Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  The following afternoon I heard from Dee Dee by phone. Dee Dee had spoken to Monte. Monte and Joey had pulled up to British Airways at Terminal 4. Joey got out, walked a few steps and tapped the curb with his foot. Then they headed back to Manhattan. At least they didn’t have to fly back to Glasgow.

  10

  WE’RE NOT STUDENTS——WE’RE RAMONES

  Once Marion and I had our own place in Manhattan it was easier to visit Joey, and I made a point of doing it. We had some time before our next tour, which would focus on the Northeast, take another break, and then head south. As I got out of a cab at East Second Street just off of Bowery around four in the afternoon, I had a couple of beers in me but my stomach was growling.

  This was the center of the Ramones’ universe. CBGB was around the corner, and a hundred or so feet down East Second Street was Arturo Vega’s loft. I opened the old metal door and rang the buzzer. A few seconds later the buzzer sounded and I pushed open the wrought iron security gate then started my way up the narrow staircase to the second floor.

  The door to the loft was already open and I walked through. The door was usually open to let out the fumes when Arturo was painting. I could, in fact, smell a combination of acrylic and oil, but it looked like Arturo had left. Joey sat on a leather couch and was scribbling something on a notepad.

  “Hey, Merk.”

  “What’s up, Joey?”

  It was a factory building built in Manhattan’s industrial days, and the brick walls and high ceilings were pretty much unchanged except for Arturo’s neo-psychedelic art hanging everywhere. Aside from a long table where Arturo had been silk-screening Ramones T-shirts, the place was very neat and uncluttered.

  I walked over to Joey and asked him if he had anything around to eat. He said yeah, but instead of showing me to the refrigerator he led me to his bedroom, and I felt like I had to follow. Joey’s “bedroom” was a small area behind a freestanding bookcase toward the rear of the loft. Behind the bookcase, on the floor, was a mattress covered with mounds of records and tapes that spilled out onto the surrounding floorboards. There were T-shirts, jeans, sneakers, books, and magazines that looked as if they had just been shipped from Birchwood Towers in Forest Hills and dumped from a suitcase. But Joey had lived here at least three years.

  Joey pointed to a milk crate just beyond an empty pizza box. Sitting atop the crate was a hamburger with a side of fries and a large pickle. Hungry as I was, I was about to step around the mattress, reach down, and take a bite, but I froze for a moment. Something was wrong with the picture but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  Actually I could put my finger on it. I leaned over carefully and touched the top of the burger roll with my index finger. It was rock hard. So were the burger, the pickle, and the fries. Everything was as dried-out as instant coffee, but this food was never going to be brought back to life. It looked like one of those plastic replicas of a meal you sometimes see in the window of a Chinese restaurant. Except this food was harder.

  I looked back over at Joey and didn’t want to ask him. His whole cluster of neuroses was a very touchy subject for all of us. If I was going to question him I didn’t even know where to begin. Why didn’t you want to eat this when you ordered it? Was something wrong with it? Why didn’t you throw it out? Why didn’t you wrap it up and put it in the fridge or the freezer? Exactly what kind of long-term plans did you have for this meal? Have you touched it lately? Have you tapped it? Have you tried hitting it with a hammer? Why did you offer it to me? Exactly how long has this been sitting here? A week? Two weeks? Since before the European tour?

  “You know what?” I said. “I could really go for some Indian food.”

  We headed down the narrow stairway to East Second. Actually, I headed out and then watched Joey go in and out a few times before joining me on the sidewalk. East Sixth Street was where all the great Indian restaurants were. We were just a few blocks away and started walking east. At the next corner I made a left turn to go north on Second Avenue and Joey said, “No, no. Let’s go this way.”

  Joey wanted to continue walking east on Second Street. That didn’t make any sense. If we made the left on First Avenue, that was the long way. If we made the left a block after, on Avenue A, that was even longer.

  “This is the fastest way,” I said. “I’m hungry. Why do you want to stay on Second?”

  “Well, you know,” he said. “God’s on this block. I gotta stop in and see God.”

