Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  Sting was looking in a mirror and preening his hair. We walked up to him and John made the introduction.

  “How are you? Johnny from the Ramones, and this is our drummer, Marc.”

  “Pleasure.”

  Sting reached out to shake John’s hand. “Shake” is an exaggeration. He grabbed it limply and released. He never made it to my own extended hand. Sting eyeballed the Ramones presidential-seal pin on John’s leather jacket.

  “Where did you get those pins,” Sting said. “Woolworth’s?”

  We were stunned. It didn’t seem like he was kidding around. There was no hint of a smile on Sting’s face. Maybe we were being tested, but we were the Ramones and we didn’t take tests. We had already graduated rock ’n’ roll high school.

  “You know what?” I said. “Fuck you.”

  “Yeah, fuck off,” John said.

  We turned and walked out without waiting to see a reaction. Better to go out there and blow them off the stage. As we walked down the hallway, we let out some steam.

  “What an asshole,” John said.

  “It’s no big deal,” I said. “It’s just peroxide reggae.”

  I thought about the Ramones logo Gordon Sumner had just taken a potshot at. It featured a bald eagle with a baseball bat. The bat was there to beat on a brat. A brat very much like Sting. With a brat like that what can you do?

  It was a long drive from Marietta to Detroit that night. We didn’t have the benefit of the Phil Spector album being out yet, but the release of Rock ’n’ Roll High School was definitely doing something in terms of where we could play and what we could ask. The Midwest crowds were larger now, so the movie must have had legs.

  It was around two in the morning, and we were in Ohio, headed west on US Route 90. Monte was fading. We could see it. He never quite fell asleep, but he was battling. The van would drift ever so slightly, and he would quickly blink, grunt, and shrug his head.

  “Okay, that’s fucking it,” John said. “You’re gonna get us all killed. We’re taking over.”

  At that point, we pulled over and rotated. John took the driver’s seat, I took John’s regular seat up front, and Monte took my seat behind. We weren’t back on 90 more than five minutes before Monte was out cold. He snored like a lawn mower.

  John liked steering the van. He liked steering everything. It wasn’t the happiest summer or fall for him. He was having the usual problems with Roxy and her drinking. Yankees catcher and one of John’s favorite players, Thurman Munson, had died in a plane crash in early August. It had happened in Canton, in the very state we were now driving through. I wouldn’t have known the significance of the location, but John mentioned it four times. He also complained that for the first time in four years the Yankees hadn’t even made the playoffs.

  Of course, John was driven by all sorts of things I didn’t understand. I didn’t really get the obsession with baseball, and I didn’t quite get the fixation on money. When you put them together, I was totally lost. John collected baseball cards in his early thirties the same way he collected them as a kid. That sounded nice until you understood what he actually did. A normal kid would rip open the wrapper, stuff the gum in his mouth, and then look at all the cards. After that, the cards would get flipped, traded, stuck in notebooks, and pinned to bulletin boards. To John, that was sacrilege.

  John would open the wrapper carefully at one end, maybe even steam it off if the situation called for it. He would then take tweezers and surgically remove the stick of gum. It reminded me of the board game Operation we played as kids. John did for baseball cards what Roxy did for minibars. From there, John would reseal the wrapper to protect the baseball cards for posterity. Because even though as a kid John had no idea what he would eventually do for a living, he knew he would one day resell his mint-condition packs with a huge markup.

  These days a guy John called his baseball “dealer” would come over to his apartment on East Tenth Street and buy mint-condition packs, individual mint cards, and autographed cards. From there John could either reinvest by buying sought-after movie posters—fifties horror and sci-fi—or simply add to his impressive collection. Buy or hold—it was a tough call, but as Vivien Leigh said in Gone with the Wind, tomorrow is another day.

