You are on page 1of 110

ROLLING STONE

PUNK
2009 PERSONS UNKNOWN ;-)

Blondie

A tough rock group rises about the New Wave with a disco beat June 1979 Deborah Harry's mother loves to tell the story of her daughter's singing debut. It seems that Debbie's sixthgrade class in Hawthorne, New Jersey, once staged a "Tom Thumb" wedding. "One kid would be the groom, one the bride and one the bridesmaid. Debbie sang the solo at the end; she sang 'I Love You Truly' all by herself!" Richard and Catherine Harry run a gift shop called Around the House in Cooperstown, New York, a sleepy little burg best known as the home of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The Harrys are a tightknit family. "The only Christmas she wasn't here was the time she was on tour in Australia," says Mrs. Harry of Debbie. "She was so depressed, and I was so depressed. She said, 'I'll never be away for Christmas again.' Debbie's a wonderful daughter." When Mrs. Harry or Cag, as she prefers to be called is asked if Debbie was popular with the boys, she erupts with laughter. "Are you kidding?" she asks. Mama tells about the time Debbie was approached to enter the high-school beauty pageant: "She didn't particularly want to go in; they called her in.

Platinum Blondie

And she asked me, 'What do you think?' And I said, 'I think it's ridiculous.' Her remark was, 'I have no talent. All I can do is twirl a baton.' "She was always beautiful," Cag Harry says with pride. "When she was a baby, my friends used to tell me I should send her picture in to Gerber's, because she would be picked as one of the Gerber babies. "But I didn't send it in," she adds solemnly. "I didn't believe in her being exploited." Debbie Harry, 34, is the star of Blondie, and she looks the part. However much it rankles the band members, however much their past press releases strived to ignore it, Blondie's initial notoriety stemmed directly from the public's response to Debbie. To put it another way, she's the only one in the hot new rock package who can't be replaced. That big, wide, angular face, with its innocent pout that somehow combines worldly glamour and naivete, is the group's most familiar symbol. Many people think Blondie is Debbie's nickname, a confusion that infuriates the band. There are even lapel buttons that announce, BLONDIE IS A GROUP. But so long as they work in a musical genre still dominated by men, she will remain the focal point. Blondie is one of the big success stories of 1979. After releasing two well-regarded but sparse-selling albums (1976's Blondie and 1977's Plastic Letters), the band shattered the New Wave's stigma of noncommercialism with Parallel Lines, an epic sleeper that was released last September and spent six months inching up the charts. The album's first two U.S. singles, "I'm Gonna Love You Too" and "Hanging on the Telephone" (a hit in Europe), sank without a trace, but "Heart of Glass," a sexy, pulsating love lament propelled by Debbie's stark vocals, became a surprise favorite that hit Number One nationwide in late April. The record, issued as both a 45 and a twelve-inch extended-play version, pleased the fickle disco crowd as much as the band's die-hard rock devotees. As a result, the members of Blondie have become important figures, if not heroes, to the dozens of New Wave acts seeking widespread acceptance in this country, and the latest overnight sensations in a diverse late-Seventies rock boom that includes Elvis Costello, the Police, the Cars, Dire Straits, Van Halen and Supertramp. As for Debbie Harry herself, the underground "punk Harlow" is not only a bright new star, but also the first rock pinup in recent memory. Since Blondie's inception in 1975, Debbie has been a fashion trend-setter as well as a sex symbol.

She contributed to the vogue of the thrift-shop look as much as anyone, once appearing onstage in a tacky wedding gown and telling the audience, "It's the only dress my mother wanted me to wear." Joan Rivers goes punk. At that time, Patti Smith was the other big female rock star in New York. Patti's bedraggled guttersnipe look was much more fashionable in those circles. There was pressure on Debbie to go dirty, but she stuck by her miniskirts and spike heels. With the passing of hard-core punk, it was Debbie's campy, Sixties nostalgia trip that came out on top, the strong visuals complemented by some of the best rock on the radio in a good long time. As Debbie warns in the band's new single: "One way or another, I'm gonna find ya / I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha." Blondie has just finished up a day in a Manhattan rehearsal studio preparing to record its as-yet-untitled fourth album. The atmosphere is chaotic; gofers and girlfriends wander around the room. Across the hall, there's a big roast beef and champagne bash for Carly Simon, who has just done a television commercial or something. Nigel Harrison, Blondie's mop-haired English bass player, guides me to the champagne, then introduces me to keyboard player Jimmy Destri and lead singer Deborah Harry. I can tell the moment Debbie lays eyes on me that she hates my guts. Her icebreaker is: "Why didn't you do this three years ago?" I assume she means Rolling Stone; she's another presshater. Back in the studio, drummer Clem Burke and guitarists Chris Stein and Frank Infante are jamming. Stein segues into "Rock Lobster," a tune by the B-52's, the New Wave group from Georgia. Mike Chapman, their producer, volunteers to round everyone up. I ask him if it's a good time for an interview; he replies with a winning smile. "Leave it to me. They do whatever I say." Before we get down to business, Chapman takes over the guitar and does a loose medley of songs. He's pleased with himself, but the guitar ultimately gets the best of him. He rips off one last power chord, announces that the interview will begin, and then bows out. Stein, who with his owlish specs (he rarely wears them in public) and prematurely graying hair looks like a young Allen Ginsberg, starts off with a message for everyone who has criticized the group for selling out: "Fuck you!" Debbie bursts into the room, wrings her hands and gives me pale, withering looks. "Why am I here at all?" she seems to be asking. Having cast her pall over the room, she rushes out again. Stein trots after her to see what's up.

The rest of us talk about the rock press. They all hate the rock press. We talk about the difficulty New Wave artists have had in getting airplay. Destri offers the opinion that the art-oriented media are just a backdrop to sell products. Chapman walks back into the room and says, "I think the music business is full of shit." His smile has become a leer. He looks like he's been hitting the bubbly. He says he's never going to do another interview again. "My favorite color is zilch," he adds. "My favorite people are nobody. My favorite thing to do is to go out and do nothing. I don't like anybody. I don't like anything. I don't like doing interviews. I hate everything except I love rock & roll, and the people who work for me are the greatest people in the world." Someone pipes up with, "What about sex?" Chapman responds gravely, "I never have sex. Sex is one thing a rock & roller does not have room for in his life. They took my cock off at the age of four." I ask him if he swapped it for a Chuck Berry album. He replies with the utmost dignity, "It would not have fetched that high a price." Debbie slouches back in, looking more tempest-tossed than ever. Her face is chalky with anxiety. Chapman tells her, "It's your turn. I've just said all the controversial things I can think of. Say something controversial, Debbie." She sits down on the edge of the stage and emits a morose, "Yeah." "Good," Chapman beams. "That was it. 'Yeah.'" The problem is that she wasn't expecting an interview; all she had been told was that she was to meet this writer me. There is a short discussion of whose fault this mess is. Debbie hates me, she hates Chris, right now she hates the world. She's just feeling rotten. I try to cheer her up, congratulate her for "Heart of Glass" being Number One. This makes her even glummer. "Yeah. It's Number Two. It was Number One for a week. Now it's Number Two." She looks like Mimi wasting away in La Boheme. "We got bumped by Peaches and Herb," says Stein, "and it's not even the real Peaches." Now the storm breaks. Debbie hollers at me. Everyone looks down at the floor. I'm afraid she's either going to cry or pull a derringer out of her raincoat and shoot me. This is a roomful of miserable people. It's like a wake for somebody no one liked.

The second time I see Debbie, a week later, the atmosphere is much more copacetic, but then it's hard to go downhill from a debacle. We are at Power Station Recording Studios, which is in the middle of being renovated, so there are boards and nails and hammers everyone. The room we are in seems to have no other raison d'etre than to intervene between the hallway and the bathroom (sign on the bathroom door: HIT RECORDS MADE WHILE U-WAIT). Debbie refuses to be interviewed without Stein, 29, but he keeps wandering off to fiddle with dials. The couple never seem to be separated for very long. Even those in their inner circle say they don't really understand the relationship. One insider told me, "She can't do anything without him. It's kind of spooky." Debbie is curled up in a dusty alcove. The window is boarded up rather clumsily, so a single bar of sunlight streaks across her. I ask about her image as a fashion plate. "I don't do the campy stuff anymore," she replies. "I've eliminated all that, the secondhand store look. I've outgrown it, you know? I can afford to buy clothes and to have them made, so now it's more what I would specifically choose to wear." Her voice is very soft. "What I do now is more of an image. It sticks in peoples minds." Which isn't to say that she doesn't look funky nowadays. Today she's wearing red tights, red high heels and a childish, embroidered smock that she is continually tugging on and smoothing out. The daughter of a salesman in Manhattan's fashion district, Deborah Ann Harry was born in Miami and raised in New Jersey. She has one younger sister, Martha, and a cousin, Bill, now in college, who has lived with the family since his early teens. When Debbie left home and moved to Manhattan, her first apartment was on St. Marks Place in the East Village, down the street from poet W.H. Auden's residence. Her initial stab at a musical career, a brief and ill-starred effort, was with a Mamas-and-Papas-esque group called Wind in the Willows. Next came a long stretch as a New York survivor. She kept her artistic credentials alive by hanging out on the periphery of the Warhol crowd, writing and painting while supporting herself with a succession of jobs as a beautician, Playboy Bunny and barmaid at Max's Kansas City, the rock bistro where she would eventually be a headliner. There was a flirtation with heroin. Then she found her milieu with a campy glitter band called the Stilettoes. Chris Stein joined the band shortly after her first club gig with them.

