Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  We performed “Baby, I Love You” in front of a live studio audience. The stage was clean and sparse and illuminated by huge oval overhead fluorescent lights. Nicely dressed English kids swayed in front of the stage. Farther back, some more nicely dressed English kids danced slowly beneath a checkerboard ceiling lighting system. There was no mosh pit. We sounded big, smooth, and produced, just like the Phil Spector record. Joey sang with feeling that belied any personal problems he was having. Dee Dee’s background vocals were spot-on. I played for real, doing the part Jim Keltner performed on the album. My drums were a bit drowned out by all the orchestration, but this, of course, was a wall of sound.

  Those nicely dressed English kids bought records. The single of “Baby, I Love You” was at number eight on the British charts. Across the Irish Sea, it stood at number five. The album was at number fourteen in England. Back home the album was peaking at forty-four on the Billboard chart, though the single had failed to chart entirely. The glass was half full and of course half empty. From a sales point of view, it was as high as we had ever gotten on either side of the Atlantic. In a few short years, the Ramones had gone from downtown nuisance to international sensation, from inventing punk to helping make it a viable force in commercial music. We played to larger crowds for more money and with more media coverage.

  On the half-empty side, there was no runaway hit, no forthcoming triple-platinum status, and no tour headlining American baseball and football stadiums. I heard John and Dee Dee make a few comments to the effect that not even the great Phil Spector could do it for the Ramones. I pointed out that he had done more than maybe they realized, and the song we had just performed for the BBC proved it. Not that I had the world figured out, but I had been in many band situations and knew that success was dangerous because it whet your appetite for more success, even when you didn’t know exactly what that meant. Being proud of what you achieved wasn’t a poor substitute for success. It was what made any form of success worth it in the first place.

  I did see the rest of the band grasp that idea to a degree, even if it wasn’t exactly spoken. As we rode the vans, buses, and planes, we talked about getting back in the studio soon to make another album. We made plans to keep touring the US and the world. We even had new management in the form of Gary Kurfirst.

  Gary Kurfirst grew up in Forest Hills and knew John from the neighborhood. Kurfirst was a rock-and-roll mover and shaker right out of high school, booking large shows at the West Side Tennis Club and Singer Bowl in Queens and jumping across the East River to innovate in Manhattan. He started the Village Theater, which became Bill Graham’s Fillmore East. That club had deep personal history for me. And as a young kid, Marion had gone to see Janis Joplin, the Doors, and Jimi Hendrix at Kurfirst’s open-air festival in Flushing Meadows Park, an event some people claimed paved the way for Woodstock. We knew from the grapevine that Gary used to print up three hundred or four hundred extra tickets for those early shows in Queens and pocket a small fortune, but that was show business.

  More recently, Gary Kurfirst had taken on Talking Heads and the B-52’s as manager. He had an office of eight or nine people on the corner of Fifty-Seventh Street and Broadway, a building which downstairs was home to the famous Coliseum Books and upstairs was home to a different kind of books—the ones kept by most of the respected accountants in the music business. Gary wasn’t our buddy, but he was thoughtful, businesslike, and got things done. I respected that. Together with our booking agent, Frank Barsalona of Premier Talent, who handled virtually every major act a game show contestant could name in sixty seconds, the Ramones were set to keep doing what we did, which was spread Ramones music.

  On June 6, 1980, we played Six Flags Great Adventure in Jackson, New Jersey. Playing an amusement park was not up there in the rock-and-roll stratosphere with playing, say, a soccer stadium in Italy. But in defense of Great Adventure, it was not your average amusement park. Located inland of the shore on what Bruce Springsteen might have been referring to when he sang about “the swamps of Jersey,” the park was built on about five hundred acres and included an animal safari that dwarfed anything Disney ever built. I loved animals, especially if they were Ramones fans. Towering over this city in the swamps was the Giant Wheel, the tallest Ferris wheel in the world. It was probably the tallest man-made structure in the Garden State, and once we spotted it from Route 195, Monte could toss the directions.

