Commando

by Johnny Ramone

  The touring machine was pretty good by now. Everybody had their roles defined. I was working; it wasn’t fun and games. That was just my personality. Monte wasn’t one to cut loose either. I didn’t drink; I didn’t do drugs. I was much different at home, where I was more relaxed, like most people who work. But I had to keep these guys in line and had to keep their respect. I had to let them know I was in charge and not let them fuck up. I wanted them to go on and be psyched up and ready to do a good job.

  And there were times when I tried to have fun. Once, I tried to get the crew to wear wrestling masks that I’d bought when we played in Tijuana. They refused. I said, “This is entertainment; you guys are boring.” I bought six of these Santo masks, these red, white, and blue nylon masks, and said, “You have to wear these.” I thought fans would see them and start coming to the shows wearing them. I kept insisting, but they didn’t know if I was serious or what. Maybe it was a little out of character for me.

  I also had to deal with a lot of things. Joey was always sick. Anything he could get, he had. He would have these foot problems, like his toe would be hurt. I told him to cut it off. I mean, it’s only a toe. He told me, “That’s fucked up.” The one time everything worked and no one was unhappy was when we were onstage. There, we all cared about each other.

  Because we were doing so well overseas and selling more records in 1977, we went back to Europe in September, came home and did some more jobs, then ended the year in England, where we recorded the It’s Alive album on New Year’s Eve at the Rainbow Theatre in London. I think our peak, our greatest moment, is that New Year’s Eve show of 1977 into 1978. I think that’s our greatest moment as a band.

  The recording of It’s Alive was probably the best show that the Ramones ever did. We knew they were recording for a live album, and we were ready. Whenever it was important, we would rise to the occasion. I would concentrate more; I would try harder.

  If it was a boring show, my mind would wander; I would be thinking about going home, start looking around at girls in the audience. You couldn’t help that when you play 2,263 shows over the course of your career. No ballplayer is going out there every day and being as psyched as when they’re playing an important game. But when the big shows came, they got my 100 percent concentration. The bigger the show, the better I’d play. It was what I was waiting for, and I’d never get nervous.

  This is also why I didn’t sweat much when I played. The idea was to stay relaxed, because if I wasn’t relaxed, I was going to worry, and then I would sweat. So I tried to always stay under control. I was never nervous for any show we did. I always knew that the fans would like us and that we couldn’t do anything wrong. Maybe a mistake or two, but that doesn’t really matter. Only if things started breaking down would I get worried, like if the gear started to mess up. Then it was just a matter of finding the problem and eliminating it right away. I would discuss it with our crew before the next show and tell them, for example, that if my guitar goes out, just unplug me and put me straight into the amp. So I never sweat, which you might notice in pictures.

  We got that stuff down pretty early, how to handle power trouble, blown amps.

  That tour of England, we were really hitting it. There were twenty-eight hundred people at the New Year’s Eve show, which was the most we had headlined for. In the United States, the most was fifteen hundred, which we had drawn at a show in Dallas that summer at the Electric Ballroom.

  As we got bigger, people got much nicer to us, but I don’t think it was ever reflected in our behavior. We kept it pretty quiet backstage. We stayed okay as far as egos go. It never really went to our heads that much because we’d be back in the real world the next day and playing CBGB’s. Nothing had really changed. We could play the biggest show of our career, and the next thing, we’d be back trying to get a job in some tiny U.S. town.

  For that last British tour in 1977, we got there a day early and saw the Sex Pistols on December 16. After they played, Johnny Rotten asked me what I thought of them, and I told him I thought they stunk.

  And they did, although their record is great. They needed some help. I would have gotten them bigger amps, some Marshalls, and had them spread out a little bit. They were always a little out of tune, so they needed a tuning machine, and they should have had a roadie get Steve Jones another guitar when the other one was being tuned. Sid Vicious couldn’t play—they were better off with Glen Matlock in the band. They also needed a professional backdrop instead of the painted sheet they used. Overall, they needed a more professional show, and it would have been simple for them to have been better. It’s actually simple for most bands to be better. I can watch any band and if they’d listen to what I say, I know I could help make their presentation better. I think my talent always lay in analyzing stuff like that.

