Pal Joey

Joey Ramone is dead. There was a nice obit in the Times that ran for two days straight, another one in Newsday, and the Voice ran a Lenny Kaye memorial, but I wonder how folks outside of New York are taking the news. The Ramones never had a hit record, they never played “Saturday Night Live” (though there was a “Simpsons” episode) and their top-selling album, the Spector-produced “End of the Century,” only made it to 44. Were they just another cult band?. I don’t see America mourning, and it’s too bad. Maybe I can supply some context.

Some context
For people of a certain age (and Joey, born in 1951, was just two years older than me) punk was our second chance. We had bands in high school and college or instead of college; we were all trying to make being rock stars a viable career option. But to make real money as a musician (and I’m not talking about the bread-and-butter gigs that kept many of us going — weddings, bar mitzvahs, the lounge circuit, teaching) you have to have the kind of luck that wins a state lottery, that draws a full house from a cold deck.

And so most of us walked away from those high-school bands, but not without regret. By 1976, the year the first Ramones album came out, I had been out of bands for five years.

Through the fog of that party that began about 1970 and ended sometime in the middle of the 1980s, a dim perception of what was happening musically penetrated the mist. And it was so lame! Some top singles of 1974: “The Way We Were” by Babs; “Seasons in the Sun” by Terry Jacks; “Dancing Machine” by Jackson 5; “Bennie and the Jets” by Elton John. By 1975 it was getting worse: “Love Will Keep Us Together” by the Captain and Tenille; “My Eyes Adored You” by Frankie Valli; “Philadelphia Freedom” by Elton John; “One of These Nights” by The Eagles; “Rhinestone Cowboy” by Glen Campbell; and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” by John Denver.

I’ll concede that one could make an equally lame list from among most years’ top-sellers, lowest-common-demoninator taste being what it is. But I can’t recall another time period with the sheer depth of tastelessness that typified the mid-’70s. It wasn’t just the No. 1 one song that was bad, No. 100 was equally compromised. The only good music was way, way, way underground — subterranean, troglodytic, journey-to-the-center-of-the-earth stuff.

Disco and punk
New York City was down, way down, in the mid-’70s. Bankruptcy was looming; 65,000 city workers were laid off; the famous “Ford to New York: Drop Dead” Daily News headline was just a few months away. Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” was filming on 13th Street and around the corner on Third Avenue, looking more like a documentary than a Hollywood feature.

But in the clubs of New York something really cool was happening: two completely new and wonderful genres were emerging.

Disco didn’t really cross over until ’77, when the BeeGees made it safe for the multititudes with the breakout tracks on “Saturday Night Fever”. But by ’76, here’s what they were asking for in the dance clubs: Vickie Sue Robinson’s “Turn the Beat Around”; Silver Convention’s “Get Up and Boogie”; Donna Summer’s “Love Trilogy” (an LP, and every cut was getting played); The Trammps’ “That’s Where the Happy People Go”; and the fabulous Andrea True’s “More More More” (a tune that will never be removed from my desert-island jukebox).

I know disco has always taken a lot of heat — hedonistic lyrics, monotonous beats, too gay by half — but look at the context. I mean, the Eagles? At least disco was still moving. Rock had crawled into those dry L.A. riverbeds and died. The gays of New York were leading the way, opening a door that led to raves, techno, jungle, ambient, and a host of other styles that still dominate nightlife and creative recording.

At exactly the same time the second half of the revolution was taking place, the one that led to Pearl Jam and Smashing Pumpkins and Nine Inch Nails, to alternative and grunge, to Nirvana on “Saturday Night Live” with the No. 1 record in the country. In the old Lower East Side of New York, rock was becoming dangerous again, was being taken back from dinosaur FM, graying A&R flacks and marketing departments. In England it set off a firestorm. And it was all happening in a little club on the Bowery, just north of Houston Street.

