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Dee Dee Ramone
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Dee Dee Ramone was one of the strangest people I've ever met.
Whenever we saw him, we were never sure if we were going to get
the good Dee Dee or the bad Dee Dee. In the 90s, when I was
asked to write a forward to his book, Lobotomy, I described him as,
“the last of the dying breed of authentic rock star, an authentic bad
guy who got over it, and in so doing, changed the face of rock ‘n’
roll. Dee Dee was the archetypical fuck-up whose life was a living
disaster. He was a male prostitute, a would-be mugger, a heroin
user and dealer, an accomplice to armed robbery—and a genius
poet who was headed for an early grave, but was sidetracked by
rock ‘n’ roll.”
Needless to say, I doubt we’ll see any more Dee Dee Ramones
coming along in the near future. Rock ‘n’ roll these days is just too
clean. And if I had to put a diagnosis on what Dee Dee suffered
from, I wouldn’t know what to say. He was that unique.
The following interview was conducted in 1989, a few months after
he left the Ramones. He called me and said he wanted to spill the
beans. Since we’d been friends since 1976, I was happy to turn on
the tape recorder and let him go—which he did for about ten hours.
DEUTSCHLAND UBER ALLES
My parents fought a lot. I don't wanna get into that, but I remember it
vividly—I mean I remember a lotta other crumby things, and some
good things too—but I had a bad childhood.
What I did to compensate for it was to live in a total fantasy world. I
grew up in Germany and when I went to school, I failed the first
grade and never went back. Actually I tried to go back the next
semester, all my friends were going to the second grade—and I had
to make a left and go down the hallway—and they said, “Where ya
goin'?”
I said, “I'm going home!”
That was in Munich, it was an American army school for the military
people stationed there. We didn't live right in the city, we lived on the
outskirts, and there was some farmland and a lot of old bombed out
houses and stuff. I’d wander around there and do things like swing
on the swings—and I'd go into these intense fantasies—and imagine
I was a fighter pilot.
I also lived in Pirmasens, which is a small town right on the French
border. The German side of the border was called the Siegfried Line
and the French side was the Maginot Line. I used to wander round
in the old bunkers and look for war relics. I used to pick ‘em up all
the time, like old helmets and gas masks and bayonets and machine
gun belts. This went on for like a year and I started dealing these
war relics—but I used to have fun with them too.
I'd always been fascinated by Nazi symbols—from finding them in
the rubble in Germany. They were so glamorous. They were just so
pretty. My parents were very upset by that.
One time my father said something fucking ridiculous. I had found a
Luftwaffe sword that was beautiful, and I knew I could keep it or sell
it for a fortune, like 80 marks. When I brought that home, my father
got uptight and said something really sick, he said, “Can you
imagine all our guys that died because of that?”
I thought, This guy is a real asshole. As if he really cared. I didn't
figure my father for any passions like that, about anything. And from
that day on, he just became a total joke to me—and I stopped
fearing him.
DRUGS
I don't know how I got turned on to morphine—I was just in the
wrong place at the wrong time. A lot of my friends were Americans,
their fathers were in the State Department or the Army or Air Force,
they were very young kids and they were very excited that you could
drink at any age in Germany.
So everybody drank, but I really didn't hang out with people that
much. I had to have a lot of time alone to wander around in fantasy,
ya know? And I didn't want anything to disturb that. Doing drugs was
always a very solitary thing with me. I did it alone, usually in some
hallway or on some roof.
I started getting high on morphine—they didn't have pot or heroin or
anything like that in Germany. I started very young, like 12. I used to
trade daggers and stuff for morphine syrettes from some soldiers I
knew. I used to go up to the Army Base and cop there. They used to
sell it in a big plastic bottle and you would go to the drug store and
buy your works and go up there and they'd give you like 2.5cc for 50
cents. You'd go to the department store and get off—everybody got
off there and the place was a wreck, ya know? The department store
was good because it had a nice bathroom.
It's funny, but I didn't smoke pot till I was like 15 or 16—until I came
to America. I didn't like to drink. I tried it a few times—but I didn't
really know how to drink.