  He smiled a little. He knew he was being nuts. That was a good sign. So I followed him east on Second. Chicken vindaloo tasted even better when you had to wait for it.

  When our tour headed south through Richmond, Virginia, and Raleigh, North Carolina, we were out of local range—that is, Ramones local range—and began staying in hotels again for the first time since Europe. I didn’t mind the hotels or taking the same seat as always for the long rides down I-95. I didn’t even mind hearing John talk for an hour at a time about how the Yankees had won the World Series against the Dodgers after being fourteen games behind the Red Sox at one point. What I did mind was that some of the band’s problems were getting worse.

  Dee Dee’s use of every drug under the sun was becoming a loaded weapon aimed at himself and anyone who cared. Whenever Vera opened the door to their bedroom in Whitestone, she hoped her husband was in there breathing. If he was, the next hope was that he hadn’t turned blue. She had dialed 911 so many times the operators knew her voice.

  Meanwhile, Roxy was on perpetual thin ice with John. I had shared plenty of bottles with Roxy back before the Ramones, and I was no angel. I liked to have a drink or two or three when it didn’t interfere with playing. But it seemed like Roxy had been on a bender since about Amsterdam.

  Her MO was to pop open a can of Tab, empty it out, and fill it with vodka. That allowed her to drink without apology everywhere—in the van, at rest stops, in supermarkets, just walking around. She could no longer hold her liquor. Her speech was slurred and her legs were wobbly. She started stupid arguments with John. John tried to keep her away from the band, but on a tour that was next to impossible. So he went to plan B.

  We could often hear John pushing and smacking Roxy around in their hotel room. We would hear her stumbling, bouncing off a thin wall, and then falling onto a bed and shrieking. It didn’t go on forever. Usually it was a minute or two. There was no excuse for it. Like every kid of my generation and all the ones before, I was taught never to hit a girl, and this routine made us all a little sick. But a routine was what it became. John did it, at least in part, to calm Roxy down. And it worked. We all wondered why she stayed with him. In some horrible way, it worked for her, too.

  By Atlanta, things got so bad that John locked Roxy in the dressing room before the Ramones took the stage. Most dogs got better treatment. At least she was in there alone.

  We had another problem in Atlanta. On November 13, we were at the Omni opening for Van Halen and Black Sabbath. More accurately, we were opening for Van Halen, who were opening for Black Sabbath. I liked both bands, especially the old Black Sabbath albums, which laid the groundwork for all future heavy metal, both good and bad. But we were all wary of how their audience would react to the Ramones. The promoters billed the show as “Punk vs. Metal.” Metal had been around a lot longer, so we knew we were getting fed to the lions.

  Black Sabbath had problems of their own. The whole band was heavily into drugs and alcohol to the point where they were just going through the motions. Ozzy Osbourne was a raging alcoholic and had already quit the band at the end of ’77. He came back to record the album Never Say Die, but when they saw the record’s poor sales, some people were at least thinking die. Van Halen had been opening for Sabbath throughout the fall of ’78 and were by all accounts putting the old guard to shame. David Lee Roth was doing karate kicks all over the stage while Ozzy looked like someone had just kicked him in the gut.

  When the Ramones opened with “Blitzkrieg Bop,” it felt like we had crashed someone else
’s party. The Omni was packed with around sixteen thousand people, but half of them were getting food, while the other half stared at us like we were some kids who had walked into the wrong classroom. “Blitzkrieg” was our anthem, so if they weren’t stirred, you knew it was only going to get worse.

  It did. By “Sheena,” a lot of the kids were yelling out, “Black Sabbath!” By “Something to Do,” the projectiles were flying: soda cans, beer bottles, hot dogs, peanut shells, and anything else they could get their hands on. Joey was getting pelted left and right. Normally, a lead singer gets it because he’s out front, but Joey was even more of a sitting duck because of the way he stayed glued to one spot. I was a sitting duck, too, even though I was sitting in the back. The cymbals shielded me from a popsicle, but some wet ice cubes got through and hit me on the shoulder. It sucked. We would have taken European spitting over Southern inhospitality any day.

