I think we can all be friendly with each other and like each other
but we can't live together or communicate or anything.
It just should be over, you know?
What can you do? You know.
Anybody else'd probably be happy if they had what we have.
The Ramones really invented "a whole new genre".
Music wouldn't sound the same if it weren't for the Ramones.
The Ramones, I thought, "should have been like The Stones".
I mean, they influenced so much stuff.
All you hear now in car commercials
and TV commercials are Ramones guitars.
I mean, this music saved rock'n'roll
and influenced millions of kids around the world.
"And they were never acknowledged".
Something very unusual is happening here tonight
and that's that this industry "is paying some respect to the Ramones".
So with the power invested in me,
I'd like to induct the Ramones.
Believe it or not, we really loved each other,
even when we weren't acting civil to each other.
We were truly brothers.
The honor of our induction to the Hall Of Fame means a lot to us
but it really meant everything to Joey.
Thank you very much.
- And this is it. - How do you feel, coming back here?
- Do you feel anything at all? - No.
You know, this place "has sort of lost its thing for me".
"It doesn't even feel like home".
This is where we used to hang out a lot.
Wouldn't you know? It looks like it's closed off.
Barbed wire up there. It means that times have changed.
"Tommy's great. He's very important".
He talked us into me and Dee "starting a band".
He was bugging me and Dee Dee "for about a year to start a band".
We told him it was sick and we shouldn't do that.
At the time of our teens, "we all lived at Forest Hills".
"It had a lot of hills". Forest Hills does have too many hills
and Queens Boulevard "is too wide to cross without"...
A lot of people get hit by cars there.
And all the kids there were taking LSD
and marijuana and, you know, were more sophisticated,
"like young college student types".
I don't think John and I and Tommy fit in there one bit.
"I guess we were all outcasts".
At one point, maybe loners, more so, you know?
How did you meet those guys?
They all said, "I heard you like The Stooges. "
Something like that, you know.
I said, "Yeah, you know, I like 'em. "
Like maybe three people "liked The Stooges in the whole area".
And everybody else "was violently against them".
So if you liked The Stooges, you had to be friends with each other.
We had one friend, Richie Stern,
"and he was the leader of The Stooges fans".
Through him, we would, like, hang out
and sniff glue or smoke pot
and listen to our... We had a live Stooges tape
we would always play, you know.
It was part of hanging out.
Listening to Iggy and watch Richie sing like Iggy a little bit for us.
During the summer months,
we would hang out in the area of Forest Hills
and there was one particular hangout
that was called Thorneycroft.
It was an apartment complex "which had a courtyard".
As a kid, I grew up on the block
and met Johnny when I was real young.
Bought my first pack of firecrackers from him.
"He had a little bit of a volatile personality".
He was cool with me. With other people, "he might not have been so cool with".
I seen him pop this guy's father in the face.
Coś my windows are right up here
and I was looking down and he got into a fight and he must have started with the kid
and the kid's father came up to the playground and he, like, popped him in the nose.
Popped the father in the nose.
But, you know, things like that happen when you're hanging out.
I was bad. I was bad every minute of the day
from the time I woke up to the time I went to bed.
- Really? - Yeah.
Anything I could think of to do, I'd do.
Really? Stole, stuff like that?
Yeah.
And I don't want my mother watching this.
John went off to college a week before I did cos he went down to Florida.
So he goes down to Florida, OK?
So we all had, like, a farewell party for him.
The next week, I come out of my house,
I'm walking up the hill towards Thorneycroft, and there sits John.
I said, "What are you doing here?"
He says, "I didn't like it down there. "
18 to 20 was a trying period, "figuring out what to do with yourself".
"So I was sort of a delinquent at that point".
Did the Ramones save you from that stuff?
No. I grew out of that stuff by the time I was 20.
I was walking on the block one day and it just hit me.
It was like a voice going, "What are you doing?
"Is this what God put us here for?"
