'Ramones' by Ramones: Everything You Didn't Know

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
I know that. Hello everyone, and welcome Too Much Information,
the show that brings you the secret histories and little
known fascinating facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your glue sniffers of gospel, you're
heavy hitters of Hey Ho, your superintendents of rock and

(00:25):
roll high school, your body savas of the blitz creen Bop.
Jordan wrote all of those. But my name is Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
And my name is Jordan Runs. It was okay, right,
I probably could have picked two and just gone with that.

Speaker 2 (00:41):
But that's anytime you think of asking yourself for edit
advice for me, just keep that one in mind. Probably
could have just picked two, you, I say with love,
I know, I know, speaking of brevity, good good.

Speaker 1 (00:57):
Very good. That's right. Today we are discussing one of
the most earth shattering debut albums in rock history nineteen
seventy six. Is Ramones by Ramones? Or is it the Ramones.
I've never really been sure. In case it's not abundantly clear,
I am not as steeped in the world of punk
as my dear friend Alex Heigel, and I will defer
to him on much of this, but I will say

(01:18):
I always got the sense that if Icky Pop and
the New York Dolls were the parents of punk, then
the Ramones were the screaming newborn infants, untamed and purely
driven by primal instinct. In a sense, I admire the rawness,
I admire the purity exactly, yes, exactly, But given my
penchant for melody and baroque style pop and studio experimentations,

(01:41):
this twenty nine minutes of Breakneck three Corps Juvenilia never
really was my jam. Although you think it would be.
Considering they took their name from Paul McCartney's pre Beatles
stage name, you think that would endear them to me,
but not really, not so much. It's similar to how
I feel about the Rolling Stones. I like the sounds
for a little bit, but then after a while all

(02:02):
their songs start to blend into one for me, and
I almost want to play, like a name that tune
style game with you and see how long it takes
me to identify different Ramones songs, kind of like that
Caleb Gammon video where he's trying to identify Jack Antonov's
production on the New Tailor Swift album.

Speaker 2 (02:17):
Does the d D count off count?

Speaker 1 (02:19):
Can you give make me a taste of those? It's really.

Speaker 2 (02:24):
I don't even think he closes his mouth when he
does it.

Speaker 1 (02:28):
What a cartoon of a human being. I never really
my knowledge of the Ramones is really not what it
should be, and it really wasn't until researching this episode
that I watched a fair number of interviews and performance
clips with the Stones and d D. What a gem
you said, Stones there? Yeah, well you take my meeting.

(02:52):
I want to put you in the hot seat right now.
Hi going This is probably an unfair question, but I
asked this with no judgments. It's your question. What is
it about the Ramones that appeals to you? I want
you to make a convert out of me.

Speaker 2 (03:06):
Yeah, I mean, much like David Lynch, I am not
a Ramones guy capital RG, but I really do love
them as a as a concept and foundational you know,
they are the load star of everything.

Speaker 1 (03:19):
I mean, anytime some British.

Speaker 2 (03:24):
Barney Hoskins or Nick Kent type wants to start making
the case for British music exceptionalisms, I say, sorry, punk
started in America. But getting away from that, I think
the Ramones are so fascinating because for all of the
high falute and v H one Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame white music journalists talking about how.

Speaker 1 (03:48):
Punk was really about stripping things back to its essentials, and.

Speaker 2 (03:53):
I think the Ramones fit that brief more than anybody,
because if you listen to I mean, first of all,
the first punk band was arguably Deaf out of Detroit.
So once again, you know, great documentary, once again stolen
from black people. But when you're talking about all of
the bands that are considered sort of the proto punks,

(04:16):
they are coming from such a kind of blues and
R and B steeped approach, like you know New York Dolls, Iggy,
I mean, Iggy was like a blues drummer, you know,
all those guys, and that they undergrown.

Speaker 1 (04:31):
Yeah, did the the Marvin Gaye song? What was the
Marvin Gaye song? They did? Hitchhike, I think. But I mean,
even with the.

Speaker 2 (04:37):
Velvet Underground, the Velvet Underground are such an outlier for me,
because you know, they had so much others going on,
with all the La Monte Young influence and all the
weird kind of experimentalism and Warhol. But I mean of
some of the more foundational punk bands, and then once
you get into the sex Pistols, the sex Pistols are

(04:58):
a pub rock band. They have like a very loose
I mean that music, with the exception of Johnny Rotten,
is like two or three steps removed from like t
Rex boogie rock. You know, there I said it.

Speaker 1 (05:12):
Oh yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:13):
And then the Class were obviously so musically like omnivorous
that their influences just kind of come from all over.
But when you're really talking about people who were like
what makes a good song, like a hook great, here's
hooks and nothing else, And like, you know, because I
really do think they have a great melodic sense, and

(05:35):
Joey has such a you know, he's got that sort
of little croon to his voice that just helps all
of that buzz sawing go down much easier. And so
I think they represent the purest distillation of punk as
an idea of going back to like fifties and sixties
rock and roll, you know. And and they're interesting too,
and just because like I'm a rhythm dorc and like
you know, a lot of the British bands were influenced

(05:57):
either by pub rock or with like the Class reggae
and again, even with like Stooges and stuff like, it's
still kind of like has that sort of bluesy swing.
But with the Ramones, it just it almost I was
thinking about it, it sounds like those Strokes records, like
the first Strokes records when they were trying to make
them sound like industrial like drum programming, because there's this

(06:19):
zero swing they played to a click. But if they
would have had a grid, I'm sure they would have
just squared it off to a grid too, you know,
all downstrokes on the guitar. Like it's just it's just
like a great, streamlined, well built series of cars, you know,
and then all and of course I'm just a sucker
for like the kind of sixties fun house vibe that

(06:43):
they were representing as well. So I mean, that's what
I really love about them, And I'm and you know,
I was kind of a Dilton. I didn't get into
them until I bought The Greatest Hits in high school
because I was just intimidated by the seventeen other albums.
But yeah, even their latter day stuff has some real bangers.

Speaker 3 (07:02):
Man.

Speaker 2 (07:03):
My favorite song is probably pet Cemetery from the Stephen
King movie and Now of course I'm biased. Yeah, but
I also think that that song has such a Joe's
voice sounds so good on that song, and there's such
a melancholy to the way that he was able, like
he was able to impart such a like sweet kind
of little boy lost attitude to all their stuff that

(07:26):
diffuses that like snarling obnoxiousness that comes from the rest
of it.

Speaker 1 (07:31):
Yeah, yeah, I will say. I don't think I've ever
talked about this part of my life on here, but
I for years was a DJ, like an old soul
R and B sixties girl group forty five's DJ around Brooklyn,
and a lot of my friends who also did that
with me, who you know, really love the kind of

(07:52):
Amy winehouse E behived sixties somewhere between greaser and maud
aesthetic and sound. Also really loved the Ramones, and I
never really saw the overlap because it just seemed like
two completely different eras, two completely different sonic worlds to me.
But then diving a little deeper for this episode, I

(08:13):
did see. I mean, first of all, that the Ramones
loved all that stuff, I mean the Shangri Laws and
beach Boys in the Stones and just all all my
favorite stuff British invasion and girl group stuff, and there
is so much of that. I mean, Judy is a
Punk is such a perfect pop song, and I don't
think I ever really paid much attention to that. I mean,

(08:34):
it was Jeff definitely a part of it was judging
a book by its cover.

Speaker 2 (08:37):
But one other thing that I want to say that
is so that I think is so important with them
is that they are like the reason that I think
they fit so well in the CBGB's crowd is that,
with the exception of like the New York Dolls and
maybe some early blondie like, they were really not doing
anything that.

Speaker 1 (08:53):
Was a rip off of the blues.

Speaker 2 (08:55):
You know, New York Dolls arguably were, but like Johnny
Ramone was explicitly like, I will never take a blue solo,
even though his favorite guitarist was Jimmy Page, Like you
might get a one, four or five chord progression, and
you might get maybe some little bluesy bends in Joey's voice,
but like it is the first I think, like at

(09:16):
that point in the whatever twenty year history of rock
and roll, them and that CBGB's crowd were like the
first guys who were very conspicuously like not making stuff
that was just rip off with blues and R and
B hot take, maybe not that hot. I probably sold
it from somewhere. Tipid take, tipid take, tipid takes.

Speaker 1 (09:37):
That's our new spinoff podcast, right, that's my show. Well,
despite my lack of appreciation and familiarity with Ramones, I
would never deny their impact. And I have to phrase
Brian ENO's oft quoted, possibly apocryphal comment about The Velvet Underground.
Though the debut didn't sell in huge quantities upon its release,

(09:58):
most who bought it formed a band, or at least
that's the popular legend. The Ramones made rock stardom accessible
to more than just a handful of virtuosos, and served
as an invitation for generations of kids to grab a
guitar and let it rip. And for me, who always
harbored dreams of playing in a band despite having only
a modicum of talent, I would like to offer them

(10:21):
a heartfelt thanks, and also to you, Heigel, for being
stupid enough to invite me into your band before you
ever heard me play. Hey, you earned it well. From
the insane stew of personalities that went into the band,
to all the ways in which they deliberately sought to
copy the Beatles while making music that caused most Beatles

(10:43):
fans like me to recoil to the threadbare circumstances of
the recording and releasing of a record that launched a
thousand metaphorical ships. Here's everything you didn't know about the
Ramones debut album.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Sweet Sweet Joey Ramone. Jeffrey Ross Hymen probably the best
place to start this episode, as the band's gangly, alien
proportioned frontman. Joey was six foot six and probably what
a buck twenty dripping wet oh yeah yeah, with like

(11:22):
hair down to his shoulders. He's up there in the
pantheon of iconic rock stances. I feel very comfortable saying that,
maybe not top five, but top ten certainly. Just that
one hand around the mic, other hand up in the air,
leaning forward at like a perpetual almost forty five degree angle.
What more do you want from a punk front man?

Speaker 1 (11:43):
Perfect?

Speaker 2 (11:45):
He was born on May nineteenth, nineteen fifty one, in Queens. Horrifyingly,
he was born with a I looked up the actual
medical name and then forgot to add this a partially
formed parasitic twin which wasn't full on like horror movie style,
but more like just like a big gross lump of
tissue with like teeth and hair growing out of his back,

(12:09):
which was later surgically removed and contributed to his health
problems all of his life, which I have to assume
I'm just speculating, but it might have been part of
his impetus for you know, some of the goofy side
show stuff and why the band adopted gabba gabba hay
from Todd Browning's indelible movie Freaks as they're on stage.

(12:32):
Chant kind of horrifying it is?

Speaker 1 (12:35):
Is that problematic to say?

Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean, I sure hope, I sure hope they didn't
take pictures of it and show him.

Speaker 1 (12:43):
Which wouldn't have been the most traumatic thing in his childhood.
That's true.

Speaker 2 (12:47):
Joey had a relatively happy childhood, at least early on,
growing up in Forest Hill's Queens, although he was diagnosed
with O c D obsessive compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia as
a teen. His brother, Mickey lay who's lee whose book
is I Slept With Joey Ramon, said he's such a
great title.

Speaker 1 (13:04):
Yeah, for his brother to write, that's amazing.