  The seventh song in the set was “I Don’t Care,” and we didn’t. John was the first to unstrap his guitar, and the rest of us were right there. We weren’t going to be humiliated. We gave the crowd the collective finger and walked off. I saw pockets of kids here and there clapping and waving as if they didn’t want to go along with the masses, but they and we were overwhelmed.

  Backstage, no one argued with our decision. Monte and the crew said we should have walked off earlier. The promoter’s people knew the situation. If one of the Ramones got hurt in their venue, they would have gotten sued and would have lost.

  We looked on the bright side. We actually played well and may have made a few new fans with the metalheads, even if some of them were afraid to admit it in public. Every show couldn’t have a Hollywood ending. But our year was going to have one.

  We checked into the Tropicana Motel on Santa Monica Boulevard on December 6. The Tropicana was a low-rent Hyatt House, nicknamed the Riot House. There were plenty of riots at the Trop, too. They just cost a little less to clean up.

  The building was a two-story horseshoe structure with access to the rooms by outdoor staircase and walkway only. It was a classic-looking motor lodge built in the late forties, when the country was putting World War II in the rearview mirror and hitting the highway for fun and sun out west. Celebrities and wayward folks both frequented the Trop, with a steady stream of pimps, hookers, and junkies coming and going. The establishment had a reputation at the time for delivering on even the kinkiest of a guest’s demands.

  In the sixties, Jim Morrison would get drunk in the bar across the street and stumble into the Trop for some shut-eye. According to rock-and-roll lore he wrote many of the Doors’ most famous songs in any number of the interconnected rooms. Just as rock and roll itself was contagious, so was the Trop’s reputation as a rock hotel. Over the years, rooms had been trashed by Johnny Cash, Led Zeppelin, the Clash, the Runaways, the Stooges, the Beach Boys, and a long list of less renowned boys and girls who liked to check out leaving the place worse than when they checked in.

  The room I got with Marion on the first floor was more like a little apartment—sort of a glorified efficiency. There was a living area with a TV in the front room and a kitchenette at the rear. Down the hall to the right was a bathroom, and to the left was a bedroom with two double beds. As always I asked for a room between the roadies’ rooms on either side. That way my partying wouldn’t disturb the other Ramones. It was sort of a buffer zone. It was a buffer for the regular guests, too. We were an unusual-looking bunch of people and we did get a few strange stares from some of the everyday folks staying there. But when you were filming a movie called Rock ’n’ Roll High School, anything short of a Rock ’n’ Roll Hotel wasn’t going to cut it.

  Partying, however, was for the end of the day. Making a movie is all work and waiting, with one part work, four parts waiting. We would get up around seven in the morning so Monte could pick us up in the van and drive us to the location. Whether they’re in a rock band or not, there aren’t many people who like to hear screaming and yelling at close range in a cramped moving vehicle before nine. But Joey’s new girlfriend, Cindy, was doing just that.

  She was a brunette who seemed nice enough until she opened her mouth. Then the rest of us were subjected to Cindy’s ranting about Joey’s morning routine, which was a lot like Joey’s afternoon and evening routines. Except that in a motel, there are a lot of doors to touch and steps to count. I felt bad for Monte, who had to hear all this twice.

  “Joey, why should I have to get up early for you? Why don’t you get some professional help?”

  “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?” John snapped. John had problems of his own with Roxy, who was already blitzed at a quarter to nine. The Trop was ground zero for alcoholics, and Roxy was off to a fast start. But at least she was quiet on the way over.

  Our main location for the movie was Mount Carmel High School in Los Angeles. Two weeks before Christmas, schools in Los Angeles are still in session, but not this one. We had it all to ourselves. Mount Carmel was a Catholic school with a classic Spanish-American stucco look, but it was closed in 1976 because of a shift in demographics and lack of enrollment. In fact, it was slated for demolition. Roger Corman, Allan Arkush, the Ramones, and company were there to make sure it went out with a bang.