Went home and stopped everything.
Plotted out the rest of my...
what I was going to do with myself.
What was OK to do, what wasn't OK to do.
Just changed, in the matter of one minute.
"Joey, I didn't know that well". "He was sort of quiet".
He was kind of reclusive and shy
and I realized that he was not like the other kids.
"He was a loner".
"Joey, I don't know, he was difficult".
He used to leave his brothers' albums on the radiator,
and stuff like that,
and not put them back in the cover and they'd be melted.
Steal everybody's hash,
I think.
We're walking down the street at night and Jeff was so tall.
I'd be looking up to... "Jeff. " Like this, you know?
"What's up?" He goes, "Yeah, what's up, man?"
That was Jeff. To me, he was freaky.
He was like... But he was cool.
He was together upstairs.
He looked funny but he was together upstairs.
The projections for him "from childhood were not good".
And teachers said, "His eyes are bad, he's not reading well. "
He was a slow student
but they didn't think about his basic intelligence.
He was highly intelligent
and very creative.
They didn't even look at that side of him.
Joey, when he was about 18,
decided to check himself into St Vincent's
because he was having a really hard time
with this condition called O.C.D. -
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
He would hear voices that forced him to repeat things.
I did take him to a specialist.
They said he was compulsive.
So they would just tell my mother
that this guy has an emotional disorder
that is probably gonna render him useless to function in society
for the remainder of his life.
We were all worried "about what was gonna become of him".
Music really was my salvation "and always has been".
"For me, it's something very special".
It's like I remember times when I was really miserable or really depressed
and I'd put on a nice, soothing record like The Stooges,
- "cos it would be like an exorcism". - "Powerful, yeah".
Just like a total release, you know?
I saw my brother on stage "with his band, Sniper".
He was never a singer in a band before.
He was already on when I walked in and I see him up there
and I see this guy who had gone through a transformation
that I had never seen, except for in the movies, like...
I guess the closest thing I could think of is Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor.
But so fucking aggressive,
I couldn't believe it was the same person.
And he was singing, he was fucking roaring.
I was so happy for him,
to see him have the balls to go up and do something like that.
But I could tell he was finally finding his niche.
A week later, they threw him out of the band
"because he wasn't pretty".
Now Johnny didn't like your brother.
He didn't get along with my brother or want to know him
because my brother was kind of a...
I don't wanna say freak. We were all freaks.
But he was more of a hippy freak, I guess,
and John even though he was not...
He tried to come off like a right-wing conservative
but he was also a big Charles Manson advocate.
"All those guys were into the glitter scene".
John was wearing satin pants and chinchilla coats
I guess that's where John and my brother found the connection.
Me and John, we'd go see The Stooges
and we all got turned on to the MC5 about the same time and Alice Cooper.
Were any girls ever involved at this stage?
Never. No.
Any girls in Forest Hills would leave there to find a man somewhere else,
The East Village or something. They wouldn't want anybody...
It wasn't cool to be from Queens.
You would lie about it if you went into Manhattan.
You'd be telling, "I got an apartment in the city. "
Then you'd go back to your mom's house.
So it was just the guys hanging out?
Joey and me, you know, and...
John and me and Richie Stern.
With the platform shoes and doing your hair for two hours.
And that's all. We'd just be able "to make it to Tommy's car".
And that's about as much "of a production that everybody could".
"There was nowhere to go after that".
Later there was, when the Dolls started playing.
When I say I'm in love, you'd best believe I'm in love, L-U-V.
Their shows would be these real eventful kind of nights
"that everybody came down".
It was real decadent but great.
Great songs, great energy. Real wild stage antics.
"I couldn't believe what I was seeing". "It was the best thing in the world".
Partly, there was nobody that could compete with them.
I was just going coś the music "was just incredible".
And the clothes and stuff "and the freaks. It was great".
And then we'd make that long trip home back to Queens.
"It was rough".
I saw where the musicianship was going at that point in time.