Speaker 2 (13:07):
He said, Joey heard voices that would force him to
repeat actions or or repeat other things. You know, there's
a lot of talk about later on in their career
when they were traveling that he would have to like
go back to the hotel and you know, check that
he'd done things in the correct way to enable him
to leave. And his mother, though divorced her first husband

(13:31):
and then her second husband, died in a car accident
while she was on vacation. So adding to that Dickenzian background,
Mickey Lee Wants recalled it was difficult growing up sharing
a room with someone turning lights on and off, running
the water in the bathroom for hours and hours, and.

Speaker 1 (13:48):
Unable to throw things away. Despite launching a genre of
music that was supposedly in direct opposition to the previous decade,
Joey grew up loving pretty standard issue music for a
kid of his time. The Beatles, who David Bowie and
my beloved Phil Spector produced girl groups. Let me specify
the girl groups are my beloved Phil Spector not so much.

(14:11):
Joey started out as a drummer at the age of thirteen,
inspired by Keith Moon, which makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (14:18):
I feel like, Yeah, I mean he was a cartoon
character himself.

Speaker 1 (14:24):
You know. And then eventually Joey got a hold of
an acoustic guitar. Just a few years later, and beginning
in nineteen seventy two, Joey played in a glam punk
band called Sniper, performing under the alias this is So
Good Jeff's Starship. I can only imagine his reaction when
the Jefferson Airplane changed their names to the Jefferson Starship.

Speaker 2 (14:45):
Why did they do that?

Speaker 1 (14:46):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (14:47):
I mean acid as a new Yeah? Was it because
Yorma left and Yorma and Jack left. Wasn't it just
Balen and old girl?

Speaker 1 (14:55):
Think you right? Yeah? Should you call her old girl?
Ol girl?

Speaker 2 (15:00):
It's a term of endearment, not big agist. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (15:04):
The band Sniper, Joey Ramone's early band played alongside Ramone
contemporaries like the New York Dolls and Suicide, but Joey
was replaced in the band in nineteen seventy four, supposedly
because he wasn't pretty.

Speaker 2 (15:20):
I mean, you know, that's what Johnny I think originally
wanted for the Ramones. They wanted like a much prettier frontman.

Speaker 1 (15:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:31):
Probably my favorite Joey anecdote that I read in his
Rolling Stone Oh Bit was that he actually took his
singing very seriously. He studied with an opera singer. He
would do breathing exercises, and he used a vaporizer to
open up his vocal cords before every show. And this
backfired in November nineteen seventy seven, right before a show
at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey, the vaporizer

(15:54):
blew up in his face and he was rushed to
the hospital for emergency treatment and then returned to do
the show. Yes Record, Yes Record. Producer Ed Stasium, who
I worked on some of their latter day stuff, said
he was on stage looking like Bob Dylan with burn
cream all over his face. The Rolling thunder look Joey
was a trooper. After the last encore, Joey was rushed

(16:17):
back to the hospital, this time to the New York Burns,
to the Burn Center, where he stayed for a week,
an experience that inspired him to write one of the
most beloved promone songs, I want to be Sedated.

Speaker 1 (16:29):
I didn't know that. Wow. Although that song has been
either ruined or improved, I can't tell which for me.
By the Nicket Knight bumper from the nineties when they
were promoting The Brady Bunch.

Speaker 2 (16:42):
I want to be a Brady. I have not heard that, and.

Speaker 1 (16:46):
Yes you did. We played I May I made you
listen to it when we did our Brady Bunch episode.
You clearly blocked it out, which I understand and appreciate. Yeah. Yeah,
I want to.

Speaker 3 (16:54):
Be a Braid.

Speaker 1 (16:56):
In the living room, ID cruise around in the brain whim.
I will not be pretty good medium funny. That's horrific.
Yeah it is. Here's a question for you, Heigel. I
don't know if there's an easy answer to this or
a really easy answer to this. I'm not sure which

(17:17):
how much of punk is an offshoot of glam because
I'm I guess I'm really thinking of the New York
Dolls here specifically looking a lot like Roxy music or something.
The stripped down sound and the peacocked outfits that all
just sort of screams glam to me. Uh, and then
their obvious appreciation for melody and pop. I mean, you've
got the New York Dolls covering the Shangri Laws give

(17:38):
him a great, big Kiss, which is one of my
favorite sixties girl group songs. Yeah, I mean, I'm not
really sure.

Speaker 2 (17:45):
I'm not super encyclopedic on the New York Dolls, but
I mean, I think when you're talking about glam, you're
talking about such a distinctly British thing that kind of
morph from the lineage of like Pentangle and all that
dance around the may pole into like electric music, because
like t Rex is all about like as a goofy
fantasy lyrics. David Bowie had done the Laughing Gnome and

(18:09):
all that other weird stuff. But New York Dolls, I mean,
David Johansson is an encyclopedia of early rock and roll
and blues songs. He's really like a very big student
of that stuff. And as far as there and Johnny Thunders,
I think was just a Chuck Berry freak. And then

(18:30):
as far as the as far as the look, I
think they just wanted to look like hookers.

Speaker 1 (18:38):
I know. I mean, but I'm not trying to put
you on the spot, and I'm not trying to be difficult.
Why I want to know what that what?

Speaker 2 (18:46):
I don't know, I don't remember them from I yeah,
I don't know. I having said what I just said
about David Johanson. I would maybe venture a guess that
there's some kind of like vague inspiration from like someone
like Flip Wilson, or like the kind of history of
drag and comedy and as descending from like vaudeville and

(19:07):
like kind of you know, minstrel shows and in the
South where like early rock and roll actually got started.
But I'm not sure if it was actually that high falutin.
I don't remember much about their sections, and please kill me.
I was just so horrified by the litany of gutters
that Iggy Pop was dragging himself through and all the

(19:30):
Nazi that they were all into. That really pissed me
off anyway, speaking of that. The villain of our story,
inasmuch as it's possible, John William Cummings was born in
Queens in October eighth, nineteen forty eight, the only son
of Estelle, a Polish Ukrainian waitress, and Francis, an Irish steamfitter.

(19:53):
Johnny's dad was a strict disciplinarian. Johnny would later recall
how his father made him pitch in a little league
game the day after he'd broken his big toe, because
Francis himself had never called in sick on a day
of work. Johnny's teenage band was called the Tangerine Puppets,
named after a Donovan song, alongside the future remote drummer

(20:14):
Thomas Erdely. I don't know how to pronounce his name.

Speaker 1 (20:18):
I'm sorry. It's Tommy Ramone per Rolling Stone.

Speaker 2 (20:22):
One time, when this high school band was playing Satisfaction
at a school function, Johnny Ramone noticed the student president
of their class standing in the wings and ran over
to him and hit him in the balls with his
guitar neck. Another time, Johnny got in a fight with
the band's lead singer while they were in the middle
of playing, beating him on stage until the other members

(20:43):
pulled him off. Tommy Ramone offered a great quote saying,
we all liked Johnny. That anger is pure. Johnny was
a genuine delinquent, though. One of his pastimes was hauling
up discarded TVs to the roofs of apartment buildings and
pushing them off onto the sidewalk as close as he
could to people walking or standing. He was he was

(21:05):
like just beating up people. He was I think actually
mugging people. A brief stint at a military academy in
Peaks kill, though failed to break his artistic spirit. And
he worked in a couple of odd jobs. Uh Like
he worked as a plumber alongside his dad. Uh and
he was also delivering dry cleaning, which is how he

(21:27):
met de d just.

Speaker 1 (21:31):
Got to say it like Dexter Dexter's laboratory, nod.

Speaker 2 (21:35):
Ded he's one of the only I mean, he's up
there with Sid right as one of the only mono
named punkers.

Speaker 1 (21:42):
Debbie.

Speaker 2 (21:44):
People just call her Blondie, right, or thought she was Blondie,
uh lou Iggy obviously probably not so much lou anyway.
Dede was the man's most the band's most prolific composer
and lyricist. He was born Douglas Glenn Colvin on September eighteenth,

(22:05):
nineteen fifty one, in Fort Lee, Virginia, to an American
soldier and a German woman. Dede once referred to his
mom as a drunken nut job, so maybe that was
her other occupation. As an infant, his family relocated to
West Berlin due to his father's military service, and because
of said military career, they were moving around a lot

(22:27):
and did He had a lonely childhood with very few
real friends. His parents separated during his early teens, and
he remained in Berlin until the age of fifteen, but
then he his mom and sister moved to Forest Hills
to basically get away from their dad, who I believe
was a real abusive garbage person.

Speaker 1 (22:45):
I imagine that that was probably the basis of a
lot of trauma for Deed that was to come in
his life. He did not have an easy life.

Speaker 2 (22:52):
Yeah, I mean I glommed over a lot of the
stuff that kind of led up to that. I mean,
he was like hitchhiking across the country and picking up
a drug problem in LA. That's where he first became
a male hustler and just was pretty constantly out of
his head on one thing or another. But great presence. Yeah,

(23:13):
and had one of the most poignant epitaphs and all
of you, all of punk rock.

Speaker 1 (23:19):
His headstone just reads, hey, I gotta go now. I
paid my respects to him last time I was in
LA and uh slightly less respect to Johnny.

Speaker 3 (23:31):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (23:31):
Well. He bonded with Johnny on their dry cleaning delivery
job over a mutual love of proto punk touchstones like
the Stooges and the MC five. I forgot to mention
the MC five earlier man so much early punk came
out of Detroit. One day, the pair of them made
the trek to Manny's Music in Manhattan, where Johnny picked
up a blue Ventures Model moles right and d D

(23:52):
snagged a Dan Electro bass, which he later smashed and
eventually adopted one of the one of the one of
the more notable.

Speaker 1 (24:00):
P bassers in punk.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
But all of these kind of hold a candle to
the genuine, actual familial trauma of Tommy Ramone. Born in
January nineteen forty nine in Budapest, his Jewish parents narrowly
escaped the Holocaust. They were hidden by their neighbors, but
many of his relatives were killed by the Nazis. Then,
in nineteen fifty seven they fled the Hungarian Revolution, emigrating

(24:24):
to the South Bronx before upgrading to Forest Hills.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
Tommy was a guitar player.

Speaker 2 (24:29):
At first, he played guitar the aforementioned Tangerine Puppets and
then left high school. I don't know that he actually
graduated and got a job at the record plant, where,
among many other things, he worked on records from Mountain.
John McLaughlan Herbie Hancock, and he was an assistant engineer
Jimmy Hendrix's band of Gypsy's album where he has a

(24:51):
really adorable anecdote of Jimmy asking him if he thought
Leslie West of Mountain was a better guitar player than him,
and Tommy to tape off. For a second, I thought
he was kidding, but then I realized it was a
serious question, I said, of course not.

Speaker 1 (25:07):
Oh. Jimmy then celebrated this psychic victory by dropping six
tabs of blotterer acids, snorting two speedballs, and railing a
Danish model. That's a real nice thing you said about me,
Tommy Ramon dig didn't. Doesn't he have like a history
of like genuinely believing that kind of obviously not as

(25:27):
good guitarists are better than him, like Terry cath from
Chicago he believed was a better guitarist. Terry, I mean,
he does, but it's not Jimmy Hendrix. And then what's
his name from Zez Top Billy Yeah, Billy Gibbons. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:41):
I feel like everybody in the world has this guitar
player who is better than me, said I was his
favorite player, wasn't Robbie Robertson, didn't he say? Dwayne Allman
said he was his favorite guitar player or something.