  Someone else once said it takes money to make money, but for John it didn’t take too much. When we were off the road, it seemed like he lived at the post office. His business model was simple—buy an inexpensive eight-by-ten publicity photo, send it to a celebrity with a nice note, and wait for it to come back in the mail autographed in a self-addressed stamped envelope. John had phone books worth of signed head shots.

  If it was Sophia Loren, he threw in a few words about how much he enjoyed It Started in Naples. If it was Whitey Ford, he would write about how much he enjoyed watching him throw eight and two-thirds innings of shutout ball in the fourth game of the 1950 World Series against the Phillies. Even if John was two years old at the time. It didn’t matter. The important things were that John knew more trivia than a TV network’s weekday lineup of afternoon game shows and that those eight-by-tens came back signed.

  If he knew a little too much about celebrities and what their autographed publicity shots fetched in the collector’s market, John knew way too much about the personal lives of the postal workers who served him. He knew Joe in customer service and his wife just had twins but that the slightly smaller one was colicky. He knew Marsha over in sorting had a nineteen-year-old enrolling at NYU.

  “How could she afford that?” John asked us. “She’s only making about twelve-five. That’s nine grand after taxes. But I think her husband just got a new title over at the Board of Ed.”

  I had to wonder whether the folks down at the post office knew how many bugs I had eaten off a windshield for money or what Godzilla posters were selling for at auction these days. In the end, none of it mattered. What did matter was that Monte’s snoring now sounded like an eighteen-wheeler with a loose axle. We were getting close to Toledo and I told John I thought it was time. He agreed.

  “Holy shit!!! Watch out!!!” I screamed for dear life, and Monte popped up like a zombie.

  “What . . . what the fuck happened?”

  “Nothing, Monte,” John said. “Go back to bed. Looks like you were having a nice wet dream.”

  “Nice one, Sloth,” I said. That was our nickname for John.

  “You’re sick,” Monte said. “You’re all fucking nuts. I really thought we were dead.”

  “Close,” I said. “We’re going to Detroit.”

  The State Theatre in Detroit was a classic old brick building that seated about twenty-three hundred people. We had already done the sound check and had an hour or two to kill before dark. John and I took a walk down Woodward Avenue. The area was kind of blighted. It had been a rough decade for the country, and Detroit in particular took it in the crotch. But the city was trying to bounce back.

  About a half block from the State Theatre we stopped at a construction site. There was an opening in the chain-link fence. There were a couple of excavating vehicles on site, but it looked like digging hadn’t begun. The lot was mostly covered in gravel and loose rocks. This really was Detroit rock city.

  “Hey, check this out,” John said. He picked up a rock about the size of a baseball and with a two-step running start, threw it overhand into the lot. It wasn’t a bad toss—probably just shy of three hundred feet.

  “What do you want me to do?” I said.

  “See if you can touch that.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  I wasn’t known as a jock growing up. I played baseball and basketball about as much as the other kids, mainly when it was required for gym class. But I had some talent when it came to throwing rocks. One time I threw one clear over PS 217, which was five stories but really at least six by normal standards. By the time I got to Erasmus, I was completely absorbed by the drums, which undoubtedly gave me additional arm strength.

  I picked up a rock a few feet from where
John had taken his and about the same size. I stepped in hard and let it fly. It landed about thirty feet beyond where John’s had landed and bounced a few times.

  “Almost,” John said.

  “Almost what?” I said. “I won.”

  “No you didn’t.”

  “Give me a fucking break, Sloth. Yours landed out by that cone. Mine easily cleared it. Get your eyes checked out.”

  We went three more rounds. The results were about the same. I could see it really bothered John. He would tell us how he was a star in Little League. How he almost won a batting title and might have gone pro if he didn’t pursue music. He just couldn’t leave it alone.

  “You know what?” John said. “You picked the smooth rocks. That makes a big difference. It’s the aerodynamics.”

  “Yeah, it’s definitely that. And your arm sucks.”

