by Marky Ramone
Roxy’s tip money paid for the booze. Roxy and I liked our booze. Until Roxy came along, I didn’t have a friend who was into drinking like I was. I would hole up in her apartment for days on end drinking whatever she had around. It wasn’t just me. The apartment was party central. On any given night, members of the Dolls, the Ramones, and Blondie would stop by. There was always plenty of pot and pills to go with the alcohol.
My contribution to the apartment was a top-of-the-line stereo. At all hours of the night, the stereo blasted out a mix of Bowie, Roxy Music, and Sparks. Also on the playlist was the Ramones’ self-titled album, which had just been released. It was “Blitzkrieg Bop” till four or five every morning. When the upstairs neighbors pounded on the door and complained around midnight, our concession was to wind it down around two or three. Our friends without a reason to get up in the morning eventually got up in the afternoon and got more pot, pills, and booze, and it all seemed routine. Then one night Roxy introduced me to Richard Hell.
Richard was a wiry guy with thick, wavy dark hair. He had been a major part of the New York scene for a couple of years. From a well-educated family in Kentucky, Richard met Tom Verlaine in a Delaware boarding school in 1969. The two left school and headed for New York, where they formed the Neon Boys. Richard played bass and sang. Tom played guitar. When they held auditions for a second guitarist, Chris Stein (later of Blondie) showed up. So did Doug Colvin, who later became Dee Dee Ramone. But Richard Lloyd got the job.
The Neon Boys changed their name to Television in 1973. They had a very original sound. The guitar was melodic, but the chording and progressions were a bit dissonant. The vocals were weird, poetic, and a little screechy, but they somehow sat just right in the music. It was Richard Hell and Tom who convinced Hilly Kristal to build a stage for bands at CBGB. It was that stage where people started to tune into Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, Patti Smith, and the Ramones.
Television had a record deal, but Richard and Tom were not getting along. Tom, Richard told me, took complete control and wouldn’t put any of his songs in the set or on the forthcoming album. In any case, Television’s debut album, Marquee Moon, was being recorded without Richard Hell. For a short while, Richard joined forces with ex-Dolls members Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan to form the Heartbreakers.
The Heartbreakers’ most popular song was “Chinese Rocks,” written mostly by Dee Dee Ramone. As the story goes, Johnny Ramone refused to record a track obviously about shooting heroin. So Dee Dee took it to Richard, who added a couple of verses. But there was some sort of competition going on in the band between Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell, and Richard’s time in the Heartbreakers lasted just a little longer than a good fix.
When Roxy introduced me to Richard one night at her apartment during a hell of a party, he was in the process of putting together a new band and looking for a drummer. He invited me down to Daily Planet rehearsal studios on West Thirtieth Street in Manhattan, and I decided it was worth checking out. At bare minimum, Richard was an interesting-looking guy. He wore his hair kind of spiky. I didn’t know if it was intentional or just the result of not shampooing much. His jeans and T-shirt were old and falling apart and held together by a bunch of safety pins. It was either the end of a wardrobe or the beginning of a new look.
When I got to Daily Planet the next day, I met the guitarist, Bob Quine. Bob had a reputation as a very original and creative musician, and he didn’t waste any time showing me what he and Richard were cooking up.
Bob played like he was from another planet. The chords and scales were bizarre. I heard something like rock and roll but filtered through a futuristic time warp. I would hear a blues chord but with one note in a strange place. I would hear a blues progression but with a strange detour. The leads contained notes that almost belonged, but by the time you started really thinking about it, he was on to some other strange experiment. Bob’s playing was surreal, like the sonic version of a Salvador Dalí painting.
I wasn’t told to listen to a demo tape and copy something some other drummer had conceived. Instead, I sat down right there on the drum set in Daily Planet, on planet earth, and started playing along with Bob’s guitar, helping fill in a partially blank canvas. In fact, the song was called “Blank Generation.”
