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Hills Street Blues

THE TIME YOU discover there’s life outside school, outside your family, outside your immediate environs, that’s the real important time in life. It’s when your tastes, your sense of being, your ideals and morals and sexual preferences coalesce and become real: adolescence shapes your future life. Yet it’s also a period that is rarefied to the extreme – and that’s why rock’n’roll bands always refer back to it, however old they become. Rock bands utilise the teen ideal in their lyrical imagery: see a girl, walk in the park and hang out – Carbona or soda pop, it’s your drug of choice. Ramones songs, too, hark back to that time.

“Wait,” says Joey Ramone, confused. “Can you repeat that again? When you’re young and you’re in a structured situation and you want to break away … which song in particular are you talking about?”

Your band’s oeuvre is shot through with classic teen angst in the style of the doomed Sixties girl groups – ‘My-My Kind Of A Girl’, ‘I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend’, ‘All Screwed Up’ …

“That last one is basically about … it’s about life.” Joey laughs. “It’s about fucking up. It’s also about how you’ve got to live it the way you learn it, even though you might never really learn it.” The singer pauses, considers the question. “It’s the story of my life. You never really know and you might never really ever learn. Relationships are the hardest to figure out. I don’t believe in giving up.

“When you’re about 15, 16, that’s when you start to learn how to live and stay alive,” he continues. “You learn the ways of the street or else you get fucked. What they teach you in school doesn’t prepare you for life. Textbooks don’t compare to living in the real world. Rock’n’roll teaches you how to live. When it’s your money, and it affects you directly, that’s when you wake up. If you don’t know how to count and spell or read and write, you’ll get fucked with.”

(Interview with author, 1989)

“BRIGHT, CHEERFUL HOUSES, well-arranged, well-trimmed lawns, hedging carefully cut … distinctly joyous,” wrote architectural critic Herbert Croly in 1914 about the Forest Hills Gardens community in Queens, New York. The New York Tribune agreed, reporting the area was a “modern Garden of Eden, a fairy tale too good to be true”.

Forest Hills was once a dry riverbed called Whiteput (“pit”) by the Dutch. In 1664, English settlers renamed it New Towne. In 1906, sugar-refining heir Cord Meyer built a community on 600 acres that he named Forest Hills because it bordered Forest Park and was on high rolling ground. The Sage Foundation purchased 142 acres in 1909, constructing a Tudor-style community called Forest Hills Gardens, conceived as an experiment that would apply the new science of city planning to a suburban setting and provide alternate housing for the cramped apartment dwellers of New York City.

The middle-class, mostly Jewish, neighbourhood of Forest Hills was known for a couple of reasons by the time the Ramones started attending the local high school.^* Its local tennis arena (and part-time rock emporium) was home to the US Tennis Open before the tournament moved to Shea Stadium in 1978. Nearby Flushing Meadow park served as a venue for many a Sixties rock hippie-fest.

According to local websites, Forest Hills is a “piece of small town America smack dab in New York City,” wonderful to grow up in during the Fifties and Sixties, with its wide ethnic diversity, and Witts, the early twentieth-century soda fountain on Metropolitan Avenue. It’s perfect for commuting to Manhattan, too – 30 minutes on the F train and G local to 8th Street and Sixth Avenue.

Drummer and founder member of the Ramones, Tommy Erdelyi has fond memories of his hometown: “It was a pleasant place to grow up. I liked living there. It had trees and nice streets. It had a good high school, supposedly one of the top 25 in the nation.”

Bassist Dee Dee Ramone found it pleasing, too. “It is a nicely groomed neighbourhood with lots of Coupes de Ville and Lincoln’s parked on the street,” he wrote in his 1997 book Poison Heart: Surviving The Ramones. “All the buildings are the same red brick colour, and chewing gum coloured sidewalks snake through the area. In the mornings, the janitors would burn the trash in incinerators and a thick grey smoke would pour out of the chimneys.”

