Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  Monte and Walter calmed me down, and I resigned myself to playing and shutting up the rest of the day. If they wanted me to treat it like just a job, I could do that. And like any job, there were bathroom breaks. As I reached into the garbage can, I wondered if I was the time bomb. I wondered if Dee Dee had written these songs specifically for me.

  That night, Monte called the apartment, and Marion picked up. Monte asked her to ask me to bring it down a notch. Not to be silent when it came to my opinion but just lower it in tone and aggression. Like the recording of my drums.

  “Ritchie Cordell is afraid of Marc,” Monte said. “That’s the point it’s gotten to. And I think he’s talking to Gary about it. Just talk to Marc and ask him to cool it, that’s all. Please.”

  On the ride over the next day, I thought about leveling out just to help Monte. It was not right that he had to clean up our mess all the time. One of the songs coming up was “Time Has Come Today.” It was a big hit for the Chambers Brothers in 1968 but wasn’t right for the Ramones. It was too flower power and psychedelic and at four and a half minutes dragged on way too long for a Ramones song. But I figured I’d play ball and do it anyway.

  Even with Oldies 101.1 playing on the radio, there was an awkward moment of silence in the car. Little Matt broke the silence with a question.

  “Hey, Marc, if you weren’t in the Ramones, what would you do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Tell you what, I wouldn’t be trying to cover ‘Time Has Come Today.’ ”

  After I planted my bottle of vodka in the men’s room, I walked toward the sound room. I passed John in the hallway, and he looked right through me without saying anything. I saw Joey coming out of the control room, and he stopped me.

  “You all right, Marc?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. “You all right, Manny?” That was my name for him sometimes.

  “Yeah, of course, whatever.”

  He didn’t smell all right. Nothing did. I couldn’t stop thinking about what Matt had said in the car. It wasn’t his style to ask me an abstract question about life. It was a reaction to something he had heard. I could imagine what that might be.

  I had never before met the drummer from Walter Lure’s band. But now as I walked in he was sitting at the kit getting sounds up with Ritchie Cordell. They both looked at me like I had interrupted something really important. The drummer got up and walked out of the room. Ritchie Cordell followed him.

  I did a take of “Psycho Therapy.” Then another. I no longer needed to hear it back in the control room. Whatever they were going to do, they were going to do. It was time for a bathroom break. As I walked down the hall, I saw Walter Lure coming out of the bathroom and Dee Dee going in. Walter was in on my secret and was sharing the bottle. The only rule in this club was, put the bottle back where you found it. I figured I’d wait a minute or two till Dee Dee came out.

  Dee Dee came out with the bottle of vodka in his hand and a big grin on his face like a kid at an Easter egg hunt or a narc after a raid. I had to give him credit. It was a righteous bust. He had to smell the liquor on my breath, figure out where I was drinking, size up where I might hide the bottle, and stick his arm not just into the garbage can but also into my secret compartment. He had to think like an addict. That wasn’t a stretch. By comparison, I was an amateur. There was no one in the world better than Dee Dee at the art of stashing. All those years of burying pot in exotic countries had finally paid off.

  “Look what I found. Look what Marc was hiding in the bathroom. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!”

  I heard the door to the control room open as Dee Dee continued showing off his catch. There was no bottle waiting for me anymore, but I went to the bathroom anyway because I had to. When I got out and walked back into the sound room, there was no tribunal. No one was stunned. Everyone knew what I was doing. Only now they had hard evidence.

  I worked on the drum tracks for Dee Dee’s song “Somebody Like Me.” There was nobody like Dee Dee. He knew that. We all knew that. And that, I figured, was why he ratted me out. His substance abuse problem was a runaway train. Pointing at a little flatbed car on the side of the tracks was a great way to get the attention off himself.

  I wasn’t saying anything about the hypocrisy of all this. Still it pissed me off. This guy was busting me? I finished the last original drum tracks for the album and told Monte I was going home. There was no way I was doing “Time Has Come Today.” They could get whoever they wanted to do it.