I had never heard the song before. Considering where I hung out and performed it with them, maybe I should have. Richard Hell had written it with the Heartbreakers. It wasn’t on an album I could go out and buy, and I didn’t recall hearing it at CBGB or Max’s, and even if I had heard it, it was probably lost somewhere between the stage and a vodka martini. So I followed along. It was a simple descending chord progression—C, B, G#, G—with a loose shuffle feel.
As much as I was concentrating on getting the right time, attitude, and accents that make the difference between an okay song and a good song, I was actually struck by the lyrics. This didn’t happen to me every day. In a lot of situations, I was back there doing my thing, hopefully doing it really well, and barely concerned with what was actually being said. But these lyrics said something. They spoke for me. I spent my childhood trying to escape the rigid ways of the World War II generation. But I wasn’t really part of the Woodstock generation, either. I was somewhere in between. I couldn’t exactly claim to have a plan in life. And I could imagine a lot of my friends feeling the same way.
Richard’s voice wasn’t what a vocal coach or a music critic would consider polished. He sometimes half-sang, half-spoke, and both halves were as uneven and spiky as his hair. Singing was not even what he was shooting for. It sounded more like a lament. But he wasn’t just some guy complaining that he couldn’t pay the rent or there were too many muggers roaming the streets of New York. It was a poetic lament. It was intellectual. What he had was punk intellect. He was a punk Bob Dylan.
After a few minutes, Bob, Richard, and I launched into another chord progression Bob was working on. This one had no history. We could make it into absolutely anything we wanted. What struck me at that point—more than the mastery Bob had over his Fender Stratocaster and the whammy bar he used the way a fine sculptor uses a knife—was that this wasn’t an audition. Even if it had been, it was over. We were a band working on songs. Sparks were flying.
What also struck me was Bob’s maturity. He had lost a lot of hair, and if I was twenty-three, he might have been thirty-three. But that wasn’t what caught my attention. Bob seemed more like fifty. He was composed and focused. Without having to state it, he was the adult in the room. In the circles I traveled, there were plenty of rooms but very few adults.
Bob’s chords went way up the neck of the Strat. Everything I had absorbed about rock and roll told me that after the third or fourth ascending chord it was time to go back down and resolve the phrase. Bob’s progressions kept going up. It produced kind of a manic, out-of-control feeling, and I pushed the already driving beat in the spirit of the thing. Meanwhile, Richard started singing some lyrics he had already written for the song when he was with the Heartbreakers. I couldn’t make out all the words, but the title was unforgettable: “Love Comes in Spurts.”
After the first rehearsal, Richard came up with the name Voidoids. I liked it right away. It was different and worked well with the bizarre sound. Not to mention the theme of a song like “Blank Generation.” The three of us continued rehearsing at Daily Planet, and sparks continued to fly. But after a few rehearsals, Richard thought the band could use a second guitar player. It had nothing to do with Bob not cutting it. Bob was cutting it into fine pieces.
Richard simply thought a second guitarist could make things even more interesting. It was also possible that a second guitarist would take some weight not only off Bob but also off Richard himself. Richard’s bass playing was solid and minimalist. He never played one more note than the music called for. Still, he had to do that and sing at the same time, pretty much the same burden that pushed Dee Dee out of his early role of lead singer in the Ramones.
We ran an ad in the Village Vo
ice. The Voice was the first successful alternative weekly in the country. It covered the cultural revolution of the sixties from the trenches and served the gay community before anyone ever heard of Stonewall. Our friend from the Dust days, Lester Bangs, was one of dozens of well-known writers from the ranks of New Journalism who wrote for the Voice. The paper covered the emerging New York punk scene front and center. Meanwhile, the back of the Voice was famous for having hundreds upon hundreds of sex ads and musical notices, and ours that week was spotted by the right musician.
Ivan Julian was the first person to respond and the first to audition. He was a young guy with curly hair. When Ivan walked into our room at Daily Planet, Richard was nodding off in a corner. I was guzzling vodka out of a bottle, and there were two girls hanging out by the drums. I didn’t know either of their names. Bob was the only normal-looking guy in the room, probably because he was the only normal guy in the room.
