mixing drugs and alcohol.
When the band got back to New York, Marty Thau became their manager, and the Dolls got a deal from Mercury Records. They were getting ready to record their first album, and all they needed was a drummer. My girlfriend, Fran, was also friends with the Dolls. She told me David Johansen and guitarist Johnny Thunders wanted me to audition. They liked my playing in Dust and thought there might be a fit. I thought so, too.
There were only two auditions that day. Jerry Nolan was the other one. I was asked to go first. The first song was “Personality Crisis,” which opened with a sort of Jerry Lee Lewis piano part and a straight-ahead beat. It had the feel of a Stones song like “Live with Me.” The song “Pill
s” was a Bo Diddley cover with a walking bass line, 4/4 time, and a rockabilly feel. The final song was “Trash,” which wasn’t by Bo Diddley but had a bit of the Bo Diddley beat, like a fast shuffle. There were also background vocals suggestive of the doo-wop era and David Johansen wailing on the harp when he wasn’t singing.
The song—all the songs—had a raw feel and a tough attitude. Life wasn’t a beautiful dream but a hard reality, and you’d better figure that out fast. There was little or no polish on the chords, the leads, or the words. The songs were also short. The band got in your face for two and a half or three minutes and then got out.
I thought my audition went well. I stayed to watch Jerry Nolan try the same three songs. He played very straightforward: few fills, no rolls, and not a lot of crashes. I kind of kicked myself because I realized that’s what the songs called for. The next day, Fran told me that Jerry got the gig.
One night Bruce and I went to a party at friend’s house. We were up most of the night hanging out, drinking, and smoking pot. I was glad to have a few things to munch on, but pretzel sticks did not make a meal. Around five in the morning, Bruce and I decided to head back to the apartment. Avenue O was dead quiet except for an occasional car. Bruce was just as hungry as I was. We passed in front of a grocery store. It was obviously closed, with the solid metal gate at the front pulled down and padlocked. Leaning against the gate were about a dozen large paper bags filled with freshly baked loaves of bread. A couple of feet away were a few stacked crates filled with bottles of milk ready for the morning rush.