Flushing Meadow was also the site of both the 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs. And in much the same way that the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago inspired the creation of Coney Island, the 1939 New York World’s Fair with its amusement parks and vernacular architecture helped inspire the creation of Disney World. Appropriate perhaps for the hometown of a band whose image was so rooted in the cartoons and trash culture of their youth. It was nowhere special, basically – a precursor of the Edge Cities that now take precedence in (lack of) town planning across America.

What better place for four bored teenagers to grow up?

JOEY RAMONE WAS born Jeffrey Hyman^* to a reasonably well-off Jewish family on May 19, 1951 – the only Ramone actually born in Forest Hills.

Joey’s upbringing fell into the classic pattern of the dysfunctional baby-boomer American family – his parents divorced in the early Sixties and he had three different fathers. Biological father Noel Hyman owned a Manhattan trucking company, but Joey didn’t get along too well with him when he was younger. Noel made him cut off his hair in Junior High when it got too long, even though Joey considered it his defence mechanism against an uncaring outside world. Mother Charlotte (Lesher: an accomplished artist and art collector) owned a gallery next door to Trylon Cinema on Queens Boulevard, where Joey would later practise his drums in the basement alongside younger brother Mickey Leigh – first having saved up for a snare drum using King Korn trading stamps.

“I rented a hi-hat,” he said, “and I’d play along with The Beatles and Gary Lewis & The Playboys on my record player.”

His grandmother Fanny (who used to sing for Macy’s department store – they would send her out to parties along with a rented piano) gave him a full set when he was 13. It was a nice change from Joey’s beloved accordion, a present from his dad some years earlier, which he squeezed until there was no sound left. Charlotte chipped in with lessons a year later, plus guitar lessons for 11-year-old Mickey – who was later to join rock critic Lester Bangs’ band Birdland as guitarist. Eventually, Joey bought a “dream” kit modelled on the one used by Keith Moon from The Who, his drumming idol, alongside Cream’s Ginger Baker, and Ringo Starr.

“Forest Hills is a very conservative, conventional place. I think we were the black-sheep household of our street,” Joey’s mother told Rolling Stone in 1979. “It was a meeting place for both of my boys’ friends because we also had the basement there open to them, and there was always a lot of music going on. They taught me how to smoke pot when they were about 13. I realised they were doing something down there, and I didn’t want them to do it outside where they could be busted.”

She wasn’t sure if the basement was ever a haven for glue sniffing (as later immortalised in songs like ‘Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue’ and ‘Carbona Not Glue’) but, as she added, “I’m sure there were things that they did that I didn’t know about. It’s very possible. The little devils tried everything.”

As a kid, Joey would seek escape from the outside world via his transistor. “I was spending a lot of time by myself. Rock’n’roll was my salvation,” he declared in a 1999 interview, “listening to the WMCA Good Guys and Murray the K,” an experience he later immortalised on ‘Do You Remember Rock’N’Roll Radio?’ on End Of The Century. His earliest musical heroes included Del Shannon, Phil Spector, The Rolling Stones, The Shangri-Las, The Kinks, The Beach Boys, Buddy Holly and Gene Vincent.

“The first record I bought may have been Del Shannon’s ‘Runaway’,” Joey told amazon.com in 1999. “My early life, I went through a lot of crap with divorce and my mom remarrying and getting a new family. I remember being turned on to The Beach Boys, hearing ‘Surfin’ U.S.A.’, I guess, in 1960.^* But The Beatles really did it to me. Later on, The Stooges were a band that helped me in those dark periods – just get out the aggression. Nobody picked up guns in those days. You put on music and it made you feel great.”

Joey wasn’t too happy at school, either – even with The Jetsons and The Beatles on his lunchbox.

“The thing about school is that if you’re forced into learning stuff, you’re not going to be into it,” he told this writer in ’89. “Let’s just say I wasn’t the best student. If it intrigued or fascinated me, then I was into it. I liked English and biology. I would read about English art schools with their bands like The Kinks and Bowie. They didn’t have anything like that in Queens. Philosophy and psychology excited me.”

Were you bullied?

“At one point, when the segregation and bussing started it was weird because there were a lot of junkies and stuff, but not really. Later on, I would get into trouble because of the way I dressed. I used to wear sunglasses to school and messed-up jeans. I started to spend a lot of time in the dean’s office. I wasn’t a conformist.”