Speaker 1 (25:51):
I think clapped and said that, ah whatever.

Speaker 2 (25:55):
Four days after that visit to Manny, Johnny and Dede
held their first rehearsal, writing two songs on the very
first day they were a band, Johnny told Rolling Stone.
One was called I Don't want to walk Around with You,
and the other was called I Don't want to get
involved with you. He said it was very much like
I Don't want to walk around with you, almost the
same song.

Speaker 1 (26:18):
You know, a very ungenerous read of the ramones is
kind of the whole God, give me the confidence of
a mediocre what thing? You're not wrong? You're not wrong.

Speaker 2 (26:29):
Walter, Dede and Johnny asked Joey to join them in
a band. Deede initially wanted to play guitar and sing well,
Johnny was going to play guitar, and Joey was drumming.
I think they probably just knew him from around the
way in Forest Hills. Presumably they caught a couple of
gigs by sniper. They invited a guy named Richie Stern
to join them on bass, but his lack of talent

(26:52):
quickly necessitated that Dede switched to bass, leaving Johnny as
their only guitarist, and it was around this time that
d D came up with the name Remote, inspired by
Paul McCartney's use of the pseudonym Paul Ramone during his
Silver Beatles days. Jordan, what were the others.

Speaker 1 (27:08):
Let's see, George was Carl Harrison, which is the worst
stage name I've ever heard, named himself after Carl Perkins.
Of course he did. The bass player at the time
was Stuart Suckcliffe. He was an artist. He famously got
his money to buy a bass from selling a painting
that he did at art school. Uh So he named
himself Stuart de Stall after a painter named Dastall whose

(27:33):
first name escapes me. Some abstract impressionist painter.

Speaker 3 (27:37):
Uh.

Speaker 1 (27:37):
And then John was just uh long John, as in
Long John and the Silver Beatles or Long John, Silver
Parable and the Beatles. Their name really in those in
those years was was a pirateist awful stuff?

Speaker 2 (27:51):
Uh did he convince the others that they should be
the name of their group and their pseudonyms as well.
Tommy was older than the rest of them. He was
Johnny's power from their high school band. But you know,
obviously it already had some I think he was like
a year or two older. He'd obviously had professional experience already,
and he basically just kind of came in to like

(28:11):
manage them and sort of like watch over their shoulder
and stuff. And what what happened was that DEDI realized
he couldn't play bass and sing at the same time,
which happens to the best of us. Can you the
few times I had to play in World's Greatest playing bass,
I really dumbed everything down. I can sort of get
away with it like punk style, but not like Geddy Lee.

Speaker 1 (28:33):
When did you have to play? Because I was I
was the bassist the World's Greatest, the tective. I know
you were.

Speaker 2 (28:38):
We had to do probably one show before you. In
one during we were playing Footlight, probably our worst day
because everybody else had been at the beach and they
all showed up wasted, and I was playing bass and singing,
so not a great performance. Joey was tapped as singer,
and then he realized he couldn't drum and singing at

(29:00):
the same time, and so they started the process of
auditioning a new drummer. And basically, even though Tommy was
not actually a drummer, he would spend so much time
during these audition processes that he had to just like
getting up and going. They basically said that everyone was
playing too much because this was sort of the heavy
metal phase. So I imagine that they were getting a

(29:22):
lot of want to be John Bottoms and and and
Bill Woards and just coming in and playing too many fills,
and Tommy just spent so much time getting on the
kit just going no. It's just that they were like,
why don't you just do that for real and for always?
And he did, oh no for like five years. Yeah,

(29:44):
he's really fascinating. He's such a quiet He's like the
Garth Hudson of this band, like the quiet genius who
like spent so much time kind of behying the scenes
and stuff. And when you watch him play, you know,
he plays so delicately. That's why I thought the Strokes thing,
because it's just like this quiet, almost drum machine like

(30:05):
sort of pulse under. He doesn't play like, you know,
like a Keith Moon guy or or I'm trying to
think of other like proto punk drummers, like I don't know,
freakin Stuart Copeland in one of those chuds somebody.

Speaker 1 (30:19):
With their whole body.

Speaker 2 (30:21):
Yeah, yeah, just he's just like I'm gonna be I mean,
I think a lot of it was just being like,
these are so fast I have to put so I
cannot bash away at this uh DEDI would, however, remain
grandfathered into the position of counting off all the songs live,
and I have always wondered if they simply all knew
the tempos already and just were like, Okay, this is

(30:45):
how fast the song goes. Because he there's no way
he's actually counting off the tempos of those songs.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
I almost wonder if he didn't even if if that
was just to signal that the song was beginning. I
didn't even it didn even occur that that was access
supposed to serve a function, right.

Speaker 2 (31:01):
The band's nascent sound at this point was reminiscent of
the fifties and early sixties bands that they'd all grown
up with, but with all of the possible frills shaved off. Johnny,
I love this so much. Johnny at some point committed
to only playing downstroke.

Speaker 1 (31:18):
Now. Is that for ease or did he just like
how he sounded?

Speaker 2 (31:22):
No? I in my experience, it actually is a more mechanic,
reliable sound, and it also helps give kind of forward
propulsion because if you're playing your sort of conventional alternate picking,
the tendency that I found at least is to almost
make it swing a little bit anymore because they're uneven. Right,
You have a generally speaking, you have a harder downstroke

(31:42):
and then a softer up stroke, and that can give
this give your even if you're playing eighth notes, it's
still going to give it some level of unevenness that's
going to suggest a swing or a pulse, whereas if
you want something that is just a jackhammer, you want downstrokes.
And Johnny I love this. Johnny learned perfected this by

(32:02):
playing along with led Zeppelin's communication breakdown, which is like
often thought of as kind of the er text for
like hardcore punk. That just playing that over and over
and over again with only downstrokes.

Speaker 1 (32:18):
That makes so much sense. Wow. The band's producer at
the time, a guy named Craig Leon, gave a really
illuminating quote to the Guardian about the band's sound in
twenty sixteen. He said they were returned to streamlined minimal

(32:42):
rock with a strong pop element. They liked Herman's Hermits
and the Bay City Rollers as much as the Stooges
that were also very influenced by comic books and pop culture.
Remember Superman in the bizarro world, where everyone was the
antithesis of their earth like counterparts. The Ramones were the
bizarro world beatles. That's so perfect, uh. CBG's associate colleague

(33:06):
Richard Hall said in the same article, Tommy was the conceptualist,
adding that d d auditioned for the band he was
playing in television because they quote needed someone who could
play a sequel. He continued, Dede wrote outrageous, timeless compositions.
Johnny came up with that driving, monotonous guitar, and Joey

(33:26):
had the sweet voice and that whole mutant vibe, and
Sire Records had seymour Stein, the guy would end up
signing the band. To put it a little more succinctly
to New York Times, Joey was so sweet, the songs
he wrote were so tender. Dedi was Dee Dee, Tommy
was the brains, and Johnny was the Paul McCartney of
the group. He was the one that held the band together.

(33:48):
But I would also like to add he also crushed
Joey's heart when he got with his girlfriend Linda, which
I forget if we'll talk about later.

Speaker 2 (33:56):
Will Johnny was a real piece OF's just that's not
min's there. I'm sorry he was.

Speaker 1 (34:03):
And he also kicked Marky Ramone out of the band
when he had a drinking problem, if I believe he did.

Speaker 2 (34:08):
Yeah, I mean, Johnny was a lifetime teetotaler, uh when
not a druggie. His choice. His drug of choice was violence.

Speaker 1 (34:16):
How'd he die? Cancer? Uh? Mad?

Speaker 2 (34:20):
Cancer? Like it spread to like everything by the end.
I think he was like one of your more standard
is shoe cancers. And then they there's literally a quote
in like this Rolling Stone article that was like months
later he was informed by doctors that the cancer had
spread to his lungs, stomach, bones and blood or.

Speaker 1 (34:39):
Like what it was just like Jesus Christ. Yeah, did
he recounted in his autobiography Poison Heart. I think Joey wrote,
like me, I don't think he knew anything about guitar
chors or the verse of the chorus and intro. Somehow
he just banged out these songs on two strings of
a Yamaha acoustic guitar, and then Johnny Ramone would struggle
his best to interpret it. Johnny would show the bass

(35:00):
parts to my own songs because I had no idea
how they went. Tommy Ramone wrote I Want to be
your boyfriend, and we could have made a million dollars
on it because the Base City Rollers wanted to do it.
That's amazing. See, I find that really impressive people who
can't really play an instrument but can just write songs
and need to have something like That's what Jim Morrison

(35:20):
used to do. He would just like kind of sit
and tap his foot and start kind of free associating
with his verses and kind of find a melody. I
find that harder than sitting down and finding chord structures
and then working out something that would go along with it.
That's really impressive to me.

Speaker 2 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, you know, Jim Morrison, I know, may
have been a CIA plant.

Speaker 1 (35:45):
And yeah, his dad started the Vietnam War, Sure did,
Sure did.

Speaker 2 (35:49):
And this book I'm reading The Weird Weird Dream, Weird
Echoes in the Canyon or whatever.

Speaker 1 (35:53):
Oh, that's a great book.

Speaker 2 (35:55):
It's incredible Daya Allen Yep, incredible book and really actually
aside from sort of the obvious thing, which is like, yes,
the entirety of Laurel Canyon was all of those luminaries,
with like basically the exception of Neil Young, everyone was
descended from military family in many cases people who were
still working in the military, and also there was a

(36:17):
giant military research facility.

Speaker 1 (36:19):
In Laurel Canyon.

Speaker 2 (36:21):
But that guy made the very interesting point that all
of these bands, and I'll get back to this with
Jim Morrison, he was like, isn't it astounding how all
of these bands came out with all of this iconic
material within like two months of becoming bands and then
never ascended to those same ranks again, almost as if
there was no reason for them to continue once their

(36:42):
work had been done. So yeah, I mean everything that
anyone says about Jim Morrison actually composing anything must be
taken with a grain of salt.

Speaker 1 (36:50):
Oh yeah, man, I'd like to add, So, his dad
was a rear admiral in the Navy, and the Vietnam
Wars was generally said to have begun after the Gulf
of Tonkin incident in mid nineteen sixty five, which involved
the ship that Jim Morrison's dad was in command of
getting in some kind.

Speaker 2 (37:09):
Of allegedly it was fired upon, which is like an
in just and yeah, I don't think they were able
to ever find any actual documentation of it. It was
positive as a false flag that may have not even
had the benefit of having a flag, may have just
been a bold face lie to the American public. And that, folks,
is why punk is better, because it was made by

(37:31):
a bunch of gross misfits from Queen's not the sons
of the American aristocracy.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
So wait, I just really spell it out for me,
like I'm a five year old gone You said that
these bands never match the heights that they reached like
two months after forming, almost as if they never needed to.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Why would that be, Or that their songs weren't actually
written by them. I mean that's the other thing, Like
obviously the Birds didn't do anything except for singing on
their debut records, and the most these bands were supposedly
us astonishingly terrible live, So that beggars the question, like, well,
if you were so bad live and you never you know,

(38:08):
weren't able to sustain a career for longer than four years,
how did you write all of those supposedly iconic and
immortal songs without having any demonstratable talent.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
You know what would I'm sorry. I love this stuff
so much, and I read this book years ago. I
thought I was the one who sent it to you.
I guess I didn't. I believe you recommended it to me,
But yeah, Dave, Dave mcgallan, it's incredible. What was the
purpose of this CIA, the social engineering experiment.

