Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  There were journalists everywhere. They were excited as if the Queen herself were visiting, which was great, but I was in no condition or mood to answer questions. Worse, the entire backstage was illuminated by extremely bright fluorescent lights that penetrated our already dilated pupils. It felt like waking up from a pleasant dream and then waking up again. We had to get out of there.

  The contrast between light and dark was sudden and overwhelming. The opening band was maybe in their third or fourth song, and we figured we would watch from the side of the stage. We went up a staircase, decided we were too close, and figured we’d be better off on one of the nearby landings. Even though I couldn’t see it or much of anything at that point, I figured there was another staircase on the opposite side of the stage. But I was wrong.

  I plummeted about eight feet. When I was about halfway through the free fall I didn’t know if I was about to hit the ground or if I still had a long way to go. So when I hit the auditorium floor, as bad as it was, I was relieved. I had survived. My right ankle was badly sprained, and my knee was banged up. Before I could think about whether I would be able to play a show in less than an hour, Marion landed on top of me. It was the blind leading the blind and the stoned leading the stoned. I might have broken something, but at least I broke her fall.

  No one seemed to notice the two near casualties limping up the aisle. No one in the dressing room seemed to care. We had a show to do. Marion got me some ice and we tried to reduce the swelling. Before the ice could melt, two and a half thousand New Zealanders were yelling, “Hey Ho, Let’s Go!”

  The hashish must have killed a third of the pain and the adrenaline another third. The remaining third I felt, but I played through it. I hobbled back to the dressing room, and when Monte saw how swollen my right leg was, he freaked. He and Marion had to cut my pants off to get me out of them.

  The next day, we were homeward bound. New Zealand was so far east, you flew east to get to America’s west. It was cold at the airport. This was winter Down Under and we wanted to get up and over. We would be flying to Singapore, changing planes, and then flying to Hawaii, Los Angeles, and, finally, back to New York. Monte had called ahead to the airport in New Zealand to get me a wheelchair. When we pulled up in the bus, one of the flight attendants met us and helped me into the chair. Sometimes life really did imitate art. I thought, Put me in a wheelchair, get me on a plane. Not only that, I really did want to be sedated.

  Having already copped everything else along the Pacific Rim, Dee Dee copped an attitude. He told Monte that I was getting special treatment. Monte didn’t even bother to answer. Then Dee Dee took it up with me directly. I told him he was fucking nuts. “What part of ‘I have a busted leg’ do you not understand?” It took a special kind of maniac to be jealous of a guy in a wheelchair. Of course, Dee Dee needed one, too, but for different reasons.

  Dee Dee and I continued our stupid argument on the flight over to Singapore. We were in first class with an open bar, which for the Ramones’ rhythm section usually spelled trouble. Dee Dee said something about what Marion was wearing, and I said something about Vera. Dee Dee was done pulling knives on me, but he wasn’t done calling me an asshole. Our women for the time being were done with both of us. There were open seats scattered throughout the plane. Marion and Vera found a couple of them at the other end.

  Dee Dee was making a pyramid out of beer cans. The pyramid was five wide at the bottom, which is impressive enough on an airplane in flight. The fact that every can was empty because the two of us guzzled the contents made it even more impressive. I was considering starting my own pyramid with shot glasses when I accidentally elbowed one of the bottom-rung beer cans and the whole stack came toppling down midflight. This bothered Dee Dee a lot more than it should have.

  “What the fuck is your problem?!”

  “What are you gonna do about it? You pack your switchblade?”

  We were loud and menacing. We were a terror in the sky. Suddenly the copilot, a big Australian-looking guy, popped out of the cockpit, walked down the aisle, and confronted us.

  “I can radio ahead to Singapore and have you both arrested,” he said. “Have you ever been to jail in Singapore?”

  “Okay, sorry,” Dee Dee said. “We’ll be good.”

  We had about another thirty hours till we hit New York, and crossing the international date line wasn’t going to help. I just wanted to get home.

