Dee Dee’s death in June 2002 was a real blow to me, more than Joey’s maybe, because Dee Dee and I had remained friends in some ways. I had no idea that he was going to die; I didn’t even know that he was still using drugs. I had seen him on Hollywood Boulevard a few days before he passed away. Here’s the most influential punk rock bassist of all time, and he died on us like that. He could be a problem, but I was really thrown by his death.
He was the craziest person there is in terms of eccentricities. It doesn’t get any crazier. If you were to meet Dee Dee right now, he’d be the craziest person you’re ever going to meet.
People have asked me, “What makes a punk?” About five years after we’d retired, I was driving in Los Angeles, and somebody called out to me, “Hey, you’re driving a Cadillac. How’s that? How are you a punk if you’re driving a Cadillac?” I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? I wrote the book on punk. I decide what’s punk. If I’m driving a Cadillac, it’s punk.” And the kid accepted that. So what determines a punk? Dee Dee was a punk. He had the look, he was a great songwriter, and he was the most influential punk rock bassist of all time. No one else even comes close.
But those last swings, Lollapalooza, the shows we did in New York at Coney Island High before that as a kind of farewell to New York—those were so satisfying. I really got to see what we meant to people. They told me how influential we were, and I got asked, “How does it feel to be a legend?” I didn’t know quite how to answer that, and the first time I was a little shocked. Then it became a joke later on. I’d get a phone call at home, and a reporter would tell me I was a legend, and I’d hang up and tell Linda, “Hey, watch it. You’re talking to a legend.” Or I would answer the phone and say, “Legend here.” I knew they were just treating Johnny Ramone like that; it wasn’t really me.
So I came to realize the impact we’d actually made much later. We were in our own little world so much that I’d never thought about it at all until the nineties, when all these other bands started telling me what an influence we were all the time. To me, the greatest American band—besides the Ramones—is the Doors. They’re my favorite American band, but I don’t know how many other groups they really influenced. So when I realize that we might have been a bigger influence on more bands than anyone, it’s surreal. There are even people wearing Ramones shirts now that don’t even know what we were about or what we sounded like. I don’t care, though. I’m just glad that our name is still out there after all these years.
We’ve been told that we changed music, that we created an entire genre, and that we mobilized kids and challenged them to get guitars and play their own music. It feels really weird to have people tell me that I influenced their lives or music. But I understand kids for going out and starting a band after seeing us. I would have done the same thing if I’d been in the audience in 1977.
If the Ramones had never existed and came out right now, we would still blow people away. The Ramones were never supplanted by anyone. Even when bands like Pearl Jam and Soundgarden hit it big, I never noticed a lack of support for us, or that our fans were straying.
Looking at it now, maybe a little less connected because I’m sick and time has kind of dwindled for me, the most important part of the Ramones legacy was that when we got up on a stage, we were the best out there. Nobody came close.
Live at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, October 21, 1977. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee, August 4, 1979. Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski. Under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.
Johnny relaxing at home in Los Angeles with his cats. Used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.
Chapter 8
I rarely even had colds. I had hay fever when I was growing up, and that was it.
All my life, I had this 100 percent belief that I would never get sick. If someone came over with the flu, I would still sit around with them. When I was a kid, I smoked pot with this friend of mine who had hepatitis. I just figured, “I can’t get this.”
Can you imagine how I felt when I started feeling funny in 1997? I was scared. I was having a hard time urinating. I knew that was part of what prostate cancer was, but I had no idea what it all meant. I never had cancer in my family. I was thinking it could be an enlarged prostate. It was getting bad, though, where Linda and I would have to leave places because I couldn’t piss and was uncomfortable. Cancer? Not really. I had never even considered a prostate check when I was at the doctor. I wasn’t even fifty years old.
So I went to a nutritionist in Santa Monica, which was weird for me in the first place since I wasn’t the kind of guy who would go to something like that. I told him my symptoms, and he told me that we’d deal with it and he’d fix me up through nutrition.
He had me eating vegetables, whatever I could eat. I don’t like to eat a lot of things that are super healthy, like broccoli or cauliflower. So I would eat Chinese food with peppers and corn and things like that, and vegetable soup and juices.
I was always skeptical about it all, but I stuck with this guy for a few months. Nothing got better. He had me eating better foods, which was fine anyway. But after a couple of months, he suggested I get my PSA checked because nothing was helping. I didn’t even have a primary care physician, although I had a Blue Cross plan that I’d bought when I was in the Ramones, sort of a self-employed thing.
So I got my blood tested, and my PSA was high, a twelve. Really high. That’s when the nutritionist got out of the game; he really panicked. By now, this stuff was weighing on me, in addition to the discomfort. I went in for a biopsy with a urologist in Culver City. I asked the doctor if this was going to hurt, and he told me, “A little bit.”
It hurt like hell. I mean, it was unbelievable.
They stick this thing up your penis, way up there, and take twelve snips. It took ten minutes, and tears were running out of my eyes from the pain. I could barely walk out of there.
Then the results came back, and it was bad, again. I had a nine on a scale of ten for the Gleason score. They didn’t know if the cancer had spread from my prostate into other parts of my body.