The Stilettoes went down with everybody else in the Great Glitter Crash that began in the early Seventies. By then, Debbie and Chris were a team, romantically as well as musically, and together they founded Blondie. Looking back on her career, does it fit together, or was it something more experimental, a case of trial and error? "A lot of people think that everything you do is, like, preconceived," she offers blandly. "Yeah, it's been good, because it's been very inspired whatever happened was it. Our biggest consideration was just to survive, so, like all art forms are frivolous. That's what 'stay hungry' is all about. "Now we're sort of at an in-between stage, commercially and artistically. We're at a stage where we are what we are, and we've been clearly defined, and there is a market for us, right? So we're taking steps in our direction, you know. We're moving on, we're doing things, but we're doing things that people can identify. We're not taking a total turn from what we've been classified as. But, like, the next things that we do, we could very well do a total turnaround." I, for one, find her statements difficult to follow. She alights from the alcove and wanders about restively. She picks up a can of two-penny nails, takes a handful and fretfully stabs them at things. I ask her about something Clem Burke told me the night before at Max's: "We want to be one of the great bands, not like the Grateful Dead." Debbie frowns thoughtfully. "The things we've done to stay together as a group and all are pretty amazing, so I don't see any reason why we shouldn't be one of the greatest rock groups. I mean, to be a rock group, to do what we do and stay together without any, like, real dictatorial leadership, it's pretty strong. It's very strong. It's like, if we weren't musicians, then maybe we'd all be at the track every day, and we'd always be in hock, because we'd be heavy gamblers. It's the same kind of drive, I guess." Debbie Harry is elusive; if you look at her too intently, she turns vaporous on you, like a Cheshire cat. I've noticed that she never looks the same in any two photos. In person, she looks like none of them. She is pretty, but she doesn't look like she feels pretty. Rather, she looks tired, spent. "It smells like a dentist's office in here, doesn't it?" she asks. A cigarette butt is smoking in the ashtray, so she fills it up with water from the tap, which doesn't do much for the room's smell. Stein is back.

Suddenly we're talking about the Sixties. As usual, Chris is trying to work in one of his radical-alarmist conspiracy theories, while Debbie responds on a personal level. "That's like the pathetic thing," she says. "People have really been dictated to a lot in the past couple of years, tastewise. I mean, eccentricity has been really frowned upon. Really, it's very frightening. You know, it makes you feel really endangered by being any kind of weirdo in this country." The musical term New Wave sounds more like the name or a laundry detergent, and if it can be applied to a song like "Heart of Glass," that makes it even more meaningless. Thus far, the single has sold close to a million and a half copies; Parallel Lines has gone platinum. The reason is simple: the hooks are irresistible a bright, bouncy organ and a bunch of cute triplets. As New York DJ Cousin Brucie used to say, "It's in the grooves." From the outset, Blondie's sound was built on a driving, compulsive beat and spacey keyboards, with Debbie's dreamy, almost uninflected vocals drifting over it all. Chris and Debbie found their rhythm section in drummer Clem Burke and bassist Gary Valentine, who knew one another from Jersey school days. With the addition of Jimmy Destri on keyboards, the original lineup was complete. Early in 1976, Richie Gottehrer, formerly of the Strangeloves, coauthor of the 1966 British hit "Sorrow," the man who made the McCoys ("Hang On Sloopy") semihousehold words, discovered Blondie at CBGB's, the sleazy dive on the Bowery that was then in the process of becoming famous. He brought Larry Uttal, the president of the small, New York-based Private Stock label, to their show. They heard the jingling of cash registers. "I was very turned on by the sound of her voice," Larry recalls. "She had that early-Fifties sound that was becoming popular again. She reminded me of Rosie and the Originals, the Tassels." Blondie's first record, the single "X Offender" backed with "In the Sun," was coproduced by Gottehrer. It didn't sell very well but provoked a lot of interest, at least enough to follow it with the first album. "He was really instrumental in breaking us," says Debbie of Gottehrer. "We got a lot of airplay at a time when New Wave music was totally untouched, and a lot of it had to do with Richard's name on the product." Meanwhile, Blondie hired a new manager. Gottehrer had been managing them as well as producing, but he didn't think he had time to do both.

He and Larry Uttal put their heads together and nominated Peter Leeds. The band hired him. It turned out to be a perfectly symmetrical bit of irony: a year later, both Uttal and Gottehrer were out of the picture. Blondie made its West Coast debut in February 1977 at Whisky in Los Angeles, where by all accounts the band went over like gangbusters. Rodney Bingenheimer, DJ and professional hanger-out, particularly gave them a boost. While in L.A., they were hired to support Iggy Pop on his American tour with David Bowie that spring. When I ask Clem Burke what was the high point of Blondie's career, he replies, "Aside from all the success, I'd have to say meeting David Bowie. That was good. We are all Bowie freaks. There have been so many things that have taken us over a hump, but that was definitely the first biggie: getting to Toronto and meeting Bowie and Iggy and having them come into the dressing room and introduce themselves and say, 'We're gonna have fun on this tour.' I called myself a rock & roll virgin, which is really what we all were, because we weren't used to meeting rock stars and all that. But they don't like to hear, 'Oh, I grew up on you.'" On July 4th, 1977, Gary Valentine, bass player and coauthor of "X Offender," split from the group. He still cites the same reason for the split that he used then, "artistic integrity," but when you talk to him about it, that translates into resentment of the despotic concentration of power in Stein and Harry. "I would write six songs, and they would say, 'Okay, we'll do this one.'" (Valentine moved to Los Angeles and formed the Know, a three-piece band also managed by Peter Leeds. There are rumors of a record deal, the latest involving Capitol. "But I don't think we'll be signed to Capitol," Valentine tells me. "I had a dream about that, and they didn't offer me enough money. I told them no.") Blondie then recorded its second album, Plastic Letters, with bassist Frank Infante, an old Jersey chum of the group's. He subsequently joined the band, and moved over to guitar when Nigel Harrison was hired to play bass. On Labor Day of 1977 came the Big Move, the switch from the small Private Stock label to Chrysalis, an aggressive independent company. Private Stock is one of those tiny independents that seem to luck into a couple of hit records but can't translate the windfall into a coherent company policy. Private Stock had two lucrative flukes in "Fifth of Beethoven" by Walter Murphy and Samantha Sang's "Emotion," but one gets the impression that it didn't quite know how to chart Blondie's course.

When you ask Leeds or the group what was wrong with the way Private Stock handled them, the answer from all sides is "everything." Specifically, the problem was cash, or rather the lack of it. It seems that everyone had intimations of rock immortality for Blondie except the label. The company simply wasn't coming up with the money and commitment that Leeds felt he needed to break the act. There were also internal group problems with the Blondie image (i.e., Debbie's image) being projected to promote the records. This culminated in the famous poster of Debbie in a black, beaded, see-through top very trashy-flashy, very sexy. The group was afraid that it was being packaged behind an image of Debbie as a turn-on for dirty old men. Debbie detested the poster; the group was angry. Jody Uttal (Larry's daughter), director of publicity at Private Stock and the original Blondie raver, still defends the promotional campaign. "At the time, it was the only way we had to market them. We had to promote them somehow, and that was all we had." Clearly, it was a great way to push posters, but not records. Leeds raised $500,000 to buy out Gottehrer and Private Stock $400,000 for the label and $100,000 for Richie. Then he took them to Chrysalis, where President Terry Ellis was crazy for the act. Chrysalis Records grew out of a talent agency started in the mid-Sixties by two enterprising young Englishmen, Chris Wright and Ellis. Their first signings were Ten Years After and Jethro Tull. The sensational success of Jethro Tull in the U.K. led to the establishment of Chrysalis there. Tull's importance to Chrysalis hasn't diminished; to this day the act remains the label's bread and butter. In 1972, Ellis and Wright, their roster strengthened with the addition of Procol Harum, launched Chrysalis in America by entering into a joint distribution deal with Warner Bros. Four years later, the label went independent in the U.S. Since then, Chrysalis has developed a reputation as one of the more adventuresome and well-managed independents, achieving limited success with such acts as the Babys and Rory Gallagher. But it wasn't until last year that they had a Number One hit record in America Nick Gilder's "Hot Child in the City" (also produced by Mike Chapman). Blondie has been almost as important to Chrysalis as Chrysalis has been to Blondie. "We sort of stumbled together at a certain moment in time and helped each other to progress," Ellis says.