  Joey had problems with his feet. We didn’t know all the details and we didn’t want to know. He had infections and toe fungus. His nails got so infected that they couldn’t be trimmed with a regular nail clipper. It took a large shear. After we played Central Park in New York, Joey went to the hospital for one of his feet and we had to cancel a bunch of shows.

  A lot of his problems were related to hygiene. He wasn’t changing his clothes much lately, and maybe that had something to do with Linda. Not that Joey didn’t have problems before he ever met her. I told him that whatever else was going on, he had to change his socks. If not daily then at least every other day. The feet are very unforgiving. Walk all over them, suffocate them, never care for them, and they will eventually take their revenge.

  If I shared an apartment with Joey, I would have changed his socks myself rather than see him go through that. But these days his fiancée wasn’t even much of a roommate. Joey was tapping things and twirling his hair at a record pace. The band’s open secret had become Joey’s open wound—literally.

  Hygiene at 29 John Street was no problem. We now went to the shower in style dressed in our psychedelic hotel kimonos. Other members of the entourage had given us theirs, so we now had a couple dozen. We were all set for the eighties as far as Christmas gifts were concerned and had already given some out to our neighbors. We walked the halls and rode the elevators in kimonos. Word actually got out that 29 John Street was taken over by Japanese tourists.

  Joey was back on his troubled feet in time for our next tour of Europe, which began with five cities in Italy. Picking a favorite Italian city is like picking a favorite Beatles song, but Milan was right up there. Located near the foot of the Alps in northern Italy, Milan had everything a great city could have—great fashion and art, breathtaking churches, and ancient history. There were canals dating back to the Roman Empire. Milan was also the industrial engine of Italy. The brief tour we took on the afternoon of September 13 barely scratched the surface.

  Milan had one more thing it could have done without—political unrest. On the streets, outside museums, on pavilions—wherever the tour bus brought us—we saw police. It was nothing like seeing the relatively friendly police in New York or even in Tokyo. In New York especially, the police usually had an air of being relaxed on the job until you gave them a real reason not to be. The year before, the Ramones had done a very successful benefit at CBGB to raise money so the New York cops could get bulletproof vests. We were criticized by some people for doing that, but it wasn’t just John who was for it. Of course, there were exceptions, but for the most part New York cops were New Yorkers protecting New Yorkers.

  The police in Milan did not blend in. It was hard to blend in when you were looking for terrorists and had a submachine gun slung over your shoulder. When we walked along the pavement, we could feel their penetrating watch. Sometimes the police held their submachine guns ready for use and marched toward us. Once they were past us, we felt relieved but never completely.

  Despite that, Milan wasn’t running a police state. The intense police presence was a reaction to terrorism from within that had been going on for at least ten years. The Red Brigades were probably the most notorious of all the violent radical groups. They were a pro-communist faction so left wing even the far, far left in Italy condemned them. They started out as a vocal proworker organization but quickly moved on to murdering pro-fascist figures. Then they moved on to killing legitimate labor leaders.

  In 1978, the Red Brigades committed the highest offense when they kidnapped and assassinated Aldo Moro,
the former Italian prime minister. At the time, Moro was negotiating a peaceful compromise between the Communists and the Christian Democrats. No matter how beautiful Milan was, reality was clear. Once a political group proves it will stop at nothing, the state will do anything to stop it.

  The vibe outside the Velodromo Vigorelli before our sound check was tense. The police and their submachine guns were out in full force. There were demonstrators with armbands and a Nazi aura about them. It wasn’t a joking matter even for John, who for months on end was ranting about how we should nuke Iran for holding Americans hostage. It wasn’t a simple issue of good guys versus bad guys here. It was an issue of not knowing what was going to happen next.

  The Velodromo, originally built for bicycle racing, was an oval stadium with regular seating of about nine thousand and an even larger capacity for festival seating. There was excitement as in any Ramones crowd when we opened with “Blitzkrieg Bop,” but everything changed about midway through the set when we launched into “Commando.” I didn’t use my cymbal a lot in that song, but suddenly there was a crash that didn’t come from my stick. A large rock hit the cymbal and fell to the ground. It was bigger than a baseball. If it had hit me, it would have knocked me out at best or killed me at worst.