Speaker 2 (38:37):
The overarching and supposed theory which is positive by this
is that if we're to believe that the entire Summer
of Love was a psyop, it was that the government
ministers of culture, whoever's actually pulling all the levers and
what have you, were genuinely alarmed at some of the
more radical fringes of the American left, like stuff was

(39:00):
happening specifically in Berkeley, stuff that was happening with like
in Detroit with the White Panthers.

Speaker 1 (39:05):
And Mario Salvo, stuff like the Bodies on the Gears production.

Speaker 2 (39:10):
Berkeley, and and so the concluded that one of the
easiest ways to sabotage that would be by creating a
mostly milk toast politics free youth movement that would be uh,
shall we say burdened by copious drug use, and you know,

(39:32):
the idea then being that these genuine radicals were actually
quite irritated when the hippies started showing up and just
talking about love and how love will end you know, everything,
and that if you just send all the you know,
psychic parts of the love into the universe, that'll end
of the war and all of these like genuine you know,

(39:53):
freaks and yippies and people were being like, no, we
have to set fire to things like no.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
We're going to elevate the Pentagon. We're all going to
join hands around the Pentagon, and it kind of levitate it,
and you.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Know, it's it can get a little tinfoily at some point,
but it is really astonishing once you realize like the
I mean you have like Van Cortland's, like David Crosby
is a member of the Van Cortland family. You know, yeah,
I don't know, interesting theory. I would probably believe it.

Speaker 1 (40:24):
At this point.

Speaker 2 (40:25):
I mean, it certainly worked, right, like because the other
thing that's interesting to me about it is how if
you do subscribe to that theory of the American culture shift,
it's also sort of dovetails with the weakening of labor
in America, you know, the sort of hoffa post war
eras generally thought of the peak of like American labor

(40:46):
power by people who are much more versed in that
kind of thing than I was. And that really started
to dry up almost immediately after Halfa died. And a
lot of that was, of course the Fed's coming in.

Speaker 1 (40:57):
But it disappeared, we should say, yes.

Speaker 2 (41:00):
Yes, a lot of it was, you know, due to
all kinds of federal pressure and the FBI and everything.
But yeah, it is very interesting how all of the
genuinely threatening people were killed or destabilized, and all of
these supposed radical figures of pop culture like somehow missed
getting popped by the DEA for anything ever, you know,

(41:23):
like why did David Crosby never serve any significant time
in jail when for all of his various drug offenses
and at the peak of the time, and Rocky Erickson
got institutionalized for thirteen years for a joint like like that.
You know, this sort of general thing is if all
of these scions of American you know, power were making

(41:43):
music and at the forefront of a culture that posed
any real actual threat, why weren't they investigated why weren't
they like, why how did they operate do this with
supposed impunity? Is it because the music was genuinely pretty
milk toast and not actually threatening. Yes, like what I
had talked to Buffy Saint Marie, she talked about how
she actually saw her FBI file like at one point,

(42:05):
and like, you know, I'm sure there was none on
like like everyone talks about, Oh, for what it's worth,
like Buffalo Springfield, like the great American protest song, not
actually a protest song, you know.

Speaker 1 (42:16):
It's about the nightclub closing. Yeah, Pandora's Box on the
Sunset Strip and the kids were pissed that they was
closing and they weren't allowed to stay out late. There
was a curfew. I mean that was what that That
was what they were protesting about.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Yeah, so that's all very interesting. That's a wonderful, useless
diversion to the point of this episode.

Speaker 1 (42:33):
Well, no, I mean punk dissatisfaction. I think it's all.
It's all related. Have you read Chaos by Tom O'Neill,
the book about Charles Manson supposedly being uh having some
connections to the CIA. Is probably the briefest way to
put it.

Speaker 2 (42:50):
Uh, yeah, I mean that's all very interesting. Well, because
there's there's two real wings for that. There's there's one
if you want to talk about Like as with any syop,
there's many good there's many angle to come in at it,
Like one the Weird Dreams of the Canyon book is great
for the kind of social engineering aspect. But then if
you want to dive even deeper into the MK ultra stuff,
you know, there's whole books that have been written on that.

(43:12):
There's a lot of people talking about how any Jacobson,
about how people might have you know, Lee, Harvey Oswald was,
Charles Manson were possibly Yeah, it's it's very interesting stuff.

Speaker 1 (43:27):
I don't know if I know where you're going.

Speaker 2 (43:29):
With that, that both of them might have been handled
by the MK Ultra apparatus.

Speaker 1 (43:37):
Oh yeah, that makes sense actually.

Speaker 2 (43:39):
Yeah, because Oswald was stationed somewhere where they were doing
his his early when he was stationed at a fort
where they were doing that kind of stuff.

Speaker 1 (43:48):
Anyway, well, from CIA main Control, yeah, and Charles Manson
to the Bay City rollers. That is the TMI promise
right there. In one move. Danny Fields, the ramones Co manager,
told the New York times. The Ramones loved the Bay
City Rollers. Dede's favorite band was Abba. They were trying
to be Abba. They were trying to have an album

(44:09):
that would sell six million copies so they could retire
for life. Now you hear all these interviews with the
band later on, you really see how they were pretty
naked in their attempt at you know, we want to hit,
we want something that's going to sell, and they never
really got that. I mean, they made I would say
conservatively seventy percent of their income on like T shirt sales.

Speaker 2 (44:30):
It was probably more tilted towards live performances because I
think Arturo Vega held the T shirt design and you
get more points if you're if he negotiated it well.
But yes, merch sales for sure. It's like Glenn Danzig
makes you know, he's kept afloat by misfit stuff even
though we stole all.

Speaker 1 (44:47):
Of it, like you know.

Speaker 2 (44:50):
But yeah, I mean, by the time that their errors,
the Johnny and Joey estates sell their beef, which I
think happened recently. They they sold the publishing rights for
ten mili each, so they were probably doing okay, it's
it's it is astounding to me the number of people
who in this from this era who genuinely got into

(45:13):
music out of wanting to avoid a real job. It's
I'm pretty sure in that inn, please kill Me, it's
where Iggy Pop talks about going to Chicago and hanging
out with like really foundational blues guys, and he was like,
they were not taking this music seriously at all. They
were drunk and this was better than working for them.

(45:33):
Like it's just so like I enjoy that refreshing candor
as opposed to like, yeah, you know your bonos or
your jack whites about like.

Speaker 1 (45:41):
Well, your music can change the world. It's an element
event for social change.

Speaker 2 (45:45):
Like yeah, it's fun, but you know it used to
be a good way to make money. As you meditate
on that, we'll be right back with more too much
information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (46:10):
What was I talking about? Dynamics?

Speaker 2 (46:12):
Oh yeah, yes, So the dynamic within the band, though
didn't exactly fit into the Beatles mold or Abba. Your
front man Joey was the shy, sweet guy. Your guitarist
Johnny was the jerk, the task master of the band
that kept them in shape with rehearsals and physical, emotional

(46:33):
and vocal abuse. That is not an exaggeration, by the way,
I'm not slandering him. Tommy the sort of big picture
guy overseeing image and industry positioning, and Dedi the wild card,
the cat. That's my favorite running. The only thing Kiss

(46:54):
has ever given me is referring to the fourth person
in any group before as the cat. Yeah, Dede would
write twenty songs for every one of the others turned
in while maintaining as powerful of a buzz as he could.
Tina Weymouth of the Talking Heads were called to The
Guardian one at one show in France, the two bands
were booked to play together and the show fell apart

(47:14):
because the ramones amps overloaded the town's power grid. This
was in Marseille, and she said, they came back to
the hotel where we had these packets of dry cleaning
spot remover. Dee Dee poured the contents into a handkerchief
and proceeded to sniff it like it was something delicious.
We were appalled. I said, don't you know it's destroying
your brain cells? He said, I know, but I just

(47:36):
got to get high. And then her immediate PostScript to
that is Joey was deeper. He used to do these
giant paintings of vegetables.

Speaker 1 (47:46):
I just love that.

Speaker 2 (47:46):
As a non sequitor, that's a.

Speaker 1 (47:49):
Real spinal tap. Oh yeah right.

Speaker 2 (47:51):
Probably the best known example of the rift between the
two principal Ramones is the fact that one of their
best known songs, the KKK Took My Baby Away, was
written by Joey after his childhood's sweetheart Linda left him
for Johnny.

Speaker 1 (48:03):
They were on.

Speaker 2 (48:04):
Different ends of the political spectrum, you know. And one
big thing in this band was after Reagan went to
visit Berlin, and Joey wrote a song called Bonzo Goes
to Bitberg because you will perhaps remember that Ronald Reagan
started in bedtime for Bonzo alongside Incredible, alongside a chimp,

(48:26):
and Joey was very incensed by this. He was a
lifelong Republican whose only quote at the band's Rock and
Roll Hall of Fame induction was God bless the USA
and God blessed George W.

Speaker 1 (48:36):
Bush.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
So they were already at odds there. But then yeah,
Joey lost his childhood sweetheart to Johnny. To their credit,
Johnny and Linda remained married until Johnny's death in two
thousand and four. Johnny did not oh the though he
outlived him. Johnny did not attend Joey's funeral, which was
in two thousand and one, saying I wouldn't him coming

(49:00):
to mine. Danny Fields, who managed the band from seventy
five to eighty, told Rolling Stone. In order of monsterliness,
Dede was first, a genius poet and charming, which is
how he got away with his disastrous alcoholic fibbing. Joey
was second, and Johnny was third. He had to whip
four very difficult people, including himself, into shape to make

(49:23):
enough money for all of them to retire. That, said
Marky would write in his autobiography Punk Rock Blitzkrieg. We
could often hear john pushing and smacking Roxy, his then
girlfriend around in their hotel room. We would hear her stumbling,
bouncing off a thin wall and then falling onto a
bed and shrieking. Danny Fields told Mojo Dede was terrified

(49:43):
of Johnny because Johnny would punch him in the face.
It would always be after the show about something like
you did a B major when you should have done
a C minor. I'd stand outside the dressing room. Inside
you'd hear glass shattering and bodies slamming into walls.

Speaker 1 (49:56):
Guy's like Joe Jackson. I know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:59):
The band's look, which were the leather jackets from the
New York City based manufacturer shot ripped, blue jeans, Converse
or Keds, sneakers, and T shirts, was a little more
calculated than it came off, though, Johnny wrote in his
autobiography Commando, I give Tommy a lot of credit for
our look. He explained to me that Middle America wasn't
going to look good and glitter. Glitter is fine if

(50:20):
you're the perfect size for clothes like that, but if
you're even five pounds overweight, it looks ridiculous. So it
wouldn't be something everyone could relate to. It was a
slow process over a period of six months or so,
but we got the uniform defined. We figured out it
would be jeans, T shirts, leather jackets, and the tennis
shoes Keds. We wanted every kid to be able to
identify with our image. That's like shockingly astute I'm saying.

