Commando Read online

  For Abrams:

  Designer: Jacob Covey

  Production Manager: Jacquie Poirier

  Managing Editor: David Blatty

  Ramone, Johnny, 1948–2004.

  Commando: the autobiography of Johnny Ramone / by Johnny Ramone.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-8109-9660-1 (alk. paper)

  1. Ramone, Johnny, 1948–2004. 2. Punk rock musicians—United States—Biography. 3. Ramones (Musical group) I. Title. ML419.R324A3 2011 782.42166092—dc22

  [B]

  2010032482

  Text copyright © 2012 Johnny Ramone Army LLC

  Johnny Ramone Army logo by Shepard Fairey, © JRA LLC.

  All rights reserved.

  “Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World” written by Dee Dee Ramone, Johnny Ramone, Joey Ramone and Tommy Ramone, © 1976 (renewed), WB Music Corp. (ASCAP), Taco Tunes (ASCAP) and Evergreen Entertainment Group Inc (ASCAP). Lyrics reprinted by permission.

  “Wart Hog” written by Dee Dee Ramone and Johnny Ramone © 1984 Taco Tunes (ASCAP). Lyrics reprinted by permission.

  THIS PAGE: Photo by Danny Fields. Under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Front jacket photograph by Danny Fields. Under exclusive license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Back jacket photograph by Deborah Feingold. Under license to JRA, LLC. All rights reserved.

  Published in 2012 by Abrams Image, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Abrams Image books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  115 West 18th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  www.abramsbooks.com

  www.johnnyramone.com

  FOREWORD BY TOMMY RAMONE

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  EPILOGUE BY LISA MARIE PRESLEY

  ALBUM-BY-ALBUM ASSESSMENT

  JOHNNY’S ALL-TIME TOP TEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AFTERWORD BY JOHN CAFIERO

  AFTERWORD BY LINDA RAMONE

  FOREWORD

  IT’S GREAT TO READ JOHNNY RAMONE’S STORY IN HIS OWN WORDS. It’s like having a personal audience with him. It has his pacing, his timing, his rhythm. It’s a nice fast read—just the way he would have wanted it.

  I always liked Johnny. He was smart and entertaining and fun to be with. I first met him in the high school cafeteria at a table where he was holding court. He was the center of attention—something he had to be. A friend introduced us, and that was it. For the rest of the year I would sit at his table. What I really liked about Johnny was his sense of humor. He was sharp as a tack and loved to outsmart you. In fact, he loved to outdo you in any endeavor—he was the most competitive person I ever met.

  In those early years, what bonded us was music. The Beatles had just hit our shores a few months before, and there was a mad passion for all the pop bands that were sprouting up. Soon we had our own band, called the Tangerine Puppets. Johnny was an amazing showman in that band. He would hold his guitar high like he was carrying a machine gun and move ferociously on the stage like he was possessed, flinging himself wildly around and undulating with the rhythm. He was the essence of rock and roll.

  Johnny was meant to be a musical warrior. Joey, Dee Dee, and I gravitated to him because he was so charismatic and interesting. He was the magnet that pulled us together. In this book, Johnny talks about the hard road traveled through his personal and musical life. It is an insightful and interesting story indeed.

  —Tommy Ramone

  Johnny and Tommy (complete with tube of model airplane glue). Ramones in-store signing at Licorice Pizza, August 26, 1976, Los Angeles. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  The Tangerine Puppets, 1966. (From left to right) Tommy Ramone (then Tommy Erdelyi), Richard Adler, Bob Rowland, Scott Roberts, and Johnny Ramone (then John Cummings). From the private collection of Richard Adler and Bob Rowland. Used with permission.

  Johnny in Aquarius Records, San Francisco, August, 1976. Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Prologue

  It was that power of the guitar: I walked out there knowing that we were the best. There was nobody even close. Volume was my friend and I never wore earplugs. That would have been cheating.

  After retirement came induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, victory in readers’ polls that surveyed influential bands, and even me getting ranked as the sixteenth top guitar player in history by Rolling Stone.

  But for all the success, I carried around fury and intensity during my career. I had an image, and that image was anger. I was the one who was scowling, downcast, and I tried to make sure I looked like that when I was getting my picture taken. The Ramones were what I was, and so I was that person so many people saw on that stage.

  That was both the real me and the image me who beat up Malcolm McLaren in the tiny backstage area at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles in 1978. The place is a great club on the west end of Sunset Boulevard that holds about three hundred people. It has a history of great music, from the Doors to the Stooges to the New York Dolls.

  McLaren was talking to my girlfriend, and all of a sudden I decided I didn’t want her talking to him anymore, so I told her to come over to where I was standing a few feet away. I heard McLaren ask her, “What’s his problem?” So I went over to him and said, “What’s my problem?” and I punched him in the head. He went down but I wasn’t done. I went over and grabbed Dee Dee’s bass to finish the job, but people intervened and hustled McLaren out of there.

