Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  Meanwhile, John was excited because his man, Ronald Reagan, was gearing up for the 1980 presidential race. Reagan promised to cut taxes for the rich as a way to benefit the middle class and the poor. My father said the right wing had it all backward. I agreed although I wasn’t an economist. I was a musician having a few vodka martinis.

  But I was capable of doing my own kind of research. I kept stacks of cash around to pay the liquor bill, tip the pizza delivery guy, or thank the super. A stack typically was an even mix of a few dozen singles, fives, tens, and twenties. By lunchtime, I usually had a few in me and I was up for adventure. John Street was pretty narrow and packed around noon with business suits shoulder to shoulder. I wasn’t sure what would happen the first time I did it, but that’s what experiments are for. I took a stack of cash, opened the window, and tossed it out.

  It was feeding time. For a second or two, as the first few bills hit street level, there were simple reflexive reactions. It could have been litter. Or it could have been shredded paper. We were a block from Broadway and the Canyon of Heroes, so a ticker-tape parade for astronauts, returning war veterans, or John’s beloved New York Yankees was always in the back of people’s minds. But as the bucks dropped out of the sky in clumps, the suits saw green and foamed at the mouth.

  It was survival of the fattest. Overfed middle-aged men in suspenders climbed over savvy women in gray wool business attire. Young virile executives threw themselves over the hood of a parked car to retrieve a ten-spot stuck in a windshield wiper. Law school grads looking to make partner laid out the elderly on the sidewalk en route to an Andrew Jackson on a manhole cover. I took notes. It was a jungle out there. It was bedlam. But I finally understood trickle-down economics.

  When the excitement died down in the early afternoon, it was time for a shower. The only problem was, we didn’t have one. As far as we knew, none of the residential lofts had one yet. We had an old claw-foot, cast-iron tub, but after a long, hard morning of boozing and tossing cash out the window, there was nothing like a good hot shower. So a bunch of the tenants chipped in and created a shower room on the fourteenth floor.

  I didn’t dress up to take a shower. I walked down the hall in slippers and a bathrobe with no pants or underwear beneath. Sometimes, when I was dying my hair black, my head was wrapped in tinfoil. I shared an elevator with VPs and accountants who wondered which floor the half-naked space alien was getting off at and why. Sometimes I ran into punk kids in the elevator. Some were spike-haired, others were Ramones-clones, but they had one thing in common, and it wasn’t that they were pricing out the open loft space on the eleventh floor. They were there to catch a glimpse of me. So I signed a few autographs and took my shower.

  About a mile uptown, Joey and Linda moved in together. A studio apartment opened up in the building where Joey’s mother lived on East Ninth Street, and the happy couple took it. Joey and Linda were getting serious. They were engaged and shopping for a diamond ring. Aside from wishing them happiness, we all hoped Linda would do wonders for Joey’s hygiene and punctuality. If nothing else, she could take some pressure off Monte.

  A block north on East Tenth Street, John and Roxy were still playing house, with Roxy slipping a few drinks and John hitting her a few shots. The Ramones’ women took breaks from the action now and then. Not every venue or club was a preferred destination like London or Berlin. Places like West Orange, New Jersey, and Allentown, Pennsylvania, needed to be seen only once.

  When they stayed behind, Marion would sometimes hang out with Roxy. Roxy liked some new wave with her vodka. Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow, two upstart bands, were among her favorites. When the Ramones got back from Staten Island one night in late June, Marion told me her night with Roxy was a brief one. They went to the Mudd Club to see the bands, but inside of an hour, Roxy was falling all over herself and then all over some cute guy. She used one of the best pickup lines in the history of the downtown music scene: “Do you want to see Johnny Ramone’s apartment?” The answer would have been yes 99 percent of the time if Roxy was sober and had two heads. As she was drunk and provocatively dressed, it was 100 percent.

  There was no way I was telling John or Marion was telling on Roxy. We didn’t really know what happened once Roxy and Mr. Whoever hopped into a cab, and it was none of our business. Aside from that, we had a band to keep together.

