Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  I didn’t get called until 1973. A bus from the army induction center stopped in front of my building on Ocean Avenue at five in the morning, and a sergeant came pounding on my basement door. I had been asleep for only about two hours, and it wasn’t even good sleep. How could it be? The last person I spoke to before crashing that night was my friend Joel from upstairs who was going to coach me on avoiding Vietnam. He had friends up in Canada.

  Whether Joel could or couldn’t help, no one could keep me off that bus. As I boarded, I spotted half a dozen guys I had gone to Erasmus High School with. None of the guys I spoke to had traveled much beyond Brooklyn in the three years since graduation, while I was glad I had the opportunity to see the country with Dust. Touring was fine as long as it wasn’t a tour of duty. One of the guys was talking about how we could still beat the Vietcong and how much he wanted to get over there and get a confirmed kill. “Great,” I told him. “You can take my spot.”

  They took us to the armory at Fort Hamilton, a hundred-and-fifty-year-old building off the Belt Parkway. I was in good condition and passed the physical with no problem. That was thanks in large part to drumming. Drumming was my life, and now drumming could get me killed. But the months afterward went by without my getting a draft notice. Fewer and fewer men were getting called. American involvement in Vietnam was winding down. We began pulling out that year, and by ’75 were out completely. I guess I was lucky enough.

  I didn’t have all the details on the other Ramones. Joey’s situation, though, was obvious. He was a 4-F poster boy. Dee Dee could have talked his way out of the draft, whether he was trying to or not. As for John, his lottery number was high, and so he was probably not called. We all knew that even if he had been, he would have found a way out of it, no question. For all his rah-rah jingoism bullshit, he would have come up with a limp, a phobia, a hangnail, a doctor’s note, or whatever it would have taken to stay out of the jungle. John talked the talk, and that’s where it ended.

  Berlin’s inheritance from World War II was still in evidence: building lots here and there that remained piles of rubble even after all this time. War was the gift that kept on giving. Buildings, like people, were created painstakingly one at a time and then obliterated all together in a few mindless hours. Kurt Vonnegut wrote about carpet bombing in Dresden so intense the heat melted stone clock towers, marking the moment the temperature took its toll. Superheated air rose up in a column, sucking in cars, people, and trees, feeding the fire still more. With a history like that, no one could expect Berlin or Dee Dee to avoid residual damage.

  The Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church was maybe the best example of a monument to ruin. We walked around the building, which was badly damaged in a 1943 Allied bombing raid and left largely as is. There were bullet holes, charred masonry, missing stones. The belfry had been replaced by a modern-looking one, but the various spires were no more. It looked kind of macabre, like a naked torso with its arms and legs cut off, left to die.

  As Dee Dee and I approached the Brandenburg Gate, we realized that was as far as we were going to get. We couldn’t get to the famous structure itself because it was on the other side of the Berlin Wall. But there was plenty of activity on our side. There were street vendors selling a wide variety of Nazi daggers, and Dee Dee had a field day. He was thrilled to pick up a dagger made especially for members of the Third Reich. The Nazi Party logo was right there on the brown handle. But the big thrill was the etching on the ten-inch-long carbon steel blade: Alles für Deutschland. Everything for Germany. The dagger, however, was only a hundred deutschmarks.

  A few steps to our left, Dee Dee spotted a Hitler Youth dagger with the etching: Blut und Ehre! Blood and Honor! The blade was short and compact—something thoughtful for that growing young Nazi in the family. “Yeah, why not,” he said. “One for the road.”

  After dark, we found a stretch of the Berlin Wall with stairs. We followed the stairs up to the top of the wall. From that location, we were able to peer through the barbed wire and see the other side, into East Berlin. The difference was stark. East Berlin was bleak. It was a black-and-white and gray world across the road below, just five hundred feet from where we were standing. The buildings were large, repetitive, boxlike structures, colorless, looking like they all came from the same mold. The closest thing we had in America to these buildings was prisons. Even the air that drifted across the wall from the east side seemed sterile and ominous.