Bob immediately took charge of the audition. Watching Ivan was a little like watching myself weeks earlier. Bob spent a few minutes with Ivan showing him the guitar parts. Bob was calm, patient, and methodical about it. The noise from two guitars woke up Richard, and soon he and I joined in.
Ivan’s playing had more of a straightforward rock approach than Bob’s artsy one. Ivan would play the same chord but in a standard position, often lower on the guitar neck. There were rarely any strange notes and no whammy bar. There could have been a sonic conflict, but there wasn’t. As it turned out, the two styles complemented each other. By a happy accident, there was a kind of off-color harmony. Ivan’s playing was anchored to my drums and Richard’s stripped-down bass, with Bob free to fly circles around the ship. With Ivan on board, Richard Hell and the Voidoids were complete.
After experimenting with a few songs, we took a short break and talked about music. Richard had been taken by the rawness of the MC5 and the Stooges. Lyrically, he was influenced by Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation that began to emerge with the publication of On the Road in 1957. He also loved surrealist art and the decadent movement poems of Arthur Rimbaud and others from the late nineteenth century. He was born Richard Meyers, but when you mixed all that together and stirred it with Bob Dylan’s attitude, you got Richard Hell.
Bob listened to jazz and blues. The way it all oozed out of his Strat was his own invention. Ivan was from the Washington, DC, area and favored a lot of heavy rock. His eyes lit up when I told him I was once in a band called Dust. He had actually seen us play a few years earlier near his hometown. Oddly, Ivan remembered the local radio commercial promoting the concert, daring the audience to come see and hear the biggest bass drum in rock. And all this time, I thought they came to see the band.
Over the next few weeks, we got into a rhythm of rehearsing, writing, sleeping, and doing it all over again. I would usually start the day with a few shots at Roxy’s place and then walk over to Bob’s apartment on St. Marks Place off Second Avenue. Bob’s seniority expressed itself in various ways. First of all, he had a real apartment. Other musicians either had no official residence, or they had a rat-trap hole-in-the-wall filled with milk crates and roaches, both the crawling and marijuana kinds. Bob had real furniture where we sat and listened to Dave Brubeck and Miles Davis.
Bob’s drug was Valium. I understood that. He had a real intellect, a real analytical mind. I could tell there was a lot of experience, disappointment, and misgivings pent up inside him. He released that by playing guitar, but he couldn’t play guitar all the time. So a couple of Valium and a side of Stan Getz would get him through whatever his Stratocaster couldn’t.
On an ambitious night, Bob and I would walk to rehearsal on West Thirtieth Street. The other nights we would take the R train. After rehearsal we usually took it back to Richard’s apartment on Tenth Street between First Avenue and Avenue A in the East Village. Richard had a musician’s apartment. The place was on the edge of Alphabet City, for many years the poorest working-class neighborhood of the Lower East Side, but now mostly an area for the wayward and drug-addicted seeking low-rent shelter.
Richard’s rent was $55 a month, or $45 less than what Bruce and I paid to live in a Brooklyn basement storage compartment and steal phone service. It was worth every dollar of the fifty-five. Gangs roamed outside. After walking up four flights of stairs to the top floor, you entered the battered metal door of the rear apartment. The front room was a narrow kitchen, and the first thing you noticed was an old cast-iron, claw-foot bathtub. You could almost see and hear a bunch of unwashed little kids from the 1880s sitting naked in the tub while their mother poured water from a large kettle heated on a coal stove.
The floors were raw, unvarnished wood that creaked when you walked them. There were enough cracks and holes in the plaster walls to make you think someone had started to demolish them but then for some reason stopped. Behind the kitchen was a narrow living room with cardboard boxes housing Richard’s numerous books and albums. Off to the side was a closet with a toilet in it. In the original apartment, it was a chamber pot, but someone in the 1920s had decided to modernize. Richard’s bedroom consisted of a bare floor with a mattress and a bass guitar usually lying on it. For good measure, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg lived downstairs, maybe close enough to hear the thump of Richard’s bass when he messed with it.