  For the album cover shoot, we visited the real subterranean jungle—the New York City subway. The photographer, George DuBose, had the idea to use the stop at Fifty-Seventh Street and Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. It was the end of the line for the B train. At night, there was about a twenty-minute layover before the train left on its next run. It was a lot cheaper than renting out a station or building a set.

  The B train had some personal significance for me. It linked the Prospect Park area of Brooklyn, the East Village, and Midtown where I had done so much studio work and equipment shopping over the years—now decades. The cover concept was simple—the Ramones on a train. The station was nearly empty except for us. There was no issue over what to wear this time. Ramones plus subway equaled leather jackets.

  A photographer and his willing subjects could go through quite a few rolls of film in twenty minutes if they put their minds to it, and we did. There were shots of us sitting in a row in the car, standing up and straphanging, and standing in the open subway car door staring out onto the platform. It was hard to tell if George suggested it or if I did it instinctively, but either way it seemed like a good idea when I scooted over to a window seat. While John, Joey, and Dee Dee stood and looked out the door, I looked out the window like a lonely commuter. George took half a roll with us like that, each click recording a slightly different nuance of the same somber mood.

  One of the first things a visitor, tourist, or transplant to New York learned was that the subway wasn’t for having conversations with strangers and making new friends. You barely even talked to your old friends. And so the shoot for us came naturally.

  The jukebox in my Sheepshead Bay bedroom was playing and a Kojak rerun was on in the background one weekday afternoon in January 1983 when the phone rang. It was Joey.

  “Marc,” he said. “I gotta tell you something.”

  Not that I hadn’t known for some time. Not that not even being called to rehearsals for the upcoming tour hadn’t underscored it. But the tone of Joey’s voice was the one people reserved for informing you about a death, breaking up with you, or firing you.

  “You can’t be in the band anymore. I feel bad about it, but there’s nothing I can do. These guys feel they just can’t handle you anymore.”

  “Listen,” I said. “I had a feeling this was coming.”

  I told Joey not to worry about it. Just to do what he had to do. What I had to do now was answer Little Matt’s question from the car ride—if I wasn’t in the Ramones, what would I do? The answer was easy. I would do exactly what I was doing now—having fun. I would have more time than ever to do it.

  On the TV screen, another question was being asked. It was Telly Savalas’s famous line, “Who loves you, baby?” That answer wasn’t as easy.

  16

  DOG DAYS

  They used the shot of me alone in the window of the B train. “Ramones” was written in graffiti on the side of the subway car. It was a special effect. The spray paint wasn’t really there. I was there but just barely.

  I was relieved. I was disappointed. I was angry. As the spring of ’83 began, and for the first time in a long time I wasn’t touring with the Ramones, there was a lot of stress I no longer had to face on a daily basis. John couldn’t stand Joey. Joey couldn’t stand John. Joey couldn’t stand Dee Dee. Dee Dee couldn’t stand John. John could just about put up with Dee Dee. And their solution was to throw me out. Me!

  I could understand it to a degree as a cutthroat business decision. Dee D
ee and I were a team. We partied hard and became toxic when we were together. The team had to be broken up. As valuable as I felt I was, Dee Dee wrote most of the songs and was indispensable no matter what he put in his mouth. Still, I had thought we were brothers. Sure, brothers who fought, but that was most brothers. The fighting was supposed to make you stronger as a unit, not rip you apart over a problem. I didn’t expect to be thrown overboard. If anything, I thought I deserved the chance to clean up for a month or so and come back. But there was no lifeboat waiting. There was no rope. I tried to let it all go.

  When I thought about the recording sessions for Subterranean Jungle, I regretted the tone I took with Ritchie Cordell. That was the alcohol talking. But I didn’t regret the content of what I said. It needed to be said one way or another. I couldn’t understand the point of spending your whole life building your chops as a musician—or as anything, for that matter—and then putting out something you couldn’t be proud of. The Ramones’ approach of getting it over with quickly in order to divvy up the leftover advance money had driven Phil Spector to Manischewitz in a Dixie cup and me to vodka in a garbage can.

