Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  Rosendale was a sleepy rural town of about five thousand located ninety miles north of the city, just off of the New York State Thruway. The town was a bit south of Kingston and a little north of New Paltz, a college town. Rosendale’s claim to fame was a cement plant. Flush with record company money, Estus rented a twenty-room mansion with a swimming pool in the back. When I got there, I thought maybe I had the wrong address. I had my pick from among several bedrooms and took one that could have fit the whole apartment I shared with Bruce. There were no garbage bins within sight or smell.

  Tom, the lead singer, had bought a Jaguar XKE, which was parked outside. His brother, John, not to be outspent, bought an Austin Healey sports car, which he liked to park next to the Jaguar. We were usually flown to gigs, but in case there were no good flights, we had a twelve-passenger Ford Econoline van in the garage. Alongside it was a truck for the roadies and equipment. The four of us in the band were still on salary and were given a $100-a-week raise. All this overkill was nothing unusual. Record companies were throwing money at bands with a shot at being the next Three Dog Night. If you didn’t climb the charts, you were dropped and used as a tax write-off. It was all just business.

  I was bored out of my mind. There are only so many laps you can do in a pool, test-drives you can take around the block, and conversations you can have about where you’re going to put your Grammy for best album. The one place I felt at home was a bar in town, about three miles from the mansion. Bartenders at the Well gave us free drinks because we were local celebrities and practically the house band. We did our warm-up sets at the Well before hitting the road to tour.

  For a modest place, the bar had a real presence on the circuit. While we were there, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, and several other prominent blues artists stopped in and performed for food and gas money on their way down to New York City. But even on a good night, the place closed around two o’clock, and then the whole party usually relocated to the Estus palace. I would normally wake up in the afternoon and find dozens of locals—having partied with us the night before—asleep on couches, deck chairs, and in otherwise empty bedrooms.

  But the well was beginning to run dry. The Estus album was dead on arrival. Sales were weak, it didn’t make the Billboard 200, and you could spin the FM radio dial all day long and not hear any of the songs. It was the summer of ’73, and other forms of music were taking off, including glam rock and disco. My friends from Dust were part of it.

  Kenny Aaronson played bass in a band called Stories, who covered a song called “Brother Louie,” about a white guy dating a black girl. It went to number one in the US and stayed on the charts for eighteen weeks. Kenny probably played more notes in a few measures of any Dust song than he played in the entirety of “Brother Louie,” but the bass part he laid down gave it a funk-soul feel that helped put it over the top.

  The self-titled album KISS was scheduled to come out on Neil Bogart’s new Casablanca label in early ’74. Kenny Kerner and Richie Wise were the producers. The band’s stage makeup was more pronounced now. More important, they were beginning to get some media attention and a fan base.

  I was restless by the late summer of ’73 but glad to play a show with Estus on my home turf at the Academy of Music on East Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. The New York Dolls, who over the past year had become the center of attention on the New York scene, came down to watch the show. Their self-titled album—the one I was almost a part of—made it to 116 on the Billboard 200. It was produced by Todd Rundgren, former guitarist for the Nazz, a psychedelic and garage-rock band from the sixties. Rundgren was driven half crazy by the Dolls’ overall sloppiness and wound up taking a hands-off approach to the sound and mix.

  The Dolls’ reckless attitude, both onstage and off, led to extreme reactions. In a 1973 Creem magazine poll, they were voted both the best new group and the worst new group. Robert Christgau in Rolling Stone raved about the Dolls, while Ben Edmonds of Creem called them “the most walked-out-on band in the history of show business.” Everyone, more or less, had a good point.

  The Dolls’ second album, Too Much Too Soon, had been out for just a couple of months. Shadow Morton of Shangri-Las fame produced it, and the evidence was all over the album. Morton had produced mid-sixties teen hits like “Leader of the Pack.” Production on the second Dolls album was not as raunchy as the first. There were cute sound effects used here and there and a lot of female background vocals. While debate about the band’s merits raged on, Too Much Too Soon was too little too late. The album barely cracked the Billboard 200. Johnny Thunders was on heroin, and Jerry Nolan wasn’t far behind.