  Our dressing room was a trailer surrounded by trees and grass. We thought it was the safari dressing room. The natives were restless. Dee Dee was on something, maybe coke. The roadies were on something, too. Joey was drinking one beer after another. Normally, he wouldn’t with Linda around, but Linda was not around. Not immediately anyway. She and John had stepped out of the trailer and hadn’t come back.

  With Monte’s help, we gathered up the troops and walked over to the outdoor concert grounds to do the sound check, but the doors were locked. We were actually early, which was unusual for a rock band, but then again we definitely weren’t your average rock band. How to kill time in an amusement park wasn’t exactly a difficult proposition, especially since we all had free day passes to the rides.

  We walked toward Rolling Thunder, which was the mother of all roller-coaster rides. As we stood on line, fans began to come up to us and ask for autographs. Joey wasn’t quite as tall as the Giant Wheel, but he towered over the other patrons. Dee Dee and I were pretty conspicuous, too. Even without our leather jackets in the warm sun we had our long dark hair and our attitude. Suddenly we were one of the attractions at Great Adventure.

  Joey decided to sit out Rolling Thunder. That made sense because once it pulled away, it was five minutes of terror and no going back to touch something. Dee Dee told him there were plenty of kiddie rides in a place like this. He was joking around, but Joey wasn’t happy about it. He didn’t seem too happy about anything. After Rolling Thunder, Dee Dee and I did the Lightnin’ Loops, then called it a day. We stood out like sore thumbs. It was like the amusement park version of Rock ’n’ Roll High School.

  The grounds were packed for the show, and the crowd enjoyed the ride. We went up and down through a twenty-seven-song set, from the highs of “Blitzkrieg Bop” to the soft refrain of “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow” and back up again to “Pinhead,” finally closing with the dysfunction smorgasbord of “We’re a Happy Family.”

  At night, as we got ready to board the van, I grabbed a small safari souvenir, a frog. I probably could have made a solid hundred bucks eating it, but I had bigger plans for my little green friend. I walked up to Dee Dee and put my cupped hands out near his belly. Then I released the Ramones’ new mascot. The frog jumped about a foot and a half onto Dee Dee’s chest. He completely freaked out. So did the frog. Dee Dee jumped back and swiped at it a few times in a panic like a detox patient having DTs.

  “What the fuck? What the fuck?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d go crazy. It’s just a frog.”

  “Are you fucking serious? You almost gave me a heart attack.”

  “Give me a break, Goon,” as I called him sometimes. “Don’t blame that on the frog. Blame it on whatever you’re on.”

  “Really? What am I on?”

  Dee Dee pulled his switchblade out and flicked it open. It was the six-inch Springer switchblade he carried around these days, even at theme parks. He held it steady and pointed it at me. I grabbed his wrist with my right hand and bent his thumb back in one quick motion. The knife fell to the ground. My grip on his wrist was like an airbrake on a sanitation truck. I released the grip and pushed Dee Dee hard. He stumbled back, looking dazed.

  “Do it again, ever,” I said, “and the knife’s going into you.”

  The ride back to the city was quiet except for the oldies on WCBS-FM. I knew Dee Dee wasn’t going to stab me. But I had to teach him a lesson. It was for his own good. This wasn’t a forgiving world, not like that. The next guy Dee Dee tried it with might kill him. I thought about all the shit t
hat went down when I was growing up and how it seeped into who I was. These were my bandmates. I had their backs and hoped that they had mine. I never brought up the Brooklyn-versus-Queens issue, but it was always there. Dee Dee, John, and Joey were a lot of things, but they weren’t tough guys.

  There was never a time in my experience when John and Joey would talk much on the van or, for that matter, anywhere. But now it was down to zero. Joey was sullen, even when he was sitting next to Linda. During lunch, Marion and I had seen John rub Linda’s leg. Chances are others in our group had seen it, too, and if they hadn’t, there were a bunch of incidents like that one lately.

  I was a realist. People got together and people broke up. That was, unfortunately, part of life. However, doing it this way was stupid. Doing it in a situation where we all lived together on the road and had to depend on each other was even stupider. But there was nothing to do about it. There was nothing to say. So we listened to oldies. We were not a happy family.

