Johnny tracking guitar for the Ramones debut album, New York City, February 1976. Photo by Danny Fields, under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
(From left to right) Joey, Tommy, and Johnny goofing around in the studio during the recording sessions for their debut album in February 1976. Photo by Danny Fields, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
Johnny with Joe Strummer, at friend Gerry Harrington’s party, April 2002. Used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.
Live at the Whisky a Go Go, Los Angeles, December 1978. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
Live at the Whisky a Go Go, Los Angeles, 1977. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
Chapter 3
It was ridiculous, but at the same time it gave us confidence. We were playing five nights, with Blondie as the opening act, two shows a night, five dollars to get into the place, which held around three hundred. We were starting to really believe we were that good.
Leave Home came out in February, and we did a four-week tour of the United States with it, starting with those shows in Los Angeles. I liked L.A. even back then and said in one interview that I wanted to move there. At the time, I wasn’t serious, but it turned out I was.
A couple of weeks before we went on the road in support of the album, which was our first real U.S. tour, we played a couple of shows with Blue Oyster Cult, at their invitation. On February 4, we played with them at Nassau Coliseum, on Long Island, then packed up our gear and played CBGB’s with Suicide. The next week, we opened for Blue Oyster Cult in Poughkeepsie. Those arena shows went a little better for us, although we would have more bad experiences in those big places. I never really enjoyed playing them.
Back then, if you got signed, you went on tour with a major group. There were no clubs to play original material. Clubs were basically for cover bands. To play original material in a club was a whole new thing until the scene started developing. And you didn’t have that many groups back then either; it was nothing like it is today. We’d go to towns throughout the country and there’d be no bands there, but as we’d leave each one, new bands would be forming. Kids would see us and think, “Hey, maybe I can do that too.” That’s how it was everywhere the Ramones went. We’d go to the littlest towns, and play the littlest places, and new bands would form.
On March 8, while we were doing the shows in L.A., we met Phil Spector for the first time. He said right away that he wanted to produce us. He kept after us later, and wanted to produce Rocket to Russia and Road to Ruin, but we weren’t ready for that. I never was, even when he produced us a couple of years later. Tommy was still in the band, and he was our producer.
We also went back to San Francisco to play and hit San Jose, Palo Alto, and Berkeley. The West Coast shows were the first real positive reactions we had in the United States outside of New York. It was a good time in L.A. We stayed at the Sunset Marquis and would sit by the pool during the day or just walk around. I never ventured far from the hotel when we were on tour. I’d sit in my room and watch TV. When we played in Europe, I would take a book, usually a baseball or film book, a biography of some sort. That’s because they didn’t have television over there, or at least not shows that were in English.
We’d play anywhere we could get a show, and in 1977 we played 146 shows. We played Pocatello, Idaho, driving in a snowstorm. There were three hundred people there. We played at this outdoor place in Austin, Texas, and it was 110 degrees. I felt like I was walking into another world going to Texas for the first time back in 1977. I thought, “Oh, this is weird!” Then I grew to love it, playing the South and playing Texas. I tried not to notice it, but I know we always got some looks in certain places, and when I noticed it, it made me uncomfortable. But really, I knew that the people there were good Americans who just weren’t used to seeing things like us.
We dealt with all sorts of things, and we made almost every show. We played anytime, no matter what, for the most part. On New Year’s Eve 1981, at Malibu in Lido Beach on Long Island, we played even though I had food poisoning. I was throwing up all night and the whole ride home, but we didn’t miss the show. The only times we missed were once in Virginia Beach in 1981, when Mark got too drunk the night before in Columbus, Ohio, and didn’t make it, and two shows in Seattle in 1980, when I had some kind of strep throat. The hotel had some ninety-five-year-old doctor come up to check me out. He gave me a shot, and I broke out in red bumps and splotches all over. Nobody wanted to go near me; they all thought I was contagious, so we canceled and made the shows up two days later.
We were always out there playing, and we always made sure we gave the fans what they deserved. So if we missed a show for any reason, we made it up as soon as we could. They deserved that. Especially those smaller towns, where not much happened anyway. Johnson City, Tennessee; Pocatello, Idaho—we played places like that. I liked those places.
If the attendance at a club didn’t look right to me, I would question it and see what their excuse was. We were conscious even then about the money, and we established policies that would stay with us throughout our career, like the guest lists. We really didn’t accumulate a lot of people along the way. I mean, some of us had friends in L.A., but in places like Dallas or Nashville, we would have nobody. In New York and L.A., we had a limit of four or five tickets per band member. After a while, that guest list comes out of your money.
As our popularity grew, we got more press attention and did more interviews. I liked doing interviews if the writer was any good. I knew that wasn’t going to be the case if there was any question about us being brothers.
We didn’t want to get portrayed as this dumb group. So we tried to keep the press away from Joey and Dee Dee and let Tommy do the interviews, since he handled them best. During that spring, in April, we played a show in Boston, and the next day these kids from a local college newspaper told us they were scared to get up front because they had heard things about us. They said, “We were standing at the back,” and I asked, “Why didn’t you come up front? It really sounds better if you get closer.” And they said, “We heard that you vomit on the audience.” This was exactly the type of thing we were always up against.