  In December of 1977, the Sex Pistols were going to be on Saturday Night Live, but they canceled at the last minute because they couldn’t get visas or something. When the show called us up and asked if we would substitute for them, we said, “We don’t substitute for anybody”—and that was the only chance we ever had to be on Saturday Night Live. That was it. Good career move. Elvis Costello went on instead, and it probably made his career.

  Even though we had no radio airplay, more and more famous people were coming to see us as people picked up on the Ramones. Bruce Springsteen came to see us in New Jersey. After we played, he came backstage to say hello. It was just him and a friend or two. At one point, he wrote a song for us, “Hungry Heart.” His manager found out that he was going to give it away to us and told him that he couldn’t. It turned out to be one of his biggest hits. He never wrote another one for us.

  Elton John came to see us in England. I opened the dressing room door, and there he was, standing outside by himself. I was surprised to see him. I said, “If you want to go inside, go on in.” He looked really normal. We took a picture with him.

  Marc Bolan came to see us, and he sat next to me at an after-show party. It was a few months before he died, in 1977. He liked to talk about himself and how good he was on the guitar. Thinking now, I should have asked him about his transition from acoustic material to electric.

  Joey enjoyed that stuff more than I did. We played on The Old Grey Whistle Test in 1978, and Roger Daltrey was on there with us. Joey and Mark met him and didn’t like him. I’m a Who fan, but I didn’t really care to meet him. I don’t usually look up to people, because I know they all have flaws. Later in life I became friends with Lisa Marie Presley, and she introduced me to Jerry Lee Lewis one time. She had taken me to Graceland for a private tour and he came to meet us. He looked like death. He had this pasty color to him, and I have no idea what he was into, with that glazed look in his eyes. It’s a miracle he’s still alive. It was a thrill though, and that trip to Graceland was my favorite vacation of all time. I mean, who else gets to look around in Elvis’s bedroom? Nobody—that part of the tour is sectioned off. No one gets to see it. It was one of the highlights of my life.

  It’s funny being friends with Lisa Marie. She and Nicolas Cage met at my birthday party, and when they were married in 2002, I was the best man. Lisa Marie called me one day and said if Nic doesn’t ask you to be the best man at our wedding, I want you to walk me down the aisle. I was really excited because that would have been Elvis’s job. But at the last minute Nic called and asked me to be best man. I was actually disappointed—I would much rather have walked Lisa Marie down the aisle instead.

  We started 1978 on a tour with the Runaways, a band of dykes. At least a couple of them were. Dee Dee was friends with them. It went well, and we traveled through the middle of America in the dead of winter. That tour lasted three months, but Tommy was starting to fall apart and have a breakdown. He was becoming catatonic and having trouble dealing with everything. He couldn’t take the road. I never really thought he’d leave. I mean, for Tommy to leave, this was terrible. Tommy was fun to have in the band, and I wish he had stayed in the Ramones forever. He was a good
friend.

  I was really worried when Tommy left, because he had been a buffer between me and the rest of the band. He was the mediator, so problems were going to start; I knew it right then. Tommy leaving was not good.

  We were getting ready to do the Road to Ruin album and looking for a new drummer. Mark was it pretty easily. I mean, there was never anybody else we seriously considered. There were names tossed around, like Johnny Blitz of the Dead Boys and Paul Cook from the Sex Pistols. But it got down to why the person wasn’t good, like Blitz had blond hair or someone had spiky hair. We tried out one drummer, Mark, and that was it. He was in the Voidoids, and we could afford to pay him more. He was a great drummer, so there was no problem at all, but we had some choices—and we wanted to make sure we made the right one. Mark was fine, but I knew he was drinking, and I knew that it always gets worse. Mark’s first show was June 29, 1978.