  It was early summer and before heading up to Toronto to play the Canadian World Music Festival we did something purely for fun. The Uncle Floyd Show was the brainchild of Floyd Vivino, a local comedian about our age whose act and clothing came out of the burlesque era. Uncle Floyd was a throwback to The Pinky Lee Show of the fifties and The Soupy Sales Show of the sixties: kids shows at first glance but with a subversive adult sense of humor just beneath the surface. If you listened closely, you could hear things no one was supposed to get away with saying on public television. Comedian Andy Kaufman was making a career using the same approach. There was a fine line between silly and sick, and the more it could be walked like a tightrope, the better.

  Floyd was a Ramones fan, and we were Uncle Floyd fans. We weren’t alone. Uncle Floyd had a cult following. John Lennon watched the show. So did David Bowie. That wasn’t bad for a show broadcast on channel 68, the far end of the UHF dial. If you lived in Manhattan, at least you could get 68 clearly on cable. If you lived in Brooklyn or Queens, you had to hold on to the rabbit ears antenna, stand on one foot, and use your other hand to play with a metal clothes hanger. For lots of viewers, it was worth it.

  The WBTB-TV studio in Newark was tiny. We lip-synched to “Sedated” in a space the size of someone’s living room. There was a plain blue background that gave the room an amateur hour feel, and that was no accident. That was ambience. It was hard to keep time with the record because there were no monitors. The song bounced around the room and sometimes we were off by a beat, or live Joey stopped mouthing lyrics a moment before canned Joey stopped singing them. But no one cared. It was Uncle Floyd.

  Once or twice a minute, we were interrupted by one of Floyd’s weirdo in-house characters. There was Scott Gordon, the crook who wore a woman’s stocking over his head and tried to mug Joey for his pants. There was a guy in tights calling himself Captain Amazing who looked like he could barely lift Dee Dee’s Fender Precision bass if his life depended on it. The cast of misfits was getting smiles out of John, which was really saying something.

  When it was time to go to break, Floyd Vivino asked each of us for a more interesting way to say “We’ll be right back after these important words.” My suggestion was “See ya later.”

  “I knew yours would be cymbal minded,” Floyd remarked, adding, “That is the worst drummer joke. It’s really beat.” Ba-dum-bum. Ching. That was what made Uncle Floyd goofy and addictive. Getting a round of applause from two dozen people in a shoe box in New Jersey never felt so good.

  A few days later, on July 2, we were getting booed by fifty thousand people. The Canadian World Music Festival was being held in Toronto’s Exhibition Stadium. The stadium was an odd-shaped sort of rectangle with an Astroturf field. First built as a fairgrounds, then adapted to Canadian football, it had recently been reconfigured to serve the Blue Jays, Toronto’s expansion Major League baseball team. John told me it was horrible for baseball. The viewing angles sucked. The left-field bleachers angled off to nowhere. The place had an identity crisis.

  So did the festival. We were opening for Ted Nugent, followed by Aerosmith. John quoted Yogi Berra, who once said it was déjà vu all over again. It really was—just like opening for Sabbath in Atlanta. There were pockets of kids getting into it, but then came the booing and, by the sixth or seventh song, the artillery. It was coins, cans, and whatever debris was solid enough to chuck from the crappy baseball seats. By now, we were as good at using our middle fingers as we were with picks, mikes, and drumsticks.

  Before we could pack it in and start heading back down to New York, Steven Tyler, Aerosmith’s lead singer, showed up in our dressing room.
The Boston band’s albums including Toys in the Attic and Rocks were FM radio staples and had gone platinum again and again. Aerosmith was rumored to be having heavy drug problems at this point, but Tyler seemed sober and sincere. He told us he was a Ramones fan, and he was very sorry for what had just happened out there. He said we were ahead of our time and one day a lot of those kids would be buying Ramones albums and bragging they saw us kick ass in Toronto years ago.

  Those words really helped cool off John, Joey, Dee Dee, and me. Not many people understood how much work it took just to take that stage when it was your turn. It was hundreds of miles of traveling and thousands of feet of cable before you played one note, one beat. We were sick of getting pissed on. Having someone like Steven Tyler reach out like that—when he didn’t have to and might never even cross our paths again—meant we could cross the border back into the US without feeling like we needed to start an international incident.