  Johnny was a very nervous person when he was not high. Once he was high, he seemed calm, collected, and focused. Almost a normal guy and fun to be around. It was an impossible dilemma.

  I liked to think that the dope explained some or all of Jerry’s behavior around me. After the Dolls passed on me, I remained friendly with the band, but Jerry and I had a love/hate relationship that was heavier on the hate. One night I went to the Dolls’ loft to jam with Johnny Thunders and their bassist, Arthur “Killer” Kane. The drum set, of course, was Jerry’s, and I noticed the skins were extremely worn. About four songs in, the snare skin broke. The next time I ran into Jerry, he demanded, “Where’s my money?”

  “Wait, did you lend me money?” It had been awhile, and I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “You broke my skin, and you’re gonna pay. I want my money, or next time it’s gonna be just you and me.” Jerry had a reputation as a tough guy, but he was about average for almost any neighborhood in Brooklyn. The thing was, if he hadn’t threatened me, I might have paid for the skin. It was only a few bucks.

  “That skin was ready to break the next time someone breathed on it. So guess what, Jerry: I ain’t paying for shit.”

  I didn’t feel we were going to mix it up, but at the same time there was always that small chance. Whenever we ran into each other, we were both a little wary.

  Now at the Academy, as I slogged my way through the set with Estus, I looked over at Johnny Thunders, who was watching from the side of the stage. Johnny looked right back at me and shook his head like he knew what I was thinking: I’m wasting my time. The Dolls had practically every problem under the sun. They were a train wreck. But when they took the stage, it was chaos and energy, the way rock and roll was meant to be. When Columbia Records pulled the plug on Estus a few weeks later, it felt like a mercy killing. The guys in the band decided to move back to Missouri to play shows and work on their next album independently. They still needed a drummer and still wanted me, enough to offer $400 a week plus any American car I wanted. I thanked them but told them I didn’t want to relocate to the Midwest. I couldn’t see myself living in Missouri. I could barely stand Rosendale. I was looking to take the first bus back to New York City.

  My head popped up early the next morning. I threw all my belongings into a pillowcase and started walking toward the outskirts of New Paltz college to find the nearest bus stop. Because of the college, there were buses going back and forth to the city all the time. As I walked off the front lawn and into the street, one of Estus’s roadies drove his car alongside me and rolled down the window. He wasn’t surprised I was calling it a day, because everyone in that house knew I was miserable. But he gave it one last shot, telling me the fans in the Midwest were great. He was right about that. But I knew I had to get back to New York City.

  While I was living in Rosendale, Bruce started seeing a girl who owned a small house in Brooklyn on Twenty-Eighth Street and Avenue D. There was no point to staying in that dingy basement apartment when you had a beautiful woman and a nice home somewhere else. So he took his stash along with a bag of clothes and moved in with his girlfriend.

  When I got back from Rosendale, I spent one night in the apartment alone and realized not only couldn’t I afford the $100 a month in rent, but also I didn’t want to even if I could. No one else did either. I couldn’t find a ro
ommate, and after spending my summer in a mansion, I wasn’t thrilled about sleeping on a mattress in a cold, empty shit hole. When I told Joel upstairs about my situation, he offered to have me move in with him. He had a second bedroom, and I could pay him the same $50 a month I paid downstairs with Bruce.

  Moving in with Joel was paradise compared with the basement. No more garbage bins. I had a regular key to a regular bolt lock instead of a padlock. There was heat, and not just the excess heat from a boiler down the hall. And although we didn’t have an ocean view, we had a view of Ocean Avenue. Joel was cool with my friends coming over, even if we threw firecrackers and ash cans off the roof.

  Joel would smoke a little pot to take off the edge but was not into anything hard. Heroin addiction ran wild among American forces in Vietnam. Tens of thousands of vets were returning unable to function without shooting up daily. I was glad Joel avoided that fate. But it wasn’t as if he’d escaped clean.

  Some nights I awoke to the sound of long groans, which usually morphed into bloodcurdling screams. It was Joel in the next room having flashbacks of fighting in the jungle. I would always get up, walk over to his door, and ask him if he needed anything, and he would always tell me no, thanks.

