![]() ![]() Q: You played the punk clubs, like lower Manhattan's CBGB's, and drew about a hundred people in your home base. Photo © Alanna Alberts/Artist Publications But, we got signed to Sire, a small label, as a punk band and we put a single out in '76. I don't know how we got signed in '75, because the New York Dolls had left a black mark on New York and no bands got signed because The Dolls never made it. When we started, we didn't consider what we were doing as "punk," but we had a song, "Judy Is a Punk Rocker," so the press started labeling it as punk. We all knew each other and had lived in the same radius and met in an elevator and decided that we were going to do this. Like, everybody was supposed to sit in the living room and listen to Meatloaf records together. The easy listening thing was being pushed on us, where everybody was supposed to partake-your mother, your father, your sister and brother. In the early '70s there were The Stooges and Elevator, but after '73 or so there was nothing but disco shit, even heavy metal had a corporate sound-The Eagles, The Doobie Brothers. It wasn't Elvis and it wasn't the '60s, the revolutionary time in the history of rock'n'roll, when so many different styles and things went down and were accepted. It wasn't what we grew up with, and it wasn't what we loved and knew as rock. JOEY: When we started, we were all disgusted with everything on the radio and the state of rock and all the b.s. ![]() We wound up sitting on a couch in the club owner's office, Joey peering at me with one brown eye over the top of his sunglasses. "Oh, he talks lots," Johnny assured me, while successfully changing the topic. I said, "Well, I've already listened to you and Johnny being interviewed and we've been talking in the car (they'd told me that working with Phil Spector had been a nightmare, the man is seriously crazy and had pulled a gun on them-Dee Dee is telling me this but Johnny is squirming, he definitely does not want to talk about the gun incident (Johnny is the "business" guy in the band). A solitary spectre.ĭriving back from the radio interview, Dee Dee asked me who I wanted to interview later. At the record store earlier that afternoon, I heard, it had been the same thing. Joey stood off by himself, sort of swinging his arms back and forth and being distinctly, well, strange. Things you can't replace, things that evoke the early days. Johnny and Dee Dee didn't want to talk about it much-they'd lost all their equipment, and worse, their original leather jackets. ![]() Their equipment truck had been stolen the night before in LA. When I get to the club, there's a serious air of doom. And it never hurt to do the local college radio station a favor.ĭigital effects © Joy Williams/Artist Publications Can you pick them up at the club at the Keystone and bring 'em on up to the station for their on-air interview?" Well, Warner Bros had already asked if I wanted to interview them, so I figured it would be extra background for a story I was gonna write anyway. So, I get this call from Stretch, music director at KFJC: "My car broke down. People, lots of people, even told me they were glue sniffers, and that Joey was really crazy/stupid/wet his bed and someone even told me that they hated women and pushed them down the stairs. I mean, I'd met up with their reputation before I'd ever met any of them in the flesh, and that reputation was pretty mean. I don't know quite what I'd expected when I found I was about to meet the Ramones the first time. They shouted out a call to arms, and the rallying cry-'Hey ho, let's go'-started a movement which changed the course of rock. Adopting the common surname-Ramone was a pseudonym used by Paul McCartney-these four misfits from Queens, New York were the advance troops of a revolution: their purpose was to bring the primal energy back to rock'n'roll, to recapture the spirit of early Elvis and Little Richard, and, above all, to make it fun again. Johnny (Cummings guitar), Joey (Jeff Hyman vocals), Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin bass) and Tommy (Erdelyi drums) forged the Ramones in 1974. When we left England, the whole British punk scene kicked off. They told us they formed their bands after hearing our album. We went to England and were attracting all this royalty and all the people who would later become The Sex Pistols. Published in Artist Magazine, San Francisco ![]()
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