(50:44):
I'm saying Tommy is a legitimately smart, very musical guy.
One of the thing that's very interesting that he said
to Rolling Stone at one point was we used block
cording as a melodic device, and the harmonics resulting from
the distortion of the amplifiers created counter melodies. We use
the wall of sound as a melodic rather than a

(51:04):
rift form. It was like a song within a song
created by a block of chords droning. And that's very
interesting because you know, quick diversion into my dummy understanding,
was that wonkery?

Speaker 1 (51:17):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (51:18):
So in every note, in every tone pitch, you have
what's called the fundamental and then the overtone series. The
fundamental is typically what you can hear and match as
the sound the pitch, you know, uh, that's whatever. But
the way that frequencies work is that there are actually
many other pitches occurring in relation to that tone. You

(51:42):
can hear this on a piano according to the mathematic
relationships that are caused by the actual frequencies in terms
of hurts that are occurring. So you can hear us
on a piano if you you know, hit a bunch
of c's or different chords and leave the sustained note on,
you can actually sometimes identify the upper harmonics of it ringing.

(52:02):
And this phenomenon is only amplified pun intended by extremely
loud instruments. And when people talk about listening to really
high volume music and quote hearing things that aren't really there,
what they're talking about is how you can suddenly start
hearing all of these harmonics and upper frequencies of the
music that aren't actually present in what you immediately identify

(52:24):
as the sound, right, And it's when you're stacking certain
intervals that's only compounded. So when you're playing power chords
which are just a root fifth and octave, and then
the bass is doubling that under all at extremely high volume,
you're getting all of those because the harmonic series moves
in fits is the other thing generally, so that's how

(52:48):
the overtone series works. So you're basically recreating with every
harmonic chord movement a series of these stacked fits, and
it makes the music sound much bigger than it in
theory actually is if you were just looking at the
notes on staff paper, does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (53:04):
Yeah, I mean that's interesting to me that it just
sounds like a lot of things are getting doubled as
opposed to just makes it sound thicker in its sense.
Then yeah, that's really fascinating. Wow. Yeah, and it's interesting.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
I'm sure he got some of that from Hendrix, because
that was part of the reason why Hendrix insisted on
playing everything as loudly as possible at all times. So
there's a lot of people who are like, oh, yeah,
he would have been deaf within five years, because even
when he was listening to playback of stuff in Electric
Ladies Land or these different studios, he was listening to
it like blasting out of the monitors, because that is
when you start to hear all of this stuff. I mean,

(53:35):
it's always That's why people, that's why music sounds better
loud like you're getting not only the harmonic distortion from
like a speaker from whatever speaker and sound reproduction you're
actually getting like a tube amp or whatever. But the
harmonics are interacting in ways that we can't really put
a finger on, but still sound better and richer to us.

Speaker 1 (53:56):
This has been Heigel's theory corner.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
So from the high Lutin concept of Lydian chromatic and
harmonic theory all the way down to the smeared floors
of the Bowery. Of all the band linked with the
legendary Bowery Dive bar, CBGB's the Ramones are probably the
most fitting with the bar's distinct birthplace of punk brand.

(54:19):
Tommy approached me and said, I heard you found this
place to play. What's the story, that's Blondie guitarist Chris
Stein to The Guardian, So we told them about CBGB.
I like to think I was part of them winding
up there. The band started playing live by mid nineteen
seventy four, and club owner Hilly Crystal provided an inadvertent
slogan for the entire genre of punk rock when he
remarked to the band after their very first time at

(54:40):
CBGB's in August of seventy four, no one is going.

Speaker 1 (54:44):
To like you, but I'll have you back. It's beautiful.
We all need a friend like that.

Speaker 2 (54:51):
Joey has a distinct memory of entering CBGB's for the
first time and noticing the floor was covered with sawdust
and dogs. He says in the band's End of the
Century doc it was like a minefield. Hilly would later write,
they were the most untogether band I'd ever heard. They
kept starting and stopping, equipment, breaking down, and yelling at
each other. They'd played for forty minutes, and twenty of

(55:12):
them would just be the band yelling at each other.
Lakes McNeil, who wrote the aforementioned early punk tomb Please
Kill Me, felt that they looked like the SS when
they walked in with the leather jackets. These guys were
not hippies, and of those early performances, he added, you
were hit with this blast of noise. You physically recoiled
from the shock of it like a huge wind. In

(55:35):
the summer of nineteen seventy five, CBGB's held their own
rock festival including Blondie, which was covered by Rolling Stone,
and from that point the scene started to change. The
heyday was basically two years. Yeah, you have had a
point about this early era of CBGB's that also includes
Talking Heads, television Suicide.

Speaker 1 (55:59):
Yeah. I think it's interesting to me how different all
the bands were. It really wasn't a lot of overlap
and sounds, So I wonder if that lack of competition
helped contribute to the sense of conaderie because they were
all very much doing their own thing. Patty Smith.

Speaker 2 (56:13):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, well, it's because there was no
monoculture around it at the time, and everybody was sort
of taking all of the different aspects of what made
New York music culture and putting them into a blender.
You know, you had the sort of beat poet things
like the poetry Damaged Class, which I would include Richard
Hell and Patti Smith. And that television comes from a

(56:35):
little bit more of I don't know, guitar wonkery, like
with Richard Lloyd, and those guys were serious muso's.

Speaker 1 (56:42):
You know, maybe like a little bit more jazzy stuff.

Speaker 2 (56:45):
And Ramones of the Mutant girl pop group, you know,
on Suicide, I never really got I. You know, admittedly
I'm not huge on Suicide, but I think they were.
I think they were a lot older than everyone else too,
and it were kind of coming out from maybe some
more kroud rock influenced stuff than an actual guitar like rock.

(57:05):
But yeah, I mean it's it's a really interesting Petri dish,
and it's a great testament to what happens when people
kind of stick to their guns and work on a
sound rather than trying to compete or fit in.

Speaker 1 (57:18):
Ramones manager Danny Fields, a Warhol associate in downtown Sceinster,
who had recently introduced David Bowie to Iggy Pop, who
was sleeping on his couch at this time, had been
initially reluctant to catch the Ramones in action at CBGB's
because he assumed that they were a Spanish flamenco band
based on their name. So wrong in so many ways

(57:43):
I can't even begin to come. But he was soon
very glad that he made the trip downtown and he
asked to be their manager, and the band responded by
telling him they needed a few thousand dollars for a
drum kit. If he could come up with that, he
had the job. Where did Danny Fields fit in all this? Jordan?
He's interesting to me because because taking it all the
way back to the Beatles again, the Beatles are sort
of the unsung heroes of the Ramones episode. He co

(58:07):
founded and edited a magazine in the sixties called Date Book, which,
despite its very kind of middle of the road teeny
bob title, fashioned itself as a progressive teen magazine, and
they're famous for publishing John Lennon's were Bigger than Jesus
Interview in nineteen sixty six, which led to a massive

(58:27):
uproar in the United States, particularly in the Bible Belt,
which indirectly led to the Beatles' retirement from touring because
on that tour they were threatened by the klu klux
Klan and other alone nuts their plane. They found bullets
in the fusel Lodge people through firecrackers in the middle
of their performances, and you'd see footage of the bandle

(58:50):
looking at one another thinking that one or the other
got shot or something, and led to their decision to
retire from touring after that tour in August nineteen sixty six.
And supposedly, and it's been a while since I read
up on this, but this interview showed the seeds of
hate in the heart of John Lennon's future assassin, Mark

(59:13):
David Chapman, who was very religious and felt that this
was a blasphemous statement by John Lennon, so Danny Fields
indirectly don't go there.

Speaker 2 (59:26):
The Ramones recorded a demo in September seventy five featuring
the songs Judy as a Punk and I Want to
Be Your Boyfriend, which they shopped to labels. Their producer,
Craig Leon, who had seen them perform in the summer
of seventy five, brought that demo to the attention of
Sire Records president Seymour Stein. Seymour took some persuading by
both his wife and Craig Leon and then their manager

(59:49):
Danny Field's the aforementioned John Lennon Killer arranged a rehearsal
audition at Sir Studios, of which Stein recalled to the
New York Times in twenty minutes, they had gone through
about twenty songs. I fell in love with them.

Speaker 1 (01:00:05):
I could release a lot of singles from these guys. Yeah,
I know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:09):
Drummer Tommy Ramone recalled Craig Leon is the one who
got us signed single handed. He risked his career to
get us on the label. Sire was considered for a
long time the most authentically cool of the majors? Is
that not correct, Jordan? I know they had talking heads
at this point, they had pretenders, and they would later
sign Madonna.

Speaker 1 (01:00:29):
Yeah. My main I mean, aside from those artists you
just mentioned. Thought on the Steins and the Sire Records was,
wasn't Seymour's wife later murdered.

Speaker 2 (01:00:40):
Yes, you put that in here, and I took it
out because I thought it was weird.

Speaker 1 (01:00:43):
Oh did I Yeah, if there's a murder, I'm gonna
put it in. I'm sorry, go on, Yeah, I think
it was. I think her assistant murdered her and she
claimed that it was the abusive scuse basically said that
she was just incredibly abusive, and she snapped one day
if I recalled, I'm doing that for memory. But did
I really put that in there? Yeah? Oh well, yeah, sire?

(01:01:07):
Who else did Cyrus? Oh?

Speaker 2 (01:01:08):
They had Dead Boys, the Undertones, famous for Oh I
forgot about Dead Boys, not early wave of CBGB's bands.
Caught with the Meat in Your Mouth, Oh yeah, Undertones, Teenager.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
The Smith's, they had a big eighties good God, Yeah,
Echo and the Bunnyman Ministry Tragically Hip, good for sire.
All right, now onto a section that you have titled
hey Ho studio notes. For years, I just assumed that
the Ramones recorded their debut in a pistory tale hole,

(01:01:41):
not unlike CBGB's famous bathrooms that you so indelibly described
moments ago. But they actually recorded their debut at Plaza
Sound Studios at fifty five West fiftieth Street, on the
seventh floor of the art deco masterpiece that housed Radio
City Music Hall. So, in other words, they were ordered
their record mere feet from the Rockett's home stage, which

(01:02:03):
is insane to me. That's the least punk vision that
I can possibly imagine America Baby yes uh. Sound engineer
Rob Freeman paints a vivid picture of entering the studio.
He said, the trek up to Plaza Sound Studios followed
its usual path and escape into a warm refuge of
Radio City Music Hall through the stage door entrance, a

(01:02:24):
slow creep up the private elevator to the sixth floor,
trudge up another flight and a half of stairs, and
the seventh floor, which house the recording studio, was suspended
on steel springs and cork in order to acoustically isolate
it from the Great Hall below, hence no elevator all
the way up, A dizzying meander through a labyrinth of
battleship gray corridors, a delightful pass by the Rockets' dance

(01:02:46):
rehearsal rooms filled with the usual blend of perfume and sweat,
and thunderous commotion of one hundred tap dancing showgirls, and
finally a disappearance through the black, unmarked door that led
to the sanctuary a Plaza Sounds control room. That's a
hell of a run on, just imagining hauling up that.
Marshall stacks Jesus so to recap. About two years after

(01:03:10):
the Ramones formed, they found themselves recording above Radio City
Music Hall for Sire Records, that is insane Sire Records.
Though they didn't have a lot of money on the line,
they puntied up sixty four hundred dollars to record of
the Ramone's debut, which was insultingly small even at that time.
Recalled this was the most bloated time in the record

(01:03:31):
industry history, when splashing out half a million dollars wasn't
that uncommon, which these days is probably close to like
three and a half four million. And three years later
Fleetwood Mac would blow over a million dollars on Tusk.
So contrast Tusk and a million dollars with Ramone's debut
for six four hundred dollars might not have even been

(01:03:54):
that much.