  We left before getting a chance to meet Ted Nugent. The Motor City Madman’s albums hadn’t been selling as well as Cat Scratch Fever a couple of years earlier, but he was still tearing it up Nugent style. Everyone in the Ramones loved “Journey to the Center of the Mind” by his first group back in the late sixties, the Amboy Dukes. Only John, however, liked Nugent’s political and personal beliefs, which were basically to kill and eat everything that moved. It would have been almost worth the price of coming to Toronto and getting booed off the stage to see Ted and John discuss how Ronald Reagan was going to sweep into office and send welfare cheats to forced-labor camps, but that would have to wait for another tour or for never.

  Our biggest difficulty getting out of Toronto was not Joey having to cross the US-Canada border several times. It was Monte and his attaché case. Dee Dee and I hid it on him. We did that a lot just to see Monte freak out. This time we hid it in a bathroom stall. It was only the tenth or fifteenth place backstage he searched. We went easy on him this time.

  It was a long ride home from Toronto, and John was already driving us crazy an hour or two east on US Route 90. When John popped open his second can of sardines in the space of fifteen minutes, Joey shook his head. We could almost see him rolling his eyes behind the sunglasses. The rest of us didn’t appreciate the cuisine much more. John and his sardines stunk up the van. But Joey believed John did it to piss him off in particular and he was probably right.

  “Could you stop with the fucking sardines already?” Dee Dee said. “You’re fucking killing us.”

  “Hey,” John said. “Leave me alone. It’s good for you.”

  It was good for his wallet. Like the rest of us, John got a per diem that included meal expenses. But the less he spent, the more money was left over for his ever growing bank account. John bragged that he never made a withdrawal. Not once. Ever. He also kept stacks of cash in his dresser drawers. They weren’t for tipping delivery guys, much less for tossing out the window to throngs of businessmen.

  John’s culinary preference was any 7-Eleven off of any highway. There, he stocked up on milk and Pepperidge Farm cookies. He drank too much milk too quickly, to the point where he snorted a lot to keep it down and we feared it was coming up his nose any minute. Marion told John he ate too much dairy, but that was like telling him he saved too much money.

  During the warm months, like now, John liked to listen to baseball games on the radio, but we told him we didn’t want to hear three hours of play-by-play and Midas Muffler commercials. So John used his earphones and a transistor radio. We took votes on what to listen to on the radio but found over time that no one objected to rock-and-roll oldies. So we tuned into whatever oldies station was strongest on the FM dial, and when we got within about fifty miles of New York City that was always WCBS-FM.

  The bigger shows we had been playing lately allowed us to lease a new Dodge van. It was burgundy and silver and held fifteen passengers. The van came with a new feature that provided not just convenience but one more way to fuck with Monte. Behind the right-hand captain’s chair was a second set of digital controls for the radio. It allowed someone in the first passenger row to change stations and adjust the volume. Monte didn’t know it was there. So with John in the captain’s seat, I sat behind and started messing with the dial. I quickly found a disco station.

  “Hey, Monte,” Dee Dee said. “Turn that shit off!”

  “I didn’t do anything,” Monte said. “I dunno what happened.”

  “C’mon, Monte,” I said. “Stop fucking with us.”

  I moved the dial to an opera station and cranked the volume.

  “We gotta listen to this shit all the way back to New York?” John said. “And I can’t even listen to the Yankee game?” John shot me a smile. He was in on it.

  “You saw me!” Monte said, reaching for the dial and trying to get back to the oldies station. “You saw my hands! I didn’t touch a thing.”

  “Are you just pissed off at us because we hid your attaché case?” I said. “Oh, we’re sorry, Monte. We won’t do it again.”

  We kept the joke running till we picked up Route 81 South. Monte finally figured it out and asked us why the hell we had to drive him so fucking crazy all the time. And we told him—boredom.