CBGB and the birth of punk

CB’s is still there, though I don’t know anyone who still attends the events. It’s a long club with a bar on the right starting a few feet after you walk in the door, with a raised seating area on the left. The raised area terminates at the soundboard; the bar stops just opposite and the space opens up a bit. Maybe another 30 feet or so through some tiny scattered circular tables there’s a stage just a few feet off the floor. Hanging from the ceiling, massive monitors flank it. On the far left a narrow passageway leads to the dressing room and the stairs going down to the most famously disgusting restroom in New York City.

In the neighborhood around CB’s, the old Lower East Side of New York, rents were cheap. Lofts could go for one or two hundred bucks, apartments for less. The cheap rents and the dope (which was everywhere, three dollars a bag, with 50 or 60 people lined up on 2nd St. and Avenue B waiting for the dope store to open every morning) attracted the fringe players, the ones who couldn’t handle the tedium in Queens or New Jersey or suburban anywhere. From this crowd of disaffected youth emerged our players, and the stage was CBGB.

Hilly Kristal opened the place in ’73 and had trouble drawing a crowd. The space had formerly been a typical Bowery bum bar, one of dozens in the neighborhood, opening at 10 in the morning with a few guys from the flophouse standing anxiously at the door. The original hippie concept was to fill it with “Country, BlueGrass, and Blues” (hence the initials appearing on the club’s tattered canvas awning) and other American genres that only become exotic when they show up in NYC.

Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, New York Dolls fans who had recently put together a band called Television with poet Richard Hell, saw the place walking to the bus stop on their way to a Chinatown rehearsal. As Hell says in “Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk”: “Where is a bar where nothing is happening? With nothing to lose if we tell them to let us play there one night a week?” They approached Kristal with the idea of doing a series of weekends at CB’s, so the band might connect to the space like the Dolls had connected to the Mercer Arts Center. Kristal went for it.

Fifteen or 20 people showed up but the momentum slowly built. Patti Smith showed up next, a local poet with advanced show-biz genes, just beginning to build her legend by knocking them dead at the St. Mark’s Poetry Project. With guitarist Lenny Kaye (read his tribute to Joey here) and band, she was added to the weekend lineup and for the first time, the place was packed.

Within months, The Ramones became CBGB punk legend number three.

Four guys from Queens
Dee Dee, Johnny, Tommy and Joey all shared the same invented last name, borrowed from the “Paul Ramon” alias Paul McCartney used to register at hotels. It meant nothing, and they claimed nothing for themselves: They were like all the rest of us. For years Joey and Johnny would tell fans, “We suck. You can play better than us; anybody can play better than us. Start a band.” After their legendary July 4th, 1976, Roundhouse concert in England, it seemed like every member ot the audience — which included the guys soon to form The Sex Pistols and The Clash — took them up on it.

At first they could barely play their instruments, and the shows were unorchestrated chaos. In the era of stadium rock, of “Frampton Comes Alive”, the Ramones were boys from the neighborhood, not glamorous, not rich, not savvy, not even clean. They were the antithesis of the prog-rock pomp of Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, the opposite of everything the industry types were claiming we wanted. The Ramones look — long Betty Page bangs hiding the eyes,black leather jackets, ripped jeans, white tee-shirts, and sneakers — said it before you heard a note: “We’re Against It”.

(photo by author)Dee Dee Ramone, Cincinnati, 1977

They were all from Forest Hills in Queens. Dee Dee hustled for dope money on the corner of 53rd and Third, on the run from a desolate Army-brat childhood in Germany. When he couldn’t get dope he would sniff glue. He would do anything, take any kind of drug. I remember seeing him on St. Mark’s Place after he left the band, hair short and spiky, in skintight Spandex pants that looked left over from some mall scene of years before. He was thin, “on the heroin diet” as we used to say. Somehow he survived, fought off the dope, wrote a book about it: “Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones”.

Johnny worked on construction projects when he wasn’t playing his guitar. He was the organized Ramone, running the practices, insisting on getting it right, absolutely straight-edge on tour with no drink or drugs and an early bedtime. There was always a dark side to Johnny; he seemed tightly wound, intense, sometimes downright nasty. In 1983 he got into a fight over a woman with an obscure punk musician; he was repeatedly kicked in the head, had brain surgery, almost died.