Charlotte wanted her son to go to college, but Joey refused and quit his studies to concentrate on music. “I knew they all had that little anger in them,” she told Rolling Stone, “and I thought it was a great release for him to get it all out of his system.”

Although it’s underplayed in Ramones lore, the fact that Joey was Jewish is important: for that sense of alienation that occurs when cultures clash in adopted countries. (It also heightens the surreal dark sense of humour of the gawky freakish Semite singing lines like “I’m a Nazi baby/I’m a Nazi, yes I am”.) Certainly, Handsome Dick Manitoba – Dictators singer and Joey’s friend – thinks so.

“I grew up in this wonderful time in New York in the Sixties and Seventies where there was a lot of Jewish culture around – delis, candy stores, Brooklyn, the Bronx. There’s a closeness between us New York Jews. It’s the same heart, the same experiences, the same type of mother. You’re from a certain type of small town neighbourhood. Joey and the Ramones come from that same rich time and place and culture.”

So Joey would travel into Manhattan, handing out fliers for massage parlours in the West Village in the winter: at 17 he was earning $50 a week, paid by the hour – and like anyone with any sense, he’d dump the fliers somewhere and go get a beer instead. He experimented with LSD, ended up in the psychiatric ward a couple of times, painted with vegetables and fruit as his tools, recorded the sound of thunderstorms and a bouncing basketball: basically, the singer didn’t fit in.

“I never liked Queens,” he told me. “I still don’t. I felt alienated. It’s middle class. It’s not wealthy. The kids were, for the most part, more normal than me. I got kicked out of my own bed so I moved to the Village. I tried doing a lot of odd jobs. I had to go on welfare for a while.^* I used to work at an art gallery, selling sculptures and modern art stuff on commission.”

His mother also recalls the period: “A couple of times we went into the store in the morning, and found Joey asleep on the floor,” she recalled in a 1998 interview. Joey built little houses out of the paintings so the police couldn’t see him through the window. “So we bought him some pants and a shirt, and he worked at the Art Garden [her gallery]. The old ladies would come in to have their pictures of the Wailing Wall framed, and Joey would be there with his dark glasses. But they got used to him, and he was really good with them.”

Joey wasn’t as successful with the girls, however.

In the 1979 Rolling Stone interview, he revealed that he would get drunk and hang around institutions because, “the girls are all loose and … fun, you know? I kind of fell in love with this girl, and every week they took her upstairs to the fifth floor to have shock treatments. They would strap her into a wheelchair. Before they took her up she was fine. Then she came down and she was like a zombie. That’s what happens to you when you have a lobotomy.”

“I knew Joey had been in a mental hospital,” Dee Dee told NYC author Legs McNeil for his hilarious oral history of punk, Please Kill Me. “I thought he was clever, because a lot of people go in there and never come out. What’s more, he always had these girlfriends that he met in the nuthouse.”

It was while Joey was working as a sales person – and playing with his glam rock band Sniper – that he met his fellow Ramones. “I liked lyrics about violence and sexual perversion,” he explained to Charles Young about his Alice Cooper-influenced first band, for which he would wear a black satin-like jumpsuit with a bullet chain hanging around the groin, “but I wanted take the antics a step further. I wanted more realism – humping the bass player’s leg like a dog.” Dee Dee lived with Joey in the art shop for a while when he too was kicked out by his mother – and it was the future bassist who re-christened Jeff as Joe (he added a “y” to his name when he became a Ramone). Joey stuck with it: the girls seemed to like it. Was Dee Dee a delinquent then?

“Yeah,” Joey laughed. “He was a little more … I can remember him saying he was in that band, Neon Boys or something, with Richard Hell. It was a little after that we started the Ramones. We all lived close by, and we’d go over to John’s house and write songs. I’d written some stuff even before the band – ‘I Don’t Care’ and ‘Here Today, Gone Tomorrow’. We shared similar musical tastes: New York Dolls, Alice Cooper, The Stooges … Actually, this was before the Dolls, so it was MC5, The Stooges, back to the early Seventies.”

