My Unified Theory of the Ramones

Johnny Ramone would most definitely have been a Trump supporter.  Although he and I both were Reagan fans in the 80s, the Donald is where he and I would certainly have parted company vehemently.  But for a variety of reasons, this has been a summer of Ramones for me.  In fact, I had the opportunity to consider Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, Tommy, and Marky as individuals, and ultimately I arrived at a thought that I subconsciously knew to be true.  The Ramones are my all time favorite band.

SUMMER SOUNDTRACK, SUMMER READING

As longtime readers of OnceWereBachelors know, I like to choose a soundtrack for the summer.  Like all summer soundtrack bands, I initially selected a few that I could blast in my pick up truck on drives to and from the beach, and which would raise my spirits when I spun them on my Hi-Fi turntable.  I had chosen some good ones meeting those criteria.

But for whatever reason, independent of the soundtrack I was listening to, my summer reading started with the memoir I Slept With Joey Ramone, by Mickey Leigh, Joey's younger and much more hapless brother.  Then as I neared the halfway point of that book, I acquired a copy of Punk Rock Blitzkrieg, by drummer Marky Ramone, which I would quickly turn to next.  By then, the other bands had disappeared from my iTunes rotation, and a steady stream of Ramones vinyl replaced it.  Most popular on my playlist was the double live album It's Alive, a document of their December 31, 1977 show at the Rainbow Theater in London, a show which Johnny himself considered their zenith performance.  Personal faves Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, and Pleasant Dreams also got lots of airplay in my pick up.  Finally, after finishing these two books, I read Johnny Ramone's unusual little autobiography, Commando.

Nota bene, I never felt the urge to read Dee Dee Ramone's own memoir, Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones, because of his reputation as a notorious exaggerator, totally bereft of any serious credibility.  I guess his mastery of punk rock metaphor, as the Ramones' prolific songwriter, went hand in hand with his daffy and loose relationship with the truth.

RAMONES DIVIDED

After first blasting out of the gate in 1976 and establishing the blue print for all post-Beatles modern rock, the Ramones quickly became its own Nation Divided.  Joey occupied one coast, a Blue Stater in everything but name, steeped in the Sixties counterculture ethos of individuality, inclusivity, beauty, poetry, and a good time.  Despite punk rock's disdain for filthy, smelly hippies, Joey for all intents and purposes, was one.  On the other coast was Red Stater, Johnny, who, upon induction into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame in 2002, famously accepted his award by saying "God Bless President George (W) Bush."*  The two became opposite ends of the compass, who were so estranged that they all but ceased to communicate.

MICKEY'S TAKEDOWN

Mickey Leigh did the best he could to posthumously deflate Johnny's legend.  Aside from providing much appreciated insider detail about being in the pull of the Ramones' gravity, Leigh found many opportunities to portray Johnny as a bully, greedy and venal, and willing to beat women, and utterly callous about Joey's untreated mental illness, especially his OCD.  I'm sure some of it was true, even the wife-beating, but I think Leigh's portrayal was a transparent attempt at giving his bitterness a target, a bitterness that was not really about Joey's treatment, but rather a bitterness that Leigh himself did not reap the meager benefits that his brother and the other Ramones enjoyed.  Leigh is responsible for much of the Johnny-directed hate within Ramones Nation.

And it was this abiding repulsion that Leigh's book left me with that made me regret the reaction I had years ago, on the morning I learned that Johnny Ramone had died at the age of 54.  I cried.  Unabashedly and immediately, for probably a good five minutes, I cried.  A full grown man, a father, and a professional, I cried.  It just hit me hard.  By the day of his death on September 15, 2004, Johnny was my favorite Ramone.  He was a punk rock stalwart, a stoic warrior of the ethos who gave in to no one, even in his devotion to the Reagan Revolution, a hard worker who suffered no fools, pulled no punches, and --  his often cartoonish music notwithstanding --  kept the Mickey Mouse to a bare minimum.  In that way, to me, Johnny was more a guitar-wielding Mercury astronaut than a musician.  By 2004, I knew that it was Johnny who kept the Ramones train rolling all those years, in spite of Dee Dee's severe drug addiction, Marky's alcoholism, and Joey's erratic mental health, all with virtually ZERO support from the radio or MTV or the industry of cool that is popular music.** Even in the inclusive and supposedly free-wheeling world of rock and roll, the Ramones were misunderstood, uncool outsiders, who survived largely thanks to Johnny's sheer strength of will.  Leigh's book made me question all that.