Tommy was the drummer, the intellectual of the band who started as the manager and became the producer, running the sessions that created the first album for $6,400 in three days. (The studio used was in the rafters of Radio City Music Hall, directly across the street from where I write.) He created a streamlined, densely layered guitar attack that Chris Thomas got down cold a couple of years later on the mammoth Sex Pistols debut LP, “Never Mind the Bollocks”.

And then there was Joey.

Joey Ramone
Joey was a gangling glandular freak with skin like milk, thin but with wide, girlish hips, topping out at 6’5″ or 6’6″. He was probably the oddest-looking physical specimen to ever front a successful rock band. He never looked healthy, always pasty and white like something hidden from the sun for a long time.

I have never seen a picture of Joey with his long legs straight; they were always bent in punk contraposto. When he sang his stance was unique: one hand always wrapped around the mic, which was always on a stand, the stand usually bent toward the audience. The other hand was held close, fist clenched, or up and moving in tight gestures that never strayed far from Joey’s side. One leg would be thrown forward, Joey’s whole frame resting on it, looming over the edge of the stage, over the heads of the fist-pumping fans.

He was fan of Phil Spector’s girl groups, a huge Beatles and Brit invasion fan, an intense radio listener who absorbed everything in the AM Top 40 between 1963 and 1969. Before the Ramones he was a glam-rocker, another New York Dolls fan. He would hitch rides on Queens Boulevard in a custom pink jumpsuit and thigh-high boots to play with a band called Sniper, finally getting his ass kicked one night like everyone who knew him was afraid would happen. Even after becoming a Ramone he always wore ’60s-style elliptical specs, hiding what I always imagined to be pink mouse eyes behind colored lenses.

More than anyone else in the band, Joey was the fan, the one most like his audience. He was always approachable, always nice, always showing up at odd times around the East Village. My wife (a punk rocker herself) recalls seeing him at 4 a.m. one night at St. Marks’ Pizza, a woman under each arm propping him up, his eyes hidden behind red lenses. He didn’t like drugs; he drank, finally hitting rehab along with the second Ramones drummer, Marky, in 1983.

(photo by author)

The Ramones leave home

Joey moved from drums to lead vocal when he could no longer play at the amphetamine tempos Johnny and Dee Dee were putting down at rehearsals. Manager Tommy took over on the kit when drummer after auditioning drummer failed to understand the stripped-down style he was hearing in his head. When Tommy finally sat down behind the drums, the first Ramones lineup was complete. They found their way to CB’s on August 16, 1974. Early sets were chaotic — 20 songs in 17 minutes — but promising enough for Hilly to bring them back 22 more times in ’74 alone.

Reading various accounts while researching this article, I was impressed by how similar the reactions were to the Ramones. There were definitely people who didn’t get it (Linda Ronstadt reportedly ran out of CB’s screaming), and there still are, in fact, but for those of us who did, the effect was incredible. The band walked out on stage without ceremony and started with a four-count from Dee Dee: “One two three four” BAM! You could feel “the wind from the amplifiers” as Lenny Kaye put it.

There was nothing remotely like the Ramones’ pile-driver attack. Nothing fancy, no filigrees or solos. Johnny’s guitar emerging from the Marshall stacks behind him was like a storm-surf breaking on your face. You could feel the pressure on your chest, just like you could feel Dee Dee’s down-picked tonic eighth notes (no one ever strummed in the Ramones) in your stomach and bowels. Tommy’s drums were metronomic, massive with almost no fills, just sledgehammer kick and snare.

On top of it all was Joey, phrasing like a girl-group singer with nothing special in the way of chops. His everyman voice, weaker every year from the strain of constant touring, was all the more effective for being so ordinary. It was a voice that didn’t call attention to itself. No strutting rock god here, no Robert Plant.

Why it all mattered
I was living in small, half-finished house in Cincinnati with five other people when I first heard the Ramones. In one corner of the dining room I slept on a sleeping bag. In the living room just adjacent was my stereo, the one I saved up for during the first summer of college: big Bose 501 speaker cabinets, a 100-watt Kenmore amp and a Philips electronic turntable with fancy heat-sensing buttons like an elevator’s. I picked up the first two albums on the same day. They were released only months apart: “Ramones” and “Ramones Leave Home”.