They told me I had to do something, and fast. I mean, I’d had some emergencies in my life, like the appendectomy in 1974 and the head injury in 1983, and this was urgent, but there was at least a little time to think about it. Now that was emotionally painful—to come to a decision that will affect whether you live or die and the quality of your remaining time. I decided to go with radiation rather than surgery. I wanted something with the least side effects.
First, I called a cancer center in Seattle, but there was a six-month wait, so Linda and I got on a plane to Oklahoma City, and on July 24, 1998, I had radiation treatment at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America. I was there for three days. They put me out for the treatment and stuck catheters in me. They also told me that the cancer had been in my prostate for five years at that point.
The doctors I went to during this whole thing, anywhere, knew who I was, because it would always come up. They would ask what I did, and I would say “retired” or “unemployed.” That usually led to some discussion. I was in the Ramones. That wasn’t such a big deal when you have prostate cancer.
The treatment was over, and I was told that I had a 65 percent chance of living five more years. I went home to continue some radiation treatment at UCLA. I went four days a week for six weeks. It was fine. I drove myself; Linda would come with me. And when it was over, I felt confident that they had fixed the problem. The symptoms eased up, but they would never completely go away.
They also told me that this was an aggressive cancer and that the younger you were, the more aggressive some of them can be. There was never a time when cancer left my mind, and I never felt that I had it completely beat, but I did think at some points that I would make it. I would read things about prostate cancer, but Linda didn’t like me to because I would get so upset. Everything I read somehow told me that w
hat I had was really bad. The books would describe the worst-case scenario, and that would be mine.
My life was simple after the radiation, and things got a little better. We had dinners out with friends, went to the movies, and took trips to Las Vegas and Florida. I went to the gym regularly; I had a trainer, and I lifted weights. And I would go to the doctor regularly so they could check to see if the cancer had come back. They checked my prostate and did a bone scan annually, because that’s where the cancer can easily spread.
In addition to my hobbies, collecting autographed photos, vintage movie posters, and baseball memorabilia, I also had some more Ramones stuff to do. I oversaw the tribute album, We’re a Happy Family, and put together Loud, Fast Ramones: Their Toughest Hits during that time.
Still, the cancer clawed at me physically and in my mind. I kept changing doctors in order to find one that I liked and finally got one, on January 27, 2003, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center: Dr. David Agus, research director of the Louis Warschaw Prostate Cancer Center. And Dr. Agus is the man to whom I entrusted my life.
At the end of 2002, my PSA started going up. I was having more trouble with the urination. But I felt fine. That’s the hard thing about this sickness. You feel OK, but you have it. This time, though, when the doctor told me my PSA was up, I sensed somehow that there was more. Then I began to understand, through our conversations, that it had spread. I went in to the doctor one day and told him I had a cough. “That’s because you have spots on your lungs,” he said. So that’s how I found out that things had gotten really bad. Five years. I’d almost made it. I still didn’t feel that I was going to die. I knew that my time was limited, but I didn’t know what that limit was.
Shortly after I met Dr. Agus, he put me on chemotherapy right away; the disease was out of control. I have talked to Dr. Agus every other day for the past year. He has been the best doctor I could have hoped for. People tell me to get another opinion sometimes, but now I don’t even bother. I have too much confidence in him; he’s too smart. I need so many little things, like a blood transfusion, and I get advice from everybody I know, but I’m not listening to them. If Dr. Agus can’t save me, nobody can. I liked him right away, and that was that.
It was funny. The Red Hot Chili Peppers and Pearl Jam did separate benefits for Cedars-Sinai prostate cancer research, and I took Dr. Agus to both of them. He had never been to a concert before. He sat on the side of the stage, and he was scared. He says he’s a nerd, and I tell him, “I don’t think you’re a nerd. I find you interesting.”
When I had the chemo, I was sick, and I couldn’t tell if it was from the chemo or the cancer. My hair fell out three weeks after the first treatment, in two days, in huge clumps. I mean, I know it’s just hair, but it was devastating.
I got a wig made, a professionally made wig that cost four thousand dollars. I wore it one time, to the premiere of Rob Zombie’s movie, and I felt ridiculous. No one could tell, but I felt that someone might be able to. I gave it to Eddie Vedder; he likes that stuff. One night he was hanging out with Theo Epstein, the general manager of the Boston Red Sox. He called me the next day and said, “I was drunk last night and took photos with the wig on.” He sent them to me and they were hysterical. Eddie and Theo, drinking and wearing the wig. The photos were worth the four grand.
Psychologically it’s hard. I didn’t even know I could get sick. I always figured I could beat anything that happened, and it was devastating when I found out how serious and advanced my illness was. I never thought the cancer was causing me physical pain, except that sometimes I’d experience what felt like a bruise on the left side of my ass. I don’t know what that was, but Dr. Agus said I had significant cancer that had spread to my bones, and much of the feeling I described was probably caused by that. I’ve had seven different kinds of chemo treatments. They were rough, and the side effects were brutal. I put up with this torture, and sometimes I wake up and don’t even know if I feel like living. I never know what’s in store for me.
