“There was always that baggage he carried around. “Dee Dee was very damaged,” Lemmy, a close friend and supporter of the Ramones, once observed. Dee Dee – né Douglas Colvin – was the band’s doomed rock’n’roll heart, a former army brat who reacted to his upbringing by becoming a teenage delinquent, guzzling and ingesting anything to get him off as he sold his body on Manhattan’s meat rack at 53rd & 3rd, later immortalised in the Ramones song of the same name. Johnny – born John Cummings and raised, like his bandmates, in the suburban enclave of Forest Hills, New York – was the heartless sergeant major, relentlessly pushing the band to keep the dollars flowing in,Ī right-wing taskmaster with a chilling blue-eyed stare who carried around a log book of venues and called gigs “jobs”. The frontline were each dysfunctional in their own way. Looking back with hindsight, each Ramone was simply exaggerating their individual personal traits on stage from behind lines already drawn in the sand.
Going underground: Riding the New York subway in 1975. “To the outside world they were this united front who never broke ranks, but individually they went separate ways,” says Mick Houghton, their original UK publicist. The united stance the Ramones presented was a lie. Beneath the goofy banter and incendiary stage shows lurked intra-personal dysfunction, psychological wreckage and lifelong trauma. As I found out when accompanying them on the road in the 70s, there was much more to the Ramones than just a blitzkrieg of noise delivered by four lovable cartoon characters operating under the same surname, and it was not all pleasant. The original ‘Bruddas’.Įxcept that’s not quite true.
Their secret weapon came from paying homage to the past rather than seeking to destroy it, taking their home city of New York’s classic pop legacy, stripping it down, speeding it up, then reimagining it all in a cartoon world populated by ridiculed Nazis, pinheads, perverts and punkettes called Sheena and Judy. They were first to tell rock it had got fat, overblown and dull, then present a scorching new blueprint to replace it. If anything was the ground zero of UK punk, then this was it.įorty years after their world-changing debut album, the Ramones’ standing as one of the most original and influential bands in history is beyond argument. With Johnny riffing like a buzzsaw, Joey gripping the mike-stand, and Dee Dee cavorting with his Fender Precision bass and bellowing the immortal intro “ Wun-too-free-faw!” before each high-octane assault, the likes of Blitzkrieg Bop, Beat On The Brat and Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue flew past as such velocity that, by the home stretch, there were no gaps between them, except when Dee Dee paused to lob a beer bottle he had just guzzled over his shoulder. An hour earlier, the four had careened through a set that wasn’t so much a collection of songs played one after the other as a sensory hit-and-run.
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