THE VIEW FROM THE DRUMMER'S SEAT

Then I read Marky Ramone's book.  Marky rode the Ramones' drum throne the longest, and although he wasn't the architect of their relentless 16th note attack (Tommy pioneered that), he laid down the beat on many of their most iconic and enduring songs.  I Wanna Be Sedated.  Do You Remember Rock n' Roll Radio.  Rock n' Roll High School.  Pet Sematery.

A word about drummers:  drummers are wired to be peace makers, conflict resolvers.  Guitarists and lead singers may think they are the leaders, and ostensibly they are, but drummers lead from behind.  I am a drummer, and I believe this.  It is our beat that moves the whole room.  The explosions of our cylinders propel the music.  And instinctively, we want harmony and rhythm in our band, our tribe.  Which explains, first why Marky's book was the way it was, and second, why I find it to be the most believable and honest.

Drummers also know that the rest of the band think the drummer is the most replaceable of its components.  True or not (mostly not), it is what keeps drummers humble.  It also makes them grounded, realistic, and clear eyed.  Keith Moon and Ginger Baker are exceptions, not the rule, and Marky was not like them. As evidence of this, I learn, Marky rehabilitated himself by becoming an A.A. disciple.  For the band.

And so Marky's memoir restored just a little bit of luster to Johnny's persona.  Per Marky, Johnny is still conservative and reactionary and jingoistic, and he is still a bully and a manhandler of "his" women.  But Marky affirms that he was also driven and, while demanding, also fair and just in his treatment of all the personnel that made the Ramones machine function.  Joey is still an untreated mental casualty with paralyzing OCD and awful hygiene habits, but it's clearer in Marky's book that Johnny is doing his best to deal with Joey's faults -- and Dee Dee's chronic drug abuse and kleptomania -- in order to knit the band together enough, so they could climb onstage every night, 200 nights a year for 22 years.

REQUIEM FOR HIMSELF

Before he reinvented himself as a Ramone, John Cummings was a prototypical juvenile delinquent, attended military school by his own choice, and held down a job as an ironworker for years.  He, Tommy Erdelyi, Jeff Hyman, and later Douglas Colvin, came from the same Queens neighborhood.  They talked themselves into forming a band (John and Tommy's second after the Tangerine Puppets), renaming themselves and developing an aesthetic in the process, and changing the face of popular music entirely by inventing punk rock.

His autobiography is the most remarkable of its type I've ever read.  I can only assume it was his own decision to name it after one of the Ramones' many great, loopy chest-beater songs, Commando.  It's title says a lot about what Johnny thought of himself.

In the book, Johnny confirms almost all of the accusations leveled against him in some of the most matter of fact prose this side of Hemingway.  Some of my favorite quotes:

     "We started 1978 on tour with the Runaways, a band of dykes"

     "I wrote the book on punk.  I decide what's punk.  If I'm driving a Cadillac it's punk."

     "In my head it was never officially over until Joey died in April 2001.  There was no Ramones without Joey.  He was irreplaceable, no matter what a pain he was.  I wouldn't have wanted to play without him no matter how I felt about him; we were in it together.  He never quit.  We broke up and he died ... I thought I wouldn't care and I did, so it was weird.  I guess all of a sudden, I did miss him. But he made an impact through his life, so he's still among us."

His book also reveals that he meticulously kept track of the details in his Ramones life, in a collection of cheap vinyl-covered day planners available at drug stores.  These were filled with terse notes:

     -June 23, 1975: played for Sire (Records) - received offer.  

     -June 7, 1976: Album: 113 on Billboard.  

     -Dec. 31, 1977:  Played London Rainbow Theater w/Rezillos, Generation X Att(endance): 2962 sold out.