On paper, Leeds is still Blondie's manager. They are now engaged in the legal process of dissolving their relationship. Leeds' office on Madison Avenue is perched way up, on a corner, with a terrific view. The walls are covered with Blondie's gold records, posters for European Blondie concerts, miscellaneous Blondie promotional junk. Peter is tall and thin, with floppy, shoulder-length saltand-pepper hair styled in an effete, sort of Italian Renaissance look. He is a very energetic fellow. When he talks to you, he fixes you with these intense, unwavering puppy-dog eyes. And when I ask Leeds about Chrysalis, he hops on the topic like a hound on a bone. "You know I made a little history when I made the Blondie deal," he says. "When in the history of rock & roll music did somebody lay down $500,000 to buy the recording rights to a group that had sold fourteen records?" Under Leeds' tutelage, Blondie embarked on a five-month, low-budget world tour. They had already toured England in May of 1977, and this globe-trotting trip, including Europe, Australia, Thailand and Japan, confirmed them as international artists. Thailand made the deepest impression. Almost as important as the defection to Chrysalis was the hiring of Mike Chapman to produce Parallel Lines. According to Leeds, this was how it happened: "The guy who was doing Blondie's press at the time, Toby Mamis, brought Mike Chapman to hear Blondie at the Whisky. Mike loved them, came back every night. And I wrote him a note on a napkin. The note said, 'If I ever get out of this thing and there's a possibility of a new producer, I promise you the first shot.' "Now I had forgotten that I had written this note. In July of 1977, I was at Mike's house in Beverly Hills, and he went to his desk drawer and showed it to me. And last week in Los Angeles, we talked about the note, and he said to me, 'I'm going to frame that note someday.'" Chapman was Terry Ellis' first choice as well. It wasn't a question of getting Gottehrer out of the picture; he and the group have continuously maintained cordial relations, but he had wanted to concentrate on his latest discovery, Robert Gordon. The rest of the story is, as they say, history: enough gold and platinum Blondie records to tile the bathroom, the awards reflecting their popularity not only in Europe, Australia and practically everywhere else, but also, finally, in America. One big question mark for them now is their management.

The group presently relies on a combination of lawyers, booking agent, publicist, business manager and above all, Mike Chapman to provide the direction they lack. No one seems to be too crazy about Leeds; he's about as popular with Blondie as Martin Bormann would be at a B'nai B'rith convention. Mentioning Leeds' name in the middle of a talk with Debbie and Chris and Jimmy nearly causes total meltdown. Neither side is willing to discuss the split while litigation is still in progress, but it is clearly an extremely acrimonious affair. The members of Blondie are emphatic in their belief that Leeds contributed nothing to their careers. Both sides hint at deep, dark revelations, monstrous acts on the other side that will make the blood run cold when all is laid bare. Blondie appears to suffer from an acute case of worldweariness. Debbie puts it succinctly: "Success is harder to handle than no success at all." Jimmy Destri offers the adage: "Money will never make you happy, and happy will never make you money." Chris Stein is more specific. "The hard part about success is that all your friends, all these people that you like, turn against you. It's amazing. Everything in this whole fucking scene is like a Grade B novel. Here's the band: they starve, they have no money. You sign bad deals, sign your life away to various deals, right? You spend all your money getting out of bad deals, then all the people you respect turn around and say, 'You sold out. You suck. I don't like you anymore.' "It's horrendous. It's just like the fucking shit you see in the movies. It's like all the old stuff your grandmother told you. Shep Gordon, a friend of ours [and manager of Alice Cooper] told us, 'You shouldn't spend all your money on a real expensive straight jacket,' which I think is a great truth of this business." One gets the feeling that Stein is afraid that this is just what they have done. And to them it is the press, above all, that is the straight jacket. In both of the conversations I had with him, he was on the press within minutes: in general, how horrible it is; specifically, the effect it has had on Debbie. "Debbie used to talk very freely," he says. "Just as a result of being abused and misquoted, she cut herself off. She isn't really interested in it anymore. The people that suffer are the fans and the artist. The fucking press gets to sell their newspapers, but the fans don't get to hear what the artists have to say, and the artists can't communicate to their public."

It was always Stein's avowed purpose to manipulate the media in the manner of Andy Warhol. It worked well in the beginning; Jody Uttal believes that it was Blondie's close relationship with press that contributed more than anything else to the band's initial success. They were very cozy with such New Yorker fanzines as Trouser Press and New York Rocker, but Blondie can't seem to take the heat of the mainstream press. If Stein is articulate about his negative feelings toward the Fourth Estate, Debbie's reaction is a muttered admission of terror. When you ask her a question, no matter how innocuous, she reacts like a deer to the smell of gunmetal. The people around her talk in this memorizedsounding monotone about how much pressure there is on her, but when you ask if the pressure is too much for Debbie, you don't get an answer. What has happened to the calm, good-natured beauty queen from New Jersey? When you swim with piranhas, either you become a piranha or you get chomped. Some people are born piranhas; other people are by nature so unsuited for piranhahood that they never get the hang of it. Instead of getting devoured, they end up devouring themselves. Dynamically, Blondie seems to be divided into two groups: Debbie and Chris on the one hand and the guys, as they are usually referred to, on the other. These two aren't necessarily adversaries, but their interests aren't always mutual. One point that was impressed on me by various insiders was, "The money doesn't all go to Debbie, you know," which is a backward way of saying that a lot of it does. Debbie and Chris have formed a production company with Robert Fripp to do a remake of Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville, a classic film from another New Wave. And she has just completed a film called Union City, in which she plays the wife of a psychotic killer. Stein would rather talk about his brand of radical politics than show business or, specifically, music. One senses that this is irksome to the members of the group, who regard themselves totally as musicians and are always itching to play. Burke, Infante and Harrison are for touring; Destri, Stein and Harry are against touring. But these things have a way of working themselves out: this summer, Blondie will tour America, beginning with New York's Central Park in July and concluding with the Greek Theater in L.A. in August.

According to Debbie, "We always agree on the music. If somebody doesn't want to do a song, we just don't do it, that's all." At any rate, they work well together in the studio, and most of the credit for the proper chemistry goes to Mike Chapman, their benevolent dictator and father figure. Talking about the new LP, he says, "There's loads of hits, it's a great album, but who gives a fuck." His smile can hardly get any bigger when he says, "It's easy you see. When we go into the studio, we go in and make hit records, and it just happens. We don't think about it. If you're gonna be in the music business, you gotta make hit records. If you can't make hit records, you should fuck off and go chop meat somewhere." Blondie is back in the studio again. In today's case, it's a bright, quasi-rustic place on the West Side that resembles a very posh toolshed. The band is laying down basic tracks for a Chris Stein ballad called "Shayla." As always, there are a million problems, but everything is going well enough. Debbie flounces into the control room with a bag of pistachios. Chapman sees her, motions through the window for her to give him some. Goggling, she takes a handful of nuts and showers them against the window. Infante, a slightly scaled-down version of Keith Richards, comes by looking a little hungover. Destri, who is sitting this one out, announces to the room, "Will somebody give me a drink, please? I'm desperate." Chapman tells Burke what he wants on the drums: Make it so straight, so simple, that it's moronic." During a break, their road manager, Bruce Patron, brings in a stack of publicity stills to be autographed. Debbie asks him who they're for. "They're for my souvenir stand on Fourteenth Street," he says with a straight face. Then he unveils their latest trophy, the framed Billboard Hot 100 chart from the week "Heart of Glass" was Number One. They all crowd around to peer at it but don't seem terribly impressed. Debbie sashays away from the rest of the band, looking like Tuesday Weld in one of her moodier roles. She gazes off vacantly into the empty studio. The next album will be out soon; it will probably outsell Parallel Lines. Every date on the summer tour will likely be a sellout. The boys in the front rows will idolize Debbie, lust after her, and everyone will go out the next day to buy Blondie records. There will be more money, more magazine covers But Debbie Harry seems to greet the future with a sigh.

I am reminded of something her mother told me about her now-famous daughter. "She is shy," Cag Harry confided. "When she's not performing and you must know this she's quiet, with a very pixie sense of humor. She's not real outgoing or loud. She's sort of retiring." As for the strong hankering for security that I perceive in Debbie, Mrs. Harry says, "She's very family-oriented. As a matter of fact, she's more family-oriented than any of the kids. She's the one that got homesick at camp." That was a long time ago, but as Mike Chapman plays back the band's last session take, I consider Blondie, Debbie's extended family, and I wonder what kind of refuge it offers her now. A line from "Heart of Glass" springs to mind: "Once I had a love/And it was a gas/Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass." Maybe Debbie Harry feels the same way about success.

Q&A: Debbie Harry

Blondie singer is in awe of great rappers April 2004 The Curse of Blondie, the band's second studio album after a sixteen-year hiatus, is a roller coaster of styles, from "Hello Joe," a jangly tribute to Joey Ramone, to "Magic," based on a Japanese folk song, to "Good Boys," in which frontwoman Debbie Harry oscillates between a rap reminiscent of Blondie's 1981 hit "Rapture" and the pouty high notes she delivered on the band's classic "Heart of Glass." It was only after "Good Boys" became a hot club track in Europe and Australia this winter that the decision was made to release The Curse in America. Thinking about the past, Harry says, makes her "suddenly realize that I'm really old," but judging from her March 24th appearance on Late Show With David Letterman, Harry, 58, is still a commanding presence, with more sex appeal than most rock chicks half her age. What's the first album you fell in love with? It was a compilation album called I Like Jazz: Paul Desmond and all this really, really heavy from the Fifties. I didn't have a lot of money records, and at that point you couldn't really I'd listen to a lot of radio. Fats Waller, jazz stuff to buy download, so

Still in Rapture

Growing up, did you have a radio in your bedroom? Yeah, a little radio where I could have my ear right next to the speaker. In those days DJs could be freaky -- the late-late-night DJs were the ones. Funky, soulful stuff, maybe a little bit of rock. What could be better? I was always a radiohead.