  Just south of Syracuse, we found a Cracker Barrel and pulled off the highway. Other than hitting the stall and ordering half the food on the menu, the first order of business was to hide Monte’s attaché case again. He brought it in with him, which was good, and placed it under the table, which was also good. What wasn’t good was that he had it handcuffed to the center leg of the table. I didn’t know if he was carrying the handcuffs with him just for this reason, but I hoped so. In any case, I asked Dee Dee for a piece of the gooey eggplant parmesan he was eating and then smeared it all over the handle of the attaché case.

  When we got outside, Dee Dee asked me if I’d had dessert. When I told him no, he pointed to the front of the van. It was a hot, muggy summer night in upstate New York, and that usually meant a variety of bugs flattened on the windshield.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Twenty-five bucks,” Dee Dee said.

  “Twenty-five bucks each,” I said.

  “Oh no,” John said. “I’m not chipping in for this one.”

  “I got twenty-five of that,” Joey said.

  “I can’t watch this shit,” Linda said.

  “No one’s making you,” I said.

  I picked a crushed horsefly off the glass on the driver’s side, put it in my mouth, and swallowed.

  “See what I do for you?” I said to Monte.

  “Oh, God!” Vera said.

  “Okay, Marc,” Marion said. “Let’s call it a night.”

  “Gotta get my protein,” I said, putting number two in my mouth.

  “You’re gonna get sick,” Linda said.

  “No, you’re gonna get sick,” I said. “I just made seventy-five dollars.” With that, I put dead horsefly number three in my mouth, swallowed, and climbed into the van.

  We attended a preview of Rock ’n’ Roll High School as a band in Texas, but the movie made its limited premiere in theaters on August 24. That night, with a friend, I went to see it in disguise. The 8th Street Playhouse in the West Village was the kind of movie theater that made New York what it was. They ran indie movies, art movies, classic horror flicks, and anything they wanted to. The 8th Street Playhouse put The Rocky Horror Picture Show on the map and made it a midnight institution.

  I wore shorts, a tank top, and sneakers with no socks. I had on regular glasses and a fisherman’s hat. I wanted to have a good time like anybody else. I wanted to experience the film like someone who didn’t watch Dee Dee Ramone pop dozens of greenies in an LA schoolyard. It seemed to work. We sat in the back and no one said a thing.

  It was surreal. As a band we looked like a bunch of aliens inserted into a real movie. The only thing missing was the tinfoil on my head. There it was—sunny California plus four leather-jacket-clad hoods representing the gritty East Coast. It wasn’t something I tho
ught about while shooting the movie, but now it was clear as day and hysterical. You could have dropped us into another new movie, like The Warriors, almost seamlessly, but we sort of fit in there, so who would have cared? Rock ’n’ Roll High School, however, worked on its own terms. It was outrageous. The audience laughed and clapped. They weren’t flattering the incognito lone Ramone in the audience. They really loved it.

  For an hour and a half, we were giants. Not in the filmmaking sense like Elia Kazan or John Huston. We were on a huge screen, where a head of long hair was a black forest and a pimple was Mount Vesuvius. Joey could have been a monster in a Japanese movie crushing little toy cars. When the four of us came strutting up the street to the Rockatorium to the beat of “I Just Want to Have Something to Do,” the crowd at the 8th Street Playhouse clapped along. I looked even sillier than I thought I would walking along clicking my drumsticks, but that worked, too. I heard feet stomping in the theater. We were their guys, and for a little while we all had something to do—something really ridiculous—together.

  When the closing credits rolled, my friend and I slipped out the back. I didn’t know if Rock ’n’ Roll High School was the next Rocky Horror Picture Show, but I could imagine Dee Dee’s face appearing on the screen and the midnight audience throwing fists full of pills. Or spitting milk at John. The movie had cult classic written all over it.

  On October 17 at Marietta College, Ohio, we crossed paths with the Police. It was the band, with a capital “P,” which was good because the other police might have been interested in what was in Dee Dee’s pockets and socks.

  We were opening up for them. “Roxanne” and “Can’t Stand Losing You” saw some chart action, and their forthcoming second album, Reggatta de Blanc, had a lot of buzz going. We were always made to feel very at home in the UK and wanted to extend the same courtesy to British bands on our soil. So John and I walked over to their dressing room to say hello to the Police and wish them luck.