The drug era was coming into rock'n'roll
so everyone was getting into "the overindulgence of their playing".
The long solos. You felt no way could I ever be able to play like this.
Even if you have the talent, "you'd spend 15 years practicing".
I went to see the New York Dolls play.
"I was seeing bands now" - "rock'n'roll was supposed to be".
How great they could sound and how great they could be
with limited musicianship.
So finally, John calls me up one day and says, "I bought a guitar. "
And he said, "I'm talking to Dee Dee. "
I said, "Maybe we can put something together. "
I had just left another band
and Dee Dee liked my style.
And so he mentioned to John that he wanted me in the band.
So the two people that we knew then would be Joey played drums,
me and Dee Dee were gonna play guitar.
Tommy was our adviser.
Tommy then would go,
"Make Dee Dee the bass player, you play the guitar... "
Dee Dee would sing but he couldn't sing and play at the same time.
So when he was singing, he wasn't playing.
When he was playing, he wasn't singing.
And then Joey would sing.
"Lo and behold, he had this great voice".
Tommy really pushed the Joey issue,
especially as a singer.
He's not my idea of a singer but Tommy said,
"He'll look good in between you and Dee Dee. "
So when we decided to have Joey become the singer,
we needed a drummer.
We kept trying drummers out
and then one day, no one showed up to try out
and Tommy just sat in and we convinced Tommy...
We sounded right with Tommy "and he stayed in the band".
"At first I was"... "I'd never played drums".
So it took me a little while
to just be able to do that,
which fit in with their playing
because they were learning, themselves.
As soon as I started playing drums, "the whole sound of the band changed".
It started to gel, to become the Ramones.
Dee Dee was using the surname "Dee Dee Ramone".
Ramone was, the way we were gonna be using it,
was to create a sense of unity.
A bond, of sorts.
Joey's mother had an art gallery
and we were in there after closing
and we were rehearsing some of the songs.
And Dee Dee and Joey were running down Judy Is A Punk.
That's the first time I heard Judy Is A Punk.
"I had never heard anything like this". "This was something futuristic".
And I said, "What is this? What are these lyrics?
"What is this melody? What is this crazy harmony?"
And then it's all gelling and I'm listening to this and I'm going,
"This is brilliant stuff. "
And from then, I became very serious
because it wasn't just a glitter rock band,
like 50 other glitter rock bands in New York,
"this was something fantastic".
New from K-Tel Records, 22 explosive hits.
22 original stars.
Gallery.
During the early 70s, "there was the doldrums".
"The spirit of rock'n'roll sort of went away".
In that time and in that culture, "Donny and Marie are on TV".
Everybody's nice. Everything just seemed "so mediocre and tedious".
It was just awful. And everything was kind of earth shoes.
Everything was muted. Everything was browns, you know?
"It was wheat groats and we didn't like that".
And you couldn't get laid
unless you were spiritually correct
or gave them some rap about macrame.
I don't know what you were supposed to do but I couldn't do it, you know?
"It was the end of white flight in New York".
Ever since World War II, people had been moving out of the cities
"to these new things called the suburbs".
So people were leaving New York "and it was kind of deserted".
And you really got this feeling that the parents had left
and you could take over "and do what you want".
"In the early 1970s, New York was empty".
"There was no clubs".
The reason we played CBGB's "was there was no place to play".
We saw a tiny, little add in the Voice.
"Television were playing there".
"I saw a lot of good shows there".
"I loved Television".
That was CBGB's to me. Some lonely night
"with ten people there and Television playing".
Tom Verlaine singing the Venus de Milo song.
"It was great, you know".
The first time I walked into CBGB's,
there was sawdust all over the floor
and there was piles of dog shit everywhere.
It was like walking over a minefield.
And so we auditioned for Hilly Kristal and he said,
"Nobody's gonna like you guys but I'll have you back. "
We walk into CBGB's.
