Interview with Marky Ramone
June 17, 2009 by Steve_Tauschke
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In their twenty-two years together, seminal turbo punks The Ramones wore out four drummers but none stood as tall and for as long as Marky Ramone.
Born Marc Bell, Marky kept the beat for his New York City brudders for a remarkable 1700 out of a total of 2225 live shows. He spent 15 years in the iconic helmet-haired punk quartet, keeping time on most of their classic records - End Of The Century and Road To Ruin among others - and today continues to celebrate a Ramones canon that still inspires leather-jacketed rock grommets the world over.
MARKY RAMONE’S BLITZKRIEG – April 2009 By Steve Tauschke
“I just felt that the 30 songs that we do are too good not to be played and it was time to play them again,” drawls Marky between bites of “cheese, garlic and onion” pizza in New York. “There is a whole new generation of Ramones fans out there so I decided to do this. And I made sure that the quality control is there and that it’s tight. We’ve been rehearsing and we just did Mexico City and parts of Italy and we’re gonna go to Japan.”
Having joined The Ramones from Richard Hell’s Voidoids in 1978, Marky replaced Tommy (who later produced the group) and remained in the line-up until its demise in 1996, save for a few years in the outer during the mid-80s to address his alcoholism, a problem he admits almost killed him.
“Dee Dee was doing a lot of drugs and so when we together there was always some kind of havoc so I had to get out,” he says. “Dee Dee was the main songwriter in the band then and if it was a toss up then I was gonna go.
“But it was the best thing that ever happened to me because it was getting to the point where I could have gone totally out of control and ended up in jail or killing myself or somebody else. I was driving drunk and it was really interfering with what I wanted to do.”
It was Marky’s drum roadie who first noticed his destructive behaviour. His tour manager then pulled himself aside and when that failed to curb him his band mates sacked him in 1983.
“All three of The Ramones confronted me and I then understood,” he says. “I didn’t say ‘go to hell, go f#*k yourself, I don’t need you, f&$k you’. I said ‘you’re right’. Drinking was a fun thing to do and I had good times on it but after a while you end up paying for your fun.”
Strangely, it wasn’t that intervention that forced him to kick his addiction to alcohol, namely “161’s - rum, Bacardi and rum”.
“I was at my parent’s house one day and I tried to stop (drinking) on my own which was ridiculous,” he says. “I looked in the back yard and I saw this dinosaur smiling at me and I turned around to wipe my eyes and turned back and it was still there. When I went through the DTs I saw dinosaurs, I saw snakes, I saw this one guy in the bath tub and he wasn’t even there! If anything else, that stopped me. Ha! When you see dinosaurs coming at you, you say to yourself ‘hey I think I gotta problem’.”
He checked into rehab and emerged fit and sober, re-joining the band in 1987 for another decade. Post-Ramones, he drummed for Dee Dee’s party outfit The Ramainz and also played on Joey’s 2000 solo album Don’t Worry About Me. Two years later, he and The Ramones realised a dream in joining their heroes Chuck Berry and The Beatles as inductees into the Rock n’ Roll Hall of Fame at New York’s Waldorf Astoria.
Now, as the only living member of the group’s longest-running line-up, Marky is the last man standing following the deaths of Joey from lymphoma in 2001, Dee Dee (drug overdose) in 2002 and guitarist Johnny (prostate cancer) in 2004.
“The most outlandish thing to me is how three Ramones died within the course of and year-and-a-half of each,” he says. “After a while I was very superstitious and I wanted my name not to appear on any of the merchandise with their names on it because I felt that it was a curse. I’m not a superstitious person but three in a row, you know, I got very paranoid.”
But Marky is still administering his remedial Ramonic tonic to the kids with a travelling jukebox of hits dubbed Marky Ramone’s Blitzkrieg featuring ex-Misfits singer Michale Graves and members of American anarcho-punks Anti-Product on guitar and bass. And for those who insist the ageing drummer is flogging a dead horse and should let the group rest in peace - think again.
“I would never call this The Ramones,” emphasizes Marky. “I would never step on the Ramones shoes. Believe me, I’m not doing this for the money, I’m not doing it for the fame, I don’t need any of that. I’m doing it because I enjoy playing these songs.
“We go through mainly the really good eras; when we first started, Rock n’ Roll High School, the Phil Spector stuff, the Road To Ruin stuff, I Believe In Miracles, Sheena, The KKK.., Blitzkrieg Bop, I Wanna Be Sedated - all the songs that I feel that made the Ramones what they were.”
When this lucky scribe was blessed with a phone interview with Joey back in 1990, the legendary beanpole cited the band’s admiration for their die-hard fans as a motivating force and factor behind their longevity.
“They’re the greatest,” concurs Marky who has a career-spanning DVD documentary The Job That My Brain out later this year. “After the show we would talk about that and we were grateful how the kids came out and enjoyed themselves. And that’s one of the main reasons I’ve kept this going.”
As a tribute to the ‘brothers’ he will always miss.
“You never forget, you think of the good times and the funny things and you laugh under your breath.”