  The wall at this spot was wide enough to walk along. But as soon as we did, a bunch of searchlights from the other side lit us up, practically blinding us. We picked up the pace a little and the searchlights followed us. It was eerie. Whoever they were, they could see us a lot better than we could see them. To us, they were faceless communists existing in a kind of hell right here on earth. To them, we were targets. It was time to get down off the wall.

  We kept walking and found a bar a few blocks away. It wasn’t a touristy place. It was filled mostly with middle-aged men who looked like they worked for a living, probably in the trades. Dee Dee and I took a small table and ordered a couple of beers. He was excited we would be in Amsterdam in a couple of days. Most drugs were legal there, and what the Dutch lacked in daggers, they easily made up for in hashish.

  As he rambled on about how he wanted to get high there and go watch some freaky movies, I noticed Dee Dee’s facial expression turn a little annoyed. He seemed distracted, stopped talking for a few seconds, and glanced back over his shoulder.

  “These guys are talking shit about us,” Dee Dee said. He was referring to a group of six men sitting at the table next to us. They were blue-collar guys in their forties with a couple pitchers of beer on the table. We looked American and were speaking English, so they had no idea Dee Dee understood every last word they spoke in German—probably better than they did.

  “What kind of shit?” I asked.

  “They called us a couple of American faggots,” Dee Dee said. “They said you liked to go on top and me on the bottom.”

  “Yeah? Anything else?”

  “Well, we should take these US pins we’re wearing and shove them up each other’s ass.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” I said.

  I was a little pissed off but not exactly trembling with rage. Sometimes you just had to laugh it off and let it go. But then Dee Dee stood up and turned around to face them. He ranked on them in German. It was like he was fourteen again, not missing a beat between a Berlin schoolyard a dozen years ago and this very moment. I couldn’t understand what he was saying, but the harshness of the German language worked well in a barroom confrontation. I did understand one word Dee Dee used—arschloch! In the fatherland it meant asshole!

  The looks on the faces of the Germans was mixed. There was anger over the German obscenity-laced tirade Dee Dee was shoving up their collective rear ends. But there was also a strange look of something like betrayal. The deal was supposed to be they got to say whatever they wanted to say as if they were making fun of characters on a TV screen. But Dee Dee stepped out of the screen. And I stepped out with him.

  “Fuck you guys!” I said. “Fuck you all!”

  It wasn’t exactly German, but it was universal. Although the wiry guy in the denim vest stood up first by a hair, they all stood up within a second or two and we heard that also universal sound of a bar table sliding around as beer glasses fell to the floor. A burly German in a wool sweater cursed us out in a booming voice about two octaves lower than Dee Dee’s. Dee Dee’s voice didn’t match his looks. He looked like a tough kid on either side of the Atlantic, but he sounded like a Long Island version of Liberace. That alone got the Germans out of their seats, and it got me out of mine.

  The wiry guy pushed his chest up in Dee Dee’s face and Dee Dee chested him back, cursing the whole time. Arschfotze! Arschgeige! Blonde Fotze! I moved toward a German in a wool cap who shoved me with his hands. I shoved him back. All other activity in the bar stopped cold. That was another universal—bloodthirsty silence
before the massacre. We all knew the exact same thing. Shove and curse all you want. Once a single punch was thrown, all hell was going to break loose.

  Suddenly, the bartender appeared to my right. He was as large as the big guy at the table, and from the looks of his nose, which had been broken at least twice, he didn’t just break up fights. He broke the people in them. He smacked a long black billy club hard into his open palm, and we knew he had no problem swapping the palm for an open skull.

  The Germans backed off, and Dee Dee and I turned and walked out the door. The bar patrons looked very disappointed. There wasn’t going to be an encore at this show. As we walked along Altonaer Strasse, Dee Dee translated everything he said and they said. I didn’t really need to know that Dee Dee told the wiry guy we were going to have sex with his mother and sister while he watched, but it was entertaining.

