Commando

by Johnny Ramone

  We played three nights, October 3, 4, and 5, at Mothers with Blondie. I had an argument with Debbie Harry over the split of the door money. She thought we were doing a 50-50 split, and I said, “No one is here to see you guys. Everyone is here to see us.” We split the door 70-30, and she was mad. I never really got along with her.

  We were really good in those shows, and that was when Sire decided to sign us. Our set included songs from what would be the second album as well as the first. We had two full albums of stuff when we were signed. Craig Leon, an A and R man for Sire, and Linda Stein were there, and they presented us to Seymour Stein, the president of Sire, who had us play an audition. We were offered a record deal with Sire; Danny decided to leave 16 Magazine and came on board as our manager in November.

  In January 1976, we signed our contract at Arturo Vega’s loft, which is where a lot of Ramones stuff happened as far as artwork and all that goes. I was pretty happy that day. Arturo was around for a while before I talked to him. He was working for us in some capacity almost from the start. I don’t think he was hired. He was just there.

  It was a cold winter, and it was freezing out every day we went into the studio to record our first album. I still had the Vega and would drive in to work, which was at Plaza Sound in Radio City Music Hall, where we were recording. I liked working during the day. It was like having normal hours, just like I did at the construction site when I was a steamfitter. My guitar replaced my lunch pail.

  We had trouble right away over some of the Nazi stuff in our songs. They were really uptight about “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” and the line “I’m a Nazi baby.” We said, “You’re going to interfere?”

  We didn’t want to change anything. I didn’t like the idea that we were giving in, but we made some changes. The line “I’m a Nazi schatze” stayed, so we weren’t completely altering the words; but Dee Dee wrote, “I’m a Nazi baby,” which we eventually changed to “I’m a shock trooper.” We never thought anything of the original line. We never thought it was a big deal. We were being naive, though. If we had been bigger, there would have been a bigger deal made of it by the press. Especially if we were coming out with that stuff now. But Joey, who was Jewish, was singing it. And it was a story about a little German boy in a little German town. We kept to the original lyrics live, though, right to the end of our career. Just compare the opening line of the album version to any live recording of the song in print. I don’t know if anyone ever even noticed the difference.

  Later on in our career, we had a flap about a line in the song “Wart Hog,” which referred to “junkies, fags, Commies, and queers.” Gary Kurfirst, our manager at the time, called and said he was getting complaints about the line. By then—this was 1984—I knew better. I said, “Who are you getting complaints from, junkies, fags, Commies, and queers?” I told him there was no way we were taking that off the record. We went without it on the lyric sheet then, which was fine. I didn’t care about lyric sheets anyway. Inside the original pressing of the album, it just read, “Wart Hog,” with a big underlined question mark underneath the verse. But when the expanded and remastered CD reissue came out in 2002, all of the lyrics were printed. By then the song was a fan favorite. Dee Dee and I wrote it, and it was one of my favorite songs to play live.

  The early songs, well, what would we write about—girls? We didn’t really have any. We weren’t artists or anything, so we wrote about simple things that we could relate to. We thought Communists and Nazis were funny. We thought sniffing glue was funny too, but we didn’t even know that people were still doing it. We’d write these songs and laugh, but we never thought we were wacky. We thought we were a normal rock band; but it soon became apparent we were a little off-kilter.

  We started recording the first album on February 2, 1976, and we mixed it on the 19th. I didn’t understand why it took that long. I was only used to playing live. I thought you’d just go in and play all the songs in one day, and then do all the vocals the next. We were rushing through it because I was conscious that whatever money we wasted was ours and that we had to pay all this money back. So whenever the engineer would ask me how I felt about a take, I’d say, “Oh that’s the best I ever played it. I don’t think I’ll ever play it that well again.” And we’d move on.

  In the studio, they stuck me in a little room to play by myself with headphones. I thought it was strange, but what did I know? When any questions came up, the other guys would listen to me, and I would ask Tommy. Tommy knew more about what we should do. We recorded the songs in the same order that we played them in our live set at the time, a pattern that we followed when we did the next two albums as well. Even then, the Ramones were a machine of habit.

  We had to do a photo shoot for the cover, but no one in the band liked having his picture taken. I’d hated having my picture taken even when I was a little kid, so this stuff was really unpleasant. Roberta Bayley did the shoot. I didn’t know her. She was someone who hung around CBGB’s and had taken that famous shot of the New York Dolls outside the Gem Spa that was on the back of their first album. She had the credibility, in other words. It was shot in the neighborhood of East Second Street, between Bowery and Second Avenue, not far from CBGB’s; the kind of area where you would expect us to hang out. It was bedraggled, with lots of black brick walls, and that worked for us. That’s why we took most of those early photos around there. It was perfect for black and white, since there was little color in the neighborhood.

  On the cover of the first album, I had my middle finger extended. I didn’t have the finger out the whole session, which lasted fifteen, twenty, maybe thirty minutes. But the label used that shot, which was good, though I was really disappointed that no one ever commented on it through all those years. I never thought they would use that one. I was really trying to sneak it in. I felt like I got one over on everybody. But I guess they just expected it from us. It was a good cover, but I still don’t think it was as good as Rocket to Russia. All I ever said to photographers throughout our career was to get it done fast. We don’t need to be paying a bunch of money for a photo.