A lot of times my parents didn't want me around, they really didn't
care what I did, as long as I didn't play the guitar in the house. I
picked up the guitar when I was around 12. I really wanted to play
the guitar. I don't know why. I got exposed to rock real early cause
my mother always liked it—she would always tell me what to listen
to. She told me about the Beatles, Ricky Nelson, everybody.
I don’t think I really discovered rock until the Rolling Stones started
breaking me away from my mother. I knew my mother couldn't listen
to them, ya know? Then when I moved to America and I heard Jimi
Hendrix, either in 1966 or 67, something like that. Then I knew I had
my own music.
AMERICA
I hated it when I came to America—the kids weren't very cool, they
didn't dress good. And there didn't seem to be any youth culture
here—and the youth culture they had, I didn't like it because it
wasn't very glamorous. Everything seemed turned out on an
assembly line. There was this thing you were supposed to do and it
all started at those damn head shops. I just didn't go for it.
Later on, when I started to find myself, I started going to the
discothèques, when the disco thing first started happening in New
York. There were these clubs in the late 60s where Spanish and
Italian kids would get together and they were like kids clubs—a lot of
them were just like juice bars. But they were some of the first
discothèques—like the Sanctuary, Superstar, and Tamburlaine.
That's where I'd usually go. And I'd get really dressed up—to the hilt.
When I was 15, I hitchhiked to California, but I got arrested on the
way. I don't really wanna talk about this too much, but I'll tell you a
little bit. I was arrested in Indiana for armed robbery. I asked my
father if he could pay a small bail to get me out. That's one of the
first times I ever asked him for anything, ya know? I was desperate. I
was really scared, it was a rough place. And my father said, “Fuck
you, rot there! You deserve it!” And then hung up.
I was stuck there for a pretty long time. It was pretty bad.
You see, I was hitchhiking and I met these kids from Flint, Michigan.
I was kinda scared of them. They were very crazy. They were talking
all this sick stuff and they kept saying how they wanted to cut
someone’s head off. They wanted to strangle somebody. They had
a thin wire and two hoops and they wanted to garrote somebody.
Finally they pulled over to a gas station in South Bend, Indiana, and
robbed the place. We all got arrested.
The police caught us because the driver tried to step on the gas in
the junk car and it stalled. No one got away with nuthin’!
When I finally got out of jail, I went to Chicago. I managed to get a
bus ticket, because I was really paranoid to hitchhike. I just didn't
wanna see any cops. I forget where I took the bus to—somewhere
like Amarillo, Texas. And then I just went to highway and started
hitchhiking.
I got a ride from this really nice guy all the way to Newport Beach,
and that's where I spent my first night in California. The night before
I was in Las Vegas and I remember thinking, “Man I gotta get outta
here; this is the worse place on Earth!”
So the next day I took some mescaline and I came into the city
tripping my brains out. I hated the Sunset Strip, so I started
hitchhiking down Sunset Boulevard to Route One and took that all
the way up to Big Sur. I went up to this place called the Gorge. You
couldn't get there easy, you had to swim to the entrance and walk
along the bank of this creek, where the cliffs came together—and
then it just opened up into these beautiful woods. I just lived there
like an Indian for months, until I went back to LA.
I’d traveled so much through Europe and the world—and I was
always going through culture shock. I had a hard time adjusting—
and I just didn't like America. And I didn't like California. It was too
weird.
See, I was hitching through Topanga Canyon and this biker picked
me up. He said, “Where you goin?”
I said “I'm just hangin out.”
So he drove me up to the hills—and on top of the hill there was this
plateau and they had all these gasoline generators up there and
amplifiers. They had a whole weird band up there, doin this real
psychedelic music and they asked me if I wanted some acid. I said
sure, and I took some, but I didn’t like it very much after it started
coming on. So I asked to leave, and the biker said, “Sure I'll drive
ya!” He drove about 2000 miles an hour down this little twisting path
down the mountain—it was very upsetting for me.
Then I ended up taking some STP or something—and I went into
this nightmare four-day trip. At the end of it, when I was coming
down, I went into this sleazy barbershop and had him cut all my hair
off! [laughs]
EARLY RAMONES
I had to have different guys to hang out with to do my different
drugs. Joey Ramone couldn't do drugs. He tried them, but he
couldn't handle it. He would freak out. One time I saw him smoke
some pot and start convulsing on the floor in the fetal position,
yelling “I'm freaking out! I'm freaking out!”