  On June 28, we were doing the middle of three shows in Tokyo kicking off an ambitious tour of the Pacific Rim that would have been unthinkable a few years earlier. Being in Japan was really being away. In the UK, I knew the language. In Europe, many people spoke English, and I could make out a lot of the foreign words. In Germany, we had Dee Dee. In Japan, though there were exceptions, we were dealing with a much more complete language barrier and a cultural one to go with it. But we knew they loved the new Ramones stuff. The publicity poster was the cover of End of the Century with all Japanese writing over it.

  The venue was impressive but definitely a change of pace. The Seibu Theatre was an auditorium seating several thousand situated on the top floor of a large modern commercial building. Where we came from, auditoriums either occupied an entire building or, like a swimming pool, were at the base of one. But the Japanese were innovators.

  The Tokyo faithful packed the Seibu Theatre and flipped over the Ramones. Once we were up there blasting out twenty-eight songs, we were all speaking basically the same language. The Japanese fans dressed like us, knew the lyrics, and applauded wildly on cue. But on the way back to the dressing room, we knew something strange was going on in the Land of the Rising Sun. There were cracks along the concrete walls. They weren’t wide cracks you could stick a finger in—more like hairline cracks. There were still more along the staircase. I knew we played loud, but this was ridiculous.

  A few people who looked like they worked for the venue were trying to tell us something but weren’t getting through at first. It was Little Matt whose words first penetrated my brain.

  “We just had an earthquake.”

  We hadn’t noticed a thing while playing. Ramones noise and vibration covered the noise and vibration from moving tectonic plates. It wasn’t like the Japanese disaster movies we grew up watching. This was a minor earthquake. Someone said it was not quite a 5.0 on the Richter scale. The Japanese, they explained, built their modern structures to withstand a much larger quake. They learned that the hard way. But, we were told, we had to vacate the premises immediately as a precaution. Sometimes the aftershock was worse than the initial earthquake. I thought about one of the songs we had just performed—“Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment.” This was a different kind of shock, but if you weren’t used to it, it was still scary.

  There were no fatalities outside, as far as we could tell. The reaction everywhere was very orderly. Dee Dee and I had made loose plans to go sightseeing, but tonight definitely wasn’t the night. I had a drink or two or three, and Marion and I decided to get some sleep back at the hotel.

  I woke up startled at about four in the morning thinking maybe I was having a bad dream. Marion was not quite awake. As the bed lifted off the ground, I thought somebody—maybe some gigantic sumo wrestler—was underneath. I dragged my body to the edge of the mattress and stuck my head under the frame. There was nobody there.

  “That was the aftershock,” Marion said.

  “Holy shit!”

  Tremors were a lot more jarring when you weren’t in the middle of a punk rock show. I wasn’t looking forward to the after-aftershock. I drank a glass of wine and tried to fall back asleep.

  In the morning, Marion made sure to put two more kimonos in our valises. The hotel provided psychedelic-looking robes every time they cleaned the room in much the same way Holiday Inn provided new little soap bars and tiny bottles of shampoo. We weren’t like John, who we suspected had a closet full of hotel hand wipes back home, but for the psychedelic kimonos we made an exception. They would be perfect for the shower runs back at 29 John Street. The rest of the band and crew were pilfering kimonos, too.

  We had an off day on June 30 before traveling to another show in Nagoya. We did a television interview show in the afternoon. When Dee Dee and I got back to the hotel, we were going to take Vera and Marion out for dinner and sightseeing, but they had gone out shopping earlier in the day and never returned. So we started our own little tour in the hotel lobby and ordered some sake. Sake is made with rice and often served warm. It’s a clear liquid that’s not really wine because it’s brewed. But sake is also not a beer, as beer is about 5 percent alcohol and sake can be as high as 20 percent.

  Dee Dee and I had different tastes when it came to booze, but we had at least one preference in common—more. We had five or six cups of sake apiece and had a nice little buzz going. It was time to hit the streets of Tokyo.