  I didn’t give anyone the finger. This was about saving lives, not saving face. I was a sitting duck behind a Rogers drum set. I got up and walked offstage. “Commando” was such a rhythmically driven song that John, Joey, and Dee Dee didn’t notice for about twenty seconds that they had lost their drummer. The words still rang out.

  The band joined me backstage soon. I was loud and clear about not going back out. I had read about Buddy Miles, whom I had met once, almost getting his eye put out onstage by a BB rifle. You couldn’t say it would never happen to you. It almost just did happen to me. If we went back out, they could finish the job by nailing me or any of the other Ramones. Once one of us was out of commission, we were all out of commission. It was as simple as that. John, Joey, and Dee Dee agreed. The promoter did not.

  While we saw red, the promoter saw green. He was freaked out. The thought of refunding sixteen thousand tickets was scarier to him than the thought of someone losing an eye or a limb, as long as it was someone else’s eye or limb.

  “Donna worry. We got the man who did a-this.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “Where is he? Prove it. Bring him in here.”

  “I assure you the police have-a this man.”

  It was bullshit as far as I was concerned. Even on the outside chance that they had a suspect in custody, if there was one psycho in the crowd there could have been twenty more. Meanwhile, we could hear and feel the crowd stomping their feet. It was literally louder than a medium Japanese earthquake.

  Joey told me about a riot that had occurred in this very stadium in the summer of ’71. Led Zeppelin was playing, and a disturbance in the audience grew out of control. There were hundreds, then thousands, of kids fighting, throwing everything they could get their hands on, and destroying the band’s equipment. Police with riot gear charged into the crowd and shot as many canisters of tear gas as they could fire off. The members of Zeppelin barely made it out of there with their lives.

  Between the earth-rattling stomping and Joey’s story, I had a change of mind, if not heart. I had two choices: stay out of the line of fire and start a riot or walk into the line of fire and stop one. I figured it was time to take one for the team, but only figuratively.

  Before I sat back down behind the kit, I stood there for a moment, turned my head left, right, and center, and shot a look out to the audience. It was a look I still carried with me from Brooklyn that said Don’t try it again. We launched into “Here Today, Gone Tomorrow,” which ended with the famous last words “Someone had to pay the price.” Fortunately, no one had to this time. At least none of us. Milan screamed and shouted its appreciation even as the police combed the crowd.

  Unfortunately, at the end of the show, Joey started his neurotic back-and-forth routine while exiting the stage. The promoter was fooled. Milan was confused. And we had had enough. There was never a good reason for a riot at a concert, but obsessive-compulsive disorder was the worst one possible. Monte grabbed him, and the show was over.

  Rome was where gladiators fought to the death in front of bloodthirsty crowds, but for the Ramones, being there was a relief. The atmosphere was calm compared to Milan. The biggest problem we had was not being able to get something to eat during the afternoon siesta when stores closed till five and people closed their metal shutters to take a nap. The second-worst problem was being taken out to dinner by the promoters. The Italian food was the best in the world, but the meal was a dozen-course event dragged out until two in the morning, at which point we really understood why the Italians needed their siesta.

  The sound check at Castel Sant’Angelo was a short study in contrasts. In the daylight, we played “Cretin Hop” against the backdrop of the ancient fortress built two thousand years earlier by Emperor Hadrian. The walls of the castle had deflected bombardments of flaming arrows and withstood battering rams, but no one in the Roman Empire ever expected four guys in T-shirts shouting, “Four five six seven, all good cretins go to heaven.”

  The show at night was tight. A song like “Rock ’n’ Roll Radio,” stripped of everything but bass, guitar, drums, and vocals, sounded pure and hard and distracted us from recent rocks, riots, tear gas, police, submachine guns, temperamental producers, and stolen girlfriends.