Speaker 2 (01:03:56):
Craig Lee undisputed that figure in a book called The
Downtown on Pop Underground, telling Kembru McLeod incredible name. We
never paid the full studio rate. It was actually cheaper
than six thousand dollars. They recorded the album in basically
a week, three days for the instrumentals, four for vocals.

(01:04:17):
There were two reasons for this. One was a esthetic,
the other was practical or at least financial. The band
was paying for studio time out of their own advance,
so the reasoned that if they work fast, they'd be
able to pocket the rest of the money. Johnny Ramone
wrote in his autobiography, we were rushing through it because
I was conscious that whatever money we wanted was ours,
and that we just had to pay all this money back.
So whenever the engineer would ask me how I felt

(01:04:38):
about a take, I'd say, oh, that's the best I'd
ever played it. I don't think I'll ever play it
that well again, and we'd move on. They also recorded
at night, which is the time honored way of getting
cheap studio time, which I have never done because I
have a day job and I liked sleeping. Uh, what
was I gonna say? It helped that they were somewhat prepared.

(01:05:00):
Johnny Ramone told Rolling Stone, we had the songs for
the first three albums when we did the first one.
We already had thirty to thirty five songs, and we
recorded them in the chronological order that we wrote them.
I didn't want the second album to be a letdown.
By picking through all the best songs for the first
album and using the lesser songs for these second albums.
That's so good, it's so smart, and that's why the
first four records are the best. And then it gets spotty.

(01:05:24):
Craig Leon told The New York Times. Until we made
the record, they literally hadn't rehearsed how to end songs,
which by which I assume they meant because their live
shows were just one after the other after the other
after the other. They were probably unacquainted with letting stuff
ring when you're recording live, to give it long enough
of a tale to let everything fade out, which I

(01:05:45):
did the first time I was in a professional recording studio.
It was just immediately talked over, like before the last
symbol hit rang out. I was like, I don't know,
how do we feel about that one? I was like, well,
you just ruined that take, so shut up next time.
Part of the recording process dated back to their demo
and their love of the Beatles. When we first went
into the studio to cut our demo, we're coming up

(01:06:07):
with unique recording ideas for the time Tommy Vermone were
called to tape op. We decided to go backwards a bit.
We decided to use hard left and right ping pong
stereo effects like we heard on old Beatles records. We
wanted to make an album that sounded different. We ended
up transferring those experiments onto our first album. Quick sidebar
unprompted about delay, Jordan, what do you know about delay?

Speaker 1 (01:06:28):
I know that this episode probably will be.

Speaker 2 (01:06:32):
So the earliest delay. Delay is just the term just
refers to reproducing an audio signal after, usually after the
original input signal happens. And it used to be accomplished
by running two tape decks with one set to a
slightly lower speed than the other one, and that is

(01:06:53):
what's called I mean, you can run them both at
the same time for kind of a chorusing effect or
very very few millis seconds off. But running it to
the point where it starts to get noticeable is when
you get the shortest form of delay. It's called slap
back and that's what you hear on the early rockabilly records,
That's what you hear on Sun all those The part
of the muge part of the Sun sound is slap
back delay, because you're essentially getting an echo double of

(01:07:19):
what is originally being heard really really quickly after it
almost imperceptibly fast. Sometimes The problem is that running those
with tape decks, you only got so much time out
of it. So by the mid seventies you started to
have a couple of different forms of mechanical delay. There's
the Binson echo Wreck, which used a rotating metal drum

(01:07:40):
to produce delay. That's on a lot of the early
Pink Floyd records. Then you get stuff like the echo plex,
which is another tape delay thing. I forget when the
roll in space echo comes into vogue, but a lot
of that pioneering work was not just done by the
psychedelic bands and engineers at Abbey Road and stuff, but
by Jamaican muse too. I mean a lot of dub

(01:08:01):
records and stuff is really where you hear a lot
of that, like.

Speaker 1 (01:08:07):
Sort of.

Speaker 2 (01:08:09):
The space Echo in particular, is really good at producing
that delay that sort of trails off into the distance
because it's running on tape, so it's actually just the
signal is decaying the longer goes on.

Speaker 1 (01:08:20):
Was there a reason why, I mean, was it just
an aesthetic that these artists liked, or for these Jamaican artists,
was there some type of reason why that was chosen?
Was it the arrangements were so sparse that they just
wanted something to fill it had part of it.

Speaker 2 (01:08:35):
Yeah, yes, I will say that. Also, when you're really high,
it sounds super cool. You know.

Speaker 1 (01:08:42):
Have you thought of that? I did think of that
well their homage to the Beatles. But further than engineering,
The Beatles famously recorded their nineteen sixty three debut Please
Please Me, in a single marathon session in an effort
to capture the thrill of their sets at Liverpool's Cavern Club.
In fact, the Beatles' debut was very nearly a live

(01:09:03):
album at the Cavern Club until they went up there.
George Martin, the Beatles producer, went up there and realized
there was no way in hell that could get a
good recording in what was basically a wine cellar. The
Ramones wanted to take the same approach and ensure that
their debut had the same excitement and spontaneity of their
legendary live sets at CBGB's, so to achieve this, the
band essentially just performed their stage show. Johnny said, we'd

(01:09:26):
record the songs in the same order that we played
them in our live set at the time, which was
a trick they'd repeat for the next two albums, Leave
Home and Rock It to Russia. Producer Craig Leon even
considered making the record a single track with no breaks
in between songs, which is awesome as a technique he
employed to a smaller extent between I Don't Want to
Walk around with You and Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World.

(01:09:50):
It's worth noting that, at twenty nine minutes and four seconds,
the Ramones debut is a good bit longer of some
of their early shows. It was a usual for Ramone
set to clock in around about twenty minutes or so
when they were cutting their teeth at CBGB's or Max's
Kansas City in downtown New York City. When a longer
concert was necessary, they simply took it from the top

(01:10:13):
and repeated their set list. We never did that. What
we always had a lot of songs. We never had encourse,
nobody ever asked.

Speaker 2 (01:10:23):
The micing set up in the room is basically live.
They used Marshal lamps for the guitars, Ampeg SVTs for
the bass. This is Tommy and tapop, he said. We
mic the marshals with SM fifty seven's up close and
that is, by the way, still just the entry level
mic that you see on stage in every single club
in the world. I guarantee you it's what they're putting

(01:10:43):
on the guitar cabs. For the bass, we miked up
with electro Voice ARI twenties. Those are the gray cylindrical
mics that you will see many podcasters using if they
are not using the one Jordan I are, which is
the Shore SM seven B. And then other than the
stuff that's on the drums, some Sennheisers for the toms,

(01:11:05):
Sony's on the high hat. The most expensive stuff that
they were using that isn't the only thing that would
be out of reach for someone is the Noymans the
U eighty seven, which are very famously expensive, precision engineered
German tube mics.

Speaker 1 (01:11:22):
But you know, he's still still saying.

Speaker 2 (01:11:26):
The guitar sound that they did was just cranking the
amp and then close mic far mic blend guitar on
the right channel based on the left drums and vocals
in the center channel. Joey doubled his vocal lines and
they pressed whoever was in the studio and who could
carry a tune into doing backing vocals, and that's it.

(01:11:50):
I just love the fact that this day was made
with and you know they had nice outboard equipment, pre
ms and stuff. But this this is basically made with
the equipment that you would probably use to you know,
Mike a live band in a just a few steps
up from a dive bar. You wouldn't use the Noymans
the U eighty seven before any dorks come at me.

(01:12:13):
But Man SM fifty seven on the guitar cab and
and on the snare is like crucial DIY punk recording. Anyway,
I digress, get in the weeds, I'm getting the Jordan's
putting out the hook biato. I didn't hit us with
a biato when I was doing my harmonic spiel earlier.
Leon Untild the vinyl factory. Capturing the energy of the

(01:12:34):
live shows was quite important. But if you jump to
the conclusion that the sound of the recording was just
the sound of the band live, you would be mistaken.
The album is quite layered and structured. There are several songs,
and there's much much more than one guitar. There's a
triangle on I Want to Be Your Boyfriend, which I
love that he pointed to as an example of how
layered it was. The overdubed bomb sound on Havana Affair

(01:12:58):
was achieved by tuning a tom tom drum very low
and then holding it under a piano, and then someone
holding the sustained pedal on the piano down so when
you hit the draw, it would filter up and ring
through the piano, creating this sort of ambient ringing sound.
Some other hilarious random quotes about recording engineer Rob Freeman.

(01:13:18):
When you asked them what key they were in, or
could you tune that up a little bit, they just
weren't interested. If you asked them to play it up
in octave, they would just play it exactly the same way.
Seymour Stein in the Lifestyles of the Ramones, I can
remember going to the studio and the Ramones had got
there three hours earlier. I said, how's everything going, And
Johnny says to me, things aren't going so great. We

(01:13:39):
only got seven tracks down. Craig Leon, we set up
a metronome with a flashing light in Tommy's booth in
the center because we couldn't get a click track to
go that fast.

Speaker 1 (01:13:51):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more. Too much information in just a moment. Well,
let's go a very briefly, song by song on the

(01:14:11):
track list, we got to start talking about one of
the all time best album openers ever, best side one
track ones. Let's create bop, frantic floor on the floor rhythms,
slicing power chords, an immensely shadowble refrain. It's a cornerstone
of punk, which is surprising considering the song has its
roots in the most triakily pop crap ever, so sickeningly

(01:14:35):
sweet that even I don't like it, Johnny would say
of the Ramon's early days, I think we wanted to
be a bubblegum band. At one point, the Bay City
Rollers were becoming popular. They had written Saturday Night, and
we sat down and said, we have to write a
song with a chant in it like they have. The
Ba City Rollers have s A T U R D
A y Night. Yeah. So that planted the seed, but

(01:14:57):
they needed something with a little more oomph. Howmy Ramone explained,
I wanted a rallying song. I was trying to think
of a good rally when I remember the Rolling Stones
version of Rufus Thomas's Walking the Dog, where Mick Jagger
sings the line high Hoe nipped her toes, presumably with
a little more swagger than I just the line morphed
into hey ho, let's go. And speaking of bubble gum,

(01:15:20):
we have to talk about beat on the Brat, which
sounds to my ears like a sadistic rewrite of Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,
I've Got Love in my Tummy by Ohio Express Yummy
Yummy Yummy, I Got love in my tummy, And I'm like,

(01:15:41):
I'm loving you. You such a sweet thing, good enough to.