Hearing the record for the first time, playing it as loud as I played everything in those days, I had no idea how much it would change my life. I just knew I liked it — a lot. The first song was just perfect — “ Blitzkrieg Bop” — opening with what became one of the patented Ramones chants: “Hey ho, let’s go!” over a fast tom-tom pattern. Suddenly the guitar and bass came in, and the effect was like a plane taking off; you felt driven back into your seat. It was the heavy unison riffs we loved so much on Led Zeppelin records, but without the silly Tolkeinesque or savagely misogynistic lyrical maunderings on top. And it was much faster than Zeppelin; it seemed like it was twice the tempo of anything else I was hearing.

After this first perfect little gem of a song, two minutes and 12 seconds long, the strangest thing happened. The second song, “ Beat on the Brat,” was exactly the same! Well, not exactly, different lyrics, different tune, but the guitar attack was still unremitting, the tempo unforgiving, and the bass and the drums were still threatening the integrity of my speakers. And the lyrics! I quote them in their entirety:

Beat on the brat
Beat on the brat
Beat on the brat with a baseball bat
Oh yeah, oh yeah, uh-oh.
What can you do?
What can you do?
With a brat like that always on your back
What can you do?

It was a combination of cartoonish violence and ironic posturing that wasn’t matched until years later, when Itchy and Scratchy started showing up on “The Simpsons.” I think they were saying, “Forget about propriety. Forget about meaning. Forget about what music is supposed to be. Lose yourself. Bang your head into the wall.” Is this a significant message? I don’t know, I just loved it. It was pure sensation, a two-and-a-half-minute kick-ass blowout with hooks and a catchy melody, too! (Did I mention how utterly melodic the Ramones were? How the tunes stay with you for years? How “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” one of the great car-radio anthems, ranks with “Don’t Worry Baby” and “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “Hound Dog”?)

By the time I realized the third song was going to do the same thing, and the fourth, and the fifth — all the way to the end of the album, in fact, just like the live shows — I was a total fan. I heard it all there, the cosmic blend of influences: the Beatles, the Stooges, the MC5, Brian Wilson, “Be My Baby,” Little Richard, the whole history of Western pop.

Three years later I was living in New York City, and everything was different. I came with all the other kids from all over the country who couldn’t make it where they were. I was going to start an East Village band, I was going to play CBGB, I was going to run into Joey around the neighborhood, and the boring part of my life would all come to an end. I was going to get my second chance. And oddly enough, it kind of happened that way, for me and a lot of people I knew.

When Joey passed, I made a few phone calls and talked to some friends and saw some of the same raw emotion I hadn’t felt since John Lennon got shot in 1980. Joey was a good guy, a hero to punks and fans of punk; he was like Mickey Mantle or Orson Welles, a man both loved and respected. And punk mattered, it changed lives like jazz did or the ’60s did. It was only stupid when it wanted to be; if you couldn’t hear that, you would never break on through to the sheer sensual pleasure it offered. I’m grateful I was there, that I saw the Ramones, that I heard their music.

Thanks, Joey.

A few links that might interest you:

Try the official CBGB web site for pictures and Hilly Kristal’s own serialized testimony.
Link from there to an online edition of Mojo Magazine from the U.K. for the most coherent and well-written history of early punk that I’ve seen anywhere.

For the official Ramones web site, go to www.officialramones.com.
A great unofficial site is www.ramonesonline.com
An even better fan site, with a complete lyrics database, is Ivo’s Ramones Sector.

An online set list by Joey, featuring his comments and samples of the tunes he loved, can be found on the Uplister site.

Or follow up with these books, both consulted for this article:

Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones by Dee Dee Ramone with Veronica Kofman
Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, edited by Legs MacNeil and Gillian McCain

Other articles by The Obsessionist:

Phil Spector and The Ecstatic Moment
Monkey on My Back: My Life with the King (Kong, That Is)