“EACH RAMONES SHOW that Johnny would turn up to, he’d have this little radio, a little red, portable AM radio, and he’d be listening to the Yankee games. If it got too loud in the dressing room, he’d just snap on a little earpiece and keep listening. If the game got really exciting, he’d wave his arm, his hand, waving it back and forth towards Monte [Melnick, tour manager]. And then Monte would go, ‘OK, everybody out of the room, we’re getting ready to play now’ – but half the time it was just because Johnny wanted to hear the game. OK, so Johnny was more into the baseball. But I would talk to John about his guitar playing. I think he’s the greatest guitar player that ever was.

“I asked him once, ‘Johnny, do you practice a lot at home? What do you do?’ and John said, ‘George, a carpenter has his hammer, the musician has his guitar. The carpenter doesn’t bring his hammer home. He’s not going to work at home, he’s going to relax at home. So I don’t have a guitar at my house. This is my job. I bring my tools to work. I leave them at work.’ I thought that was a really interesting insight.

“Probably, early on, Johnny was really into it. But as his career went on, he was the business guy. He left his hammer at work – he was Johnny Ramone, which I thought was the coolest shit in the world. You’re not pretending to be some great fucking artist … you are what you are, which is pretty neat. I asked him why he never brought his girlfriends to the gigs, and this was even before the Joey thing [with Linda, Joey’s former girlfriend who Johnny later married]. He would say, ‘George – does a carpenter bring his wife to work with him? She can meet me for a couple of days but this is my job. I go do my job, I go home.’

“Every time I would see Johnny backstage, it would be like, ‘When’s our next job?’ It was never a gig or a date or a show. In Johnny’s own words, he was the businessman. But he’d created something that hadn’t been done before, the buzzsaw guitar sound that was so amazing everybody copied it. The whole world – now, popular music is the Ramones.

“I’ve heard him play leads, I’ve jammed with him before. Johnny can’t play lead? Sure he can, he’s a great lead player. But why should he play lead when he’s so good at what he does, not even trying to compete with the Jimmy Pages and Jeff Becks of the world. This guy created his own genre – why go beyond that?”

(Author’s interview with George Tabb, Ramones fan)

JOHNNY RAMONE WAS born John Cummings on October 8, 1948 in Long Island, the only son of a mechanical constructor.

A lifetime Yankees fan, he wanted to be a baseball-player from the age of five but wasn’t prepared to make the necessary compromises: he didn’t want to cut his hair. So he bought a guitar instead.

As he explained on the 1990 video compilation, Lifestyles Of The Ramones, “All [my] life as a kid growing up, I either wanted to be in a rock band or I wanted to be a baseball player. [I] never thought [I’d] ever succeed at doing that.”

Johnny was a self-confessed teenage reprobate who drifted from one military school^* to another during his formative years – occasionally ending up on the wrong side of the law.

“I guess we were sort of juvenile delinquents,” he told Sounds magazine, “but Forest Hills ain’t the South Bronx; it’s a nice neighbourhood. So if you walk around like this [he indicates his leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans] you’re already looked upon as a hoodlum. We were general nogoodnicks.”

A firm believer in enforced discipline – he once stated he believed that everyone should do military service for two years, mandatory – he didn’t turn bad until he got out of high school: “Sniffing glue was probably the start of my downfall,” he stated. “We tried it and then moved on to Carbona. We once tried robbing a drug store on Queens Boulevard – unsuccessfully. It was in a whole row of stores and we broke into the laundromat by mistake. The next time, we tried robbing a bakery on 63rd Drive. The police came to my house and asked somebody to identify me.”

Johnny became interested in music after seeing Elvis Presley on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1957, and still cites his favourite artists as Elvis and The Beatles. When the early Sixties British Invasion hit America he started practising guitar but couldn’t figure out how to play it like his heroes, so he gave up – until The New York Dolls came along in the early Seventies to show there was another way. But to this day, Johnny contends he has no influences as a guitarist.