  The way I saw it, I had nothing to apologize for. There were plenty of guys I knew hitting their thirties who were still wondering what to do with their lives. I had had my nose to the grindstone—or to the skins—since my teens. I had been a professional musician for almost fifteen years, paid all my dues and then some, and been an integral member of three, maybe four, groundbreaking bands. The Johnny Shines album I recorded was in the Library of Congress. I had money in the bank. I had earned the right to sit back and enjoy life.

  One Sunday morning in the late spring, Marion and I did what couples all across America had done almost forever—go for a nice drive and shop for a few things. We were cruising down Sheepshead Bay Road in the ’68 Caddy at about forty miles an hour when I slammed on the brakes.

  “Holy shit!” I said to Marion.

  It was John and Linda standing on the sidewalk outside a drugstore.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” Marion said.

  I had no idea. They had been sneaking around together for literally years, but why here? Why now? They both lived in downtown Manhattan. A secret rendezvous might have brought them to the Village or Midtown, but Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, was across a river and a borough and had seemingly nothing of interest to them, including either of us. The attraction couldn’t have been the drugstore they had just walked into. It was a perfectly nice little family-owned drugstore, but there were at least a dozen Duane Reades in Manhattan that blew it away.

  “What are you doing, Marc? No.” Marion put her hand on the wheel.

  I had to do it. I parked the car and got out. Marion got out, too. Stupid as it was, it was hard not to. We walked into the drugstore. John must have seen us, because I saw him hiding in the back behind a large cardboard nail polish display. He must have thought I wanted to kick his ass. Linda darted over to the bath supplies aisle. Suddenly Marion and I had the urge to shop for deodorant, toothpaste, hand lotion, and anything else we might be running low on. We took our sweet time. Every so often, I spotted John’s bowl haircut peering out from behind the Maybelline sign.

  We checked out with enough stuff for the medicine cabinet to last through the summer, then headed for the door. We burst out laughing when we hit the sidewalk and the fun continued in the car. Coincidences like this one had been happening for a while in Manhattan, but certainly not out here. It wasn’t as if we were stalking John and Linda. We had moved out to Brooklyn to get away from the craziness, not run toward it. If anything, they were stalking us.

  John and Linda had become a little sickening. The way they ran around on Roxy and Joey was part but not all of it. They would do these cutesy little things that drove us all crazy. On a given Monday, John would have on a red T-shirt, and Linda would have on a short red dress. The next day, he would wear a green T-shirt to match her green sweater and skirt. It was color-coordinated torture. Part of the torture was that we couldn’t say anything to their other halves, who were our friends. We couldn’t rock the boat or sink it. But now that I was out of the band, all bets were off. Or, as John might have said, it was a whole new ball game. We rushed home.

  Marion called Roxy first. The idea wasn’t to build a federal case. It was just to report what she saw and leave it at that.

  “We saw them together. In Sheepshead Bay, of all places.”

  “Are you kidding me?” Roxy said. “Are you sure?”

  “Roxy, either one of them is unmistakable. Together they’re one of a kind.”

  I called Joey next. Joey accused me of lying to stir up trouble now that I was no longer in the band. He was in denial.

  “Joey,” I said. “I’ll bet all the money in the world she’s not home with you right now. How would I know that?”

  Joey said that didn’t mean a thing, and we got off the phone. Marion and I had done our duty and it felt pretty bad.

  When the phone in our bedroom woke us up, the digital clock read 1:48 a.m. Marion picked up the receiver, and I could hear Roxy hysterical on the other end. She wanted Marion to repeat the content of their conversation Sunday morning, including where we spotted John and Linda and exactly what Linda was wearing. For a moment, I wondered why Roxy needed to hear all this again, but then I woke up a little more, and it dawned on me this wasn’t for her ears only. No sooner did I realize that then I heard John’s voice shooting out of the receiver like darts.