  We started to walk away, but then John ran the fifty yards or so back to the lot, grabbed another rock and threw it like it was the last play in the seventh game of the World Series. I let him have the last throw. We had a show to do. I took a look at where it landed. He did a little better this time. It skipped in front of a big pile of sand. I thought that was fitting. We were like a bunch of kids in a sandbox.

  On January 6, 1980, Monte picked me up in front of our building at 29 John Street. We had played New Year’s Eve at the Palladium in New York City and nothing since. We were starting off the new decade by heading up to play Port Chester, New York. It was cold outside and not exactly breaking new tour ground, so the Ramones women weren’t coming along.

  Monte parked as usual by the fire hydrant off the corner of Ninth Street and Third Avenue and went upstairs to get Joey while we waited in the van. People who followed our band very closely knew if they had some business or music to discuss we would be right here in the late morning before a show. Lester Bangs had joined us a few times as had other music critics, merchandise people, and promoters. It was the closest thing the Ramones kept to office hours. But this time we were having a closed meeting and would even find another parking spot if we had to.

  Monte brought Joey down pretty quickly. Maybe Monte was getting better at the whole routine. Maybe Linda was helping Joey. She was, in fact, keeping him from drinking too many beers from time to time. Or maybe for once Joey took the elevator without the usual up and down to hear what we all came to hear—the final mastered version of End of the Century. John popped in the cassette tape. It was the entire album in final form.

  A DJ introduced the song “Do You Remember Rock ’n’ Roll Radio?” When the band came in, along with a loud keyboard none of us had ever heard before, it was a bit of a shock. It wasn’t a Ramones sound as we knew it or as anyone knew it. At this rate, it was going to be a very long twelve-song experience sitting on a corner in a van with snowflakes falling and a band in a state of confusion.

  But the song settled in very quickly and so did the rest of the album. The sound was bigger than we were used to. The core Ramones sound was not as up-front as usual, but it was definitely there. The more my ears adjusted, the better I liked it. “Rock ’n’ Roll Radio” was powerful. So were “I Can’t Make It on Time” and “I’m Affected.” “Danny Says” was actually a moving experience. I thought of the Beach Boys during the Pet Sounds era. The music was nicely layered. Not every song was a winner. “The Return of Jackie and Judy” might have been my least favorite, but that had at least as much to do with the song itself as the production.

  I felt good. I felt relieved. If this was an experiment—a huge Phil Spector experiment—it was a successful one, studio drama and all. I thought once it was released to the public, we would definitely pick up many new fans, and the old Ramones fans—or at least the large majority—would come to appreciate the album.

  John and Dee Dee weren’t among those Ramones fans. You could tell from their body language. Joey and I were rocking our heads to the beat. John and Dee Dee were staring into space with almost no expression. John told Monte we needed to get moving, and Monte pulled out of our office spot. The ride up to Port Chester was nearly silent. We listened to WCBS-FM, oldies 101.1.

  In the dressing room at Port Chester, John finally broke his silence, but just barely.

  “Not good,” John said, shaking his head. “Not good.”

  The album on which he himself had played some great guitar deserved a more thorough review, but there was as much point in arguing with him about this as about the rocks we threw in Detroit. Punk wasn’t a religion. Music wasn’t a religion. You tried new things and they worked or they didn’t and you went on. We opened up some new doors, and it was time to look around on the other side. We never really surrendered our sound, but I couldn’t see us ever going back to exactly the format and production the Ramones had used in the past. As Joey sang in “Rock ’n’ Roll Radio,” it was definitely the end of the seventies.

  13

  PUT ME IN A WHEELCHAIR, GET ME ON A PLANE

  Joey didn’t want to get off the plane at Heathrow Airport. We had twenty shows to do in twenty cities over twenty-four days in England, plus at least two major BBC appearances—The Old Grey Whistle Test and Top of the Pops. The list of cities read like roll call in the House of Commons: Brighton, Leicester, Cambridge, Norwich, Exeter, Aylesbury, and so on. The UK loved the Ramones, and if we had a real chance for a Top Ten album, it was here. We came to conquer, but it would all go to shit unless Joey set foot on British soil.

