Commando

by Johnny Ramone

  Now I knew I could handle it, so I went to my dad, and he set me up with a union job. I had to be ready, because I couldn’t let my dad down even more and screw up. After my parents sold the bar in 1961, my dad got into construction. By this time he was a union boss, steamfitters union. So he got me a job as a construction worker. We worked on a fifty-story building at Fifty-first Street and Broadway and another at Forty-second Street and Sixth Avenue. These are buildings that are still there. I was glad for a number of reasons, in addition to the twelve dollars an hour I was making. My dad and I had been estranged after my bad time. This repaired the relationship, when he saw that I could work hard.

  Even though Dee Dee lived across the street from me, this was when I really got to know him, working at Fifty-first and Broadway. He worked in the mailroom of the building when I was working construction. This was 1972. We would go to this topless place across the street, Mardi Gras, and have a beer at lunch, talk about music and who we saw play the night before or something.

  I did that construction work for five years, never missed a day. So I was really normal. I wasn’t sure it was what I wanted to do for a living, but if that’s the way it was, I figured, that was my lot in life.

  I had other ideas along the way, even as I worked construction. At one point, I thought I would try to own a string of self-serve Laundromats. I figured that couldn’t be too much work, other than servicing the sites. I wanted something where I could make a living at it and still enjoy music.

  After I graduated from high school, even in my bad period, I went to all the shows. I would check the ads in the Village Voice to see who was coming to town. The bigger guitars came along with the Beatles and the Stones. I saw Hendrix shortly after he played the Monterey Pop Festival, at Steve Paul’s Scene, among other places. The crowd sat on the floor, and I took a seat right in front of Hendrix. I thought it was tremendous, and he actually made me not ever want to play the guitar. You had to be a virtuoso—then. Even if you had the talent, you’d have to practice for fifteen years before you would get to that point. It was funny seeing him, though. I mean, I couldn’t tell if he was great because of all those effects or if he was great because of how he played. It didn’t matter. He was just great no matter how you looked at it.

  The first concert I ever went to see was the Rolling Stones in 1964. It was their first show in New York, at Carnegie Hall on June 20, 1964. I saw them again, at the Academy of Music, twice. I saw the Who a lot, at the Fillmore on their first U.S. tour and when they did Tommy live. I saw the Beatles concert at Shea Stadium. I took in a bag of rocks to throw at them, snuck them in under my coat, but they were too far away to hit, like out at second base, and I was in the stands, pretty far back. I had to just watch the show.

  I saw Black Sabbath early on, their first American tour. I saw the Doors ten times, and the best ever was at the Singer Bowl with the Who opening. I saw the Amboy Dukes twice. Alice Cooper were tremendous. I bought Love It to Death, then went back and bought the first two albums, which didn’t even sound like their third album. They really fine-tuned themselves. I saw them live three or four times. The first was at Town Hall on the Love It to Death tour, and the place was half full.

  I saw the MC5 a number of times. I loved them—they were great. But I always really wanted to catch them on their home turf, at the Grande Ballroom in Detroit. That’s where the real deal with them went down.

  I bought the first Stooges album at Alexander’s as soon as I saw the cover. I just liked the way they looked: tough. I might have read something before that, but nothing had prepared me for the music on that album. I was crazy for it the same way I had been when I’d started hearing those first rock and roll 45s from the jukebox. It was unlike anything I had ever heard; it was just amazing. No matter how cool they looked on the cover, nothing could have prepared me for that. So when the Stooges came to play at the Electric Circus on St. Marks Place, I was there. Ron Asheton came out with his Nazi outfit and made a speech in German. The next day, they went to play some place in New Jersey, and the Jewish Defense League was there to protest.

  I think that show at the Electric Circus was one of the first times I ever taped a show, on this portable cassette recorder I snuck in. I still have that tape.

  I loved those rock and roll shows where you got soaked in sweat and when it was over, nobody could hear a thing, the noise was so intense. Grand Funk at the Stony Brook University gym was one of those. July 24, 1970. That was probably the loudest show I ever saw. I also caught them at Shea Stadium with Humble Pie opening.

  Something like Woodstock wasn’t for me. I knew people who went to Woodstock, and I knew that I didn’t want to sit outside on the ground, in the mud. That just sounded bad. I told them they were crazy. I had seen all the bands that were playing it anyway.

  Tommy, Dee Dee, and I would go out to the clubs, which is really how the band got started. We were all friends. We had the same musical tastes, and we liked to get dressed up at one point—in the glitter days. Tommy would always say, “Why don’t you and Dee Dee start a band?” And I’d say, “Oh that’s ridiculous, that’s sick, I want to be normal…” I think Dee Dee always sort of wanted to do it, but he would repeat what I’d say, that he didn’t want to be in a band; “We have to be normal,” you know, have a job and stuff. Dee Dee wasn’t quite as eccentric back then; he was a little saner.