So it must have been nice to hear Blondie on the radio. Chris [Stein, Blondie guitarist] and I were walking, and someone drove past and I heard some music. "Oh, gee, that sounds good! That's us!" Quite a moment. I think it was "Rip Her to Shreds." I went to the dry cleaners two days ago, and "Rapture" came on. It sounded OK. How much of a part do you think "Rapture" played in the evolution of hip-hop and rap? Creatively it did one thing in particular: It was the first rap song to have its own original music. Commercially it made rap viable for the mainstream charts. I don't think it was a tremendous influence. I am nowhere close to being a rapper. I'm completely in awe of great rappers. Like who? Missy Elliott and Lil' Kim, Ludacris and 50 Cent. All of the subtle, rhythmic things they do with their phrasing is really outrageous. When you worked as a waitress at Max's Kansas City, which musicians were you most excited to serve? Janis [Joplin] having her filet mignon that she probably ate two bites of. Jefferson Airplane were chatty; I brought them lamb chops. What's his name from Traffic? Stevie Winwood. He was cute. Mmm. Put him on the sex list of the time. Sure. . . . How did you come up with the name Blondie? Chris lived on First and First in Manhattan, and I was walking to his house to write songs. The street noise was, "Hey, blondie! Hey, blondie!" I'm like, "Jesus . . ." Because we were trying to think of a band name and there it was, right in front of me. Is there one word that you've been proud to use in a song? Yes. I was so excited that in "Picture This" I rhymed solid and wallet. I said, "Wow. Things are happening now!" [laughs] Who's the best-dressed performer out there? Pink! She's a little boyish, but her costumes are really exciting. I'm a little confused by Christina Aguilera -there's no continuity as far as her identity through her clothing.

You were at Courtney Love's recent outrageous show in New York. What'd you think? I thought she was fascinating and dynamic -- she's an incredible performer, and her madness is such a great part of that. But the band, musically, was really very . . . nothing. What was the craziest afterparty, back in the day? We had great loft parties that were pretty far out. I remember one -- I don't know if it was an after, a before or an ongoing, but it really lasted a long time. It was down on the Bowery, right when Blondie was picking up steam. Our landlord was this crazy maniac queen. He really loved the Hells Angels, and he was always in biker drag. The loft was above a liquor store, so we had bums drinking Night Train. And it was a block away from CBGB, so take it from there. When the party was over, all our records were missing.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame 2006

Deborah Harry and Chris Stein share the rapture March 2006 Blondie were the most commercially successful act to emerge from CBGB's late-Seventies punk scene, but the band rarely received the same critical recognition as fellow New York scenesters the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith Group and Television. But in the two decades since their initial run ended, Blondie's Warholian fusions of pop forms and nervy streetwise attitude has left an indelible stamp on an array of artists, ranging from Madonna to Franz Ferdinand. With their iconic status now undeniable, founders Chris Stein (guitar) and Deborah Harry (vocals) share their thoughts on Blondie's legacy and how it feels to be joining many of their punk-era peers in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Blondie's stature seems to have risen over the last twenty years. Have you noticed it? Harry: For me, it became apparent when, all of a sudden people were telling me Blondie was an icon, and I just sort of swallowed hard and thought,

Blondie

"Oh my god! When did that happen?" I think if you just keep going long enough, it starts to pay off. Thirty years ago, if someone told you that there would be a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and Blondie would be a member along with the Ramones and Talking Heads, I imagine that would have seemed pretty absurd. Stein: Yeah. The Ramones [situation] is a very similar thing to Blondie. You have this band has this huge worldwide influence, but they just never really quite made it. Even though everyone draws from them and references them in their music, and everybody knows who they are, still they never made it onto the A list. Is it true American DJs wouldn't play your records early on because of their perception of you as punks? Stein: Yeah, somewhat. But the whole thing was crazily out of whack. What I keep saying is that the first two Rolling Stones albums are completely punk style -- they're R&Bbased, but all the irony and the rawness and the speed and crazy sounds are there. It's all a matter of perception. Do you remember where you were when you heard that "Heart of Glass" went to Number One? Harry: We were in Milan at a hotel near the Duomo. [Producer] Mike Chapman got the news and invited us all down to the bar to have a toast. You had your greatest success once you teamed with Chapman. What did he bring to the party? Harry: He had a strong reputation in radio as a hitmeister and great record producer, and he really was. He took us in hand and made us really aware of what the recording process was about and how we could best do what we did within our technical restrictions, because none of us were really technical players. He just educated us all and he made it fun, and he was nutty but smart. It really became a different process for us. Stein: The recording process with Chapman was completely different from what goes on nowadays. People who work in the studios tell me these bands come in now and spend a week recording and two months editing. It was exactly the opposite with us: We spent months putting the stuff on tape and once we worked so hard to get the specific parts on tape, then it was very easy to mix -- it just happened by itself.

Of all the songs the two of you have written together, which would you pick as the quintessential Blondie track? Harry: Performance-wise, the song I get the most out of is "Rapture," because we've taken it in a lot of different directions. The fact that it has this rock-ballad, R&B kind of feel at the beginning, then it goes into this rap and then we break it down allows us to do all kinds of things to it now that aren't on the recording. Every time we go out, we add another dimension to it. On our last tour, Chris did this thing at the end where we completely break down the song and he goes into this delta blues thing that's just great. It's just a great song that we can fuck around with, and yet it still holds together as this identifiable piece of music. When you recorded "Rapture," did you have any idea hip-hop would become as big as it did? Stein: The first hip-hop stuff we encountered was in 1977. Around that time I was talking to a lot of higher-ups in the record industry, all these heavyweights, and almost 100 percent of these guys told me hip-hop was a passing fad. The excitement at the first couple of hip-hop things we saw was really tangible, and it was obvious that it was a really exciting movement. The black kids weren't involved in what was going on downtown with us. This was their personal thing. I was always behind it, myself. There's a lot of crappy hip-hop going on right now the same way there's a lot of crappy rock & roll. But there's also a lot of really great stuff going on. You thought enough of "Rapture Riders" [a mash-up of "Rapture" and the Doors' "Riders on the Storm"] to include it on [the new anthology] Greatest Hits: Sound & Vision. Stein: Oh yeah, that was an exciting thing. I quite like it. I had heard it on the Internet, and I guess we made it official by putting it on the album. I'm kind of amazed how well those songs fit together. How did the re-recording of [1976's] "In the Flesh" come about? Harry: I was going to do a little show at a friend's club, and he suggested that we do a fresh treatment of "In the Flesh" since it was the first song we ever had go to Number One [in Australia]. So we went in and recorded this new version and he produced it.

Actually, that really excites me a lot more than the "Rapture Riders" thing. I'd like to redo a lot of old material - sort of bring it up to date - because a lot of the material is really good musically but suffers from a dated kind of style. What other songs would you be interested in redoing? Harry: I think a really great version of [1976's] "Man Overboard" could be done in today's world. And also a lot of material from my solo albums could be done -- a lot of that stuff was written by me and Chris. I think a lot of those songs are really beautiful but have been completely overlooked. Is the Sound & Vision cover one of the infamous photos Chrysalis rejected for the Plastic Letters cover because you guys looked too punk? Harry: Yeah, we'd never used them before. That's a hidden little treasure. Stein: I was watching that Don Letts movie [the 2005 documentary Punk: Attitude], and it reminded me how insane it was at the time with all this carrying on about the terminology, about what these words meant. None of that shit means anything to me now -- "punk" and "New Wave" and all these phrases. It's all just one form of music. But Chrysalis was really worried about us being stuck with this punk label. Given the way the band ended, has this time around felt like a second chance, or do you just look at it as another phase? Harry: I think probably both those things. This is clearly a different phase for us, because we're working with different musicians. But it is a second chance for the name "Blondie." Up until now I think we've felt we had to do shows that paid off the audience for coming by playing the songs they expected to hear. I think on this last tour we finally got our heads around a little bit more adventurous kind of show, which is really much more enjoyable for us, because then we can really take on the identity of who we are today and really play music. That's what's exciting.