In fact, Johnny loved Bo Diddley, Dick Dale, Cream-period Eric Clapton, Mountain’s Leslie West (who back then was in a local band called The Vagrants), and Jimi Hendrix, among others.^*

Johnny chose to shut out his musical past and start all over again when inventing the Ramones sound: sucking out the extraneous soloing and virtuosity with a belligerent force. One of his favourite bands was LA’s Love; and the clipped brilliance of their 1966 debut album’s rhythm guitars can be detected in Johnny’s brutal harmonic minimalism.

Dictators bassist Andy Shernoff, meanwhile, thinks the blueprint for the Ramones sound comes directly from two songs – ‘Paranoid’ from the second Black Sabbath record, and ‘Communication Breakdown’ from the first Led Zeppelin album. “But,” as he adds, “when they made their first record everything else was overblown drum solos and classical rock and explosions and it was like – what happened to ‘Wop Bop A Loo Bop’?”

As part of his musical apprenticeship, Johnny played bass in Tommy Erdelyi’s high school band Tangerine Puppets: “We were like the Nuggets album, that era,” Tommy says, “a conglomeration of that sort of music. Mostly covers. It was songs like ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’ by the Stones, ‘I Ain’t Gonna Eat Out My Heart Any More’ by the Rascals, ‘Gloria’, the hipper songs from that era. We lived within a couple of blocks of each other, in the same area of Forest Hills, so we hung out like teenagers do. Johnny was really good at stickball, a form of baseball, and we’d play a lot of that.”

“Once we all went to see The Beatles at Shea Stadium and John brought a bag of rocks, and threw them at The Beatles all night,” fellow Puppet Richard Adler told Finnish writer Jari-Pekka Laitio. “It’s amazing nobody got hurt. These were rocks as big as baseballs.”

Johnny wore his guitar high, and dived around on stage. He could get carried away in his exuberance. In Rego Park 1966, he beat up the band’s singer right in front of an audience. Another time, he shoved Adler right through the drum kit. Yet another time, he ran into a girl and she fell and cut herself – an incident that, according to Ramones video director George Seminara, led to the Puppets being banned from playing colleges. Consequently the band, unable to find work, split in the summer of 1967.^*

“Johnny has a wicked sense of humour, coming from Queens,” explains journalist Joan Tarshis. “It was like Beatles humour, sarcastic. The Ramones all shared a similar sense of humour – on the dark side. Joey’s was more acceptable, not so many people know about Johnny’s because he’s more private.”

Johnny became known for his cartoon T-shirts, and like his fellow future band mates, cited The Texas Chainsaw Massacre as a favourite film.

Several years of welfare cheques and building work followed. According to Poison Heart, Dee Dee and Johnny first met when the latter was delivering dry cleaning at the top of the hill on 66th in Queens. Johnny’s hair was down to his arse, and he was wearing tie-dyed jeans and a headband. The pair discovered a shared love of The Stooges and mischief, and began chatting about amps and guitars.

The two hung around during evenings and weekends after that, being near neighbours, and after Johnny got a construction job at a 50-storey building at 1633 Broadway (on 50th St) they were able to meet up at lunchtime as well – Dee Dee worked as a mail clerk at the same place. It was during the lunch sessions that the pair talked of starting a band together.

“John and I used to sit on rooftops and sniff glue and drop television sets on people,” Dee Dee told Rolling Stone writer Charles M. Young in ’83. “Actually, John used to drop the television sets. I only threw firecrackers. We didn’t receive proper guidance from our parents.”

Johnny had actually grown past his delinquent phase by the time the two future Ramones met, along with any usage of hard drugs – Dee Dee was guilty of embellishing the past to suit his own present. It wouldn’t be the first or last time, either.

“DEE DEE WOULD write three or four songs in a sitting. Two of them were bad but one of them would be genius. And he wasn’t precious about it neither – he’d be like, ‘You don’t like that one?’ and he’d tear it up.”

He was the punk, wasn’t he?

“He was the punk before there was punk – and Joey was the soul of the Ramones, the voice, he tied it all together. He encompassed the great singing styles that went before him. With two words he could sum up any situation. He knew that music saved his life and he knew that the Ramones had saved other people’s lives and I think that was something he was really proud of.”