"It's literally a bowery bar".
I mean, there's Bowery bums at the bar counting out their pennies
"to buy a shot".
And then there's like ten people "sitting at these tables".
At that point, the Ramones came out
and they hit the stage,
"wearing these black leather jackets".
And they counted off the song
"and they started playing different songs".
"And it was just this wall of noise".
And they threw down their guitars in disgust "and walked off the stage".
And they looked so... It looked like the SS had just walked in.
They looked so striking.
I mean, these guys were not hippies.
This was something completely new
and the noise of it just hit you.
And then two minutes later, they came back
and Dee Dee counted off, 1-2-3-4
and then went into Blitzkrieg Bop.
They just played really fast and really short songs
and it was very funny but they were very earnest about it.
It wasn't that they were trying to be funny.
They were really serious and so it was almost like conceptual art,
that it was just so great, you couldn't believe that it could exist.
It made you smile,
"once you managed to close your mouth".
Coś at first it was like...
The first person that came up to us was Alan Vega from Suicide.
And said, "You guys are great. This is what I've been waiting for. "
And I thought, "This guy's nuts. "
First fan.
I watched them as I was laughing
cos I was more of a serious musician,
coming from the different groups I came from.
And watching the Ramones, it was like a joke, really.
I remember that they had a sound problem and Dee Dee got pissed off
and took his bass guitar and threw it on the ground
and I think they walked off and then came back on.
And that was exciting, too.
I'd never seen any spontaneous anger like that from anybody.
And that's what made me a little bit scared of them.
The famous thing about the Ramones is they would always stop and start
and have arguments on stage, which I always thought was pretty endearing.
You didn't go to a bar and see an original band.
You went to a stadium to see some big band.
And when you went to a bar, they played cover tunes.
So actually seeing guys who wrote their own music and did their own thing,
wore black leather jackets, "was kind of amazing".
I felt - my God, this is it.
Initially, CBGB's was about 100 people.
Four were the Ramones and five were the people in Blondie.
Do the math, as they say, "and there was a few other bands".
"And that's who was there".
Everybody would hang out outside of the club and it was...
There was like, I guess, a decent kind of camaraderie to some degree.
CBGB's, I remember the early bands there.
It was getting to be a nightmare, "the competition".
With the Mumps, Mink DeVille and the Marbles,
all these jerk-off bands thought they were big stars
and they weren't. The Ramones were the stars.
And we were very standoffish and snobby
so we irritated the hell out of everyone.
We're the Ramones and you're a loudmouth, baby.
You'd better shut it up.
"Their concept was very well-defined".
They were very organized.
Yeah, they were like the military.
They really had a very clear vision and it was very tight.
After the failure of the New York Dolls to achieve commercial success,
it was like a black cloud over New York and nobody was gonna be signed in New York
and more people started coming down to CBGB's, there was an abundance of artists.
Talking Heads were doing something totally different,
Television, I didn't see as competition,
Heartbreakers were a bunch of junkies,
so I knew that their careers were going to be short.
In around the summer of '75, "there was a CBGB's rock festival".
"This was a big thing at the time". Rolling Stone was actually covering this,
a one-page article and three quarters "of the page was on the Ramones".
At that point, we started selling out, once it was a Rolling Stone thing.
I'd shot the Ramones live once,
mainly at CBGB's but it was really early
and it got so crowded you couldn't do that any more.
About 550 people a night, "three nights in a row".
We raised the price of the tickets.
We were the first one raising it to $2, $3, $4 and $5.
We'd always try and take as much control, "get it away from Hilly".
We'd want somebody at the door, we didn't want to be cheated by them.
This is a business, right, at that point.
We built a big following, we kept sending out invitations,
trying to get Danny Fields to come down, "we thought coś it was his thing".
He worked for the Doors and he worked for the Stooges
and he worked for the MC5,
so we figured with those credentials, if anybody was gonna see what we're doing,
it would be Danny.