We were aware that it wasn’t good to be lumped in with these other bands that had gotten some bad publicity. I never understood why we were put together with them in some people’s minds. I thought we were fun, although we were also brutal and visceral. But I just wanted us to be a good band and good to our fans.
When we played England and some other spots in Europe, they were into spitting on the band, which I hated. We couldn’t get them if they were in the middle of the crowd. If it happened in America, we could get them; it would be an isolated incident. I would get security to get the person if they were spitting at us. It’s an insult to the band. If they do something to anyone in the band, they’re doing it to the whole band. In England, it was twenty kids spitting. It would ruin the show for me because I wouldn’t move to the front because I didn’t want to get spit on. I’d look into the lights and try to dodge it if I could.
The first week of April, we recorded “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” which would become one of our bigger songs. We used it to replace “Carbona Not Glue” on re-pressings of Leave Home, because the Carbona Company had contacted us and made us remove it from the album. They thought the song promoted drug use. I thought it was just funny. People were still doing that kind of thing?
We recorded throughout our career whenever we got a break—it was the circuit: record, tour, record, tour. We did well in the studio. I worked fast, and the band was good at it. Joey always took a long time getting lyrics together and doing the vocals, but the songs were written a certain way, and everyone else’s parts were always done quickly.
To keep things moving in the studio, some of the time I would have someone else play a guitar part. It was me playing 95 to 99 percent of the time, but occasionally we would use someone else for different
reasons. Sometimes another player would bring something different to a particular part than I would, and all I really wanted was for each record to be good. I never saw a problem with this—it would just be a little extra thing to make the song better. I would tell the player exactly what I wanted to hear and how I wanted it played and where—I was right there telling them what to do. We selected guys we knew and people who would be easy to work with.
Daniel Rey was great to work with all the time. We met him early in our career when he was with this band Shrapnel that opened for us a bunch of times. He produced our last album, ¡Adios Amigos!, and he played the leads. Walter Lure from the Heartbreakers was good to use too. On Subterranean Jungle, which came out in 1983, I had him play rhythm along with me because I knew he would do something different. It came out great. It was so sloppy it was funny. But when we put it together with my guitar, it sounded good, because he was playing these two-note things instead of chords. Nobody could play those bar chords like I played them, so he had to do something different. Ed Stasium, another producer we worked with, also played sometimes. He did some of the notes on some acoustic-based songs on Road to Ruin. Tommy played the final guitar chord on “You’re Gonna Kill That Girl,” off Leave Home.
It went the same for lyrics. Later on, we used Daniel to help Dee Dee with songs. Daniel knew the band and how it was supposed to sound. We used him because we would do whatever it took to make a good song. The bottom line was that I wanted to have a good album; I didn’t have to be all over it. It was also part of the expediency. I just wanted it done quickly. That was the only way we were going to make any money. We could take two weeks to do an album or two months, and it would still be a Ramones album.
I look back and see that we could have taken more time on some things, but we had a small profit margin and had to get it done; otherwise, we’d have been working for free. That’s the one thing I might have changed if we had had a hit on the radio. I would have taken a little more time on the recordings and maybe used some different guitars on some songs.
By the time Leave Home started to get out there, we were a professional-looking band on stage; everything had come together. Arturo had designed our eagle logo just before Leave Home came out, so we used it on the back cover, and we had a professional backdrop now too. That was to be part of our evolving look onstage—the backdrops, the lighting. Arturo was the first guy to really use all white lights to light a band. I liked it because I liked a bright stage.
In April, we left for a seven-week tour of Europe with the Talking Heads. That was two stress factors: the Talking Heads and Europe. I was clinging to my sanity. I wanted to kill myself. It was miserable, and Europe was a horrible place. I hated the hotels. I couldn’t make phone calls home from my room; I had to go to the lobby and then wait in my room to be connected. I didn’t want to go out or go anywhere. There was nothing on TV. The food was terrible, all this boiled shit or curry. They didn’t even have ice. I mean, who doesn’t have ice? I hated Europe.
Jerry Harrison, the Talking Heads keyboard player, made me nuts. If you asked him a question, he would go on and on, talking for twenty minutes on the same subject. They were all intellectuals. Tina Weymouth was unbearable. I told my roadie to get my guitar, and she told me to get it myself. We were on a tour bus, and I hated the bus. We really didn’t talk to them much.
I was never rude to the crew. I think if I was a little stern and said, “What are you doing?” or “Don’t fuck up,” they might have thought of that as rude. But I never yelled at the crew or called them names. The Talking Heads were college-educated folks, and we were street kids.
Because of all this, things were not going well for me, but the shows were great; I liked that part of it. That was the only part I liked. Though later, I got to like a couple of the Talking Heads. But at the time, with all the factors combined, it was hell.