  I never wore a watch. I liked to stay on schedule and on time. I was rarely late for anything. I leave when I’m supposed to leave, and I’m generally five minutes early. Even for the dentist. I was never late for school. I’ve been like that my whole life.

  I always thought that if I were doing something, I should be fully serious about it and do whatever I can to make it good. I felt the same way about my job when I worked construction, even though I never felt I would do it forever. As the first album was being mixed and readied for release, we were still playing any show we could get.

  We ordered new equipment after signing with Sire, but it took a little while to come. I opened those boxes with my new Marshall amps at Arturo’s loft, where we had them delivered. On May 10 and 11, we played at the Bottom Line with Dr. Feelgood, and it was the first time I used those new amps, four huge cabinets, all wired up. It was deafening. I wasn’t aware of how loud they could be. My habit was to crank everything to ten with my other equipment, so that’s what I did. I could see the audience leaning back, the noise was so loud. I couldn’t hear for a week. I figured there had to be a better way to do this. So I started just going with the bottom cabinets, but kept the other two out there, empty. I always had the amps on ten.

  My ears are fine. I don’t keep the TV at a loud level. Some frequencies I can’t hear well, and sometimes the phone might ring and I don’t catch it right away. If someone is talking and they turn away from me, I might not pick it up.

  I saw our first album for the first time at Alexander’s, probably the day it was released, April 23, 1976. There it was. It was cool, sort of like the first time I heard myself on the radio. I also knew that we had another one coming out and that it had to be better. It was like one-upping ourselves each time. The albums became a constant quest to make it better.

  At first, I thought that the demo we did earlier was better than the alb
um, then I realized that the album was really good. Tommy did a great job.

  When I saw some of the reviews, I thought they were funny. Some people would see us as these cartoon rock-music characters, while others tried to intellectualize the record, like it was this big statement. We were really serious, trying to be good. But we weren’t thinking of it as anything besides fun rock and roll; we weren’t really trying to be anything but that. But as long as people were enjoying it, that was good.

  The album was out, but we had no tour, and no booking agent in the United States. We decided we should go to England. So Danny managed to get us shows there, and we played at the Roundhouse, then Dingwalls, both shows with the Flamin’ Groovies. We did well there. We played in front of two thousand people. It was great to go there; it was a place where so much music history had been created. We went to the record stores, but really all I cared about was playing and coming home. I didn’t get real upset about the overseas touring until the next year, when I realized that I really hated not being in America.

  When we got to England, we saw that something was really happening there. We hung out with the Damned, the Clash, and the Sex Pistols, and they all came to our two shows. They were all cool-looking kids, which was what we needed for the movement. We were aware that we were changing music by this point, and that we were at the forefront of something new, but we couldn’t do it alone. These were people and bands who could help us. We knew that we needed this British invasion. We had based this movement on the Beatles, we were the Beatles, and anybody else was part of it.

  That was the first time I met the Clash. Later, when I saw them perform on their tour for the second album, Give ’Em Enough Rope, I thought, “Shit, they’re as good as us.” They were the only thing that ever really came close. I’d seen them during their first album cycle and again later on, when they put too much reggae into their set. But during that tour with the second album, they were great. Every band peaks at some point, and that was it, as good as they would get.

  The rest of the year was playing in places we hadn’t yet played, like Detroit, Atlanta, and Los Angeles. We moved Monte Melnick from roadie to road manager. We had sporadic booking agents, who would find us shows, then just drop off. We did some shows in L.A. with the Flamin’ Groovies, a co-bill thing on August 11 and 12 at the Roxy. We played two nights, the 16th and the 17th, at the Starwood on our own.

  We liked L.A. right away, and they liked us. We met Rodney Bingenheimer, who was a really sweet guy. We did his show on KROQ, and L.A. became a very friendly place for us. In all, we did thirteen shows in the L.A. area and San Francisco. During that time, the album made number 114 on the charts. I tracked it all the time. On August 26, we went to Disneyland. I always liked that place, loved riding Space Mountain. I like fast roller coasters. I don’t know that I cared about going with the band, but I did have a good time. I like those parks. I’ve been to Disneyland three times and to Disney World twenty times. At Disney World, I like to ride Thunder Mountain and Splash Mountain.

  The rules we had set out for touring were already in place. No food allowed, because then the van would smell like food. There was no cigarette smoking in the van, but pot was allowed. Dee Dee had a pot problem; he smoked a lot. When he was in the Ramones, the others tried to get him to stop smoking so much pot, but I thought he was much better off with it. It kept him tranquil.

  We’d take our girlfriends on tour, which was sort of different for a band. It didn’t matter; we never had that many hot women hanging around our shows, except maybe in California or Texas. Mostly punks and misfits, and those aren’t the kind of girls you want. When we played, I would scan the room, for fun, and if there was a pretty girl, I would see her, usually at the back of the club. Maybe that’s why the guys weren’t really into finding girls. I know that the standards for the road crew had to be lowered, I’m sure. Besides, I’d rather have my girlfriend with me.