At the time, Joey was painting—and he would chop-up carrots and
lettuce and turnips and strawberries and mix it all together and paint
with it! [laughs] His paintings were very good—and then he would try
to make tapes of like different sounds. His parents had an apartment
on the 20th floor and it was lightning out and he stuck a microphone
from the tape recorder out on the balcony to tape the thunder—and
the lightning struck the mike and burnt everything! He'd have me
come over and bounce the basketball for half hour and he'd tape it.
Then he'd listen to it all day in a daze.
Joey and I used to sit on the steps of the bank in Queens Boulevard
with a bottle of wine—when John would wanna go in the hallway
and sniff glue. So John was up, when Joey was down—or whatever.
Johnny Ramone had stopped doing hard drugs by then. He really
was a pot smoker. He was the first person to introduce me to really
good pot—no one even knew about good pot, but John did. He'd
say, “Dee Dee, I promise you, three tokes of this stuff and you'll by
really out of it!”
I said, “Alright,” and I would be.
Yeah, there was a lot of glue and Tuinals and Seconals—what a
party! You couldn't get your head outta that bag! We used to call up
numbers on the phone, it would go, “Beep, beep, beep, beep, beep,”
and we’d listen to that for hours. And sniff some glue a little more,
because we knew these numbers to dial where you could get these
weird sounds.
John was a construction worker at 1633 Broadway, and I got
transferred there. I was a mail clerk in the office building. I'd pack up
the mail in the morning and sort it out. I had my cart and I'd have it
lined up according to how the desks in the office were organized.
And I'd drop off the mail and I'd gossip with the people a little bit—
and then do it all over again ten times a day. So John and I would
meet every day for lunch and usually we'd go to the Metropole and
have a few beers. The Metropole was like a go-go place and after
we got a little tipsy we'd go next door to look at the guitars. But we
thought it was wrong to be in a band. We thought it was a bad thing.
I thought we should work, you know, and try to hold down a job.
But then one day it was a payday, and we both bought guitars and
decided to start a band. John bought a Mosrite and I bought a
Danelectro.
Tommy Ramone definitely got us off the ground, the Ramones
wouldn't have done anything without Tom. We were really green, we
didn't know what the hell was going on, but Tommy was really
annoying too. Tommy was a control freak, he was like a mother that
was always upset with us.
But Tommy cracked real early on. All our drummers cracked, every
couple years one would crack—and then the group would be really
happy, because we'd get rid of someone. And nobody would say
we're gonna add this quality or that quality—they would just say
we're gonna get faster! So every drummer we got we'd make them
play faster and faster.
One time we were outside some hotel and some fan came up and
pulled out a pen and asked Tommy for an autograph. Tommy said,
“That's not a knife is it? You aren't going to stab me, are you?”
The Ramones gigs, especially the early ones in England, were very
violent. And Tommy was very tiny and it was hard on him, ya know?
And John was very nasty to Tommy and then Joey started getting
nasty to Tommy. Tommy and I got along cause I was obviously not
in competition to be the leader of that group—and Joey and John
we're always striving for it.
I remember the first time we went outta town to play and I couldn't
cop that morning. We went to some awful place in New England, on
the ocean to some awful club, it was called Frolics, a real sleazy
beer-stinking ballroom, ya know?
And I was getting sick. It was winter and it was cold—and afterwards
we went back to some fleabag motel. I've been in some bad places,
but this hotel was disgusting. Plus, I was getting sick, I was in
withdrawal. So I took a blanket and I put it over the sink and I started
running the water. And I sat underneath the blanket, underneath the
sink. I just tried to make myself think I was sitting underneath a
waterfall to forget where I was.
We wanted to get outta there so bad, but we only had one van. We
had to be there three days and the third day I was a wreck. We
hated being outta New York and that night it was like the coldest
night I ever been through. And as soon as we stopped playing this
cop came in and took out this big pistol, and said “You guys better
play more!”
He was real drunk and this went on for an hour. We just wanted to
leave and everything was so disorganized. So the next morning we
called up Danny Fields, our manager, and said, “Danny we ain’t
never doing this again!”
And he said, “Well you’re playing this place and that place
tomorrow!”