Buzzcocks

Performance: Buzzcocks
Buzzcocks still playing the punk after nearly twenty-five years October 1999 Whether or not this was a punk show, depends on how you define punk. Are you talking about a style of music, loud and fast and out of control? Or are you talking about punk as a lifestyle fueled by rebellious rage and frustration? Because when discussing Buzzcocks live in concert in 1999, this distinction must be made. Buzzcocks burst vividly out of the late-Seventies British punk scene, playing pointedly furious music that, at its heart, was some of the most finely-structured guitar pop since the Beatles. They made it sound easy, and you'd call their songs "carefree" if all the lyrics weren't about how much life sucks bollocks. Broken up in the early Eighties over the usual nonsense, the group's two frontmen, Pete Shelley and Steve Diggle, reunited about a decade ago with a new bass player and drummer. Not so much a comeback as a resumption of working-band status, the reunion has produced three respectable studio efforts (including a new album, Modern) and French, an astonishing live recording of a 1993 gig. While Modern isn't quite the apex of Buzzcocks' career, that's quickly forgotten when you see the band live. They waste no time, tearing into new tunes and old favorites alike with ruthless efficiency and a bare minimum of chatter. New tracks like "Soul on a Rock," "Why Compromise?" and "Don't Let the Car Crash"

(a weird number that starts all trance-like before mutating into Def Leppard arena rock) benefit from a lack of studio noodling that has obsessed Shelley since his quasi-techno solo hit, 1982's "Homosapien." With only a four-piece band to play them the old fashioned way, these songs had a terse ferocity on stage, making them fine additions to Buzzcocks' canon of flame-thrower pop. But the unquestionable highlights of the show were the classics: "What Do I Get?," "Ever Fallen in Love," "I Don't Mind." In those instances, the band and crowd shared in the joy of music that aims for the angry young heart and hits it, dead on. The irony, of course, is that the crowd wasn't very young and the musicians certainly weren't. Nor did it seem like there was much genuine anger in the air (other than one guy who seemed to be having a nervous breakdown while lipsynching every word of "Boredom.") The music had all the torrid hallmarks of punk, but the show lacked verisimilitude, and the band spat more bemusement than venom. Still, can you blame Pete Shelley -- 44, married and completely gray -- for flashing a wry leprechaun smile while singing "Orgasm Addict" for the ten zillionth time in twenty years? Diggle, likewise, was once known for his Townshend-esque stage leaping, but his one timorous jump this evening led Shelley to gaze at him and mouth the words "you're crazy!" The crowd wasn't much different. Sure, there were more than a few old-school, pierced-septum punk holdouts, but you could have had the vast majority of those people cleaned up and ready for an interview at Microsoft inside of twenty minutes. Dignified strangers stood around before the band took the stage, warmly recalling fond memories of Buzzcocks shows of yore. There's an ad on currently on TV for some car (Volkswagen or something -- shows you how well advertising works) that uses the original recording of "What Do I Get?" as its soundtrack. Rather than seem like a sellout -- how many people are really going to recognize that song? -- the ad seems more like a tribute to the Buzzcocks' music, to its immediate appeal and the instant energy it can lend to something as prosaic as yet another dumb car commercial. So while the punk attitude, lifestyle and mission may not be the main thing at a Buzzcocks performance these days, the music -- the part that really matters -- has everything it needs to be punk at its best. It's fast, it's loud and it's exciting - even after a quarter century.

Buzzcocks

Buzz Back
Punk legends to release new album in March January 2003 Punk-pop pioneers the Buzzcocks will release their next studio record on March 18th on Merge Records. "The Buzzcocks" will be the only text printed on the front cover, but that shouldn't be confused with the album's title. "It isn't self-titled," says guitarist/vocalist Pete Shelley. "People think that because it doesn't have a title, the title must be 'Buzzcocks.' But it's not. It doesn't have a title -- it's not eponymous." It's not the first time the Manchester foursome has tinkered with static components of record-making. Just before the band broke up in 1981 (they reformed in 1989), it tried to issue three singles, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 with symbols in lieu of A's and B's to buck the A-side/Bside trend. The label compromised offering "P" and "Q" sides. "You gotta keep people on their toes," Shelley says. "This one is not untitled, because untitled is when you decide you're not going to call it anything. It's generic. Though I do like the sound of 'Untitled Number One.' I'm interested in what people will call it. I think because of the artwork they'll probably call it 'The Black Album,' or 'The Black and White Album.'" Whatever you call it, the Tony Barber-produced album is the band's first studio recording since 1999's Modern, and it might have been released last year, but after promotional duty for Modern wrapped, guitarist/singer Steve Diggle wiped out on a motor scooter in Greece and broke his wrist. In addition to the title, fans might initially be befuddled by a pair of songwriting credits ("Stars" and "Lester Sands") which are Shelley co-writes with Howard Devoto, his Buzzcocks co-founder in 1975.

Devoto left the band two years after it formed to start Magazine, but twenty-five years later the duo re-teamed for Buzzkunst, an album released last year under the name ShelleyDevoto. The recording was prompted by Shelley's desire to mark the band's anniversary, a plan complicated by Diggle's injured wrist. Despite the two co-writes, Devoto has not, it turns out, been pulled back into the fold. "Lester Sands" goes back to the band's early years and was included on Time's Up, a 1977 release that was issued after its songs had been regularly bootlegged. A band favorite at sound checks, the song finally received a more thorough treatment than its original four-track release. And "Stars" was written for and included on the Buzzkunst record as the wordier "'Til the Stars in His Eyes Are Dead." "I sent him a CD of some ideas I'd been working on," Shelley says. "And he said, 'Oh yeah, I've got something for that one.' It's the most Buzzcocks thing that came out of those sessions, and the lyric was the first lyric that Howard ever wrote. He wrote it when he was fourteen." Among Shelley's other favorites is "Jerk," the album's opener, which the band demoed five years ago, yet never quite managed to record just right. Drummer Phil Barker insisted the group continue working the track, and after speeding up the tempo, it made the cut. "Morning After" doesn't require much explanation, as the song was hatched amid a hangover's haze. "We had two days in the studio and Phil came in and he brought some cans of lager," Shelley says, laughing. "The inspiration got further and further away as the alcohol consumption increased, so I ended up not doing anything that day. Early the next morning, I had to go to a hairdress appointment to bleach my hair, and I was sitting in the salon waiting for the bleach to take effect with the worst hangover I've had in a long time. And as soon as I was finished I had to go straight to the studio, because it was the final day. So I thought, 'What can I write?' Oooh, my head. And I thought, 'There it is.'" The Buzzcocks have a six-date tour of Australia (launching January 31st) lined up, and further touring duty of Europe and the U.S. is expected to follow. Shelley is itching to head out and seems a bit flustered by the industry's current pace, which sometimes puts a year between an album's completion and its release. "We're champing at the bit, really," he says. "Albums and tours, everything was really compressed into a small space of time [in the Seventies].

Now things are a bit more spread out, it always seems to take far too long. You think, 'Wow, this is great, isn't it? Everybody should hear it.' And you realize that it's gonna be a year before anybody does get to hear it. But in some ways you anticipate it, it's almost like wanting people to open the Christmas presents you bought them. Wanting to see the smiles on their faces."

The Clash

Punk leaders set sights on America "Never mind that shit," says Joe Strummer, the thuggishlooking lead singer of the Clash, addressing the exultant kids yelling, "Happy New Year" at him from the teeming floor of the Lyceum. "You've got your future at stake. Face front! Take it!" In sleepy London town, during a murky Christmas week, rock & roll is being presented as a war of class and aesthetics. At the crux of that battle is a volcanic series of four Clash concerts including a benefit for Sid Vicious coming swift on the heels of the group's second album, Give 'Em Enough Rope, which entered the British charts at Number Two. Together with the Sex Pistols, the Clash helped spearhead the punk movement in Britain, along the way earning the designation as the most intellectual and political New Wave Band. When the Pistols disbanded early last year, the rock press and punks alike looked to the Clash as the movement's central symbol and hope. Yet, beyond the hyperbole and wrangle that helped create their radical myth, the Clash brandish a hearty reputation as a rock & roll band that, like the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen, must be seen to be believed. Certainly no other band communicates kinetic, imperative anger as potently as the Clash. When Nicky "Topper" Headon's singleshot snare report opens "Safe European Home" (a song about Strummer and lead guitarist Mick Jones' ill-fated attempt to rub elbows with Rastafarians in the Jamaicans' backyard), all hell breaks loose, both on the Lyceum stage and floor.