There are questions that my doctor will not answer. But I do know that there are symptoms that will never go away. My instinct was to not talk about it at all. I get so sick sometimes, though, that people can tell, and I have to answer to that. So it doesn’t matter anymore. And much of the time, no one is recognizing me. It beats you down so that you don’t feel the same about yourself. I do have good days. Some are better than others.
In June 2004, I developed an infection and nearly died. I wasn’t doing well for a few days there in late May, and I don’t even remember driving to the hospital. I was feeling badly. The next thing I knew, I woke up and it was June 8. I was tied to a bed, and I had tubes coming out of me. I had been unconscious the whole time, for a week. What had happened was that they had done something to me, some treatment, and it had poisoned my whole body. They told my wife that I was going to die, that I had less than a 1 percent chance of living.
There was a chalkboard on the wall when I woke up that day, and Linda and Lisa Marie Presley were sitting there with me. I tried to write something on the chalkboard, but all that came out was squiggles; I couldn’t keep my hand straight. It was very frustrating. Then they gave me a board with letters, and I would point to individual letters to make words, but I also couldn’t point straight; I was pointing between the letters.
That’s when it became public knowledge that I had cancer, and I wasn’t even in the hospital for cancer at that point. Mark was the one who had blabbed, to RollingStone.com, that I was dying and on my deathbed. That really wasn’t his business.
RollingStone.com, June 16, 2004, 12:00 AM EDT: JOHNNY RAMONE HAS CANCER
Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone is in a Los Angeles hospital battling prostate cancer, according to his longtime bandmate, drummer Marky Ramone. “Johnny’s been a champ in confronting this, but at this point I think the chances are slim,” says Marky … “I’ve been getting so much email from people and from papers and magazines wanting to know what was up I had to take it upon myself to say something, because eventually John won’t be in any condition to say or do anything,” Marky says.
Here I was in recovery, out of intensive care, and Mark takes it upon himself to tell the world my “chances are slim.” The phone never stopped ringing. Linda and I were furious, so we decided it would be best to authorize Dr. Agus to explain my condition to Kurt Loder, from MTV, who’d called the hospital.
MTV.com, June 16, 2004, 4:37 PM EDT: JOHNNY RAMONE IS NOT DYING, HIS DOCTOR SAYS
Johnny Ramone is not dying, according to his doctor.
The Ramones guitarist, who has been living with prostate cancer for the past several years, was recently admitted to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles with what his physician, Dr. David Agus, told MTV News was a “complication from the cancer. But he got through it, and he’s now on a new, experimental therapy. He’s fighting courageously, and I think he will be going home in the near term.”
“He’s not dying,” Linda said on Wednesday afternoon (June 16). “He was okay for years, and he’s fine now. He’s in the hospital, but he’s not in ICU. And I think he may be leaving by tomorrow.”
I called Mark after I got out of the hospital and told him, “You really have to control yourself, control what you’re saying. You’re desperate for attention.” He said he was dealing with rumors, but there were no rumors. No one knew until Mark broke the news to get his name in the press. He’d do anything to get his name in the press. He was always like that.
Mark and I always went back and forth, and it’s not my fault, it’s his. He has all these bad ideas and I tell him that we can’t just do things for a quick buck. We have to make sure the Ramones are well represented; we have to do what’s best for the Ramones. And when we do something Ramones-related, I’m in charge, not him. He just doesn’t get it. I’m all for making money, but we have to have standards. I’ve had to stop him from doing Ramones things all the time, especially since the band retired. I try to tell him that it’s not like I’m doing anyth
ing against him, but he resents it, so he spends a lot of time trying to badmouth me, every chance he gets. He did the same thing to Joey for a long time too. Then after Joey died, Mark practically went on a press junket about it. He’s always looking for any attention he can get.
As I said before, the whole cancer thing is confusing. I’ve always been into health and things, taking vitamins. I went to the gym, had a trainer. I lifted weights. I only gained twenty pounds over the years the band was playing, from 150 to 170.
I don’t care to be a role model for illness. I just know that I had to tell people that I was sick; so many people already knew. If a situation ever came up where I could help other people with this, I would do it.
As far as medicine goes, I will try anything that does not interfere with what Dr. Agus says to do, so I even tried a healer. Kirk Hammett from Metallica had recommended him, and it didn’t make any sense, but I tried it. I would call him up, and he would say to lie down and relax for fifteen minutes. While I’d do that, he would do something at his house, like look at a photo of me. It’s wacky, and it didn’t work.
It’s interesting that I have never felt that I was going to die until this last time. I’ve known that my time is limited, but I had nothing definite. If this happens again, I want them to just let me die. I won’t go through that again.
Of course, now I know. We all have time limits, and mine came a little early.
By the time you are reading this book, I might not be here. But I’ve had a great life no matter how it turns out now. I think that when I lost my job back in 1974, it was God looking after me. All of a sudden I got into a band, and I had success. I’ve been very lucky and very fortunate in life. I owe everything I have to the fans. I’ve had the best wife, Linda, that I could ever hope to find, and I’ve had such great friends, who really care and would do anything they could for me.
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