  To no one’s surprise, the Ramones didn’t go much for makeup. We took just enough powder not to get too shiny under the klieg lights. There were no dressing rooms in a condemned Catholic school, but there were plenty of empty classrooms. The Ramones were given one on the west wing of the first floor.

  On this given day, we were going to be filming a climactic scene where the four members of the band push the two SS-like hall monitors in a laundry cart down the hall and out a second-story window. We were looking forward to it, since none of us ever liked Nazis or hall monitors very much. But that was in the afternoon. In the morning, we basically had to wait. It would have been a perfect time to lip-synch “I Just Want to Have Something to Do,” but even that had to wait. For most of us, sitting and waiting in a classroom felt eerily like detention.

  As with school back in the day, we made the best of it. We talked with other cast members who were not at that moment shooting a scene. We read the script and got a better idea of the plot and where we fit into it. Vince Lombardi High School, the story goes, gets a new principal who is a hard-line, old-fashioned, eccentric schoolmarm looking to make a name for herself and is ready to steamroll anyone who gets in her way.

  Riff Randell, a hot-looking girl and the world’s number one Ramones fan, gets in Principal Togar’s way from the beginning. Randell’s goal is to get to Joey at a Ramones concert and give him a song she wrote for the band. Randell’s forged absence notes claim a dead mother, a dead father, and a dead goldfish. Principal Togar smells a rat and declares war. The war concludes with the Ramones and the kids taking over the school and blowing it up. The band always liked happy endings.

  Principal Togar was played by Mary Woronov. In person she was nothing like the insane tyrant in the script. Woronov had been one of Andy Warhol’s well-known actors and made her debut in the relatively successful experimental flick Chelsea Girls. Mary was really cool and friendly, but when Allan yelled “Take,” she became an insane tyrant.

  P. J. Soles was long past her teen years but was still making a good career playing one in the movies. She was in the Stephen King thriller Carrie, the horror movie Halloween, and the dorky TV movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble, starring John Travolta. She was injured on the set of Carrie during the prom scene. While all the spoiled brats who tortured Carrie got fried in a gymnasium inferno, P.J. got her eardrum ruptured by a fire hose. More happily, she had recently finished filming Our Winning Season and married its star, Dennis Quaid.

  We were excited in the early afternoon to finally be pushing the laundry cart down the hallway. We blocked out the scene, which was really divided into multiple shots, each one of which had to be done right. The camera and cameraman were on a dolly being pulled by two grips. We ran through it a few times to m
ake sure the Ramones were properly in the frame and we were all moving at the same pace.

  Once the kinks were worked out, we filmed the sequence a couple of times. Allan made sure we looked like we were doing it for the first time instead of the fifth or sixth, which is one of the keys not only to acting but also to music. Even though it was a teen comedy being shot for about $300,000, it was important to look like we were really pissed off at the hall monitors and sending them to their doom instead of just going through the motions. Thinking about being strip-searched at Erasmus worked for me.

  Before we did a bunch of close shots, it was time for a short break, so we did what any overgrown, aging school kids would do—hit the schoolyard. It was like any schoolyard, concrete pavement with a chain-link fence around it. The difference was it was lined along the outside with Ramones fans. Los Angeles was a city with celebrity whereabouts coursing through its veins. Word of mouth was the lifeblood. If they cared enough, they knew where you were and when you were there. The only unknown was when the director would yell, “Take five,” but these kids seemed to have all day. And some other things, too.

  We approached the fence ready to sign autographs, but something else was going on between the albums and pens being waved around. A few of the fans, typical California guy and girl punks and mall rats, were tossing pills and packets over and through the fence. Since they put in the effort to show up, they were probably big enough Ramones fans to know only one Ramone was interested in free drugs. Sure enough, Dee Dee was down on the pavement picking up random nickel bags, capsules, tablets, and anything else hitting the concrete that looked potentially mood altering. It was like watching an amateur gambler on the floor of a casino after pulling all triple-bars on a slot machine.