  “Why are you upsetting her?” John said.

  “Why are you doing what you’re doing?” Marion said.

  “Why don’t you stay the fuck out of my life?”

  “Why don’t you stay the fuck out of our neighborhood?”

  “I wasn’t even in your neighborhood,” John said.

  “Oh, really?” Marion said. “So I happen to know you were wearing a gray shirt and walked into a drugstore on Sheepshead Bay Road because I’m psychic? You’re a disgusting liar!”

  “You need to find something to do with your life now that Marc’s not in the band.”

  “So, John,” Marion said, “who were you hiding from in the drugstore? Who were you so scared of?”

  The fight escalated into the kind that can only happen when things have built up for a long time and when you no longer care because you think you’ll never see the other person again. Marion and John unloaded, and I couldn’t tell who hung up first.

  Early in the summer, I got a call from Little Matt. He had parked the Ramones’ equipment truck overnight in the street in front of his apartment on Ocean Avenue and awoke in the morning to find the vehicle had been burglarized. Everything was gone—amps, monitors, mixing boards, lights, cables. Even John’s leather jacket had been stolen, so he was really pissed off. I told Matt I was sorry to hear it, and then he let me know the other reason he was calling. John thought I might be behind the robbery. He wasn’t sure, but when the Ramones were discussing the incident, my name came up. John’s reasoning was that I was getting back at him for firing me and that I lived in the neighborhood.

  I had to laugh. I hardly had to remind Little Matt who else lived in the neighborhood—the same people who just a few years earlier had successfully planned and executed the Lufthansa heist, the largest robbery of cash in the history of the United States. By comparison, the Ramones heist was probably easier than sniffing glue. But somehow in John’s paranoid mind, in a few short weeks I had gone from stalking him and Linda to casing out the band’s equipment truck.

  When Little Matt called again on the night of August 14, he had bad news about John. He had just gotten out of the van and was walking to his apartment on East Tenth Street when he spotted Roxy in front of the building with a guy named Seth Macklin. No one else in the band or crew witnessed it, but whatever happened next, John and Seth Macklin got into a fight. John was severely beaten and, once he was down, kicked in the head with a steel-tipped boot. A witness had seen John defending himself by swinging his travel b
ag. Macklin was in police custody, and John was in St. Vincent’s Hospital undergoing surgery for a fractured skull. Matt said everyone expected John to pull through.

  In the morning, the story was splashed all over the newspapers including, of course, the front page of the New York Post. There was no more information than what we had the night before. In fact, there was less. But the basics weren’t hard to figure out. I had heard that Roxy had been bringing guys home for years. When John saw Roxy and her friend together, he charged. He was probably looking to assault Roxy but instead wound up running into Seth Macklin and a steel boot.

  A few days later, I heard from Little Matt that John was expected to make a slow but full recovery. His relationship with Roxy, however, was not expected to recover. The night of the incident, while John lay in St. Vincent’s, Roxy invited the police and the press into their apartment and handed out personal photos of John and herself that were on the cover of the Post the very next day. When John got out of the hospital, he read Roxy the riot act. There was nothing more upsetting to a control freak than losing control. In this case, he had lost control of both Roxy and the information coming out of his own home. Word was that John was looking for another apartment and that, presumably, Linda would join him.

  Joey was ecstatic that John got his head handed to him. Anytime the world did to John what Joey himself couldn’t, he was happy. I was sad for John. I really didn’t like seeing anything like that happen to anyone, especially someone I was friends with for so long. But I wasn’t shocked it happened. John set himself up for it. Eventually your lifestyle catches up with you.

  I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a nice dream and knew the world I was waking up into wasn’t going to be nearly as nice. But the tapping noise wouldn’t stop. I reached out my right hand as if to silence some sort of alarm clock, but there was no alarm clock. I was inside my Caddy. There was a New York City cop on either side of the car. The tapping was the sound of their service revolvers against the windows.