CHINESE ROCKS
I wrote that song outta spite for Richard Hell, cause he told me he
was gonna write a song better than Lou Reed's “Heroin.” I went
home and wrote “Chinese Rocks.” I wrote it by myself, in Debbie
Harry's apartment on First Avenue and First Street. I always wrote
my songs with all the same verse and chorus, like “53rd & 3rd.” It's
always the same thing—so I could just repeat, "My girlfriend's crying
in the shower stall."
Then I took it and showed it to Richard Hell—and he put something
else in there, he put that line in, "It’s hot as a bitch, I shoulda been
rich, I shoulda been digging a Chinese ditch," so I give him some
credit. That's how people are—we had this competition going, ya
know? He put me in that position. He's very argumentative. He's
smart and all—but he had to be the top dog, and he never really
was, ya know? For people who used my song—from Lee Childers to
Johnny Thunders, to Richard Hell—they never gave me much
respect as a writer, ya know?
Johnny Thunders got on my nerves about that song—I don't
understand why he was so touchy about it. Johnny Thunders is
great at everything he did, so why did he have to take it out on my
song? I mean I love his song, "I Love You," I think that's a great
song, but I have no idea why he stole “Chinese Rocks” from me.
The more I realize how good a song “Chinese Rocks” is—then I
think, “But it ain't the best song in the world,” ya know?
The Ramones said they wouldn't do Chinese Rocks, and I had an
apartment on 10th Street with this girl Pam, that I was going out
with. So Jerry Nolan came up one day and I showed him the song
and Jerry said, “Perfect.”
So I gave the song to Jerry and said, “Why don't you guys do it?”
And then the Heartbreakers L.A.M.F. album came out, they all had
their names on it. I think everybody thought that was like a real
tough thing to be a junkie—but I don't really know the real reason
why he stole it from me.
SID VICIOUS
Sid used to follow me all over the place when we went to London.
He wasn't in the Pistols then—and he was very nice. He was like a
little kid, ya know? He wasn’t a nut then, he was very nice and very
innocent.
Then one night we had a big party—it was the summer, and in
London, there's no air conditioning. It was at a place called Country
Cousin or Country Club, where everybody has their parties. They
were just serving beer and wine and everybody was bombed. The
whole bathroom was filled with puke and piss and shit—in the sink,
in the toilets, on the floor—the whole place!
It was really disgusting, and Johnny Lydon or somebody asked me,
“Dee Dee, do you need anything?”
I said, “Yeah, I want some speed!”
So all of a sudden I had a huge amount of speed in my hand. I
started sniffing it like crazy and I was so high, and I saw Sid and he
asked me, “Do you have anything to get high?"
I said, “Yeah I got some speed.”
So we went in the bathroom Sid pulled out a set of works. He puts a
whole bunch a speed in the syringe—and then stuck the needle and
the works in the toilet with all the puke and piss in there and loaded
it. He didn’t cook it up—he just shook it and stuck it in his arm and
got off.
I just looked at him, ya know? I'd seen it all by then—and he just
looked at me kinda dazed and said, “Man where did you get this
stuff?”
PHIL SPECTOR
Working with Phil Spector was a nightmare. First of all, we had no
money. We'd been together four or five years and we were flat
broke. We were staying in some flea bag motel in Culver City—with
just enough money to buy two damn Tuinals and a beer every day.
And Phil was like totally out of his mind—I hadn't met anyone crazier
than him. We hated his music and we hated each other, but he liked
me a lot.
He used to pull guns all the time, and he had two guys with him that
were fully armed. Johnny Ramone took care of it—he told Phil to cut
it out or we're gonna leave. Then Phil said, “Alright you guys, just try
and leave! I’m not letting you leave!” So we just sat there for a
couple days. He just held us with these guns, and we had to sit
there in the living room and listen to him play “Baby, I Love You”
over and over. [laughs]
I don't know what he was drinking. I couldn't figure it out because he
had this big gold goblet with all these jewels on it and he looked like
Dracula drinking blood, so I said “Phil let me have some of that…”
And he said, “OK, Dee Dee,” and it was ManischewitzWine.
I hated him. I don't like anything about him. I don't like people who
are in the music business who are bitter and trying too hard to prove
something. He was all that.