  We didn’t know the streets around the InterContinental Hotel, and it wasn’t like Chicago or Detroit or Houston where you were basically in another version of a big American city. We knew we were near some sort of highway, and that was about it. We walked and laughed and looked at one Japanese face after another. It was like a dream. There were, of course, Asians all over New York, but there was everybody all over New York. This was just Asians and us, and we felt like we were the Ramones dropped into another film, this time a monster movie. We also realized that we had underestimated the sake. It hit you hard and fast. The nice little buzz had been crushed by a forty-foot dinosaur. We were drunk out of our minds. Dee Dee approached a midforties businessman in a suit.

  “Hey! Hey! You see that? Godzilla’s coming! Look out, it’s fucking Godzilla!”

  The poor guy hurried away. He had, in fact, seen a monster. I saw a neatly dressed young woman and made the next play.

  “Where is Hirohito? Where is Hirohito? Please, take me to your emperor! Take me to your leader!”

  She walked away, too, but not as fast as the guy before her. And she looked kind of insulted.

  I didn’t know exactly where we were when the police surrounded us or if we were now in the second movie of the double feature. But I had an urgent message for Tokyo’s finest.

  “We are Ramones! We are Ramones! We come in peace!”

  “We play rocky-rolly,” Dee Dee screamed. “We drinky sake go pee pee. We rove you velly much. We rove Nippon! Rong rive Hirohito! We no droppy bomby!”

  There was now a language barrier the size of Mount Fuji. Maybe that was good. When I heard the things we were saying, I knew the less they understood, the better. I wasn’t sure they knew we were Ramones, but they definitely knew we were Americans and a pain in the ass. One of the police said something and motioned for Dee Dee and me to get into the car. I wasn’t sure if this was how an arrest was made, politely, in Japan, and I didn’t want to find out. I had to think fast, which was hard because at this point I couldn’t even think slow.

  I pulled the hotel keys out of my pocket and handed them to one of the officers. He looked at the key chain with its InterContinental logo and had a moment of recognition. Dee Dee saw it, too.

  “Ahso! Ahso! You see key? Ahso! You takey to hotely!”

  The officer showed the keys to his partner, who nodded and said something. This time when they motioned for us to get in, we did it.

  Instead of just dropping us off in front of the hotel, the officers walked us into the lobby. That was the right move. We were staggering.

  “Don’t
forget to write!” Dee Dee said as the police walked back out the front entrance.

  We took the elevator up to our floor and went back to our respective rooms. I checked my pocket to make sure I still had the keys. I opened the door, walked a few more drunken steps, and collapsed on the bed.

  In the morning, Marion told me it had taken her and Vera half the day to find gifts for everyone back home. When they got back to Vera’s room and opened the door, Dee Dee was crawling around the room on his hands and knees like a dog. He was barking a bit, too, but in Japanese. Vera prepared him his favorite—a bubble bath. Once he was in the tub, he started demanding more bubbles and then quickly nodded out. Vera drained the tub and Dee Dee stayed there for the night.

  The Ramones summer tour of the Pacific hopped south to Australia and then east to New Zealand. I turned twenty-eight in Sydney. The final show of the tour was in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand, on July 24. New Zealand was primarily two large islands. Great Britain had adopted New Zealand as a colony the previous century, making English the official language. As in Australia, the police understood every word Dee Dee and I said except for the ones we slurred.

  Christchurch, like the rest of New Zealand, had the kind of beauty that many of the Scandinavian destinations had. You would think you’d died and gone to heaven if you didn’t know better—and if John and Joey weren’t carrying on a transcontinental cold war. Like the name said, there were churches, and whether they were old-fashioned or modern, they were classic. Looking east, you saw a perfectly blue Pacific Ocean. When you looked west, you saw the Canterbury Plains stretching out to a ring of snowcapped mountains. But like any city on the planet, they wanted to hear “Go Mental,” “Pinhead,” and “Beat on the Brat.”

  Christchurch Town Hall held about twenty-five hundred people. It was a modern, artistic steel-and-concrete building set up for theater-in-the-round with a high platform in the center. To avoid architectural boredom, there were irregular heights between various seating areas. Marion and I were road weary, strung out on some hash we had just smoked, and wandering around the building like kids in a corn maze. The opening band was already onstage. We found our way back to the dressing room and had a rude awakening.