Anger On The Left

Like the Sex Pistols, the Clash's live sound hinges on a massive, orchestral drum framework that buttresses the blustery guitar work of Jones, who with his tireless twostep knee kicks looks just like a Rockettes' version of Keith Richards. Shards of Mott the Hoople and the Who cut through the tumult, while Strummer's rhythm guitar and Paul Simonon's bass gnash at the beat underneath. And Strummer's vocals sound as dangerous as he looks. Screwing his face up into a broken-tooth yowl, he gleefully bludgeons words, then caresses them with a touching, R&B-inflected passion. Maybe it's the gestalt of the event, or maybe it's just the sweaty leather-bound mass throbbing around me, but I think it's the most persuasive rock & roll show I've seen since I watched Graham Parker rip the roof off a San Francisco night club almost two and a half years ago. I try to say as much to a reticent Joe Strummer after the show as we stand in a dingy backstage dressing room, which is brimming with a sweltering mix of fans, press and roadies. Strummer, wearing smoky sunglasses and a nut-brown porkpie hat, resembles a roughhewn version of Michael Corleone. Measuring me with his wary, testy eyes, he mumbles an inaudible reply. Across the room, Mick Jones and Paul Simonon have taken refuge in a corner, sharing a spliff. "You a Yank?" Jones asks me in a surprisingly delicate, lilting voice. "From 'ollywood? Evil place, innit? All laid back." According to the myth encasing this band, Jones who writes nearly all of the Clash's music, is the band's real focal nerve, even though the austere Strummer writes the bulk of the lyrics. In the best Keith Richards tradition, fans see Mick as a sensitive and vulnerable street waif, prone to dissipation as much as to idealism. Indeed, he looks as bemusedly wasted as anyone I've ever met. He's also among the gentler, more considerate people I've ever spent time with. But the same evening, sitting in the same spot, Mick declines to be interviewed. "Lately, interviews make me feel 'orrible. It seems all I do is spend my time answering everyone's charges charges that shouldn't have to be answered." The Clash have been hit recently with a wide volley of charges, ranging from an English rock-press backlash aimed at what the critics see as reckless politics, to very real criminal charges against Headon and Simonon (for shooting valuable racing pigeons) and Jones (for alleged cocaine possession).

But probably the most damaging salvo has come from their former manager, Bernard Rhodes, who, after he was fired, accused the band of betraying its punk ideals and slapped them with a potentially crippling lawsuit. Jones, in a recent interview, railed back. "We're still the only ones true to the original aims of punk," he said. "Those other bands should be destroyed." The Clash formed as a result of Joe Strummer's frustration and Mick Jones' rock ideals. Both had been abandoned at early ages by their parents, and while Strummer (the son of a British diplomat) took to singing Chuck Berry songs in London's subways for spare change during his late teens, Jones retreated into reading and playing Mott the Hoople, Dylan, Kinks and Who records. In 1975, he left the art school he was attending and formed London SS, a band that, in its attempt to meld a raving blend of the New York Dolls, the Stooges and Mott, became a legendary forerunner of the English punk scene. Then, in early 1976, shortly after the Sex Pistols assailed London, Mick Jones ran into Strummer, who had been singing in a pub-circuit R&B band called the 101ers. "I don't like your band," Jones said, "but I like the way you sing." Strummer, anxious to join the punk brigade, cut his hair, quit the 101ers and joined Jones, Simonon (also a member of London SS), guitarist Keith Levine (now a member of Public Image Ltd) and drummer Terry Chimes to form the Clash in June of 1976. Eight months later, under the tutelage of Bernard Rhodes, the Clash signed with CBS Records for a reported $200,000. Their first album, The Clash (unreleased in America; Epic, the group's label stateside, deems it "too crude"), was archetypal, resplendent punk. While the Sex Pistols proffered a nihilistic image, the Clash took a militant stance that, in an eloquent, guttural way, vindicated punk's negativism. Harrowed rhythms and coarse vocals propelled a foray of songs aimed at the bleak political realities and social ennui of English life, making social realism --and unbridled disgust key elements in punk aesthetics. But even before the first album was released, the punk scene had dealt the Clash some unforeseen blows. The punks, egged on by a hysterical English press, began turning on each other, and drummer Chimes, weary of ducking bottles, spit and the band's politics, quit.

Months passed before the group settled on Nicky Headon (also a member of Mick Jones' London SS) as a replacement and returned to performing. By that time, their reputation had swelled to near-messianic proportions. When it was time for a new album, CBS asked Blue Oyster Cult producer Sandy Pearlman to check out the Clash's shows. "By a miracle of God," says Pearlman, "they looked like they believed in what they were doing. They were playing for the thrill of affecting their audience's consciousness, both musically and politically. Rock & roll shouldn't be cute and adorable; it should be violent and anarchic. Based on that, I think they're the greatest rock & roll group around." Mick Jones balked at first at the idea of Pearlman as their producer, but Strummer's interest prevailed. It took six months to complete Give 'Em Enough Rope, and it was a stormy period for all concerned. ("We knew we had to watch Pearlman," says Nicky Headon. "He gets too good a sound.") But nowhere near as stormy as the album. Give 'Em Enough Rope is rock & roll's Stage of Seige with a dash of Duck Soup for comic relief. Instead of reworking the tried themes of bored youth and repressive society, Strummer and Jones tapped some of the deadliest currents around, from creeping fascism at home to Palestinian terrorism. The album surges with visions of civil strife, gunplay, backbiting and lyrics that might've been spirited from the streets of Italy and Iran: "A system built by the sweat of the many/Creates assassins to kill off the few/Take any place and call it a courthouse/This is a place where no judge can stand." And the music a whirl of typhonic guitars and drums - frames those conflicts grandly. The day after the Clash's last Lyceum show, I meet Joe Strummer and Paul Simonon at the Tate Gallery, an art museum. Simonon leads us on a knowledgeable tour of the gallery's treasures until we settle in a dim corner of the downstairs caf for an interview. We start by talking about the band's apparent position as de facto leaders of punk. Strummer stares into his muddy tea, uninterested in the idea of conversation, and lets Simonon take the questions. Probably the roughest looking member of the group, with his skeletal face and disheveled hair, Simonon is disarmingly guileless and amiable. "Just because I'm up onstage," he says in rubbery English, "doesn't mean that I'm entitled to a different lifestyle than anyone else. I used to think so. I'd stay up all night, get pissed, party all the time. But you get cut off from the workaday people that way.

I like to get up early, paint me flat, practice me bass. I see these geezers going off to work and I feel more like one of them." But, I note, most of those same people wouldn't accept him. They're incensed and frightened by bands like the Clash. Strummer stops stirring his tea and glowers around. "Good," he grunts. "I'm pleased." This seems a fair time to raise the question of the band's recent bout with the British rock press. After Give 'Em Enough Rope, some of the band's staunchest defenders shifted gears, saying that the Clash's militancy is little more than a fashionable stance, and that their attitude toward terrorist violence is dangerously ambiguous. "One is never sure just which side [the Clash] is supposed to be taking," wrote Nick Kent in New Musical Express. "The Clash use incidents as fodder for songs without caring." Strummer squints at me for a moment, his thoughtful mouth hemming his craggy teeth. "We're against fascism and racism," he says. "I figure that goes without saying. I'd like to that we're subtle; that's what greatness is, innit? I can't stand all these people preaching, like Tom Robinson. He's just too direct." But that ambiguity can be construed as encouraging violence. "Our music's violent," says Strummer. "We're not. If anything, songs like 'Guns on the Roof' and 'Last Gang in Town' are supposed to take the piss out of violence. It's just that sometimes you have to put yourself in the place of the guy with the machine gun. I couldn't go to his extreme, but at the same time, it's no good ignoring what he's doing. We sing about the world that affects us. We're not just another wank rock group like Boston or Aerosmith. What fucking shit." Yet, I ask, is having a record contract with one of the world's biggest companies compatible with radicalism? "We've got loads of contradictions for you," says Strummer, shaking off his doldrums with a smirk. "We're trying to do something new; we're trying to be the greatest group in the world, and that also means the biggest. At the same time, we're trying to be radical - I mean, we never want to be really respectable - and maybe the two can't coexist, but we'll try. You know what helps us? We're totally suspicious of anyone who comes in contact with us. Totally. We aim to keep punk alive." The conversation turns to the Clash's impending tour of America.

"England's becoming too claustrophobic for us," says Strummer. "Everything we do is scrutinized. I think touring America could be a new lease on life." But the American rock scene and especially radio seems far removed from the world in flames that the Clash sing about. (While the Clash may top the English charts, they have yet to dent Billboard's Top 200. "We admit we aren't likely to get a hit single this time around," says Bruce Harris of Epic's A&R department. "But Give 'Em Enough Rope has sold 40,000 copies and that's better than sixty percent of most new acts.") I ask if a failure to win Yankee hearts would set them back. "Nah," says Strummer. "We've always got here. We haven't been to Europe much, and we haven't been to Japan or Australia, and we want to go behind the iron curtain." He pauses and shrugs his face in a taut grin. "There are a lot of other places where we could lose our lives." Those may seem like boastful words, but I doubt that's how Strummer means them. Few bands have fought more battles on more fronts than the Clash, and maybe none with better instincts. Of course, it's doubtful that the American and British underclass or the teenage middle class for that matter are any more willing than the music industry to be shaken up as much as the Clash would like. As producer Sandy Pearlman says: "No one's really very scared of punk, especially the record companies. They've sublimated tendencies this art is based on. The Clash see the merit in reaching a wider audience, but they also like the idea of grand suicidal gestures. We need more bands like this as models for tomorrow's parties."