"Danny Fields came down eventually".
And I think he didn't want to come down
cos he thought we were a Spanish band or something,
like a flamenco band or something.
"I went to see them the next time they played".
"I was like, "This is just everything".
"Guitar solos, the songs are over so fast,
"they're all so cute, they look great, I love what they're wearing. "
I said, "I want to be your manager. "
So they said, "Oh, well, we need a few thousand dollars for a drum kit,
"if you come up with that, you can be our manager. "
"OK."
He knew all these people,
cool people, nobody who could help our career,
but those Andy Warhol people.
So they started coming down to meet us, "it was like a bunch of freaks".
"And I wouldn't be very sociable or friendly".
I just came off as unfriendly and nasty, "which they were fine with".
They probably wanted the abuse, right?
This was my first priority - get a deal, like Patti had a deal.
"That was the first thing".
"We were playing at Mothers". "This must be later on in '75".
"Then Craig Leon brings down Linda Stein".
I guess eventually it leads to getting Seymour Stein to come and see us.
Danny organized a rehearsal "at S.I.R. Studios".
They did their set, probably took 15 minutes, and that was it.
"Seymour signed them".
I heard in the Ramones
what I look for first in any artist that I sign...
...which is great songs
because to me that is the most important thing.
I mean, the Ramones, we all shared a dark sense of humor,
a dark... a darkness, you know.
The first album, Seymour comes down to the recording thing,
"Will you please not sing 'I'm A Nazi, Baby' on Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World?"
I go, "What's wrong with that?"
And, "Come on, guys, please, for me, just change it to something. "
We're like, "We're compromising ourselves not singing, 'I'm a Nazi baby'."
I Don't Wanna Walk Around With You is a love song.
Dee Dee wrote it about his girlfriend at the time.
We didn't try to be crazy, we didn't try to write things that were offensive.
This was all natural, we were trying to be normal, so...
You were trying to be normal and you failed?
Like a lot of people, when we first put it on, we all sort of laughed
and looked at each other and couldn't stop staring at the cover.
And that's all we could listen to.
It instantly made half of our album collection obsolete.
Our music is just part of what the Ramones are about.
It's, in part, music, but then there's a lot of living in there.
They were in one way as real as real could be.
You could've been walking down on the corner of 53rd and 3rd
"and seen Dee Dee Ramone hustling".
53rd and 3rd in New York was a very famous chicken hawk corner,
where if you wanted to go pick up a boy prostitute,
you'd drive up and they'd all be standing on the street.
Dee Dee wrote a song "about turning tricks there".
We'd like to wish Seymour Stein a very happy birthday
and we'd like to dedicate this set to him.
In the song he's lamenting that he's the one they never pick
and when a guy finally does pick him up, he has to kill the guy,
proving he's not really queer.
I think in the early days he turned tricks for drugs,
to get heroin.
I think later he just slept with everybody because everybody wanted to sleep with him.
Dee Dee, you know, 53rd And 3rd. What's the true story behind 53rd And 3rd?
There's lots of rumors.
I'd rather by-pass that.
These rumors, nobody's really giving me a fair chance,
like, what is real and what is fantasy.
Everybody always blows up the negative.
People try to make me out "like I was some rough character".
"I was just a bass player".
They should take a look at themselves.
"Wayne County was the D. J". "Of Max's Kansas City upstairs".
"He just got the copy of the first album".
I never heard anything like this before in my life.
I was blown away, it was something I never heard before.
It was so stripped down and so powerful,
that at one point I said, "Shit, I wish I was in this band. "
The opening for Johnny Winter, who was a huge star at the time,
in Waterbury, Connecticut.
We thought that we were gonna go over.
We thought that these people are gonna hear us
and gonna go, "Wow, this is amazing, boy, are we lucky to see this band. "
That's not quite what happened.
In fact, we were kinda lucky because there was no pauses between our songs
but when we stopped to take our jackets off before I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,
this slow crescendo of...
came up.