(Author’s interview with Daniel Rey, Ramones producer and songwriter)

DEE DEE RAMONE was born Douglas Glenn Colvin on September 18, 1952 in Virginia – and spent the next 14 years moving between different towns in Germany.

Although he went to army school in Munich, Dee Dee mostly grew up in Berlin where he would lie awake at night listening to his parents’ drunken brawling (his parents divorced when he was 15: another classic dysfunctional American family). In a preview of his own second marriage, his mother was only 17 when she met her 38-year-old future husband – a Master Sergeant who fought in the Battle Of The Bulge and the Korean War.

For recreation, Dee Dee would scour the old war fields for Nazi paraphernalia to sell to visiting American soldiers – bullets, gas masks, bayonets, helmets. One time he claimed to have found an unexploded bomb. He started experimenting with drugs barely into his teens: found tubes of morphine in a garbage dump – the experimentation escalated and turned into a 14-year heroin addiction. A divided Germany, still licking its wounds from the war, later became a rich metaphorical source for Dee Dee’s lyrics – darkly humorous slices of barely restrained anger and cartoon violence.

“People who join a band like the Ramones don’t come from stable backgrounds, because it’s not that civilised an art form,” Dee Dee explained later.

In the early Sixties, his family – father, mother and sister Beverly – were stationed in Atlanta, Georgia for a while, and Dee Dee recalls hearing rock’n’roll blaring from the PX snack bar, and at the swimming pool (“with the sun, the comic books and the potato chips”). Back in Pirmasons, Germany, aged 12, he heard The Beatles, and got himself a Beatles haircut and suit. A couple of years later, he bought a cheap Italian electric guitar. It was after reading an article about a wrestler called Gorgeous George discovered in a pile of discarded Playboys that he decided to change his name to Dee Dee, and – inspired by The Beatles movie A Hard Day’s Night – changed his last name to Ramone, after Paul McCartney had called himself Paul Ramon.^*

From there, it was a typical Sixties rock’n’roll upbringing for this alienated youth – shoplifting in Berlin, dope, Levi’s jackets, LSD, Hush Puppies, and concerts by British groups like The Troggs, The Kinks, The Small Faces, The Rolling Stones, The Who and The Walker Brothers … His favourite TV viewing in the Seventies was archetypal good-time rock’n’roll sitcom Happy Days and old war movies: which makes a lot of sense.

“I hung out in Lefrak City, Queens,” Dee Dee told Spin in 1989, “and I’d do glue and Tuinals and Seconals. We used to call up numbers on the phone, and it would go beep-beep-beep-beep-beep and we’d listen to that for hours. Then sniff some more glue.”

“Dee Dee was lovely, a big dangly puppy,” says Gloria Nicholl, future Sire regional PR. “He even had this lovely Frankfurter-type dog called Kessie. He was my first boyfriend, straight out of convent school. I was 15. He was 16. We all went to school together in Forest Hills. Joey was always hanging around outside the flagpole. We dressed in the fashions of the day: bell-bottoms, long hair. We wore matching pink aviator shades. He shocked the life out of me because once he shot up right in front of me. We used to go to the pizza den and listen to the jukebox and eat pizza for 15 cents a slice – ha! 15 cents a slice. We were into all that Nuggets stuff. I liked him because he wasn’t going to grow up to be a dentist. That’s why we all became punks – we didn’t want to be dentists or dentists’ wives.”

In one of his final interviews, conducted by Harvey Kubernik in the spring of 2002 for use in the authorised liner notes to the reissued End Of The Century, Dee Dee also revealed that he had lived in a suburb of Culver City, California in 1970: “I hitchhiked out here and when I got to LA, first stop was Newport Beach. I met some guys, service men, jarheads, who drove me into LA. I stayed in LA for five minutes, hitched up the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur for a month. Then I came back, and stayed in Culver City in the Washington Hotel. MGM Studios right down the street. Worked as a maintenance man. Helms Bakery. I might have been 18, and started at midnight, and hosed all the garbage dumps. I listened to the radio, AM and FM dial. I used to go to all the thrift shops and look for 45s.”