  We’d go hang out at this place on Bleecker Street, between Sullivan and Thompson in the Village, called Nobody’s. So one night we went, and the New York Dolls were hanging out there. They were already a band, but I hadn’t seen them yet. I asked Tommy who this one guy was—I pointed to Johnny Thunders and told Tommy that he looked cool. Tommy said that he was in the New York Dolls and that the band was terrible. But I knew, looking at him, that there was something there, and to me it’s always been about the look. So I told Tommy, “No, he’s got something going on.” He looked so cool, I figured that he had to be decent because image was so important in rock and roll, and he had that.

  The New York Dolls really did it for me. I saw them over and over, twenty times in all, starting on August 15, 1972, at the Mercer Arts Center. The last time I saw them was on April 19, 1974, at the Coventry Club in Queens. I keep all this information in little notebooks, which have become known as the “black books.” The shows I see, the movies I see, all documented.

  I identified with the Dolls crowd. I liked the effect the band had on them, and the look of the audience. They were a good-looking audience, and I thought, “Wow, this looks like fun.” It was an event. This was entertainment, not musicianship and people who take themselves too seriously. And for me, it was always about entertainment.

  I saw Kiss right in the beginning, and it may sound hypocritical, I guess, but I always thought it was silliness. I have a certain amount of respect for what they’ve done, but Kiss wasn’t cool. The New York Dolls were cool. And that was always very important, coolness. Wayne County was playing loft parties on the Lower East Side with Kiss back then, and I always found him too perverse. There was this ugliness to that. I liked seeing worlds where the girls were all beautiful and the guys all looked like they were in shape and looked a certain way, and to some degree, that’s what I felt like the Dolls attracted. The girls were all dressed up in nice outfits. Johnny Thunders looked good. David Johansen basically looked good. Sure, I’d grown up and seen bands like the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix when their first albums came out. But here, even though I didn’t know anybody, I felt like I was a part of it, at the ground level, and that was a totally new experience.

  Like the Ramones, who hadn’t formed yet, the Dolls, too, were limited musically, but they knew what to do with what they had. When I saw them and realized how limited they were talent-wise, but how fun and entertaining it was, I think that’s when it first occurred to me that maybe rock and roll was an option. I’d say to Tommy and Dee Dee, “I can do this too, just as good,” and Tommy probably believed me, because he kept encouraging us. Dee Dee
and I talked about it for two years sitting outside our job.

  Tommy really wanted us to form a band, and he would be manager, and it would be this primitive thing and so on. We kept saying no, telling him he was sick. I was full of confidence when I would just talk about doing it—you know, “Sure, I can do that.” And I could say that as long as I wasn’t really doing it. But he kept bugging me, and finally it turned into “Oh, now I have to actually do it?” I wasn’t a rock star.

  But I liked to dress well, which was part of it, at least the charisma part. I was six feet tall and weighed about 150 pounds, so I could wear a lot of things. I didn’t spend a lot of money on clothes, but would always find stuff I thought was cool. Later, when I got a good job, I would get my clothes made at Granny Takes a Trip. That was during the glitter period. I would have them make me velvet suits; I wore snakeskin shoes, chiffon shirts.

  I went through phases. In high school, I always looked toward Brian Jones to see what he was wearing and then tried to find the closest thing I could to that. I always thought he was one of the best dressers in rock and roll and one of the coolest guys. Corduroy pants and corduroy shoes and striped shirts and striped T-shirts. Then in 1970 I was influenced by Joe Dallesandro from going to see Trash, multiple times, and there was a two-year period where I would wear jean jackets with no shirt, jeans, a tie-dyed headband, and a tie-dyed scarf around my waist. It was the glitter period, in 1972. And I always wanted to be the best-dressed person anywhere I went.

  And all through those times, I had a leather jacket that I would try to incorporate into my look. I got it in 1967. I was always my own person. I wouldn’t be influenced by what was around me; I would be influenced by something that I thought was ultracool, and take my influences from that. Any show I went to back then—and I was going to them every week—I made mental notes to myself about what I was seeing.

  At the same time, I was working the construction job, and I was ready to get married. It was part of getting my life together and being normal. I thought it would be good to be married and set up my normal course in life. Even though I felt too qualified to be a construction worker, I thought, “I don’t know what else I can do.” And I thought that I just had to accept that fate.

  When I first started seeing Rosana, she was eighteen and still in high school and I was twenty-two. She was an Egyptian-Jewish mix and reminded me of Sophia Loren. I couldn’t believe she liked me. I didn’t have anything to offer anybody at the time, and I didn’t think much of myself. Now when I look at a picture of myself from then, I think, “Well, I was a pretty good-looking guy.” But at that time, I had no confidence in myself at all. We went out for a few months, and then she broke it off. I thought about her for a while and thought that if I got a good car, I’d get her back. This was in 1972. I was working and had money in the bank, so I went with Dee Dee to a car dealership. At first I was going to get a Bentley, but I settled on a Jaguar, which I bought on April 13, 1972. I got there and realized that I didn’t know how to drive. So I paid my friend Mark Lester fifty dollars to take my driving test and get a license in my name. At that time, you didn’t have a photo on your driver’s license. So I went to the dealership with Dee Dee and bought the car for thirty-five hundred dollars, but I didn’t know how to drive. I had Dee Dee drive the car home. I really don’t know what I was thinking there, but I guess I didn’t know any better than to let Dee Dee get behind the wheel. I’d never let Dee Dee drive if I didn’t have to. So I drove the car around the block a couple of times, and that’s how I learned. Later I got my license in the mail. The night I got the car, I took it into the city to see a show.