I'm supposed to be like the stage roadie
and I find myself hiding behind the Marshall amps
because bottles are getting tossed like every ten seconds.
Everybody's yelling, "Get the fuck off the stage. "
We were lucky they didn't murder us.
The Ramones are not an opening act.
Whoever you came to see, they will confuse you as an opening act.
In America at the time, we couldn't even get a start. Nobody cared.
Outside of Rolling Stone, Village Voice, nobody else.
But in England, we actually created a stir.
Joey said, "I got to go to England. " I was going, "Why have you?"
England didn't seem that important. They couldn't get a job in New Jersey.
I'd been aware, and the Pistols had been aware, of the New York scene
through Malcolm McLaren.
We used to hang about in his shop and he'd been backwards and forwards to America.
He'd been involved in managing the New York Dolls.
If that Ramones record hadn't existed,
I don't know that we could have "built a scene here".
It fulfilled a vital gap, if you like,
between the death of the old pub rocking scene
and the advent of punk.
July 4th, 1976.
"We went over to England".
We played this place called the Roundhouse. It held 3,000 and it was sold out.
There were people waiting at the hotel "to sleep with us all".
You can tell it's pretty good
if you've got people lined up to fuck the roadies and the managers.
During the sound check that day, all these kids came over to us
and told us how were responsible for turning them on, basically,
for them to go out and form their own bands.
Everyone who was gonna be in one of the UK punk bands was there at the show.
There must have been 60 people in the audience, which was nobody,
but everyone formed a band.
They kick-started the thing in a big way.
Stranglers, the Pistols, "The Clash, The Damned".
We knew how to get to the back stage window.
And so when the Ramones were getting ready to do their concert...
I was there, Simo, Jonesy, some of the Sex Pistols.
We were in a back alley "and threw a rock at the window".
Johnny Ramone stuck his head out and went, "What?"
And we went, "Hey, this is The Clash and this is the Pistols and we need to get in. "
So they kind of formed this human chain and pulled us up through this window.
And that was the first time we met them and it was a really great punk-rock moment.
"Johnny Rotten" - "I didn't know who he was" - "was trying to come in a side door".
"He says he wants to meet the band".
"But he's afraid".
He's asking me if he comes in and meet the band, will they beat him up?
Everybody thinks the Ramones are "a gang from the Bronx or something".
Paul Simonon once said, "Jeez, you're so big, you sold this out".
"We're from England
"and haven't even performed yet because we're not good enough. "
Johnny said, "Wait till you see us. We stink.
"You don't have to be good. Just go out and play. "
Everybody, it's good to be here this evening. Happy 4th of July.
What was it like to see them live?
It was like white heat, because of the constant barrage of tunes.
You couldn't put a cigarette paper between "one tune ending and the next beginning".
A lot of people, probably from the industry,
"thinking, "It's a punk-rock shambles". It's going to be drunk people falling over. "
They weren't ready for a piledriver going...
Like that. And then...
It couldn't have got tighter if you'd been in New Orleans all your life
because it was unbelievable.
It was 4th of July weekend, 1976.
I remember going to the loft and hanging out "on the stoop, waiting for Joey".
I didn't know what to do. I was like, "Where's Joey? When's Joey coming back?"
He came back and said, "They really, really liked us. " I said, "Really?"
I was like, "Wow. That's great. "
I didn't have any understanding "of how significant or important it was".
It was just, "Oh, someone didn't throw bottles at you. That's great. "
It was exciting, but it was over because you're not rich or famous.
You come home and guess what?
You still can't get a gig in New Haven, Connecticut or something. Toad's.
"You have to beg for Toad's".
They were paying me $50 a week to roadie for them.
"I was going broke, and they were broke too".
Arturo had this big loft "and everybody just wound up staying there".
Joey's bed used to be "all the way at the back".
And Dee Dee used to have a mattress on the floor that moved around all the time.