  The rage started with adolescence and never fully left. I would walk off the stage with that anger going, although it eased when I retired in 1996. While retirement seemed to soften me, the prostate cancer I was diagnosed with in 1997 did so even more. It changed me, and I don’t know that I like how. It has softened me up, and I like the old me better. I don’t even have the energy to be angry. It has sapped my confidence. I fought it as hard as I could. I figured it would win in the end, but I hate losing. Always did. I liked being angry. It energized me and made me feel strong.

  When I was younger, I was ready to go off at any time. My wife, Linda, and I would go out to the Limelight in New York, and I would see people and be able to freeze them with a look. People were even too scared of me to tell me that people were scared of me. I could tell that some people were just uncomfortable around me. I never tried to make that happen; it just did.

  I really never felt out of control. It was just the way I lived my life. I was the neighborhood bully.

  I even beat up Joey, our singer, one time, before we were in the band, back in the old neighborhood. He was late to meet me—so I punched him. I was twenty-one; he was nineteen. We were meeting up to go to a movie. There was no excuse for being late.

  Once we did start playing in the band, we had fights like any gang of guys. Even onstage at the very beginning, we fought over what songs to play. We’d yell at each other, “Fuck you,” you know. Then walk offstage, come back and play some more. At CBGB’s especially, we’d start a song and an amp would malfunction, and we’d all have to stop. We’d already be excited to play, and then have to stop, so someone would ye
ll, usually Dee Dee, “What the fuck is wrong?” Then someone else would yell back at him to shut up. And on it went. It was an extension of what happened in rehearsal. We forced ourselves out of it when we decided we just wanted to play the songs quickly.

  When we started touring, I had to smack Dee Dee a couple of times to get him into the van after stopping for gas at a roadside stop. One time I smacked him outside the Tropicana Hotel in Hollywood. He was high on something, as usual. I liked him, really, but I think he just liked to be difficult.

  Marky, our second drummer, and I would go months without talking to each other over some stupid thing, like who should sign what. We were in Japan, and he had a cracked cymbal. I thought we should all sign it and sell it. He and I actually had a fight over whether the band should sign it or just him. He thought that since he was the drummer, he should be the one. I thought a fan would rather it be signed by the whole band than just Mark. We all ended up signing it and selling it.

  With Joey, I’d try to like him, talk to him, then it just went bad. He was a fucking pain in the ass. So I gave up.

  The reality is that I was surrounded by these dysfunctional people, and I was the one who ran the business end, aside from our managers. Everybody else was a mess—in their own world pretty much. We traveled by van, and someone would want to stop every fifteen minutes. So I had to tell them that we could only stop every couple of hours. Otherwise we would never have gotten to any shows.

  The Ramones hinged on aggression, and balanced that with the cartoon-like fun that so many people seemed to see in us. So the anger was diffused in the public eye a lot of the time.

  I was so bent on making us the best band in the world, I was willing to do anything without compromising us.

  The first time we played CBGB’s, Alan Vega from Suicide came up and told us that we were the band he’d been waiting for and he couldn’t believe how great we were. I told Dee Dee, “Look, we fooled someone. Maybe we can fool other people.”

  Every time we had a new fan in those early days, I’d say, “Fooled another one.” Then I realized at some point that we really were good.

  But what people saw had deep roots, even though it was pure rock and roll. What we did was take out everything that we didn’t like about rock and roll and use the rest, so there would be no blues influence, no long guitar solos, nothing that would get in the way of the songs.

  The Ramones were fun, and the more intense, the better. Our shows had violence. We had fights; we had blood. I’d have been bored crazy if crazy stuff didn’t happen.

  At one point in the early nineties, I came into possession of a canister of police-issue mace, compliments of a former New York City cop. In fact, he was with us working as part of the crew at this show in Washington, D.C. It was a sturdy can, big enough that your whole hand went around the canister, not one of those little things that women carry. I figured he knew how to handle the mace, so I told him to get ready and fire it into the crowd at some point during the show.

  So he got behind a PA column and let go. It was terrific, like a bomb went off, with everybody running and pouring beer on their faces. That was a Ramones show.

  Johnny, live with the Ramones, at the Palladium in New York City, January 7, 1978. Photo by Stephanie Chernikowski, under license to JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  The Ramones live at the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles, February 16, 1977 (opening act Blondie). Photo by Jenny Lens. © JRA LLC. All rights reserved.

  Johnny’s first Communion. Photo used courtesy JRA LLC photo archives. All rights reserved.

  Chapter 1

  Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Fats Domino. He gave me the singles he was taking out as he put in the newest hits. I loved it; I had a great collection of 45s. I still love that era of music. The songs sound so clear and exciting, like Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’.”

  The bar was in Stewart Manor, which is a two-thousand-person population town on Long Island in New York mostly full of Irish immigrants and their descendants. It was a beer-and-shot joint with a great jukebox. My parents worked together and closed the place every Saturday. I stayed at home alone until two or three in the morning, from the age of seven to thirteen from 1956 to 1961.