  Mark would eat anything. We paid him a hundred and fifty dollars to eat a large can of cat food. He got sick. He’d eat bugs, cockroaches—anything—for money. Later on in our career, we found this giant beetle, and when we lifted it up, there were all of these little babies crawling around underneath, attached to it. It was really disgusting, and Mark was going to eat it. Everyone was ready to chip in to pay him, but I said, “No, we can’t let him eat that, he’ll get sick and he won’t be able to play the show.”

  The band trusted me to get them as much money as I could, and we did fine. They never said a word to me about it or questioned me. I was the money guy. Joey was into his money, and he was happy; he always had walking-around cash.

  It was the same thing with the crew. We always kept them working and always tried to pay them some wage even when we weren’t working. We started with a couple of roadies, and we had Arturo and Monte. Pretty soon we had a guitar technician. Soon after that, we got a monitor man and a drum tech. We always had some professionalism in having our own crew and tried to always keep the guys around. We had the same soundman for most of our career, John Markovich, who was really good. I always liked him.

  We went through some guitar techs and roadies, but they would stay for three or four years. I know we didn’t pay the best, but we only had so much money. And I tried to make up for it with more work.

  I would say, “Money is our friend. It doesn’t do anything to you. It is good.” I used to say that all the time. It was half in jest, though. Of course, money does help bring happiness, but it’s not the whole picture. Having good friends and having someone you love to be with. And being healthy. They’re all important. No matter what you have, you can’t enjoy anything without being healthy. I learned that later in life. Money does make things easier, though. You can be more generous to people.

  We made money over the long run while we were still together. I think that when we really got going, we paid ourselves a $150-a-week salary. When we came back from a tour, we each would get another $1,000. And then we started getting merchandise money, which was more than our regular salary.

  I was trying to watch the money. Our profit margin was very small, and we took care of the crew the best we could. I would have liked to have taken care of them better. I was aiming for retirement. I wanted to make sure I had enough. We didn’t make a lot of money. We were playing clubs, not arenas. No one ever quit, and they would have if they didn’t like it. No one ever asked for more. I was doing what I thought was best. Sometimes you’re wrong. If I had paid them an extra fifty dollars a week, they still would have complained. We weren’t getting rich, any of us.

  Later, we did fine. Anheuser-Busch approached us in 1994 and bought a song for a commercial. I thought it was terrific. I liked seeing the commercial, and people would ask me how I felt about it, and I would tell them it was the easiest money I ever made. I never looked at it as anything bad. Sometimes something like that can be lame, but for beer, which is very American, it’s good.

  I make more money now, years after we stopped, than I ever did while the Ramones were active. We made a lot of money from merchandising even after we stopped. And the records sold better than ever. Maybe everyone really does love you when you’re dead.

  Photo by Danny Fields, under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Photo by Danny Fields, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Johnny brooding in France, 1977. Photo by Danny Fields, under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Elton John (wearing a Rocket to Russia button) visits the Ramones at the Rainbow Theatre, December 31, 1977. Linda Stein is to the left of Dee Dee. Photo by Danny Fields, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Dee Dee and Joan Jett. Photo by Jenny Lens. © Dee Dee Ramone LLC. All rights reserved. Used with permission.

  Lita Ford of the Runaways talks shop with Johnny. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Johnny with Lisa Marie Presley at her wedding. Used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Flipping off the crowd at the Canadian World Music Festival, July 2, 1979. Used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Chapter 4

  So in 1978, when Allan Arkush came along and asked us if we wanted to be in a movie for him, Rock ’n’ Roll High School, we were open to offers. I found out it was going to be a Roger Corman picture, which made it a sure thing. I loved Corman’s movies, like Attack of the Crab Monsters, Caged Heat, and Death Race 2000.

  We set out to drive to Hollywood to do the movie, and on the way we opened for Foreigner in St. Paul, Minnesota, on November 18. The next day, we drove nine hundred miles to Denver, and the day after that we drove one thousand miles to L.A. We got there and recorded “I Want You Around” for the movie. It was about the third time we had recorded that song.