The recording was a nightmare, it couldn't have been worse. One
time he made John play the guitar chord to the beginning of “Rock
‘n’ Roll High School” over and over again for about six or eight
hours. Phil just sat there listening to it in a daze, and finally Johnny
said, “Look I can't do this anymore, I'm going back to New York!”'
Phil said, “No, just give it a chance, there’s something I'm trying to
hear.” And he'd sit there dazed—it sounded the same every time
John played it—I don't know what he was listening for.
Phil would always just get real violent around me. I seemed to bring
out something bad in him. He always seemed to be competing with
me to try and let me know he could be tougher than me, and I wasn't
going for it. Finally one night I put him in his place. I got real heavy
with him—I had to. I’d had enough.
The album took forever to start because Phil wouldn't even tell us
where we were recording. Then finally, he gave us a list of three
studios, all within 50 miles of each other and said, “Call this one
every day at a certain hour and that way you'll be able to know
where we’re going to record.”
That's how paranoid he was. He rented three studios and paid for
them all—had them open sessions that he booked weeks before. I
mean, when he went outta the house it was all a big strategy of how
he was armed, and what his security was.
End of the Century was our biggest selling album, but it almost
ruined our careers because the people who bought the record came
and saw us, they came to see “Baby, I Love You,” and as soon as
we started playing they left. The next tour we did it was half empty
seats. I couldn't believe it. I don't think we really recovered till I
wrote Too Tough to Die.
I was driving home with the band from the record company in New
York and they put on something from the End of the Century album,
I think it was, “I'm Affected.” I couldn't believe how awful it sounded!
It was horrible! And I didn’t like our version of “Baby, I Love You.”
Not at all.
Some of the worst crap I ever wrote went on that album. I don't even
want to say the names of the songs, but that was me at my worst.
After I heard that album, I said, “Never again!”
LEAVING THE RAMONES
I don’t know when I left the Ramones, I'm not certain. I made a lot
changes in my life in the last five to six months. I left my wife, I left
the band, and I left my girlfriend—and it was hard, you know? I had
to do it because I had to become myself. I’m not a puppet—I didn't
want to be a little boy anymore. I wouldn't grow up, and a lot of
things were irritating me about the Ramones.
One thing that's always been important to me is to be myself. I don't
write music according to a certain style that I'm noted for or familiar
with. I write how I feel at the moment. I write current. I don't try to
recreate the past, and that was the Ramones' thing. That was hard
to deal with.
I was also sick and tired of the little boy look—bowl haircut and the
motorcycle jacket. And really, for four middle-aged men trying to be
teenage juvenile delinquents is ridiculous.
The thing that you want to strive for is to become a man, whether
you want to be an adult or not. I think it's better to be an adult—to be
secure enough with yourself not to hang on to what may have
worked before.
I was just getting sick of playing in a revival act. See, I was trying to
say something about life and something positive. I don't know if what
I was doing was right at the time—and I don't think the kids buying
the albums wanted to hear what I was trying to say. I would write
things about getting down on my knees and praying' for peace and
all that, ya know? I was doing that kinda stuff and that's how I felt—
and it was really hard to do that in the Ramones because they're
very bigoted, very prejudice, and very right wing. And then I'd come
out on the total left side of the field, and it was causing trouble.
No one in the group was really growing up besides me, which is
pretty weird cause there was no one in that group more self-
destructive than I was. I was a big troublemaker in the group. I put
them through a lot of pain, but as much as I gave to them, they gave
right back to me.
The Ramones stand for nothing but pure hate.
So now that I can write what I want to write and don't have to censor
what I'm writing, unbelievable things are coming outta me that I
didn't know I had in me. I always knew I could write a good song, but
I listen to a Ramones album now and there's very few things on
there that I'm really happy with.
Of course, Joey writes all his love songs, crying about his broken
heart, which I think is embarrassing. I always thought a rock star
should never have his heart broken. He should break hearts and be
a real lady-killer, and not be whining. That’s all Joey did in all his
songs. It was annoying the hell outta me.
So I started trying to write more serious. I think I was doing it just to
flaunt it right back at them. I don't know that it was the right thing for
the group now, but I think rock ‘n’ roll should be three words and a
chorus.
And the three words should be good enough to say it all.