  Traveling to Spain was like going back in time. The joke on Saturday Night Live for a couple of years was that Generalissimo Francisco Franco was still dead. But sometimes it was hard to tell. In Barcelona, the hotel was utilitarian at best. If you wanted to see a first-run movie, you had to cross the border into France. Rock albums were available only on the black market. Even though as a dictator Franco rejected communism, what was left after his death felt a lot like the Soviet Union. The roads were horrible. Going from point A to B was a misadventure.

  We figured out quickly that rock and roll was still new and the Ramones were a novelty. We stopped at a little café for sandwiches. When we looked at the menu, there were just a few locals sitting at the tables and the bar. By the time we ordered coffee, there were maybe a hundred people in and around the establishment gawking at us. No one mentioned our band’s name or asked for an autograph. Apparently, the punk fashion—the guys in leather jackets and the girls in tight, bright miniskirts—was as new to them as color TV.

  Spain was transitioning to democracy and determined to move forward. Joey was having a hard time moving forward. The Ramones plus wives and girlfriends had just been dropped off and were walking to a TV studio to do an interview. We crossed a busy intersection as a pack. Joey was right behind me and Marion. As we reached the opposite curb, the light turned red, and I heard a collision. It was the screech of car tires and a dull thud, and that was never good. I turned around to see Joey flying over the hood of an Alfa Romeo.

  No explanation was necessary. Joey had done an about-face to touch the opposite curb and then run out of green time. In Barcelona, as in New York, drivers had no time to waste. Crossing the street normally wasn’t a round-trip ticket unless you were the lead singer of the Ramones. We had our hearts in our throats as Joey twirled through the air and hit the street still spinning sideways. Barcelona came to a halt at least at this one corner. We surrounded our frontman, who sat up dazed but thankfully much more alive than the Generalissimo.

  We played in front of about 250,000 people on the stepped side of a hill known as Montjuïc. Someone told us in all seriousness Montjuïc in old Spanish translated to “Mount Jew.” We hoped this information didn’t get to John so we could be spared dozens of horrible jokes. But Joey, true to form, did tower over the huge crowd, which was much better than being sprawled out on the pavement.

  As we packed it in backstage, we heard Mike Oldfield’s band playing “Tubular Bells,” featured in The Exorcist. It didn’t follow “Pinhead”
that smoothly, but the audience loved all of it. It was a nation still getting rid of its demons.

  The last leg of our tour was Great Britain, starting with London on October 2. The week before, while we were closing out Spain, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin died after drinking what was reported to be the equivalent of forty shots of vodka. It was doubtful the band would continue.

  Everyone was seasick as we took the ferry across the Irish Sea to Dublin. Everyone but me. My strong stomach went beyond the ability to swallow bugs of various types and foods barely fit for human consumption. But on this cloudy afternoon afloat, my head was the problem. The frenzy of a tour combined with my hyper nature would usually distract me from thinking too much about mortality. Now, for a little while, there was time.

  Mortality naturally wasn’t a favorite topic, but when someone in rock passed away, it hit a little closer to home than I might have liked. If he was a legendary drummer who inspired me, it hit closer. And if it was alcohol related, it was a bull’s-eye. Like most musicians, I went through ups and downs doing what I had to do. Feeling invincible served a purpose. It was a useful tool. But for a few quiet moments at sea I felt vulnerable.

  Reflection time was over when we arrived at Dublin Port. It was a homecoming of sorts for Marion with her Irish roots. It was also a homecoming for the Ramones. We had played here two years earlier and put down some Irish roots of our own. The recent success here of “Baby, I Love You” watered the tree.

  The Dublin punks were out in full force. They were in their leather jackets and swarmed us as we got off the ferry. It felt like they had hung out by the docks for two years waiting for our return. The Irish warmth and cheer was contagious, and we invited about a dozen of the kids to board the charter bus taking us to the hotel. They helped us with our bags and even navigated a bit. They were all taught about the next world in catechism, but this was apparently punk heaven on earth.