They’d always want to stop and go sightseeing while driving from place to place. When they insisted we stop at Stonehenge, I wouldn’t get out of the car, and I was upset that we were stopping to look at a bunch of rocks. If I didn’t want to stop, I wouldn’t get out. I didn’t let my girlfriend get out, either.
Later we went to France, and I couldn’t even believe how bad it was. That’s probably the closest I ever came to having thoughts of killing myself. Being in France the first time, I thought, “This is the most miserable thing imaginable.” I just developed an instant dislike for it. We made this long drive to Marseilles, and they didn’t even have the proper electricity to power us up. So there was no gig. And I never wanted to go back. Maybe I shouldn’t have felt that way about France, but that tour did it. I was just so miserable. At one hotel, I didn’t have a bathroom in my room, there was some toilet down the hall that was filthy and disgusting. At another, I had a shower—right in the middle where the toilet seat was! It was worse than camping out, and even though I’ve never camped out in my life, this was probably worse. I told our booking agent that I would never play in France again, but I gave in later on the condition that I didn’t have to spend the night there. I don’t think I ever slept another night in that country after that first trip there. And look how they ended up treating us, anyway, politically. What a lousy place. I had no interest. We could have been playing Pittsburgh or Paris; it was the same thing to me.
We were in Europe to work, anyway. We did better over there as a band than we did in the United States. We drew more people, at least. But there were towns that were more exuberant all over. I always liked playing Baltimore, and Toronto was good. Germany wasn’t so great at first; it got better as the years went on. It was more modern than the rest of Europe. I liked it better than Scandinavia but not as much as Spain and Italy. The food in those countries was better, the weather was nicer, and the people were good too.
The visits overseas really wore me out. I’m so Americanized that anything else was hard for me to deal with. I’d be so frustrated when I’d try to order food and they couldn’t understand what I was saying. I’d order ice and they’d give me one ice cube, and I’d have to drink a glass of warm Coca-Cola. It was so hard. We’d go to a fast food place, and I couldn’t special-order, like, cheese and ketchup only and nothing else, so it would always come with everything on it. I couldn’t eat any of that other stuff, and I couldn’t scrape it all off, either, so it just added to my frustration. And you sure weren’t going to get someone who spoke English at a Burger King there. You were lucky to find that in the hotels, where people might be more educated. To see anything familiar was good, though, and I don’t even eat McDonald’s.
When we got back, I was happy to be home. We played more shows right away, three at CBGB’s with the Cramps and then on across the United States. In June, we got our van stolen in Chicago. It was one of the two times we got ripped off during our career. They just took the whole trailer. I came downstairs, and there was no equipment truck. I lost my blue Mosrite, the first guitar I played in the Ramones. The insurance covered everything, but it was a huge hassle. The crew took care of it all; they knew what we had and what we needed. Later, again in Chicago, we got ripped off and I was spared somewhat because my guitar was in my guitar tech’s room being worked on.
That summer, we were asked to tape a show for Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, and I said yes right away. I had watched the show for years, from the time it started in the early seventies, when they had the New York Dolls and Mott the Hoople on, all those bands. It was taped on August 9 in Los Angeles. They wouldn’t let our fans be in the audience, so we played for twenty people who didn’t seem to know our music. We did twelve songs. I broke a string, and they wouldn’t let me restring the white Mosrite, so I used the Rickenbacker for the rest of the set. It was exciting to do it. Kirshner wasn’t there, but he probably wouldn’t have wanted to meet us anyway.
We came home two days later, and shortly after that Elvis Presley died. It was August 16. I was in Crazy Eddie’s buying some records, and the news came on the radio. I had been listening t
o Elvis at home before I left and had just finished reading Elvis! What Happened?, by Red West, so I was a little depressed already. One more icon gone.
In late August, we recorded the music for Rocket to Russia in seven days and then took two days for the vocals. We’d go in and play the songs, pretty much in the order we’d written them. It was our greatest record ever. I still love that album.
We did some shows that fall with Iggy Pop in the East and the Midwest. It was with the best band Iggy had assembled post-Stooges, with the Sayles brothers. But the shows were ruined by rock star bullshit. Iggy kept taking lights from us each night, and finally we got to Chicago and we were down to one red light. We told him we weren’t going to play. They gave us another light. This stuff happened once in a while, and we were conscious not to pull it. We played with Cheap Trick one time, and the bass player sound-checked his instrument for an hour, so we never got a sound check. I have no idea what makes people do this stuff. This ain’t science.
After a show that year in L.A., I met James Williamson from the Stooges, one of the best guitarists of all time. I think he was the first person I ever met who intimidated me. We met him at the club we’d played that night, and Joey and I went with him back to his apartment to listen to some mixes of Kill City. Joey brought a girl, and he was talking to her, and Williamson didn’t seem to like that. He kept looking at them. He was very uptight. I was trying to listen to the tapes and enjoy it. I always felt he was charming in a way, but he was just so uptight. I don’t know if he was under the influence of anything, or just uncomfortable with a bunch of strangers. I respect him still. He was so intense.
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