Speaker 3 (01:15:47):
Thing, And it's just a what I'm gonna do? What
beton the Brat Beeton the Pratz bet with the face.

Speaker 2 (01:16:06):
Yea, yeah, I believe you're onto that. D D told
Michael Hill in two thousand and one that the when
they were first starting out, he just said, the Romones
started trying to figure out songs from records and we
couldn't maybe Yummy Yummy Yummy by the Ohio Express or
can't you Hear My Heart Beat by Herman's Hermits. Joey
would say that the idea for this song came from

(01:16:27):
when he lived in Forest Hill's Birchwood Towers complex with
his mom and brother. He said it was a middle
class neighborhood with a lot of rich, snooty women who
had horrible brat kids who were obnoxious. There was a
playground with women sitting around, a kid screaming, A horrible
kid just running around, rampant with no discipline whatsoever. The
kind of kid you just want to kill, you know,
beat on the brat with a baseball bat just came out.

Speaker 1 (01:16:49):
I just wanted to kill him. Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:16:53):
Dede has a slightly different but no less violent memory
of the song's origins. Joey saw some mother going after
a kid with a bat and his lobby and wrote
a song about it. Should be said, though, that Dede
is resolutely referred to by everyone as sort of the
ultimate unreliable narrator. So grain of salt, mountain AsSalt with
everything he said, Uh hmm, I want to be your boyfriend, man.

Speaker 1 (01:17:17):
Said, hell Loo girl, I want to be a man.

Speaker 2 (01:17:23):
The Man's second single nailed their power pop song so
perfectly that d D has claimed that the Bay City
Rollers wanted to cover it. I believe so did Tommy
at one point. The songs Ronnett's Shangri Las girl group
style vocals came courtesy of producer Craig Leon and engineer
Rob Freeman. H Freeman said, we tried with Doug Dedi

(01:17:43):
and he'd gets spit all over the microphone. He was
so aggressive after a lot of torture. It was supposed
to be sweet.

Speaker 1 (01:17:50):
We did it. Jermoe's brother Mickey Lee, also performs backing
vocal duties on the song, as well as Blitz Creekbop
and Judy is a Punk. None of these contributions re
noted on the album's original liner notes, however, and when
a very disappointed Mickey asked why, Johnny Ramone had a
very simple explanation. We didn't want people to get confused
with who's in the band or who's not. It's our

(01:18:12):
first album, you know, we didn't want people to get confused.
Fair Yeah, I mean I mentioned this earlier. My musical
interests really overlapped with the Ramones and a very big
way from gool groups like the Shangri Laws to the
Beatles to all my catchy bubblegum crap and British Invasion stuff. Yeah.
I think the only reason I don't like it is
that it's just not pretty enough for me, much like Joey.

(01:18:34):
That's why he wasn't in Sniper.

Speaker 2 (01:18:38):
Not much to say about Chainsaw in the fact that
it is a fact a tribute to Toby Hoopy's groundbreaking
masterpiece of slash exploitation, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. My only
note about this song is how incredible it is that
Joey pronounces massacre as massacree. Oh, it's like in order

(01:18:59):
to force thesaurant. Yeah, well he's trying to force the
rhyme with me, so he pronounces it that Texas Chainsaw massacree. Hilarious, incredible,
No notes Jordan tell us about Now I want to
sniff some glue.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
Yeah, this is a funny one. Supposedly, in nineteen seventy six,
the West of Scotland was facing an epidemic in glue sniffing,
with a few deaths as a result, and an MP
from nearby Coatbridge. In that area, a guy named James
Dempy called for a ban on selling solvent products to
anyone under the age of eighteen, and that summer one

(01:19:33):
angry parent contacted him, mentioning that their son had the
debut Ramones record. So on August nineteenth, nineteen seventy six,
a little over a month after the Ramones played London
for the very first time, on America's by centennial on
m Ad the headline of Glasgow's Evening Times read glue
sniff disc shocker, and that front page is now part

(01:19:54):
of an exhibit in Berlin's Ramone Museum, which I've actually
been to. It's very cool. Oh nice. Denie's response to
the versus supposedly went, damn, it's a good thing we
split from these f two hundred years ago. I hope
they really don't think we sniffed glue. I quit when
I was about eight.

Speaker 2 (01:20:10):
Incredible. I don't want to go down to the basement.
Another supposedly horror inspired one about how dumb it is
if you're in a horror movie to do that.

Speaker 1 (01:20:20):
Loudmouth.

Speaker 2 (01:20:21):
Uh, Tommy did an incredible bit of time. I knew
a kid in Brooklyn who used to email venues as
his own fake manager.

Speaker 1 (01:20:30):
That's good. Yeah, would you say a kid?

Speaker 2 (01:20:33):
Do you mean it wasn't any when you knew?

Speaker 1 (01:20:36):
Sorry, it wasn't you. No, it was not me.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
No, I have ethics to my detriment. Uh, I should
say principles. But so Tommy would conduct the band's business
correspondence from under his Christian name Thomas Air did Lee
or a delay, I don't know something Hungarian under Loudmouth
Production's letterhead, So people did not know that they were

(01:21:01):
getting male from the actual Ramones drummer. They assumed it
was like their actual management company. Hilarious, great scam Havana affair.
Probably a combination of the group growing up and experiencing
the Bay of Pigs and Cuba missile crisis would be
my bet.

Speaker 1 (01:21:16):
From that.

Speaker 2 (01:21:17):
Nothing else interesting to say about it, Yeah, listen to
my heart.

Speaker 1 (01:21:21):
Dede said in this autobiography that when he showed the
song to the band, Tommy said, oh, it doesn't have
a middle eight in it, So I just wrote the
middle eight on the spot, also known as a bridge.
Tobby couldn't believe I could do that. Do you know
that the Beatles? Again? I always take it back to
the Beatles in this episode. It actually works though, because
the Ramones were such big Beatles fans, they were actually
the ones who popularized the phrase middle eight as a

(01:21:41):
colloquial term for a bridge, because they never made the
connection that it meant the middle eight bars of a song.
So they just started calling all their bridges the middle eight,
regardless of how many bars it had, and that always
cracked George Martin. Up.

Speaker 2 (01:21:55):
Yeah, I have to assume that it comes from the
thirty two bar form that, like all of Tin and Alley,
falls into the aaba.

Speaker 1 (01:22:03):
Umm, oh you gotta do this one fifty third and
third Oh yeah, classic one of them. Autobiographical time.

Speaker 2 (01:22:09):
Oh well, it's not all biographical because it's about a
marine who returns from Vietnam and turns to male prostitution
to support his drug habit and then murders one of
his johns to prove that he isn't gay. So not
explicitly about d D.

Speaker 1 (01:22:25):
But did he did?

Speaker 2 (01:22:29):
He? And he sings lead vocals on it terribly. People
often say that, well, I'm trying to think I sensitively
phrased this. There's a nineteen eighty seven book called Addict,
Out of the Dark and Into the Light, and ded
he spoke delivered an interview about his journey into drug
addiction and sex work for this book, and incredibly, the

(01:22:51):
audio from that interview is actually online. It's hosted at
intervention dot org and you can actually go and listen
to the full twenty three minute or whatever where he
talks about this, and it's it's grim. I mean, like
I said, he mentioned. He talks about hitchhiking to la
and picking up his drug habit there, and the really

(01:23:13):
harrowing part of it is him talking about how he
wasn't gay and didn't like having sex with men, but
had to. The area at the intersection of fifty third
Street and Third Avenue was a section of what was
known as the Loop, and it was basically a hot
bed for male prostitution. There was a lot of it

(01:23:34):
was a lot of gay night clubs in that area too,
and it basically survived up until the early nineties when
the MIYPD were sort of putting increased pressure on the
gay community in New York because of the fallout of
the and continuing AIDS crisis at that time, and basically
just you know, swept it a night after night after

(01:23:55):
night and sort of ruined that area. Fascinatingly enough, it's
the same intersection mentioned by Rod Stewart in this song
from the same year, Killing of Georgie. That's a devastating song,
you know that song, I don't we is it off
Gasoline Alley?

Speaker 1 (01:24:11):
No, No, it can't have been. No, it's a lot later.

Speaker 2 (01:24:13):
No, I don't listen to anything past that early So really.

Speaker 1 (01:24:16):
You should check it out. It's like shockingly progressive, especially
for Rod Stewart. Yeah, it's it's this lengthy ballad kind
of mourning the death of I actually don't know if
it's based on somebody actually knew, but a gay man
who was killed in a street fight. I forget.

Speaker 2 (01:24:34):
Do you like Rod Stewart or is he I do
Jeff Beck I mean early?

Speaker 1 (01:24:38):
I like Jeff Becker Whips.

Speaker 2 (01:24:40):
Obviously The Faces are one of the greatest rock and
roll bands ever, and then the Early like the first
two or three. Well, I don't really like Gasolene Alley
that much, but those first two back to back Rod
records that he made with other members of the Faces
never dull moment and ever picture tells a story. Fantastic records,
Hilarious records too, So many errors on those records. They

(01:25:02):
are so damn funny to me. I like it's I
just it would annoy me in almost any other circumstances.
But just knowing that motley crew of idiots, just like
drunkish hacking their way through this stuff is so fucking funny.

Speaker 1 (01:25:17):
Dude.

Speaker 2 (01:25:17):
There's one where he audibly misses his vocal cue or
goes in to do it too early, and they kept
him like he goes up to the you hear him go,
then packs off the bike. There's another one on the ballot.
If it feels like a long time, seems like a
long time. Where Ron Wood is playing some of the
worst bass guitar I've ever heard, committed to record. He

(01:25:38):
hits so many clams and just and rather than trying
to play fewer clams, just continues to play more notes,
perhaps in the hope that he will stumble onto the
correct note at some point. Truly incredible stuff, great songs,
great record, love them.

Speaker 1 (01:25:56):
What were we talking about? Back to the killing of
Georgia Yeading the Way nineteen ninety five issue of Mojo,
Roger Stewart explained that was a true story about a
gay friend of the Faces. He was especially close to
me and Faces pianos Ian McLaughlin, but he was knife
or shot. I can't remember which. That was a song
I wrote totally on my own over the court of

(01:26:16):
open E. Yeah, good song, very good song. Touching Let's
Dance just a great cover.

Speaker 2 (01:26:25):
Original was number four hit nineteen sixty two for Chris Montes,
apparently extremely beloved by English glam rockers slate I was
pronounced it slot a.

Speaker 1 (01:26:37):
That's gonna be your Halloween cover band lamm versions of
shot as.

Speaker 2 (01:26:43):
Yeah, t Rex and David Bowie all covered that song
at different ones.

Speaker 1 (01:26:49):
Did that that's that's not like the MTV song of
the same name. It's he covered the no no, no,
no no no, Let's dance hold place. It's ungooglable because
all going to get as the big song. Oh it was.

Speaker 2 (01:27:02):
It was Tina Turner and David Bowie on Tina Live
in Europe. Wait, I need I'm listening to a snippet
of this to make sure it was an interpolation. They
did Let's dance, but then they broke into the other
last dance.

Speaker 1 (01:27:14):
Oh that's cool. Well not like I did a fifteen
hour documentary bios series.

Speaker 2 (01:27:19):
It was gonna say that's why that one hit you
so hard? Yeah, like there's a bully blind, spots a
stone I.

