Interview with Marky Ramone

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.”

Marky Ramone offical website
Marky Ramone on Myspace

Ramones

After fifteen years and countless tours The Ramones’ love of rock n’ roll keeps them going strong, Joey tells Truepunk.

Archival December 1992 Interview by Steve Tauschke | steve@staff.truepunk.com | with The Ramones’ Joey Ramone.

“We’re a live band and a touring band and the key is spontoneity. It’s very exciting playing live, I mean it’s like instant gratification – it’s the ultimate high!”

Joey Ramone, gangly singer and unchanging face of New York punk rockers the Ramones is ruminating on the simplicity of the band’s approach and its 15-year success.

On the phone from NYC, slow-talking Joey, who punctuates each statement with a drawling ‘you know what I mean?’, almost sounds as starry-eyed as he did when he first started out in Forrest Hills in the mid-70s.

“We’re big fans of rock n’ roll and we’ve always been big record collectors,” he begins. “We really enjoy what we do, we enjoy playin’ live and goin’ out and playin’ for our fans because they are a unique bunch; they’re real rock n’ roll purists and loyalist diehards.

“We love playin’ and that’s what it’s all about and that’s what excites us. It’s what fuels us and without sounding cliched, it’s our love of rock n’ roll that keeps us going, you know what I mean?”

The Ramones – Joey, guitarist Johnny, bassist CJ and drummer Marky – recently completed a dream tour of Europe where audience responses rivalled the kamikaze stage dives and general skinhead-fuelled mayhem of earlier gigs in Mexico this year. Joey says he’s always thrilled to see crowds go beserk.

“It’s great! Hahaha! It’s all about letting go and it’s a release for fans and it’s just great to see them enjoying themselves. As a metter of fact we just came back this week from what’s probably been our most succesful tour of Europe yet. It was nine countries with twenty-four shows in twenty-eight days. We played Yugoslavia for the first time and when we got there the promoter told us the three biggest bands in Yugoslavia were David Bowie, Paul McCartney and the Ramones, which was a great feeling.

“We also did about six cities in Spain. The kids there, you know, the average age was about 20 or so and it was just like total insanity – like real mass hysteria! People were sayin’ that we were the Beatles of Spain!”

While the 33-track Sire Records compilation All The Stuff & More has kept Ramones fans at bay in recent months, Joey says a new studio album isn’t too far off.

“We go in in May and we’re working with Ed Stasium, who’s done all our orginal records since Leave Home and has been involved with us ever since. He’s also done both Living Colour albums and a number of other projects. He totally understands the Ramones so we’ll be going in and hopefully we’ll have an album ready by the early fall. We’ve been writing and we should have a lot of stuff by May to sort out the best for the record.

“But what we’re also really hopin’ to do is a live album and we’ve been talking to the record company about that because we’ve never had a live album released in America. The only one we ever had out (It’s Alive) was recorded on New Year’s eve in 1977 at the Rainbow Theatre in London. Everybody in the band wants a live album because we’re so tight right now. So we’re thinking about maybe doing it Australia or Spain and hopefully that’ll carry us through until the studio album is available.”

Another Ramones collectible to look out for in the short term is the quartet’s very own video release Lifestyles Of The Ramones, a one-hour documentary featuring not only footage and interviews of/with the band but also notable musicians (Debbie Harry, Anthrax) and identities (Sire President Seymour Stein) discussing the Ramones. Also included are uncut versions of all the group’s ten videos plus a handful of unreleased clips.

Meantime, New York’s famous punk brudders hit the road for more touring, ready to carve up another decade with a brazen punk attitude that has outlasted most of their peers.

“When we first started out, we just considered ourselves a rock n’ roll band and all that,” shrugs Joey, “but that’s too general, especially nowadays. To me, the meaning of punk is rebellious so it works well for us, it’s accommodating, you know what I meeeaaan?”