  So essentially, my life was putting on my jean jacket, getting in my Jag, and going to work with all these union tough guys, then going home, changing into whatever clothes I was into at the time, glitter probably, getting back in the Jag, and driving into the city to see a show.

  But the car worked; it did get Rosana back. She saw me in the Jaguar, and she called me within a month—on May 13—and we were back together. I got rid of the car shortly after that. It kept breaking down, and it was eating up all of my money. After all the stress I was having with the Jaguar, I decided to get the cheapest American car. I bought a brand-new red Chevy Vega.

  On October 7, 1972, the day before my birthday, we got married. I was twenty-three; she was twenty-one. We got an apartment in Forest Hills at 67–38 108th Street. It was there that the Ramones wrote some of the songs on the first three albums.

  Rosana and I would go see the Dolls and any other shows together. We didn’t even know anybody else there. We’d get dressed up, drive to the city, see the show, and drive home. And I had to go to work the next day as a construction worker again. I’d go back to putting on my construction outfit, and then I’d get all dressed up and go out and see the Dolls.

  But I still didn’t want to be in a band.

  Early photos of Johnny with his parents and with Santa, 1950. Used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Johnny, age four, August 1953, with the teddy bear still in his collection.

  Bear photo by Suzanne Cafiero.

  Johnny with his pop, age three, Christmas 1951.

  “I’ve liked animals all my life. I always had pets when I was a kid, but they always seemed to disappear. I even took my pet poodle on the road with us in 1980. I’ve always enjoyed going to zoos.” Both courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Johnny, age eleven, September 1960. Johnny, top row, center. Courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Teenage Johnny. Courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Johnny, in uniform

  Johnny with his father. Courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Johnny’s father, Frank Cummings, served in the military and was influential to Johnny in many respects. Courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  A few of the countless concert ticket stubs Johnny saved over the years. From the private collection of Johnny Ramone. Used Courtesy JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Three punk-rock guitar legends collide: Johnny Ramone and Johnny Thunders talk at the Rainbow Theatre aftershow, in London, New Year’s Eve, 1977, while the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones looks on (background at far right). Photo by Danny Fields, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Live in-studio performance at a 1976 video shoot in New York City.

  Live with the Ramones in Boston, circa 1977. Photo by Danny Fields, under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Chapter 2

  I was an unemployed construction worker from Forest Hills, and I loved rock and roll. And I had this guy bugging me for the past two years to play in a band. I finally gave in.

  I bought my guitar at Manny’s, on Forty-eighth Street and Broadway, on January 23, 1974. They carry every kind of guitar you can imagine. Mine cost fifty dollars. I picked it out. I liked Mosrites because not many people played them. I got the cheap one. The Ventures and Sonic Smith from the MC5 both used a Mosrite. Those were pretty good references. It was blue. I stuck it in a bag because I didn’t have enough for the case. Later I would get photographed carrying it in a shopping bag. I never planned that to be an image.

  Tommy kept telling us that he would be our manager and producer, saying, “Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do this.” So we thought, “Okay, who else should be in the band?” We were friends with Joey and we knew he played drums, and we had another friend named Richie Stern who was into the Stooges like we were. We used to hang out all the time, smoke pot, listen to the Stooges, and Richie would do his Iggy imitation for us.

  Dee Dee and I started the band practicing in the living room of my Forest Hills apartment. Both of us were playing guitar, and we were going to teach Richie how to play bass. Joey would play drums, and Dee Dee was going to sing. But after a few days, we realized Richie just wasn’t goi
ng to get it. He had no sense of timing or rhythm. I was still terrible, but getting better and better each day. I realized I wanted to be the only guitar player in the band, so we got rid of Richie and moved Dee Dee over to bass. We’d be a trio.

  On Sunday, January 27, just four days after I bought my guitar, the band rehearsed at Performance Studios, at 23 East Twentieth Street between Broadway and Park Avenue South. The New York Dolls and Blondie also rehearsed there. Tommy and his friend Monte Melnick had built and managed the place for the owners. Tommy got us in for free, and Monte would later start helping out as our roadie. I knew no songs, really, and I didn’t know how to play anyone else’s. I had to write my own or learn songs that someone showed me that were simple enough. I had no patience at all, but I really wanted to be good. I even practiced at home.

  Soon we had two songs that Dee Dee, Joey, and I came up with when we’d practiced in my living room. They were “I Don’t Wanna Get Involved with You,” which we never recorded, and “I Don’t Wanna Walk Around with You,” which was on the first album. So we did those two songs over and over. By the way, those songs had more than three chords. We got tagged as being a “three-chord band” early on by critics who didn’t know how else to put us down. But most Ramones songs, even to the end, had more than three chords.