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

In a last interview, Strummer recounts his band's wild ride February 2003 When I spoke with Joe Strummer in November, his ears were ringing. He and his band the Mescaleros had just finished rehearsing for a U.K. tour, and he hadn't even spoken with his former Clash bandmates -- Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Nicky "Topper" Headon -- about their election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. That level of recognition was not common for the Clash during the five to ten years (depending on whether you count the 1985 Jones-and-Headon-less Cut the Crap album) they were a band. Although their combination of raw punk power, world beats and politically charged lyrics produced one of punk rock's greatest records, 1977's The Clash, and one of rock & roll's greatest record's, 1979's London Calling, but the Clash didn't break in the U.S. the way the Police or AC/DC did. They would have to wait for the emergence of Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring and Blink-182 a decade later to see how much they mattered to the U.S.A. A week after this interview, Strummer and Jones, who was kicked out of the Clash in 1983, performed three Clash songs, "Bankrobber," "White Riot" and "London's Burning," together in London -- the first time they had played onstage together in nineteen years. A month later, Strummer died suddenly from a congenital heart condition, leaving behind his wife, three daughters and millions of disciples.

The Clash

On Grammy night, four of them -- Bruce Springsteen, Elvis Costello, Dave Grohl and Steve Van Zandt -- barked out "London Calling" to the largest audience that has ever seen it performed. Joe's ears must have been ringing. What was the first rock & roll song that blew you away? "Not Fade Away" by the Stones. We were stuck up in school, and there was no way of getting out to get it, but I do remember the radio delivering it. The song moved like a steam train, and that was the moment when I went rock & roll forever, the moment I said, "Yeah . . . wow!" How did you react when you were told that the Clash, like the Stones, were going to be inducted into the Hall of Fame? When I heard the news, I put my fist up and said, "Like Babe Ruth!" I just didn't know what to say. You only put it together later when you start to think, "There is that old beat-up guitar I started out on propped up in the corner . . ." And then it hits you: "Wow, I'm in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame!" Will the Clash reform for the ceremony? I'm sure I'd do it, and I'm sure Topper [drummer Headon] would do it, but it's only fair and polite to inquire of the others. Looking back, what was it like to be onstage with the Clash? Do you know those shots from above a rocket gantry, especially those Sixties, early-color shots of Cape Kennedy or Cape Canaveral? There's that moment after they count down, 'Three, two, one . . .' when clouds of smoke billow from the rocket. And then it begins to thrust and burn a hole in the atmosphere. That would be the feeling of a Clash show. And it would seem about that length of time too. Because of that combustibility, were the Clash destined to burn out quickly? Yeah, I think maybe that's part and parcel. Also, when you think about groups like the Chili Peppers, they were boyhood friends, but we met when we were already grown up in London town. Some groups might last longer if they played basketball together when they were eight. We met, and then we started the Clash immediately. We didn't take two seconds to say, "Hey, nice trousers, man."

Why did the Clash break up? I think everybody wanted to take over. Everything's fine as long as you are struggling to some goal, but as soon as you have a Top Ten hit in America . . . We also had a lot of fatigue. Maybe we said all we needed to say in a five-year blast. We put out sixteen sides of vinyl in five years. Maybe we could have strung that out over twenty years, and we'd be on the fifth side of Sandinista! right now. How do you all get along these days? Well, the last time all four of us were together was a couple years ago to accept the Ivor Novello songwriting award over here, and it was strangely enjoyable. You sort of grow up and stop grousing. You bury the hatchet, or you just forget what the hatchet was. You actually all came together for some of the anthology and reissue releases too, right? Yeah, yeah. We had to put that black oblong box set [1991's Clash on Broadway] together, and there was much discussion and listening. Mick and Paul really got together over the live record [1999's Live: From Here to Eternity]. They must have spent over a month in the control room without coming to fisticuffs. If I had never heard of the Clash, how would you sum up the band for me? I'd say, "Look, mate, we are the band that invented everything, so get on with it!" No, really, that was a joke. I'm a modest man. I would say, "Well it was a real roller coaster ride, over five years of shows and records." I'd tell you that the sheer variety and excellence of the whole thing was well worth a dip into, without beating on my drums, or trumpet or whatever it's called. And if you had to play one song to demonstrate the Clash's sound? I'd play "If Music Could Talk," which is on Side Four on Sandinista!, but I always really liked "Rock the Casbah" -that would be my number one fave. Do you have any vivid memories of writing a particular Clash song? I remember writing "London's Burning" in the top room of a squat. I was crouched over an unplugged Telecaster whispering "London's burning!" so as not to disturb a sleeping person.

I can remember writing "(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais" in a flat in Canonbury, all day and all night. Just bashing in a typewriter in a kitchen with a horrible fluorescent light. Assuming everyone is game, how would it feel to get up there and play those songs for the first time in a long time? They're good songs to play, fun songs to play. They were always sort of blunt and to the point. But it ain't like a machine, where you can just start it up and it goes. We would have to put some spirit into the performance. What song would best fit the night? I'd say "White Riot." It's a little toe-tapping little number. It's not too long, and brevity is the soul of wit.

The Immortals

The Greatest Artists of All Time #30 The Clash


By The Edge April 2004 The Clash, more than any other group, kick-started a thousand garage bands across Ireland and the U.K. For U2 and other people of our generation, seeing them perform was a life-changing experience. There's really no other way to describe it. I can vividly remember when I first saw the Clash. It was in Dublin in October 1977. They were touring behind their first album, and they played a 1,200-capacity venue at Trinity College. Dublin had never seen anything like it. It really had a massive impact around here, and I still meet people who are in the music business today -- maybe they are DJs, maybe they are in bands -- because they saw that show. U2 were a young band at the time, and it was a complete throw-down to us. It was like: Why are you in music? What the hell is music all about, anyway? The members of the Clash were not world-class musicians by any means, but the racket they made was undeniable -- the pure, visceral energy and the anger and the commitment. They were raw in every sense, and they were not ashamed that they were about much more than playing with precision and making sure the

guitars were in tune. This wasn't just entertainment. It was a life-and-death thing. They made it possible for us to take our band seriously. I don't think that we would have gone on to become the band we are if it wasn't for that concert and that band. There it was. They showed us what you needed. And it was all about heart. The social and political content of the songs was a huge inspiration, certainly for U2. It was the call to wake up, get wise, get angry, get political and get noisy about it. It's interesting that the members were quite different characters. Paul Simonon had an art-school background, and Joe Strummer was the son of a diplomat. But you really sensed they were comrades in arms. They were completely in accord, railing against injustice, railing against a system they were just sick of. And they thought it had to go. I saw them a couple of times after the Dublin show, and they always had something fresh going on. It's a shame that they weren't around longer. The music they made is timeless. It's got so much fighting spirit, so much heart, that it just doesn't age. You can still hear it in Green Day and No Doubt, Nirvana and the Pixies, certainly U2 and Audioslave. There wasn't a minute when you sensed that they were coasting. They meant it, and you can hear it in their work.

New York Dolls

The glam-punk pioneers are back with their first album in more than three decades April 2006 "That was so weird it was great," crows New York Dolls singer David Johansen, sitting in the control room at the Shed, a small Manhattan recording studio. On the other side of the glass, guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Steve Conte, bassist Sam Yaffa and drummer Brian Delaney have nailed the keeper take of a track destined for the re-formed Dolls' new album, to be released in June. The song, like the album as yet untitled, is a Delta-juke-joint romp with drunkenparade snare rolls and rusted-screech slide guitar: a different raunch, as Johansen notes in his strip-mined growl, from the mascara-and-fuzz fury of the original Dolls' glitter classics, 1973's New York Dolls and '74's Too Much Too Soon. "But when you took off the makeup and spiked heels, at the bottom of it all, it was the blues," Sylvain says of the Dolls' lipstick-killer heyday during a break in making their first studio record in thirty-two years. The Dolls "were a blues band. We played those three-chord progressions." In that sense, nothing has changed. The new material is firmly rooted in the futurist-R&B swagger of the first two albums.

Make Their Return

And except for Johansen's vocals, everything -- from the Eddie Cochran-like zoom of "Beauty School" to the girlgroup classicism of "Plenty of Music" -- was cut live in the studio. "When I heard the new songs, I knew they were capable of sounding like the Dolls but not as nostalgia," says the album's producer, Jack Douglas, who first worked with the band as the engineer on New York Dolls. "They had the stuff." Johansen and Sylvain are the only survivors of the infamous '72-'75 lineup. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died in 1991, drummer Jerry Nolan in 1992. In July 2004, bassist Arthur Kane died of leukemia, a month after reuniting with Johansen and Sylvain for two shows at the Meltdown Festival in London. "He'd be here now, and it would be great to have him," Johansen says soberly. But he insists the new Dolls "are part of the enterprise. It's not just me, Syl and a pickup band." Delaney has played with Johansen for several years, while Yaffa started out emulating the Dolls' sound and couture with the Finnish band Hanoi Rocks. "They want a balance -bring your own shit to it but have respect for what went before," Yaffa says of the charter Dolls. "And you know if you go a little too far. David will be like, 'No, no, that's too smart. Reel it back in.'"

