Punk Rock Blitzkrieg

by Marky Ramone

  “Dee Dee, you’re not here for coffee and donuts. You can have coffee and donuts at home. You’re here because you want to get off the shit you’ve been taking for years and years. And if you want to do that, which I hope you do, you’ve gotta keep your ears open. You’ve gotta listen.”

  “I’m hungry.”

  “Be hungry to learn something,” I said. “This is the first day of school as far as you should be concerned. These people have been through a lot of what we’ve been through. If you listen, something might really click. You can’t do this on your own.”

  “Okay, Marc. I’ll sit there and listen. But I’m not getting up there and making a speech.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “Do what you want. If you learn something—even one thing—you’re ahead of the game.”

  We took two of the few dozen chairs set up. The room was packed with men and women in their twenties, thirties, and forties. It made sense that there were no senior citizens. This was NA—Narcotics Anonymous. When the meeting leader asked me if I’d like to introduce myself, I got up and spoke as I had hundreds of times.

  “Hi, I’m Marc, and I’m an alcoholic. I’ve been sober for almost five years.”

  “Hi, Marc.”

  The other attendees were polite but clearly not thrilled to see me. NA meetings were open to AA people and vice versa, but many people in either camp considered the other to be another world. Yes, there were cliques even in the world of addiction. To me, this was a little crazy. It was like the difference between hardcore and thrash—not all that much. Whether you were addicted to drugs or alcohol, you were dealing with a substance that took control of your life and made you a hostage. But whatever my opinion might have been, there was no doubt that Dee Dee had come to the right place.

  “It’s good to be here,” I said. “I’ve been working very hard to stay sober and stay focused. I’m a musician, and focusing on my music has been very positive for me in funneling my excess energy. And I’m very excited tonight because a good friend of mine is here.”

  Dee Dee was sitting next to me and stood up as I sat down. He looked around for a moment, and I had some of the same anticipation I always had when he counted off a song . . . one, two, three, four . . .

  “Hi. I’m Dee Dee. And I’m checking it out.”

  That was it. There was no other intro. No verse. No chorus. I understood exactly where he was in life. I had definitely been there. He couldn’t admit to the other people in the room that he was an addict. He couldn’t admit it to himself. Step One would have to wait at least a little longer.

  But my afternoon wasn’t wasted. I made sure he knew where to go and what to do. I made sure he took a pamphlet listing all the upcoming meetings—morning, midday, and night. I told him the next time he picked up something he was better off keeping out of his mouth, nose, or arm, he could also pick up the phone, call me, and maybe I could talk him out of it. I left the door open. The door was always open.

  The Ramones were by now officially around long enough to make a compilation album. The working title was Ramones Mania. This wasn’t to suggest Beatlemania. There could probably be nothing like that ever again. But as we neared the end of the decade and played bigger shows to wilder audiences, we could see and feel we were at least reaching another level of appreciation.

  We were on tour in California in the summer of ’88, and on July 9 took a day out of our schedule to film a video for “I Wanna Be Sedated.” In the early days of MTV, a video and a song were usually released more or less simultaneously. Sometimes when a song became popular, the video would follow a few months later to capitalize on sales. It had been ten years since “Sedated” was released. It was hard to believe.

  The song, like the band, had steadily picked up steam even as an entire era came and went. It was the Ramones song most likely to turn up when we were just randomly flipping through the radio dial. There were probably millions of casual listeners who were familiar with the song and the “ba-ba-ba-ba” at the end who couldn’t even identify the band. It was amazing what a talented singer and bass player could come up with one night while bored in a London hotel room.

  The video was being shot to promote the compilation album. The director, Bill Fishman, had a simple concept for the video. The Ramones would be sedate while everyone around them was in a frenzy. That would be a first, but this was Hollywood.

  We filmed in the hallway of a hospital. Dee Dee, John, Joey, and I sat at a table in the middle of the hallway, ate breakfast, and read while dozens of actors dressed for every walk of life dashed up, down, and across. It was a nice payday for extras. We had a ballerina, a young bride, a nun, a pinhead, a guy on a unicycle, a cheerleader, a doctor, a nurse, a bagpipe player, and many other folks from central casting. It was a real mental ward. We felt right at home.