  We had no promise of much money while we were in L.A., so we had to play some shows there to pay the expenses. The band made a total of five thousand dollars for the very low-budget movie.

  We moved into the Tropicana Motor Hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard while we worked on the movie. It was cheaper than the Sunset Marquis, where we usually stayed. We spent a lot of time at the pool. Tom Waits had a room at the Tropicana when we got there. We all talked to him, and he was a nice guy. They tore the place down in 1985. Now it’s a Ramada.

  We kept working on Rock ’n’ Roll High School even as we played all these shows. That was when we did our three shows with Black Sabbath, another disaster. There was no way we were going to go over with their fans, who were yelling, “Ozzy, Ozzy!” We would come out and play, and it would fly by, and people would say, “What was that?” And by the time we were done, people were either booing or yelling for Ozzy.

  I wish I had checked out Black Sabbath, though, because I really liked them when I was a kid. I went to see them on their first U.S. tour and bought all their records through Vol. 4. It would have been like seeing legends. But they were the other band, the enemy, and that trumped legend. They were the competition.

  Playing with bands like that was really rough because their fans were tough, they threw things, they were excited about seeing their favorite band, and we were getting in the way. But it was easy opening for Foreigner or Eddie Money or Tom Petty. I mean, who’s really into those bands? Who gets excited enough about them to throw something or even to boo?

  But on July 2, 1979, we played on a bill with Aerosmith, Ted Nugent, Johnny Winter, AC/DC, and Nazareth to a crowd of forty-six thousand people in Toronto. It was called the Canadian World Music Festival. I saw the other bands we were playing with and I thought, “This isn’t gonna work.” I complained to Premier, our booking agency, about it, and they said, “We’ve been in the business a long time, we know what we’re doing. It won’t be like the Black Sabbath shows. This is Canada, it will be different this time.” It wasn’t. It was a disaster again.

  About five or six songs into the set, the whole crowd stood up, and I thought it had started to rain. Dee Dee thought the same thing, but they were throwing stuff at
us—sandwiches, bottles, everything. Then, all of a sudden, I broke two strings on my guitar in one strum. I thought it was a sign from God to get off the stage, because I’d rarely break a string, maybe once a year. So I just walked to the front of the stage, stopped playing, and gave the audience the finger—with both hands. I stood there like that, flipping them off, with both hands out, and walked off. The rest of the band kept playing for another ten or fifteen seconds until they’d realized I was walking off, and then they did too. I wasn’t gonna stand there and be booed and have stuff thrown at us without retaliating in some way. We had to come off looking good somehow, and there was no good way to get out of that.

  Aerosmith was on the side of the stage watching us. It was so embarrassing. Steven Tyler came back to our dressing room and said, “Oh, I’m really sorry that happened to you.” I said, “Fuck that, who gives a shit. Now we can catch an earlier flight home and get out of this stinking country.” But Canada was actually great to the Ramones, particularly Toronto. Doing that show was just a mistake. The agency stopped bothering us about playing with other bands after that one. We’d do festivals in Europe, but nothing metal; basically, shows with us headlining or co-headlining. But in 1978, while we filmed the movie, the word wasn’t out yet that we were nobody’s warm-up act.

  The filming of Rock ’n’ Roll High School was torture, sitting around all the time. Dee Dee was getting high all the time, my girlfriend was drinking, and I just stayed in my room and watched TV. Things were really getting crazy.

  We were in a rehearsal studio during the filming, and Mark said he had left his money on the table, about thirty-five dollars, but it was missing. I knew I didn’t take it, and I knew Joey wouldn’t take it, so there was no one left but Dee Dee. We had everyone empty out their pockets, and I knew Dee Dee had it. So I said, “Okay, everyone take off your shoes,” and there it was in Dee Dee’s shoe. We had always trusted each other and that it was okay to leave money lying around. At least that’s what I thought.