  At first we shared rooms, Tommy and I, Dee Dee and Joey. But by 1977, we had our own rooms. And when we took our girlfriends along, we had to have our own rooms. We were working steady now, and even though we were making very little money to begin with, there was more of it coming in. So the first thing we did before we took a raise was budget money for our own rooms. There was never any roughing it at all.

  There was one thing we had to deal with right away, which was this condition that Joey had, this obsessive-compulsive thing. He had always behaved erratically, like touching things as we passed them on the street. He was also always sick, even when we were starting out, and down the road he forced us to cancel tours. But this problem he had made him late for everything.

  We had to have Monte get over to his apartment an hour early just to get him in the van. There is no way for me to understand this affliction, this condition he had. I saw it as being irresponsible and unorganized. I’d see Joey going up and down the stairs while we waited. I didn’t bother to ask anyone about it because I didn’t care why he did it. I just wanted to make sure we dealt with it and made it to jobs on time. These were the people I worked with, and we had a job to do.

  Once in a while, Joey would say, “We can’t go this way,” or he would have to go back to the hotel. Monte handled all of that. If we couldn’t go back or something, Joey would get in one of his moods. I think people could see it too; fans could see him doing all this touching if they saw him out somewhere.

  That wasn’t all bad. It wasn’t as if we were the models of sanity, so if someone thinks he’s nuts, great. We are the Ramones, after all. I just didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t care about him in that way.

  But we were never late to a show. We established that early on, that the show was the most important thing.

  And no one could get drunk before a show. As far as vices, I would have two beers after every show, a Bud or a Miller or a Coors, something American. Joey always had a drinking problem; he was always hanging out with everybody. Tommy was fine; he had no vices except cigarettes. Dee Dee … whatever.

  Later in our career, when we got to the nineties, nobody was drinking. Joey stopped; Mark had stopped. Mark slowly developed problems when he joined the band, and he was drunk for some shows. The most beers I’ve had at a time, since I stopped getting drunk at age twenty, has been three. I’ve smoked pot all my life. The pot would rarely have much of an effect. To me, smoking a joint was like having a beer. I’d feel like I had a beer.

  Maybe pot should be decriminalized, but we sure don’t need kids smoking pot all day long. You could never legalize it, because kids would get it for sure then. They can get cigarettes, and there’s no reason to think they couldn’t get a pack of pot. I don’t think pot is good for you. I don’t think alcohol is good for you, either, but it’s been legal for a long time.

  In October 1976, we went back into the studio to record our second album, Leave Home. I wrote most of the stuff I contributed at my apartment in Forest Hills, before I left and moved to a place in the city. I had no amp at home, just an electric guitar. I recorded it onto a cassette and played that back at rehearsal. We had better production, we were playing a little faster, and we had a lot of songs accumulated. We were in really good shape for that album. I like it a lot. I think it’s one of our best. I probably preferred it to the first album. It took about as long, if not longer than it did recording the first, but I was used to the process by that point. The whole thing went pretty smoothly.

  The title refers to the Ramones leaving New York to go on a tour of the United States and the world. But, coincidentally, I had some personal issues at the time. I got married at twenty-three, in 1972, because I thought that was the right thing to do to lay out my course in life. I got bored in that situation in 1976, because I guess I got married too young. Then I got into the band, and all of a sudden I started realizing that I couldn’t really communicate with my wife. I was having trouble communicating. I had found someone else. She went by Roxy, but Cynthia was her real name.

  I left my wife in late 1976. I
moved out of my Forest Hills apartment at first to Gramercy Park, then to a place on East Tenth Street between Third and Fourth Avenue. By now, the band was going well, and the new album was coming out. We ended 1976 playing seventy-three shows. I was sure that we would be big. I thought we’d do this for five years, and then I’d get into the movie business, and be a director or producer of some sort. I wanted to direct low-budget horror films. It was just a thought at first, but I became more serious about it as time went on. I’ve always had my eye on the future, not so much planning as being worried. I think I became a delinquent because I didn’t know what to do and I was scared. So I thought that after the Ramones, I’d have a big enough name that I could work in the movie industry. I saw films as my future, and music for five years. The band was never supposed to go much past that.

  (Left to right) Johnny, Joey, Tommy, and Dee Dee wait on the subway platform in Forest Hills, Queens, on their way to rehearsal in New York City, July 18, 1975. Note Johnny carrying his guitar in a shopping bag instead of a guitar case. Photo © Bob Gruen / www.bobgruen.com. Under license to JRA, LLC. All rights reserved.

  The Ramones—(from left to right) Dee Dee, Tommy, Joey, and Johnny at CBGB’s on Second and Bowery, New York City. Photo by Danny Fields, under license to JRA, LLC. All rights reserved.

  The Ramones live at CBGB’s in 1976. Photo by Chuck Pulin, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Johnny in Washington, D.C. Photo by Danny Fields, under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Johnny with Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie in the corridor of CBGB’s. Stiv Bators (of the Dead Boys) and Jimmy Destri (of Blondie) talk at far right. Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.