  The trick to the shoot was the band had to move in slow motion while the extras moved at normal speed. The film would be sped up later to make our motions appear normal and everyone else’s appear frenetic. It was the slowest I had ever eaten a bowl of cornflakes in my life. Dee Dee turned the pages of the comic book he was reading in the same time he would usually take to empty a medicine cabinet. This was either the challenge of a lifetime for our hyperactive band or some sort of bizarre therapy.

  Meanwhile, the loony bin was getting loonier by the second with cereal, crackers, potato chips, hors d’oeuvres, and party streamers flying around the hallway. Just another day in the nuthouse.

  On the flight up to San Francisco the next day to play the Fillmore, Marion and I sat behind Joey. It wasn’t his worst-smelling day and it wasn’t his best, but the flight was full and this was the luck of the draw. Somewhere over San Jose, Marion pointed out something bizarre. Because of Joey’s height his head extended well above the top of his headrest. Stuck in his large mop of hair were bits and pieces of food—chips, crackers, cereal, plus a few bits of paper. Each shard was a small souvenir from the shoot the day before. It was a new low in personal hygiene. Even grubby frat boys cleaned up the day after a food fight.

  I felt fortunate to have every last fan, and being sober made me appreciate the upside of the Ramones’ world even more. There were people I was a fan of, too, and of course, I always hoped to be treated with respect. One of the rare and special occasions was when we discovered someone we were a fan of was also a fan of ours. Stephen King, it turned out, was a huge Ramones fan.

  John and I were into science fiction and collected sci-fi posters. Ramones songs were, in some cases, musical sci-fi. Ultimately, science fiction wasn’t about the special effects, however good they were getting lately. It was about the power of a story—with the help of the outer limits of knowledge—to probe your darkest fears, deepest insecurities, and wildest fantasies. In a movie like Stephen King’s Carrie, a homely girl gets picked on by the brats in her high school, which happens every day in real life. What doesn’t happen every day is that girl’s rage triggering her telekinesis and creating a vengeful bloodbath. We were all outcasts sometime, somewhere. We just didn’t get to torch and decapitate the school bullies by blinking our eyes.

  During a brief Ramones swing through New England, Stephen King invited us up to his home in Bangor, Maine. The house was a classic Victorian structure with a slightly haunted look. King had piercing eyes you could tell had read and written a lot of books. He was really friendly and happy to meet us. He served us a big dinner in the basement, but the real treat down there was all the props and memorabilia, mostly from sci-fi and horror movies, and not just the ones based on his books. Godzilla, Night of the Living Dead, The Blob, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre—it was a museum of some of the best gore ever splashed across the silver screen. John’s eyes became as piercing as King’s.

  During a break in the friendly Yankees–Red Sox debate between John and King, the legendary author handed Dee Dee a copy of his bestselling novel, Pet Sematary. It was the story of a graveyard where cats and dogs were resurrected and humans inevitably followed. The problem
was, they became ghoulish and bloodthirsty. As the baseball and movie trivia session continued, Dee Dee disappeared for a while. That usually meant trouble. But in less than an hour, he came down the stairs, book in hand. In the other hand was a piece of typing paper with some words scribbled on it. Dee Dee had written a song called “Pet Sematary.” He had condensed the book into a concise, hooky, three-minute song in which he pleaded that he didn’t want to live his life again.

  I could see why he didn’t. Dee Dee’s life had gotten hard. But when it came to writing songs, he had definitely done it again. Dee Dee hummed it for King and the rest of us, and a title track was born. Pet Sematary the movie was set to begin shooting the following month, and Stephen King wanted the song, as long as it was recorded by his favorite punk band of all time.

  Out on the front porch a little later I asked Dee Dee why he wanted to quit the band, as good as he was at what he did. He had heard this question from me at least a dozen times, and I had the answers memorized. He wanted to be Dee Dee King the rap artist, not Dee Dee Ramone. He was past the point of no return putting up with John and Joey’s long-running cold war and sick of being looked upon by everyone as a problem child. As a liability. He was a toxic-waste dump site, as far as he was concerned, for blame. He wanted a life free of control by the Ramones, by Vera, by his doctors, and the medications they prescribed.