This continued through the years until the end.  

      -March 16, 1996: Played Buenos Aries att: 43,000 Eddie (Vedder) at show.

In the end, I believe Johnny was less the selfish and heartless misanthrope that Mickey and Dee Dee would have him be.  He was less the false friend who stole Joey's girl.  Then again, he was also less the heroic figure climbing aboard the rocket to venture into space that I thought he was when I wept for him on the day he died.  He was more like the asylum orderly supervising the crazies who all harbored misperceptions of him.

If Johnny were alive today, I'm sure he would gleefully be cheering our current president on without remorse.  I'd give him that, even though I gravely despise that perspective.  After all, this is America, and America is where punk rock was invented.

*The Joey-Johnny dichotomy may have its origins in the fact that Johnny ultimately stole Joey's girlfriend out from under him in 1980, and eventually married her.  Johnny and Linda were together until the day Johnny died.  But that is of little consequence to my summer.

**Sire Records, the Ramones own label, and particularly its owner and his wife, Seymour and Linda Stein, are excused from this criticism.  They always stood by the Ramones with what little power and capital they had, even from the beginning when they first encountered the Ramones' unpolished act on the dingy CBGBs stage in 1976.

Mid-Sixties Honolulu

My parents married two years before I was born and I know a bit about their story. After the wedding my parents travelled often. Here are some pictures I have of them in the Honolulu of 1965 or '66.

I wonder what it was like for them before I was born. I imagine in their lines of work, without me to chase around, and at that time in Manila, life was pretty cushy. It shows in their faces, if you know them. Here they are at the Ala Moana Shopping Center, once known as the largest shopping mall in the world.


I love the way Mom is standing in the picture above, still at Ala Moana. Like one of those sixties models. Below, I don't see a bit of the game face that Dad almost always wore around me when I was a kid, nor do I see the stiff "parade rest" that I think was always for my benefit. I also love his trim trousers, Florsheim loafers (always Florsheim. The day he stopped wearing Florsheim, I knew he was mellowing), and the French aviator sunglasses. By the way, the parking lot below later became the location for one of Mom's medical clinics in the Eighties.


I also can't ignore Dad's shirts. Not exactly cheesy, but certainly not traditional either. I imagine those are the same shirts the Mercury 7 were wearing whenever they hit the Cape back then.

Next, they are with another couple in front of the apartment they bought. Pilots used it as a crash pad well into the Eighties, and I remember going there occasionally and finding three or four of them at a time. A new flight crew would move in every few days. After my father left the airline, he kept his interest in the place until the end, although he never used it other than to see old friends. We always referred to it as "The Apartment". We still see the other couple regularly.

The other "star" in the pictures is definitely old Honolulu. The sky seems emptier, more exotic. Today, there would easily be three times as many buildings in the background if you were to stand in the same spot and snap the same image. And this Savings & Loan failed long ago.

If I can steal some from Mom's albums, I'd love to show you some pics of them in Europe. Dad looks like a secret agent and Mom looks like Jeannie Shrimpton.

OnceWereBachelors Careers: International Airline Pilot

When you're a bachelor airline pilot flying international routes, you've literally got the whole planet stretched out before you. Possibilities are endless. Your life is a William Holden movie unfolding. You leave home, go someplace exotic, mingle, and return refreshed. When you get married and have children, as my father eventually did, not much really changes except now you miss home, you return to your wife, and you make sure you've got toys in your flight bag for the kids to rifle through in your den.

Before I was in preschool, my father flew routes between Manila, Honolulu, San Francisco, New York, and London for Philippine Airlines. Back in the late Sixties at PAL, that meant Douglas DC-8s. Flying to the States enabled my father to keep his hot American cars, as well as those of his race-car-driver pals, excellently equipped with Goodyear tires he had loaded in the cargo holds of his planes. Corvettes. T-Birds. Mustangs. PAL would send him to flight training with KLM in Amsterdam. That's where he acquired his French aviator sunglasses, Harris tweeds, pegged pants, and Florsheim shoes. The gold Rolex Day-Date Oyster Perpetual he also acquired while travelling, I believe in Hong Kong.