  Monte climbed the aircraft stairs and reboarded the Boeing 747. Joey looked kind of sad and pathetic in the little window of seat 23H with his long legs scrunched up toward his chin. As usual, John was the most pissed off. If someone had handed him a dozen large Grade A in a carton, John would have egged Joey. At first we thought if we all got off the plane, Joey would follow, but we were now past a half hour of waiting. It seemed like ten hours and it was no bluff. Our lead singer was dead serious about wanting to go back to JFK. About having to go back to JFK.

  Monte was armed with every subtle and not-so-subtle tactic. This was not a door or an elevator. This was not even a crosstown trip back to the airport. This was a trip across the Atlantic. The Ramones had already landed and planted a flag. There was no turning back. It didn’t matter what Joey had to tap back in Queens. The Queen herself was waiting. So were all her subjects. So was British Airways.

  In the end, what Monte and the Ramones had on our side was time. Somewhere near the forty-five-minute mark Joey got his head together. We had no idea what was going on inside that head. But we knew from experience we could wait it out just a bit longer if we had to. And we had to.

  The band ended the tour in London in February. We had a day off before an afternoon of filming at BBC Studios. Although England wasn’t known for great food the way France and some other European countries were, Marion and I loved it. That night, we went to the hotel restaurant and treated ourselves. We ordered cod fillet and, as expected, the chef came to our table to debone the fish. It was a big production, like a TV cooking show without the cameras. It was all done cleanly and quickly with precision.

  At BBC Studios the following day, we told John about our evening. He was appalled and dumbfounded. It was hard to tell what puzzled him more—why we would subject ourselves to the deboning ritual or why we would spend all that money. From listening to him rant, you would have thought we took all our tour money and then some and plunked it down on the crown jewels. We explained that we were in England—not Queens, Brooklyn, or da Bronx—and it was all part of a great experience. John summed it up for us with two words—he said we were “nigger” rich.

  But we did have something in common with John—seafood. While we were eating fillet, he was dining on canned tuna and sardines he bought at a London discount market. John traveled in style. He always packed his can opener on transcontinental flights. As far as we knew, he had never once in his life ordered room service. If he was feeling really flush, he might eat at the hotel cafeteria.

  Top of the Pops made its debu
t in January 1964. The first show ever, on New Year’s Day, featured the Rolling Stones performing “I Wanna Be Your Man,” the Dave Clark Five with “Glad All Over,” the Beatles with the number-one hit at the time, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and several other huge acts. Considering that the Ramones were going to be performing Phil Spector’s “Baby, I Love You,” we were in royal company all around. Top of the Pops could have been compared with America’s Ed Sullivan Show, but there were major differences, not the least of which was that on TOTP you played live.

  Not just the band played live. Every backing instrument on the recording had to be played live as well. There were strict union rules in England when it came to radio and television. Whereas in the US we could have played live to a soundtrack featuring a string arrangement or just lip-synched the thing entirely, on TOTP, they brought in a half-dozen professional violinists and assorted other musicians to represent the recording on a one-for-one basis. This was not The Uncle Floyd Show.

  Our lunch break in the studio cafeteria was an event in itself and not just because John got to eat for free. There were dozens of actors dressed up in period costumes—Shakespearean, Victorian, Knights of the Round Table. It was like a scene out of A Hard Day’s Night and representative of English entertainment as compared with the American kind. English entertainment was theater. Even English music was theater.

  The twentysomething actor with a green leotard at the next table eating pudding might not have been so imposing while wiping his chin, but in an hour he would be completely convincing stealing from the rich and giving to the poor as Robin Hood. Two tables over to the left, the middle-aged man dabbing ketchup on his forearm might have been enhancing a fake wound while playing Jack the Ripper. At least we hoped he was preparing for a scene.