Coś he kept burning the floor, you know.
"He really took good care of Joey and I". "We were like kids".
We had no idea how to clean the loft or anything.
And he put up with it for the sake of art.
He thought the Ramones were some kind of art thing.
And Connie did live here for a while.
I kicked them out because of the fights.
- Who did? - Connie.
Connie was a prostitute, blonde, big blonde...
big breasts, big girl,
who was Dee Dee's girlfriend.
"They were both heroin addicts together".
Connie was psycho. Connie was with Arthur Kane from the New York Dolls.
She got mad, and while he was sleeping
she took a knife and tried to saw his thumb off
so he couldn't play bass again.
Oh, man.
Heavy-duty... She was into drugs, but a very heavy person, very intense.
"She stood toe-to-toe with him". "They'd have fights, man".
Once Dee Dee took half a dollar and stuck it in his fist with it sticking out and hit her.
They would always be out in front of CBGB's arguing, smashing bottles.
Connie stabbed him in the ass, I remember that.
"And he couldn't sit down".
My job was to keep Connie out in the parking lot while they were playing shows.
It was kind of tough for me
because John would be trying to get me to keep Connie away from them
and then on the other hand, Dee Dee, she was his girlfriend.
Some girl was always trying "to steal Dee Dee".
That's basically what the fights between him and Connie were about.
Connie was very protective of her man, "who was becoming this rock star".
Why do you play so loud?
We like that. I don't know.
- You don't? - We don't have... Why?
We just like it. We don't have any control over it.
Joey had to become a rock star
"because he stuck out anyway".
"So he had to do something with this".
Instead of getting shit on by people, he had to become...
I don't think he really had a choice.
The first thing that I remember
that made me realize something "is really happening here for my brother"...
"We were hanging out at CBGB's".
This guy, Joe Stevens, a photographer,
wants to take a picture, right?
And he says to me, "Excuse me, can you step away from Joey?"
I could tell my brother felt strange about it
because we looked at each other and laughed and I said, "Go for it, no problem. "
Then all of a sudden,
he starts coming out of his shell a little bit, "getting a bit of confidence".
And all of a sudden, "girls are paying attention to him".
"Girls that weren't on medication".
Well, after eight weeks on the road,
I wanna be well.
"Every city was a goddamn struggle".
Boston, Rochester, New Haven, Philadelphia...
It was the United States, "they were stunted here. It was horrible".
"You couldn't get on the radio". "The media here was against them".
We were always getting blacklisted
because I guess the industry "didn't want the boat rocked".
"They were hoping that we would disappear".
We always played someplace "where no band had ever played before".
I remember a lot of the places we played would still have the disco balls on the ceiling.
They left a legacy of fans.
Kids. "No future, people. No future. "
"Maybe we have a future. We thought we had no future.
"Look at them. They can't play. They're terrible.
"They don't know more than three, maybe two notes.
"But look, it's exciting. They're big, they're famous, everyone's here. They can get laid.
"Let's start a band. "
I swear to you, every place we went to,
there were bands that did not exist when the Ramones first played there
"and when they came back, they did".
They were Pied Pipers out there.
And of course I felt "that we're the best at what we do".
I couldn't see another band and say, "This band's better. "
"This is king of the hill".
And at one moment in time, I did think someone was as good
and that was The Clash.
On the second album tour, I did go, "Shit, these guys are as good as us. "
Joey got White Riot in a single.
We took it out the sleeve and Joey put it on a little record player.
We both looked at each other and said, "My God, they're just copying you guys.
"Completely. "
This English thing became even bigger
and we're still trying to get 75 cents for a quart of beer.
"Like nothing's changed".
"It kind of makes you like, "Wait a minute". We did this first. We don't get anything. "
And then once the Sex Pistols album came out, it was great. It was a great album.
Not only did Malcolm steal the scene and repackage it,
but the music was good.