  I was relieved we were out of there. We could have hurt somebody. So could they. We didn’t need a headline in the Berliner Zeitung saying “Ramones Blitzkrieg Bop!” We had shows coming up and dozens of people who made a living from those shows. So we headed back to the hotel to drink Jägermeisters the rest of the night. As I hoisted my first cold one, I remembered something and had a moment of clarity—we were lucky tonight we left the daggers back in the room.

  Next stop: Amsterdam. Dee Dee was in heaven. Drugs were legal. The Dutch government had decided that spending a big chunk of the gross domestic product to throw people in jail for smoking weed or shooting dope was a total waste. Instead, substances were controlled and sold by licensed establishments, like booze in the US. Kids came from down the road and all over the world to Amsterdam for the drugs. When we walked along the canals—which were laid out in circles—we saw boatloads of those kids clustered around benches, steps, and statues, looking dazed and confused. If we didn’t have to leave the next day, Dee Dee would have been one of them.

  Our show was at the Paradiso, a well-known rock venue on the edge of the Leidseplein, a square packed with nightlife. The Paradiso was a three-story brick building originally built as a church but occupied in 1967 by hippies looking for a place to party. Although the hippies themselves got kicked out by the police, their plans for the building eventually became a reality, which said a lot about Amsterdam.

  Partying at the Paradiso started with the upper balcony. There was Coca-Cola, beer, popcorn, pretzels, and all the usual vending way up above the stage. Plus the pot vendor. Just another guy making a living, except this guy had a line running almost to the exit. Marion and Dee Dee’s wife, Vera, were near the front of that line. When it was their turn, they asked the vendor what he had and he said pot and hash. Marion said they’d take everything and the vendor looked puzzled. He dealt in little bags of five or ten dollars and tins of twenty.

  “What do you mean everything?”

  “We mean everything you have. All of it.”

  The vendor explained that would cost two thousand guilders, which was roughly eight hundred dollars. Fine. No problem. Marion pulled out about half and Vera the rest. The kids in line behind them, at least the ones close enough to witness the transaction, were pissed off. But we had a lot of mouths to feed and brains to fry. The bus rides were long, and big fat joints made them shorter.

  The vendor must have called in his supplier for more. Either that or most kids walked in with their own, because by the time the lights went up and we launched into the show, the place smelled like a drug den. Combined with a bar. There was a full house of about fifteen hundred, every one of them stoned and amped up. The smoke was so thick it seemed machine generated, but the only machine was the collective lungs of the Dutch youth.

  We noticed that, for whatever reason, the kids in Holland were physically large—larger than the Swedes, Germans, or Belgians. From where we were it looked like an audience of giants and not just because we had a contact high. Maybe there was something in the bong water. Or the hash brownies sold next door at the Melkweg. When these oversized punks moshed and stage dived, it was brawnier and beefier than in the rest of the Continent. The kids shook the old church ghosts out of the walls.

  The spitting at the Paradiso was bigger, too. The Amsterdam punks started spitting out mouths full of beer onto the stage and the band. Then the spraying started. They would shake a can or a bottle of beer and pop it open in our direction. The range was incredible, like a bunch of fire hoses shooting Amstel and Heineken. It was hard to tell what had more distance—cheeks or containers. If I was getting sprayed behind the drums, Joey, John, and Dee Dee were getting soaked. It would take a thousand bubble baths for Dee Dee to stop smelling like a brewery. Joey tried to appeal to reason.

  “Cut that fucking shit out, guys. I mean it. You’re gonna electrocute us. This is not a fucking joke.”

  All it took was enough ale to create a ground between a hot wire and a Ramone and there would be no fifth album. The last thing we ever sniffed would be fried hops and barley. Joey took his life in his hands every time his lips neared the microphone. And he thought the shower was dangerous!

  The storm subsided, maybe because they listened to the band, maybe because Amsterdam was running out of brew, maybe both. But the party went on. It was a loony bin in a brewery.

  After playing Arnhem in the Netherlands, we were headed to Paris by bus, through Belgium. This was a big problem for Dee Dee, because cannabis and all other street drugs were illegal in both Belgium and France, and Dee Dee was carrying enough to get an entire embassy stoned. But when it came to illegal substances and international intrigue, Dee Dee was as resourceful as James Bond.