Back in Forest Hills, Dee Dee would take the F train to New York City, and cop heroin, sometimes by the fountain in Central Park. In 1969 he accepted a job in an insurance company, delivering the mail. He later became a hairdresser – a good one, too.^* When he first met Joey, the singer was sporting a red Afro hairstyle, a yellow suede fringed jacket, moccasins and round, tinted glasses. The pair became drinking buddies – wine on stoops on summer evenings.

All four future Ramones attended early Seventies glam rock clubs in Manhattan, and dabbled in the look of the time. It was a small scene where everybody sort of knew each other and hung out at the Mercer Arts Center, the original Max’s Kansas City, and Nobody’s on Bleecker Street. The Mercer was to glam what CBGBs would be to punk: the crucial centre, where the New York Dolls would frequently play.

“They were great, those times,” the bassist told Mojo in 2001. “The people in [the Mercer] really lit up the place. There would be bands there like Eric Emerson [a Warhol Factory fixture who died in 1976], Magic Tramps, Teenage Lust, who had these really cute dancers who everyone wanted to go out with but nobody ever saw except on stage. Too bad.”

Dee Dee was a fan of the Bay City Rollers (the Ramones’ famous “Hey ho, let’s go” chant was an attempt to emulate the Rollers’ ‘Saturday Night’ 1976 chart-topper), and had an autographed biography of the Scots teen idols. In one interview, he even claimed the Ramones were as influenced by Shaun Cassidy and The Wombles^* and the Rollers as they were by Iggy, the Dolls and Alice Cooper.

Of course, all they were trying to do was to recapture the innocence of rock’n’roll as fans.

LET’S TALK ABOUT the New York Dolls.

David Johansen, Sylvain Sylvain, Arthur ‘Killer’ Kane, Jerry Nolan (replacing the late, OD’d Billy Murcia) and Johnny Thunders brought a trash aesthetic back to rock music in the early Seventies that had previously been the preserve of female pop artists like The Ronettes and The Crystals. Like early Aerosmith (only 4 Real), like a revolver concealed in lingerie, this troublesome trans-gender New York five-piece fucked, flirted and flounced their way across just two gloriously throwaway albums before self-destructing in a downward spiral of drugs, alcohol and recriminations. It’s been well documented how their lippy loudmouthed behaviour and police siren guitars helped serve as the blueprint for the Sex Pistols and, through them, British punk. The Dolls understood that what was important in rock music wasn’t the ability to play three fret-boards simultaneously, but to have FUN.

It took a little while before others caught on.

Tommy, for one, was initially taken aback by their lack of musicianship: “Here were the New York Dolls, and they could hardly play,” he told Mojo writer Michael Hill. “Yet they were much more exciting and entertaining than any of those virtuosos. Why was that? What was going on? Everyone was having a great time. It was like a party atmosphere. And I realised we were basically tired of what was going on. Everything was being rehashed and reformulated. It was getting to be like fifth generation Led Zeppelin clones. Subconsciously, it struck me, if there’s going to be a new direction in music it’s not going to be through virtuosity, but through ideas.”

“TOMMY RECOGNISED SOMETHING in the other Ramones they definitely didn’t recognise in themselves. That was his genius – they had the heart and the idea, but not the cohesion. Tommy was able to unite the others over his backbeat, which you’d think anybody could’ve done … but then you’d think anybody could be Ringo Starr. It’s not possible because most drummers can’t sit still long enough to play a simple beat.”

Yeah, well it’s the old joke about how do you tell when the drummer’s knocking on your door? He speeds up at the third knock.

“Tommy plays at the same speed, the same beat, the same patterns all the way through. Most drummers are genetically incapable of doing that. He knew that simplicity was king. Simplicity was …”

Yeah, he’s fascinating. I spoke to him the other day on the phone – he’s so unassuming.

“They all are. I would sit and interview Joey and, considering his height and the way he was recognisable everywhere he went, he did not carry that overbearing aura about him, you know? He had a quiet, shy nature that suited the celebrity he had. The Ramones were the normal guys everybody loved to love.”