Speaker 1 (01:27:26):
Left unturned and then all right, and then they I
believe the last track on the album, I Don't Want
to Walk Around with You, which, as we mentioned, one
of the first promote songs ever written. Oh wait no,
this is the last song. Ohio, you take this one?
No you do it some of a bit okay, all right, today,
your love tomorrow, the world a famous Hitler quote paraphrase quote.

Speaker 2 (01:27:51):
Early punks man really into Nazi.

Speaker 1 (01:27:53):
It's weird.

Speaker 2 (01:27:56):
Why was there some kind of my My theory is
that it was just enough in their past to be, yeah,
to be like transgressive without them actually being that affected
by it, you know, even though.

Speaker 1 (01:28:11):
Probably Tommy had to say about it.

Speaker 2 (01:28:13):
Yeah dude, I mean, and it was easy to shock
people with that stuff too, and you know, but yeah,
I freaking one of the stooges collected it and he
showed up at their man at someone's wedding. We're in
like a full length SS jacket. It's like, what the
wow is wrong with you?

Speaker 1 (01:28:32):
Well, seymour Stein begged the Ramones not to include the
reference to a Nazi in the opening verse while I'm
a stormtrooper and a stupor, Yes, I'm a Nazi statzi,
you know, I fight for the Fatherland, But they refused
to change it because they felt like they would be
compromising themselves on day one of their career. The Nazi
imagery was commented upon by Robert Chriscal in his otherwise

(01:28:53):
very glowing review of the Ramones debut. I love this record,
love it. Even though these boys flirt with image is
a brutality, nazis, especially in much the same way Midnight
Rambler by the Rolling Stones flirts with rape. This makes
me uneasy, But my theory has always been that good
rock and roll should damn well make you uneasy, okay man.

(01:29:16):
The original cover concept for the Ramone's debut was meant
to be yet another nod to the Beatles, specifically the
cover of the beatles nineteen sixty four American debut Meet
the Beatles, which was a moody black and white photo
of their faces shot by English photographer Robert Freeman, whose
wife Sonny, a German born model, would have an affair
with John Lennon, possibly inspiring the lyrics in Norwegian would

(01:29:39):
see It's all it all comes together. The Ramones label
Sire Records, spent two thousand dollars or nearly a third
of the album's recording cost, on a photoshoot to mimic
the Meet the Beatles cover, but the results were deemed
unsatisfactory and the idea was scrapped, so the band desperately
searched for an alternative on the cheap and their thoughts

(01:30:02):
turned to ROBERTA. Bailey, who's a staff photographer for Punk
Magazine who they had recently worked with for an article.
And I think she was also the door person at
CBGB's if I recall, and ultimately they opted for one
of the shots from her session instead.

Speaker 2 (01:30:16):
Good She would recall in the book I Slept with
Joey Ramon by the aforementioned brother mickiy Lee. That photo
that ultimately became the album cover was just one of
those perfect moments when everything came together. The frame before it,
the frame after it aren't that great, but for that
one moment, everyone looked right exactly like the Ramones. Then
when I was changing film, Dede stepped in dog Leg's

(01:30:39):
McNeil was also present for the occasion, and he remembered
this moment distinctly. If you look at the contact sheet,
you see Dede trying to wipe the dogs off his
sneaker with a stick. Then he chases everyone with a
dog stick and the photo session is over. What a
great series of vignettes. Imagine that set to like Me
and Julio down by the School, Halla World ten and bombs.

Speaker 1 (01:31:04):
Johnny Ramone never thought that.

Speaker 2 (01:31:06):
The label would use that particular photo because, as eagle
eyed viewers more eagle eyed than the record label have
been noticing for decades now, he is slightly slipping the
bird with his hands in his belt loop. He said,
I was really trying to sneak it in. I felt
like I got one over on everyone, but I guess
they just expected it from us. Sire Records did go

(01:31:28):
for the photo, which had already appeared in Punk Magazine,
and shout out one hundred and twenty five dollars for
the rights.

Speaker 1 (01:31:34):
The Ramote's self titled debut was released on April twenty third,
nineteen seventy six, and it was not a financial success,
reaching reaching the dizzying heights of one hundred and eleven
on the Billboard Charts and selling only six thousand copies
in its first year. Yes, more people listen to this

(01:31:55):
show than bought the first Ramones album in its first year.

Speaker 2 (01:32:00):
Suck it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:01):
I a win. Who will be the most influential gang
of adiothropic diletants. Only time will tell.

Speaker 2 (01:32:12):
I'm gonna start telling people I beat j Johnny Ramone.

Speaker 1 (01:32:18):
And what It's not important. It wouldn't be certified gold
by the RIAA for sales of over five hundred thousand
until April thirteenth, twenty fourteen, almost exactly thirty eight years
after it was released. I'm shocked that it didn't have
some kind of a spike. I mean, I guess that's
a hell of a jump from six thousand to half

(01:32:39):
a million, but still, like that's for such an iconic,
influential album. I can't believe it's sold. I don't know.
Maybe just a lot of people are trading copies from
record stores and thrift shops and stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:32:50):
I mean, I don't think they were big. Well, it
makes sense for me. The timeline makes sense for me
because their first this came out in seventy six, their
first UK shows were a year later. They weren't really
getting booked in the States outside of New York, and
they weren't big in Europe until they make it over there,
where they were huge, at least in London. So yeah,
I don't know tracks, but it's depressing. Sire publicist Jennis

(01:33:15):
Shot in Everett True's Ramones biography, heho Let's Go, said
the first album only sold seven thousand copies, even though
I had a two level horizontal file cabinet one for
the Ramones press and one for all of the other
Sire acts. In that same book, Melody Maker journalist Chris
Charlesworth recalled that there was a preview party held at

(01:33:35):
the label's West seventy fourth Street building, but it didn't
last long because he said the album was over pretty quickly.
He said, if it had been Atlantic launching the new
led Zeppelin album, there would have been an all up
market with huge speakers and a wide variety of food, lobster,
heaven knows what. This was fun but scruffy. We were

(01:33:55):
served this dreadful sweet red wine, the worst I've ever
Tastedottles of it were pressed on us as we left.
Two bottles of it stayed in my kitchen undrunk for
months afterwards. Real last resort stuff. Seymour Stein told The
New York Times, I got hate mail when the record
came out. The manager of two of my bands threatened
to sue me if I didn't drop the Ramones on

(01:34:16):
what grounds moral outrage.

Speaker 1 (01:34:20):
But the Ramones' impact was arguably felt the greatest in
the UK and the immediate aftermath of the album's release,
As you mentioned, they couldn't even get a gig in
New Haven they went over to play a small series
of gigs in England at the Roundhouse, and Joe Strummer
was one of the many future punk luminaries. If you
call him a punk, I guess you can, that was there.
He said that he doesn't think the Clash would have

(01:34:41):
had support in the UK if the Ramones hadn't laid
the groundwork. And they played at the Roundhouse where I've
heard multiple versions of how many people were there. I've
heard some people say about sixty people turned up, and
then I've heard people say it was sold out. It
was a relatively big venue, at least like a couple thousand,
so I don't know your knowledge, my very but among
the people who showed up were future members of the

(01:35:03):
Sex Pistols, the Clash, the Stranglers and the Damned, and
I think it was in the end of the century.
I believe it was Joe Strummer who tells a story
about them going like around back of the venue and
like calling up to their dressing room and just like
throwing rocks at the window like Romeo and Juliet while
and asking to be let in, and the Ramones formed

(01:35:23):
a human chain and hoisted these guys up inside through
the dressing room window, which which I love. They were
a lot nicer than most of the Brits thought they
would be. They all assumed that the Ramones would be
a gang from the Bronx or something. Johnny Rotten thought
that they were going to get beaten up by the Ramones,
but he was pleasantly surprised, and then he spent the

(01:35:44):
rest of his musical career being the worst version of himself. Yeah,
he sure did.

Speaker 2 (01:35:50):
UK Punk was basically launched off the Ramones debut album.
Joe Strummer said an end of the century. If that
Ramones record hadn't existed, I don't know that we could
have built a scene here because it filled of vital
gap between the death of the old pub rocking scene
and the advent of punk. When he first talked to
them in seventy six, he was worried that his band's
musicianship was still too rough for them to start recording.
Johnny Ramone responded, are you kidding? We're lousy. We can't play.

(01:36:14):
If you wait until you can play, you'll be too
old to get up there. We sting, really, but it's great.
Sid Vicious was supposedly obsessed with the band and learned
how to play whatever baar rudiments of bass he did
acquire by playing along with the debut and one of
the earliest and most iconic power pop punk bands, The Buzzcocks,
worked up their own cover of Judy as a punk

(01:36:34):
after hearing it. Brian James of The Damned told The
Guardian those July seventy six, Ramon's gigs were mesmerizing. We
got a copy of their album early on Me and
Damned drummer Rat Scabies, my favorite punk rock nickname ever,
listened to it after we'd drunk a few bottles of
Carlis Brown, a heavy morphine based cough medicine. We thought

(01:36:56):
this is good, hilarious.

Speaker 1 (01:37:00):
Craig Leon went on to have quite a career in
classical music of all genres. Was hanging out with renowned
tenor Luciano Pavarotti in two thousand when the singer told him, hey,
he was interested in recording an album of soccer chance,
which let's table that for a moment, because that's insane.
Leon took the opportunity to play him blitz Creak Bop,

(01:37:21):
which he said Pavarotti loved and started singing along to
which regretfully, I don't believe there is a recording of.

Speaker 2 (01:37:30):
He who it's like when he does perfect day. Most importantly, though,
the record is in the Library of Congress Good.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
I love the line that Joey wrote to be read
at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony
that took place a year after he died in two
thousand and one. We always loved each other, even when
we weren't civil to each other. In that way, we
were truly brothers. Well said, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (01:38:02):
Mean you can see here at the bottom. I was
typing something so that one of my coworkers would not
look at me as they exit.

Speaker 1 (01:38:14):
I forgot that was there. And in that spirit, oh yeah,
Iigel's got another thing to say. No, he sure doesn't.
He'll have a nice outra Oh no, I don't.

Speaker 2 (01:38:24):
I mean, you know, I hope everybody who listens to
the Ramones gets a combination of either that I can
do this and then they want to do it, or
they get some distant shimmering memory of what rock and
roll originally was, or at least the actual animating spirit
of it, like whatever it stands for nowadays, it was

(01:38:48):
fun and goofy and simple and pure, and it's great
that they left us with something that expresses that.

Speaker 1 (01:38:58):
And that's all well, folks. The Ramones were bad at
ending their songs, so are we.

Speaker 2 (01:39:05):
So are we.

Speaker 1 (01:39:07):
That we should have opened with that? We really should.
I know that.

Speaker 2 (01:39:19):
This has been too much information. I'm Alex Heigel and
I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time.

Speaker 1 (01:39:30):
Too Much Information was a production of iHeart Radio.

Speaker 2 (01:39:32):
The show's executive producers.

Speaker 1 (01:39:34):
Are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtalk. The show's supervising producer
is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:39:39):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalg
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:39:43):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
us a review. For more podcasts and iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows. Clatland at Clack Bass and Ta

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