  Whenever I heard this laundry list of complaints, I told him the truth—that I not only sympathized, I empathized. I told him that if he got out from under the control of the drugs, the control by everyone else would become a nonissue because he would then be in control of his own life. I told him maybe the psychotropic drugs were masking the symptoms of whatever dope he was still using but that what he really needed to do was get clean of all substances, legal or not. I told him the band would probably wind down over the next couple years, and there was no reason the two of us couldn’t hang on, hang out, and have a few laughs while socking away some decent money.

  This time, on a front porch in Bangor, Maine, having just witnessed what I had witnessed, I figured I would try a different approach. I explained to Dee Dee that he was among maybe a handful of people who could pick up a book, skim it, and write a catchy song about it in under an hour. I told him he had done for punk what Stephen King had done for fiction—create, from scratch, images, themes, and stories that drew people in because they could relate. Because the songs penetrated to the curiosity, fears, and insecurities people carried around with them but couldn’t put into words. I told him it was great to play Dee Dee King for a while, but he was really the Stephen King of punk. With a gift like that, he had a basic, fundamental need to use it. Dee Dee listened and stared silently into the dark New England woods.

  For a guy with one foot out the door, Dee Dee contributed a lot to our next album. The foot that was still in wrote at least half the songs, including the straight-ahead rocker “I Believe in Miracles,” the punk-metal song “Zero Zero UFO,” the anthem “Punishment Fits the Crime,” and of course the movie ballad “Pet Sematary.”

  It was a struggle for John to play the arpeggios and chords in “Sematary,” even with Dee Dee coaching him. The style was a bit of a late-eighties rock ballad with a lot of tasteful picking. After a while Daniel Rey laid down both the rhythm tracks and then the lead, which John was never going to do in the first place. Daniel also helped with the structure of the song. Jean Beauvoir of the Plasmatics produced, and gave it a commercial feel to make it radio and movie friendly.

  The Ramones were way past craving a so-called hit, having experienced repeated disappointments over many, many years creating a sort of Zenlike approach to the recording process. High expectations were a way to set yourself up for another fall. But having a song in a major motion picture couldn’t hurt.

  Our main producer, Bill Laswell, had an avant-garde background. He had worked with Brian Eno and Herbie Hancock. He was jazz influenced, which I liked, and he had even worked with my friend and Voidoids bandmate Bob Quine. Bill experimented with my sound by placing my drums up against a brick wall. The intention was to generate a lot of slap-back into the drum mikes.

  It definitely did that. The effect was to make the drums very loud and up front. The snare in particular seemed to jump out of some of the songs instead of sitting nicely in the middle. I figured if a drummer like myself who enjoyed big drums thought they were too loud, we were likely to turn off just about everybody else. But this wasn’t Ritchie Cordell in ’82, and I didn’t have a bottle stashed in the bathroom garbage pail or anywhere else. I gave my thoughts to Bill Laswell calmly and politely, and we went about our business. For the first time on a Ramones album, my business included contributing lyrics, which I did on “All Screwed Up” and “Learn to Listen.”

  There was more to like than not to like on the project. “Can’t Get You Outta My Mind” had a classic Ramones feel to it. I thought we played “Miracles” a little too slow and the early-sixties cover “Palisades Park” a little too fast, but Brain Drain was not a drain to record. If anything, it was energizing and moving us into the next decade.

  The sound of rock radio was changing, and the record companies that passed on King Flux might have been on to something, whether or not it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Guns N’ Roses was all over the airwaves, and you could hear the punk influence on almost every song from their breakthrough album, Appetite for Destruction. Bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, R.E.M., Suicidal Tendencies, Jane’s Addiction, Sonic Youth, and the Cure were getting heard. They were different from the Ramones and from one another, but all shared a sort of do-it-yourself attitude that started with sixties garage bands and, a bit later, punk.