(Author’s interview with David Fricke, Rolling Stone writer/editor, 2002)

TOMMY RAMONE WAS born Tommy Erdelyi on January 29, 1949 in Budapest, Hungary.

The future drummer came to the US with his family in 1956: “I was six or seven when it happened,” he told me. “It was a very restrictive regime, you didn’t hear too much Western music. I remember the early stages of rock’n’roll, how much it excited me – even as a young kid I was into dressing cool, into wearing a certain type of shoes. It was nice there, except for the political regime. One of the first records I had was a score to a Hungarian movie, with a rock beat to it, making fun of America. I’d go to playgrounds in the city, but I also used to spend some time in the country – I have some rural memories of rolling hills and stacks of hay, dug wells with stone casings, very pastoral. I had a regular childhood.”

At school, Tommy was into The Beatles, playing his guitar and listening to music – a good guy, but quiet.

After he graduated in 1967, Tommy became a recording engineer at Manhattan’s Record Plant, where he worked with Hendrix on his Band Of Gypsies sessions, Leslie West (pre-Mountain), and on John McLaughlin’s Devotion album.

“You won’t find my name on any albums,” he told NME in 1978. “The only group that gave me credit was 30 Days Out. I was very young and working with Hendrix was a thrilling experience. He’d come back in the studio and play back the stuff, and say, ‘Oh, that’s awful,’ and I’d thought it was great. He’d put down a guitar track and say he wanted to do it over. And he’d do it over and over and over …”

Tommy then took a job at a film company near the Museum of Modern Art and would take long lunch breaks so he could see avant-garde films by directors like Spanish surrealist Luis Buñuel that showed there.

At this point, the drummer was also going under the name Scotty: “I was using the name Scott Thomas,” he explains. “It was a stage name I had. I had a group after Tangerine Puppets called Butch, alongside Monte Melnick [future Ramones tour manager]. I was lead singer and guitar player. We dressed in the rock’n’roll fashions of the times. We were part of the glitter scene but didn’t wear make-up or anything. My most outlandish outfit would have been a silver Mylar plastic Granny Takes A Trip shirt jacket, with no shirt, suspenders and a tie.”

It was during this period he encountered The Stooges: “I heard them on late night radio when they first came out, and I thought they sounded interesting, like an avant-garde version of The Rolling Stones. Next time I saw Johnny, I mentioned he should check them out.”

“WHEN I HAD MY dark room,” begins Roberta Bayley, photographer of the first Ramones album cover, “I would put a Ramones record on and I could use the length of the songs to time the print.

“I’m from California, but I’d been living in London. In April ’74, I got a oneway ticket to New York. I wanted to see the New York Dolls because I’d heard a lot about them. It turned out one of the people on my list to look up was the Dolls’ sound guy. So we went to see them at Club 82 on East 4th Street, a former drag club. The first time I ever saw the Dolls, David Johansen was wearing a strapless dress and heels and a wig. Of course, I just assumed that was their regular look because everyone always said they wore make-up. From there, over that summer, I saw many different bands. I remember hearing about the Ramones and thinking they were probably a Spanish group, or Puerto Rican, from the name.

“Through the trajectory of my New York experience, I ended up falling in love with Richard Hell. My first memory of seeing the Ramones was going along with Richard to the Performance Studio at 23 East 20th Street where they were doing little showcases. It was a tiny place, no stage. It was very strange, seeing them for the first time, because you didn’t have any precedent for the look or the sound or the really short songs, even. They played a really short set. It was almost like conceptual art, thinking about it. It was weird but great. Like, ‘Wow, who would have thought of this?’ It seemed so funny but it wasn’t like you were laughing at them, more because it was so wacky.

“Other people said they would stop and start between songs and have arguments. But the framework was all there. I’d seen all these different musical things from San Francisco to London. I’d observed the different crazes. Before the San Francisco thing, I’d been into the British Invasion bands, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles. There was a feeling that the Ramones could be something like that, that you really were in on something different and interesting and fun.”

(Interview with author, 2001)

BY COMMON ASSENT, the music scene sucked in 1974.