There was a second, tiny bedroom with a bunk bed in it. That’s where Ivan and I would crash whenever we couldn’t make the walk back to wherever. It was a little like sharing a bunk bed with my brother, Fred, staring at the ceiling and falling asleep to the sound of music in my head. Here on Tenth Street, the apartment faced the interior lot and was high above the rear yards. There was strangely some peace and quiet and a nice breeze running through, in the middle of chaos.
One night at CBGB, Richard introduced us to Terry Ork. Terry was a fun guy with a beard and mustache. We all knew who Terry was and how he figured into the birth of the new music scene downtown. He started out making silk-screen prints for Andy Warhol and hoped to follow in his footsteps by grooming the next Velvet Underground. Terry helped Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd when they formed Television and ultimately managed the band, which, for a while, had Richard Hell in it. As the band got its act together, Richard learned to play the bass. Terry promised CBGB owner Hilly Kristal he would make good money at the bar if he let Television play there, and he made good on that promise. After that, Terry effectively became the booking agent for CBGB.
Parlaying his presence in the New York punk world, Terry now ran a small independent label called Ork Records. He and Richard, of course, had some history, and he asked Richard if we’d be interested in recording a single—two songs, with an A side and a B side. Richard quickly bargained him up to a three-song extended play, or EP, record. Without much time together as a unit and not having played our first gig, we now had a small but very real record deal.
Ivan more or less moved into Richard’s apartment. It wasn’t like he didn’t know what he was getting into, but there were always new surprises. Sometimes Ivan walked into the kitchen and found Richard asleep in the bathtub. At least once Richard had been in there all night through to the morning and was slumped over with his mouth wide open and an arm dangling out haphazardly. He looked comatose. There were empty bags of heroin on the floor, so death was not out of the question. Ivan shook Richard, who barely awoke just in time for Ivan not to call 911.
When Richard wasn’t nearly drowning in it, the kitchen bathtub served as a table. With a few pieces of scrap wood laid across the top, it was perfect for sitting around and cutting up meat, potatoes, or smack. The people doing the cutting were Johnny Thunders, Jerry Nolan, Heartbreakers guitarist Walter Lure, and Dee Dee Ramone. The real Hell’s Kitchen was a neighborhood of tenements and mobsters in Manhattan’s West Thirties and Forties. But this Hell’s kitchen gave it a run for its money.
We recorded the EP at Plaza Sound, on the eighth floor of Radio City Music Hall. I was hyped up, not only about the opportunity but by our producer, Craig Leon, who onl
y months before had produced the first Ramones album. I hadn’t recorded in a while and was a little anxious. Roxy was with me and slipped me a Valium. It was a 2.5-milligram white pill. I never drank before playing and wasn’t sure this was the right time for my first-ever Valium. It was like spinning a roulette wheel. But it got me loose, took the edge off, and most importantly didn’t ruin my focus. I felt great. It was like taking a page out of Bob Quine’s book.
We worked on “Blank Generation,” “Another World,” and “Gotta Lose.” The studio drum set was a 1967 blue-sparkle Ludwig with Paiste cymbals, and I felt right at home. Craig let the band do what we wanted to do. He just went with what sounded good to all of us. The constant rehearsals paid off. We finished all the basic tracks in one day.
We sometimes partied at Terry’s apartment, a huge loft on East Broadway in Chinatown. Richard Lloyd had once lived in the small front room. One night the whole band was there, and Ivan got really drunk. He staggered to the toilet, first pulling his pants halfway down to pee, then realizing he had to throw up. He knelt down before the porcelain god, as they say, and let the booze out the way it came in. If there is one thing everyone has in common in that situation, it’s lingering there a while to see if the episode is really over and just to catch your breath.
Before Ivan could do any of that, he felt a pair of hands around his belt pulling his pants the rest of the way down. It was Terry, the master of the house, trying to get into the Voidoid. Sick as he was, Ivan sprang to his feet screaming. When I saw Ivan stomping through the living room trying to wipe his mouth and pull his pants up at the same time, I knew I should leave with him and talk him down. He had his pants up by the time we hit the sidewalk on East Broadway.