  5

  PUNK, PAIN, AND WAYNE

  Max’s Kansas City was the happening place in New York in the early to mid-seventies. The club was located on the ground floor of a narrow five-story, turn-of-the-century commercial building on Park Avenue South just a couple blocks north of Union Square Park. The club really had two incarnations. When Mickey Ruskin first opened the place in 1965, it quickly became the haunt for artists and writers, including Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs of the so-called Beat Generation.

  Soon after, Andy Warhol and his crowd followed, which transformed the club into an important rock venue and hangout. Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, David Bowie, and Aerosmith all played to intimate but wild audiences. If you were there on New Year’s Day 1974, you would have seen Bob Marley and the Wailers kick off a world tour by opening for an up-and-coming Columbia Records artist named Bruce Springsteen.

  By 1974, when I started hanging out there a lot, you could argue that a third incarnation of Max’s had begun. New groups with a different sound—different from what came before and even from one another—were in and around the club, onstage, in the back, outside, wherever. The Dolls were the first and most obvious band on the list, having been around since ’71 and releasing two major label albums. But even the shortest list had to include the Patti Smith Group, Television, the Heartbreakers, and Blondie. Deborah Harry, the striking bleached-blonde lead singer of Blondie, was a waitress at Max’s. And no short list of the new bands could possibly be complete without the Ramones.

  I had first met John Cummings when he turned up at Cafe Wha? to see an early Dust show. Now he called himself Johnny Ramone, after the band he had helped form. All four members took on the same stage surname as a tribute to Paul McCartney’s pseudonym, Paul Ramon, back from when the Beatles were the Silver Beetles. They were all from the nice middle-class, largely Jewish, neighborhood in Queens known as Forest Hills.

  With all the single-family homes and upscale apartment buildings going up since World War II, there wasn’t much forest left, but there were still a few hills. In Brooklyn, we thought of Forest Hills as the suburbs. It was the home of tennis’s US Open and to luxury European-style condominiums built in the 1920s along the Long Island Railroad to cater to the fat cats busy making a killing on Wall Street before the crash of 1929. Musically, there was something in the water in Forest Hills, but until that point, you couldn’t say the water was hard. Burt Bacharach, Paul Simon, and Art Garfunkel grew up there, but they didn’t look or sound anything like the Ramones. No one did.

  In 1974, the Ramones started playing clubs in the New York area including Max’s and, especially CBGB. CBGB stood for country, bluegrass, and blues, but there was less of those types of music at CB’s in 1974 than there was heavy metal in Burt Bacharach’s backlist. Musician and promoter Hilly Kristal had opened the club the year before and had the vision to just let it become what it wanted to become.

  When the Ramones took the stage, there was no bullshit. It was four seemingly street kids in jeans and T-shirts. Their hair was long, but not like a hippie’s. Their songs lasted two minutes—maybe two and a half. There was no milking it between songs. Just a few words, then “OneTwoThreeFour!” and on to the next. The songs were kicks to the chest, with straight-ahead pounding drums, fast downstroke power chords on guitar, and a driving bass. The vocals were fifties rock on speed, sometimes with an English accent. There were harmonies but no shrill screams or falsettos. The lyrics told simple stories of beating up a neighborhood brat, sniffing glue, being afraid to go down in the basement. A whole show was fifteen, maybe twenty minutes, and if that was too short? Fuck you.

  But the band needed work. They were not exactly trying to be polished, but at times they were flat-out disorganized. The songs could have been tighter. Sometimes they would make a mistake near the beginning of a song and start the count over again. Sometimes they would argue with one another onstage. You got the feeling you weren’t watching a performance so much as a rehearsal.

  The bassist, Doug Colvin, was known as Dee Dee Ramone. Dee Dee was very friendly and outgoing whenever I ran into him. He started out as the lead singer and bassist but had trouble doing both at once. The original drummer, a tall gawky-looking kid named Jeffrey Hyman, called himself Joey Ramone. Joey was more introspective. Like Dee Dee, he also had trouble playing and singing, so he became the lead singer. While auditioning drummers to help out the band, their friend Thomas Erdelyi realized he was the right guy for the job and became Tommy Ramone.