The Ramones suffered greatly
because the Sex Pistols were so famous for vomiting and bleeding and scratching...
...and anarchy.
This followed them here, with the Sex Pistols dominating the headlines.
An English rock band, which has somehow developed a following
by spitting into the audience
which frequently responds by throwing bottles at the band
has come to this country saying it is here to "rip some dollars off the Yanks".
We felt us and the Sex Pistols would become
almost like the Beatles and the Stones of the '60s.
Like we were the new revolution, let's say.
It wasn't gonna work like that. It was giving such a negative feeling off...
...that it would destroy the whole thing.
It scared everyone off, it scared off the music industry, the radio...
I remember I had written a song called Sheena's A Punk Rocker
and I played it for Seymour Stein
and he flipped out and said, "We've got to get this right out. "
"The record was doing really well".
Then one day on 60 Minutes was the thing about the Sex Pistols,
and the safety pins, and everyone gouging each other's eyeballs out,
and the strangulation, and this and that.
And everybody flipped out "and then things changed radically".
It really kind of screwed things up "for ourselves".
And when their records went around to radio stations, that...
intuitive, like, "What do I know about them?" "Oh, they're trouble. "
"They throw up. If we play their record, we'll have to have them here
"and then they'll throw up on the console in the recording studio.
"We don't want them. Don't play their record.
"It's easier. Don't play their record. "
It's always easier not to do something than to do it.
Those songs are classic American pop songs.
Why weren't they played on the radio? Why weren't they?
The first write-up we got, they called us punks, a punk band.
That's where it started. After that, they called us punk.
Tommy was our main spokesman "at that point. He did most of the interviews".
He felt it was important that the band come off sounding intelligent
cos we had this cartoon dumb image.
So we tried to keep the interviews "to basically him and me".
And I was not very friendly, so wasn't wanting to talk to anyone
so it was left to him.
It was Johnny's band. Johnny was the inside manager.
He was the disciplinarian
and it was, "They don't want to deal with Dee Dee on an important subject. "
Dee Dee's very smart, "but Dee Dee is trouble".
"He lives to be trouble".
"He lives to be that awful six-year-old".
"And Joey was trouble".
He was so frail, he was always getting sick, "he couldn't come down a staircase"...
Johnny was trouble. He punched Dee Dee "in the head after the show if he missed a bit".
They were all trouble.
It's a band. I mean, you know, it's rock'n'roll.
We'd play so loud, and all the amps couldn't take it...
but now we got these amps
that... they... really...
work.
We can really push them. We could blow this place apart if we wanted to.
We'd set up everything.
"The Ramones were all crazy".
Imagine being in a van with Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey forever.
I was in the van a lot, and let me tell you, "it wasn't fun".
I'd be sitting in the fucking van, "Come on, Joe, we've got to get to Buffalo tonight. "
He would come down the steps,
go back up because he didn't touch every other step or something.
He was... superstitious, but beyond. It was compulsive behavior.
He'd touch every other picket on the...
If he'd cross the street,
come back, start to cross the street...
I remember they would sit with their girlfriends.
Connie and Dee Dee would be there.
And Johnny'd be saying, "She's a pig. What are you doing with her?
"What are you doing with a pig?"
And just goading Dee Dee.
And Dee Dee would just be freaking out,
and pulling out that huge 007 knife, gravity knife.
And I was between them.
Dee Dee's lunging with this huge knife to stab...
Johnny's going, "You gonna kill me?"
As far as business goes, "Johnny was right on the ball".
He knew how to run that organization and business
and all the aspects of making sure the group had certain rules and stuck with them,
which I respected a lot.
"His personality sucked".
He was a controlling...
I don't know, a very controlling personality.
And difficult.
He was just trying to...
take advantage of a once-in-a-lifetime situation.
He'd try to be an adult about it.
And we were really dysfunctional. It drove him crazy.
He was unpleasant enough as it is,
so on top of that, we just instigated him into becoming a monster.