  FM radio was starting to play songs with eclectic mixes of sounds that defied easy categorization. There were more genre names than bands, but the one name that seemed to provide an umbrella for all of it was “alternative.” We were hearing the word dropped here and there. The Ramones’ music was diversifying, too. I didn’t spend a lot of time wondering whether we were influencing these younger bands or they were influencing us. Clearly, both things were happening at the same time.

  In the middle of all this evolution and progression, the final song on Brain Drain was Joey’s “Merry Christmas (I Don’t Want to Fight Tonight).” Going back to Irving Berlin, nice Jewish boys had a knack for writing catchy Christmas tunes. Ours had enough of a Ramones feel not to be a campy sellout and enough of a doo-wop holiday spirit to actually get cued up during the yuletide season.

  Our breath looked like it was produced by fog machines. That was fitting for a video being shot in a graveyard. But this fog came naturally. It was January 1989, and we were shooting the video for “Pet Sematary.” As in all horror flicks, even three-and-a-half-minute ones, the scariest scenes were shot at night. The temperature was twenty degrees and falling, and Joey, Dee Dee, John, and yours truly were all freezing our asses off.

  Sleepy Hollow wasn’t any run-of-the-mill cemetery. Located just north of Tarrytown, New York, near the Hudson River, Sleepy Hollow was the setting for Washington Irving’s short story “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” In it, the lovelorn Ichabod Crane gets chased through the graveyard by the fabled Headless Horseman. At the moment, the Ramones had another graveyard occupational hazard to worry about. We were getting lowered into an open grave by a hydraulic lift. The lift was in the hole, hidden from the camera, so all that would be seen were the Ramones, slowly disappearing into the grave as we played “Pet Sematary.”

  I stood next to Joey who sang as I pounded a drum kit just big enough to play a dirge. We both had prescription sunglasses on, which are ideal for reading tombstone inscriptions in three-hundred-and-fifty-year-old cemeteries. Dashing and dancing around us were a couple dozen ghoulish characters who could have been the “Sedated” video extras refitted with funeral garb. But a few—like Debbie Harry, Chris Stein, and members of the Dead Boys—were stars in their own right.

  This video wasn’t pretend slow motion. The lift droppe
d ever so slowly giving plenty of time for the bone-chilling winds to penetrate our leather jackets. The cast placed a large headstone over us with “The Ramones” written on it. That was take one and probably the closest we were ever going to get to dying on a set. The problem was take two. And then take three. Dee Dee had written he didn’t want to live again. The real horror was dying again.

  When the klieg lights were turned off and the crew disappeared, all that was left were Dee Dee, myself, and my friend Mike. The three of us had driven up together in my silver two-door 1979 Cadillac Coupe de Ville. Mike brought along Max, his 120-pound Rottweiler, who was getting anxious and seemed a little spooked. The darkness had closed in quickly. With the darkness and the quiet came faint sounds of leaves, trees, and night owls you would never notice in the commotion of a video shoot. This was not a set. It was a real graveyard.

  We made it to the Coupe by the partial light of the moon and the distant glow of the town of Sleepy Hollow. There was some relief as I flicked on the headlights, but we just wanted to get the hell out of there. We pulled away and made a left at something called Cataract Hill. We drove for a while, laughed as we warmed up a little in the car, and swung a gradual left around a site called Monticello.

  “You sure this is it?” Mike said.

  “This is the general direction,” I said.

  I kept veering right, past headstones, ancient arches, monuments, mausoleums, and old stone walls built before there was such a thing as the United States and that would probably still be here afterward. Finally, we got to a clearing. It was the same place where we shot the video, and it now looked more desolate than ever.

  “Do you know the way out of here?” Dee Dee asked.

  “Do you?”

  “I’m asking you,” Dee Dee said. “You’re driving.”

  Mike was smart and said nothing. But Max was literally howling at the moon. I tried driving in the other direction. Even in a graveyard, streets have names, and Sleepy Hollow was no exception. Forest, Terrace, Lincoln—the one sign missing was the one that said “This way out.” I tried a left on Pleasant Avenue. There was nothing pleasant about it. Sleepy Hollow was apparently arranged in a series of interconnected circles. We started recognizing headstones, which was never a good thing. As we tried another winding road Dee Dee looked out the front window, then the sides, panicked.