  The third incarnation of Max’s Kansas City didn’t have an exact date or a formal name, but some people began to call it punk rock. Or simply punk.

  One night in 1974, I was having a few drinks at Max’s, and Wayne County stopped by my booth. I had never actually met him, but everyone knew Wayne as the house DJ at Max’s. He had one hell of a backstory.

  He was born Wayne Rogers in Georgia and moved to New York City in 1968 as a young man looking to meet the boys. He was a regular at the Stonewall Inn and was part of the famous riot in 1969, when the police raided the place for no valid reason, and the modern gay rights era began. He plunged into stage acting and was cast by Andy Warhol in Pork, which had a successful run in New York, then in London. His stage name became Wayne County, a tribute to Detroit.

  Back in New York, Wayne formed and fronted a campy rock band called Queen Elizabeth. With a transvestite lead singer, Queen Elizabeth may have been a first. My old friend and nemesis Jerry Nolan was the drummer. David Bowie was a fan of Wayne’s and got him signed to his management company, MainMan Artistes. They put together an elaborate stage show, but there was no album to show for it.

  And here was Wayne County sitting across from me as I drank a vodka martini and wondered what the occasion was. He was in outrageous attire, but the male sort: denim from head to toe and a big pimp hat with a wide brim. He told me he was putting together a band called Wayne County and the Backstreet Boys, and they were looking for a drummer. By the end of my vodka martini, I was a Backstreet Boy.

  The other Backstreet Boys in the initial lineup were Jeff Salem on lead guitar, Michael Geary on rhythm guitar, and his brother, Eugene Geary, on bass. Wayne was still signed to MainMan, which was run by Tony Defries along with his close friend and roommate, photographer Leee Black Childers. The guys in the band, myself included, were happy to be with management just to eat. None of us ever had any money, and MainMan had a running tab at Max’s. That tab ran a marathon.

  MainMan also paid for Wayne and Leee’s duplex apartment on Fifty-Eighth Street right off of Second Avenue. That location was prime all by itself. But because of the girl I was going out with, it was even better. I’d first met Marion about eight years earlier when I was fourteen. Fred and I used to go to our friend Paul Baxter
’s house near Church Avenue and Beverly Road in Brooklyn to jam with Paul and his brother, Michael. The Baxter brothers played guitar and organ, so they were a good match for the Bell brothers on guitar and drums.

  The Baxters had a little sister in the fourth grade named Jodie. Her best friend was a cute redhead named Marion. Jodie and Marion were our fan club. Any chance they got, they watched the Baxter-Bell four cover Beatles, Stones, and Who songs. When they got old enough to take the subway, they would come out to see Dust play at the Flatbush Terrace.

  Jodie’s parents were progressive. Marion’s family was traditional Irish-Catholic and sent their daughter to Catholic school. In those days, when people met other people, they would ask, “What are you?” They didn’t mean Democrat or Republican, Virgo or Capricorn, Mets or Yankees fan. They were asking for your religion or ethnicity. When Marion met Jodie and asked her what she was, Jodie didn’t know what she meant. They became friends and stayed that way.

  Marion’s parents had a certain perception of entertainers. They were friends with Sammy Spear, Jackie Gleason’s orchestra leader. The story they heard through the grapevine was that musicians were very nervous people who drank and did drugs. So they didn’t necessarily want their daughter going out with a guy who was not only a musician but also older. On top of that, they thought I was Jewish.

  Marion and I remained friends for several years. We liked the same music and had the same taste in clothing. We always got along. By 1974, with Marion graduating high school, we became an item.

  Jodie became the governess for a wealthy family who lived only a couple of blocks away from Wayne and Leee’s duplex. The family would spend weekends, holidays, and summers at their home in the country. They knew that, while they were away, Jodie would have Marion and me stay over to help watch the house. They just didn’t know the full extent of our activities. We had the run of the house. Wayne, dressed in his everyday straight clothing, would arrive about ten minutes after the family left. Some of the Backstreet Boys would usually follow. We would empty the liquor cabinet and then work our way down to the wine cellar.