For the PAL pilots back then, Hawaii was a significant touchstone, a waypoint in more ways than navigation. Investments were made here. Real estate. Life insurance policies. Friendships. And of course it was so very much like Manila. So when airline management got chintzy with the pilots, and a strike they organized collapsed because of scabs who crossed the line, my father resigned from PAL, packed up his whole OnceWereBachelor life, and moved us all to Honolulu. He traded the large Metro Manila home with the den and bar and the maids and houseboy for a small cottage on hospital grounds where my mother became a resident physician, a profession she barely needed to practice while dad flew the endless skies.

My father considered a few options, the least promising of which was American International Airline Pilot. Something about quotas for non-American-trained flyers, despite the fact that KLM training was top of the industry back then. Next least promising was bartender. My father has never been very talkative or hospitable and smoky places make him irritable. Eventually, he settled on life insurance, which he turned into a nearly thirty-year second career. He barely looked back during those three decades. Once I asked him if he regretted ever leaving PAL. Without hesitation he scoffed at the thought and pointed out that if he hadn't he doubted he would have a lawyer son or a surgeon daughter. I tend to agree. Privileged Manila Kid is a dicey upbringing to have, but I digress.

Selling life insurance sure wasn't the same as world travel, hands at the controls, thousands of pounds of thrust at your command. So it is not lost on me that this was one of many, many sacrifices that my father made for the better of our family. In this day and age, where I myself espouse quality of life, insisting that I couldn't work at a job I was unhappy doing, my father's sacrifice is even more remarkable.

This is barely the story of my father, really. I mentioned the maids and houseboy? In this new, non-airline pilot life, dad did most of the feeding and cleaning and grocery shopping and bill paying, while mom built her medical practice. He drove us to and from school. And he sold life insurance with great success.

Dad's in his early seventies now, and thanks to grandchildren, I truly believe he's getting younger and younger. He hasn't worked in years. When they can pry themselves away from our kids my parents travel often, mostly to Madrid and Manila, anywhere we have family. But for the sake of my dad, even though he retired from Equitable Life, I like to think of him as a former airline pilot and I always will.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. There will never be enough of them in my lifetime and yours together for me to be able to express my love and gratitude to you.

Top: My dad in the right seat of a DC-8 cockpit.
Bottom: My dad and his red 1955 T-Bird.

What I Wore Twenty Years Ago

What I wore twenty years ago was a pair of Duck Head chinos from Britches Great Outdoors, a Brooks Brothers oxford button down shirt over a turtleneck, no socks, and L.L. Bean footwear, either leather bluchers or dirty bucks. I would hold my pants up with a braided leather belt from Jos. Banks; a belt which I still have but which is now unusable because of both condition and size. If the weather was inclement, I'd wear a Bean Baxter State Parka with a tear in the back from when Rich Matic and I went tumbling through a plate glass door in front of New South Dining Hall. This uniform would work for me for about three and a half seasons in D.C. If it was sunny -- in fact, daylight was the real prerequisite, not brightness -- I'd wear a pair of gold Ray Ban aviator sunglasses, but not the kind that Tom Cruise wore in Top Gun. They were more like the glasses Dennis Quaid wore in the "who's the best pilot you ever saw" scene in the Right Stuff, my all time favorite movie.

Ah yes, the Right Stuff, an incredible movie based on an equally incredible book by chronicler of zeitgeist Tom Wolfe. A movie that was meant to be a western with pilots instead of cowboys. Take stock of the Mercury Seven, portrayed with stylized verisimilitude by Scott Glenn (Alan Sheppard), Ed Harris (John Glenn), Fred Ward (Gus Grissom), and Quaid (Gordo Cooper, the best pilot you ever saw). Throw playwright Sam Shepard in as fastest man alive Chuck Yeager, for good measure. These were men who had public personae thrust upon them, when in fact all most of them (save John Glenn and his twerpy sidekick, Scott Carpenter) wanted to do was to navigate the holy coordinates of the fighter jock: flying and drinking and drinking and driving and screwing. How can you do that when you're expected to be Buck Rogers?