  But it was great having the place in the family. I would walk home from school and hang out there and listen to that jukebox full of powerful songs, stuff I had never thought existed. Sometimes my dad let me help him, and I would go downstairs to sort the bottles and put them in cases. I’d pass it on the way home from school in the afternoon and stop in; if a ball game was on, I’d stay and watch it. I’d hang out at the bar as much as I could.

  My parents, Frank and Estelle, were working class all the way. My dad was full-blooded Irish, and my mom was Polish-Ukrainian. Both of my dad’s parents were born in the United States and deceased by the time he was a little kid. My grandparents on my mom’s side were born out of the country. Her mother was born in Poland, and her father was born in the Ukraine. He died when I was twelve.

  We were also Catholics, and I made my first Communion when I was six, but I quit going to church soon after that. I’d ask, “How come Pop doesn’t go to church on Sunday?” And he’d say, “Well, I don’t have to go.” So I said, “Well, I’m not going anymore unless you’re going.” As with so many kids, I didn’t do too well with the nuns, who would smack me around all the time. I don’t think I even did anything to deserve it, but they would hit me with a stick. I got out of going to church school after I showed my mom the marks. I told her I wasn’t going anymore. She didn’t believe they were hitting me until I showed those to her. I’m still Catholic, I just don’t go to church.

  Soon after the jukebox guy started giving me those singles, I saw Elvis Presley on the black-and-white television in our Westbury living room, on The Ed Sullivan Show. The first time was September 9, 1956, in a broadcast from Hollywood; then seven weeks later from thirty miles away in New York City, at the CBS studio at Broadway and Fifty-third Street. Today that’s the Ed Sullivan Theater, where Letterman does his show.

  I just knew that I would be a big Elvis fan from that moment on. It was that wildness, and it really upset my parents, who thought he was a dope fiend. I didn’t know what that was, but I figured it must be a good thing, because if it upset the grownups, it had to be good. I just followed him from then on and became a rock and roll fan forever, and by the next year I was listening to Ricky Nelson, the Everly Brothers, and was a big Jerry Lee Lewis fan. And Little Richard, I mean, he was gay and black, and that made everybody crazy. I’d probably like Pat Boone now, but back then, that was what parents listened to, which meant it was no way to really outrage them. That was one of the cool things about that music, how it pissed off the grown-ups. I would say I had the seed of rebellion very early.

  It was easy to be a kid back then. All this good music was played on the radio, not like now. I would hear all of the greatest artists, Ricky Nelson, the Platters. I’d come home from school and watch American Bandstand at four P.M.

  Westbury was half black when we lived there, but it was a different country then, where everybody got along—you know, the 1950s. As an only child, I was by myself a lot, and we moved around, sort of climbing the economic ladder. We moved from Westbury to Stewart Manor in 1956 and stayed there for about five years. After that we moved to Franklin Square on Long Island, then to Jackson Heights in Queens until we finally moved to Forest Hills, another Queens neighborhood, around 1964. That was a new apartment building in a decent neighborhood close to the high school. It was considered an upper-middle-class area. My world was very small. I basically didn’t leave my block or two.

  So I went to a bunch of different schools, had to adjust a lot to new people. It was probably good for me, but I didn’t like having to keep moving away from whatever friend or friends I might have made.

  All of my fondest memories of childhood have to do with my father. He was a hard-drinking Irish guy who everyone liked. Our family had all our meals together w
hen I was little. It was a real family. My dad for some time worked at Grumman, an airplane factory. He would come home from work and pull me out of bed and walk around the neighborhood with me on his shoulders, sometimes in the middle of the night if he was working a double shift. And he would have a beer after work and give me a sip when I was five or six. It tasted so good out of the can.

  In terms of time, I remember everything from my childhood by the year of baseball cards. I remember the first cards I saw were ’54 Topps cards, a nickel a pack, which was wax paper, and they came with a stale slab of gum. Sometimes, even now, thinking about the cards takes me back to opening the pack in my neighborhood as a kid. That feels good, thinking of that. I remember standing behind my apartment building and opening a pack of 1957 cards. The first card I saw was a Raul Sanchez, from the Cincinnati Reds.

  Baseball is the way I mark a lot of early things. Even the way I began to rebel had to do with baseball.

  In 1960, I was sitting in my seventh-grade classroom during the Yankees-Pirates World Series, last game, and I had my transistor radio held up to my ear, listening to the game, and my teacher asked me what I was doing. I told her that I was listening to the World Series and that this was very important and that it was something that everyone should be listening to. She told me to shut it off, but I told her I thought we should put it to a vote and see who wanted to listen to the series. She just told me to keep doing what I was doing and leave everyone else out of it.

  I wanted to be a big-league ballplayer when I grew up. But each year, as I got older, I saw how difficult it was. I saw that even being the best wasn’t good enough. Being great in Little League was one thing, but you had to go way beyond that. When I was nine years old, we had a pitcher who was twelve, Neal Tenent. Every game, he would strike everybody out. I never got to know him, and never heard of him again, and I thought, “Wow, he was so good, and he never made it…” Well, it was really hard to accomplish. But I did think that if things went well, I could make it to a low-level minor-league team, so I figured I’d just have fun playing and see what happened.