  Dee Dee made friends with the bus driver, which wasn’t hard to do because the driver was a good old European soul. When we stopped just outside the Dutch–Belgian border to exchange guilders for francs, Dee Dee walked around to the back of the one-story brick customs building, and I followed him. He looked around a bit at a concrete planter with some shrubs and poked at the dirt with his hand.

  “What do you think?” he said.

  “I think you’re fucking crazy.”

  That was good enough. Dee Dee picked a spot between the second and third shrub from the left and started digging with both paws like a beagle burying a bone. Once he got about a foot deep, he pulled two large clear plastic bags out of his jacket and placed them in the hole. Then he filled in the hole and patted it down. This wasn’t a first time for Dee Dee. He had buried pot, dope, and pills all over New York. Some of it was still there. He also hid stuff in the backs of speakers, under floorboards, and in the hollow bodies of acoustic guitars. If you knew Dee Dee, you might be holding some of his junk and not even know it.

  “Yeah, all right. Perfect.”

  He took one last look before we headed back to the bus. It was never as simple as it seemed. For mission accomplished, three things would have to happen. First, he would have to convince the bus driver to cut back through the same route and stop at the same customs office. Second, no other dope fiend could spot him. Third, Dee Dee would have to remember exactly where he buried it. The last one might have been the hardest. Maybe that’s why I was there.

  The Palais des Congrès in Paris was like a burlesque theater. The stairs to the stage were a huge climb, so we were looking down at most of the room, basically the opposite of the early CBGB. The Parisian kids were very different from the kids up north. We did “Sedated” and they already were. Not that they didn’t like the music and even bounce around. But they were cooler, like sophisticates at an art gallery. They were taking it all in. We didn’t complain. The place was sold-out, and we weren’t covered in spit and beer.

  As we passed back through the Netherlands on the way up to the UK, the bus driver stopped at Dee Dee’s one-story brick customs building, though there was no currency to exchange in the middle of the night. I followed Dee Dee around back as he walked up to the spot between the second and third shrub from the left. He was “on” in Paris and he was on in this little parking lot.

  He dug quickly and efficiently, and when
he pulled out the first bag, he eyeballed it closely. He did the same thing with the other bag. Then he smiled and loosened up a little, cradling the two bags. If I didn’t know how fucked up Dee Dee was going to get once we got back on the bus, I would have been almost touched. It was like watching a family reunited after the war.

  We landed at JFK Airport in Queens on October 9. I was jet-lagged. Given the flight back from Scotland, my body thought it was midnight even though it was six in the evening. But I was excited to be home, and home was about to get better with the loft on John Street that Marion and I would be moving into.

  Monte got our van out of long-term parking and picked us up at Terminal 4. We cut around the south tip of Brooklyn along the Belt Parkway to try to miss the remains of rush-hour traffic. Still, it took about an hour and a half to finally pull up in front of the loft on East Second Street in Manhattan. As Monte looked over his shoulder and parallel-parked in what was probably the last open spot in the East Village, Joey spoke his first words since we left the airport.

  “Monte, we gotta go back.”

  “What happened?” Monte said.

  “I left something at JFK,” Joey said.

  “What did you leave, Jeffrey?” John said. “Your fucking brains?”

  John was pissed off. He thought Joey was doing this to break our balls, but we really all knew better. Joey couldn’t help it. The thing was, this was taking it to a new level, at least on my watch. We had just returned from a transcontinental flight where our lead singer counted every seat, every overhead light, and every emergency air supply button. He had actually used the bathroom twice but returned dozens of times to tap the soap, touch the seat, and flush the toilet. Now he was headed back across the river to JFK without his band.

  We pulled our luggage off the van and scattered. Marion and I jumped into a cab to go back to Brooklyn. Monte would have to drive solo with Joey. What else could he do? He was the driver. Joey couldn’t have enjoyed it much either. The only consolation was he could move up to John’s seat if he wanted to.