The Ramones Are Punks and Will Beat You Up

The Ramones

Are Punks and Will Beat You Up


One, two, three, four boys from Queens turn their liabilities into assets August 1976 Johnny Ramone claims it was an accident -- that time he hit the student body president in the balls with his guitar and got an early incarnation of the Ramones banned from the high school talent show. "I just got a little carried away with the music," he says. Bassist Dee Dee Ramone says is wasn't his fault the principal asked him to leave his classes permanently. "They gave me this long list of credits and I couldn't figure it out," he says. "They wanted me to take this academic stuff. All I wanted to take was shop." Drummer Tommy Ramone used to build model army tanks and get high from the glue. "A lot of out music comes out of that sensibility," he says. "We're intellectual twelve-yearolds." Joey Ramone, comatose singer, says only that he would like to increase his collection of doorknobs.

Riding a wave of rapturous reviews from New York critics, their album, Ramones, has actually broken into the Top 150 and they just returned from two dates in London with the Flamin' Groovies. Their music -- an amazing amalgam of higher energy, funnier lyrics and less command of their instruments than the New York Dolls' -- derives much of its charm from the Ramones' instinctive understanding that great artistry can result from turning your liabilities into assets. "The reason I start all our songs by screaming 'one-twothree-four' into the mike is that we couldn't learn how to do the silent count," explains Dee Dee, searching his face for zits in a cosmetic mirror on manager Danny Field's desk. "Besides, screaming 'one-two-three-four' is more fun," says Tommy. "Our music is an answer to the early Seventies when artsy people with big egos would do vocal harmonies and play long guitar solos and get called geniuses. That was bullshit. We play rock & roll. We don't do solos. Our only harmonics are in the overtones from the guitar chords." The Ramones (not their real surname) were born in 1952 (Johnny in 1951) and grew up in Forest Hills, Queens, where they went to high school together and got dumped on by girls. "They always wanted to go out with guys who had Corvettes," says Johnny, "so we had nothing to do but climb on rooftops and sniff glue. Musicians never have girlfriends in the beginning -- they get a guitar instead." "It still makes me bitter they wouldn't have anything to do with us," adds Dee Dee. "Back in the glitter days I had to dress up and tell them I was from T-Rex." From this adolescent trauma arose such masterpieces of misogyny as "I Don't Want to Walk Around With You" and "Loudmouth" ("You're a loudmouth baby/You better shut it up/I'm gonna beat you up/Cause you're a loudmouth babe"). Their extensive experience with model building produced one of the ultimate statements on teenage lobotomy, "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." "We used to sniff and then call this telephone number and listen to the beeps," recalls Dee Dee. "I got it all over my pants and shirt. It would be on my breath. Really stank. You can kill yourself that way. I wouldn't recommend it to kids now." For their next album, the Ramones are doing a tune they call "Carbona, Not Glue" in honor of a cleaning fluid they sniffed after the hobby stores wouldn't sell to them anymore.

After graduation the Ramones got menial jobs to support themselves. Two years ago they began playing at the CBGB, the Bowery Bar that specializes in rock. They dressed in leather jackets and, more than any other local band, personified the punk image: they talked tough, played loud, and looked so wimpy their audiences wanted to mother them. "We developed a small following of weirdos," says Tommy. "Then we got the intellectuals. Now the kids are coming." "Some people say our music all sounds the same," Tommy continues, "but new kinds of music sound alike until you're used to them. We had the lyrics to our songs printed on the envelope because we were sick and tired of being called stupid mutants by people who weren't picking up on the words. We've finally found an outlet for our self destruction." "Adolescence sure was tough," says Dee Dee. Adds Tommy, "Especially when you don't grow out of it."

The Ramones

The importance of being a Ramone February 1979 Joey Ramone's father has never been too big on his son's peculiar brand of rock & roll. Until recently, exposure to the Ramones' spare, howling blare would promptly reduce Dad to a headbanger (his own, of course)or leave him feeling like he wanted to, well, be sedated. "The music used to drive me up a wall," he admits wearily. "I tried to get him interested in some good music - his grandmother, Fanny, used to sing for Macy's; you rented a piano from the store for a party and she came with it - so I got him an accordion when he was a child. He loved the goddamn thing, but he squeezed it until there was nothing left of it - I think he loved to hear the wheezy noise it made. As a teenager he was fairly good at the drums, playing 'em in the basement with his friends, but it got so I really had a hard time standing the racket." "But say, I got a question for you: How the hell did you find me?" It wasn't easy. Precious little is known about the backgrounds of the various Ramones, save the customarily mumbled information that original members Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy Ramone all hail from Forest Hills, Queens, New York, and formed their one and only band in 1974 after graduating from, or "growing out of," high school. They had been together for less than a year when they debuted to a virtually empty house at CBGB's, the notoriously seedy Bowery club where a blank generation of distinctively raw rockets first gained a foothold.

Bang The Heads Slowly

Hammering out a numbing, seventeen-minute set consisting of about eight three-chord, two stanza songs, the Ramones were instrumental in spawning an aggressive national groundswell of back-to-basics rock bands whose defiant individualism inspired a horde of disaffected young English snots simultaneously rallying together as the Sex Pistols, the Clash, Generation X.... New York music writers like Danny Fields of the Soho Weekly News began devoting passionate columns to the four Forest Hills rockers. Mop-haired and sickly looking, with faces so acne-caked they resembled pink peanut brittle, the Ramones were as appealing as their hasty repertoire of head splitters: "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Chain Saw," "Loudmouth," "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue," etc. Meanwhile, on the other side of a widening No Band's Land, the trenches were full of contemptuous mainstream rockers and their fans, not to mention radio programmers, concert promoters and even some critics, all of whom denounced the Ramones as no-talent sacks of shit. Incensed that four mysterious creeps with the same last name (the Ramone Brothers?) had come out of nowhere to release one remedial record (Ramones, Sire Records, 1976) and subsequently generate as much press as the last Rolling Stones tour, the tradition-bound opposition demanded an explanation: Where do these punks get off? Four years and four albums later, Joey Ramone's father is still pondering the same question. "I gotta be honest with you," says a bemused Noel Hyman, chatting in the office of his Manhattan trucking company, "I was surprised, very much so, when Jeffrey [a.k.a. Joey] and the band started putting out records and getting a little popular. I was always hearing him say, 'We got something here,' until it rang in my ears. And I didn't believe in it at all. I would have liked him to come into the business; really. "The first coupla times I saw the group play, I must say I didn't like em, but I got used to it although it took some time. But then, I guess the first time some people taste champagne they wanna spit it out, right? Still, I think they oughta put more different things in their music, 'n' complicate it up a bit, if they wanna get high up on the whatayacallit - the lists, the charts? I Dunno, I'm an old square. Guess it looks like he may do okay after all, right?" "I'm sick of not selling records," Joey mutters to himself as he peers into the mirror in his cramped upstairs dressing room at Philadelphia's Walnut Street Theatre.

"I want to draw more people to the shows, make something happen. If the new album isn't a hit, I'm gonna kill myself." Recently returned from a well-attended tour of Europe, the Ramones are back on the road to promote their latest LP Road to Ruin. The album has been almost universally praised as the band's most ambitious and engaging effort to date, demonstrating as it does an impressive growth in musicianship and an expanded compositional flair. Dee Dee has blossomcd into a deft, distinctive bassist; Johnny's brisk, chunky riffing has given way to some canny, if restrained, leads; new drummer Marky (a replacement for Tommy, who bowed out last year) provides a solid bottom and powerful forward thrust; and Joey has evolved - with the help of voice lessons - into a rather spry, inventive vocalist. None of these developments has lifted the band anywhere near the Top Fifty or the lofty status of an arena-filling attraction, however, so the Ramones have dragged their equipment out to Philly by van to headline a modest program on the site of the historic first presidential debate between Gerald R. Ford and Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter. Snapped out of his dressing room doldrums by a pat on the back from baby-faced Johnny Ramone (alias John Cummings] the spindly, knock-kneed Joey is summoned into a back room for an impromptu preconcert conference. Timing and pacing are discussed, the meeting chaired by the authoritative Johnny, who clearly is the de facto perfectionist of the group. He's also the most business-minded of the four, momentarily putting their huddle on hold at the appearance of sandy-haired manager Danny Fields, the Ramone's longtime booster. Johnny registers a stern complaint with the straight-faced Fields about the absence of posters in the theater's outside display cases and requests some information on current airplay and record sales in secondary markets, before returning to his cohorts to drill them on the evening's songs. "Watch the beginning, of 'Cretin Hop' tonight," he scolds the lantern-jawed Marky (Bell). "You came in wrong again last night. You're just not hearing it." "Okay," Marky says meekly. Tell it all to me again." "No, we'll play it once quickly," Johnny rules as he plugs his white Mosrite guitar into a small practice amp. "Hey, I don't want to play, too much, John," Dee Dee (Colvin) whines, scratching the arrow-through-the-heart MOTHER tattoo on his biceps. "Look at my nail. It's split! I want as little pain as possible."

Johnny ignores the bassist's plea and they launch into the song. His presence not required for the run-through, Joey has slipped into the dressing room and is bent over the dirty sink, rinsing his purple eyeglasses under the faucet. He remains locked in this position for an extended period, oblivious to the ebb and flow of awed fans and curious members of the other groups on the bill. Ten minutes later, diminutive Linda Stein, thirty-two-yearold wife of Seymour Stein (the president of the Warner Bros.-distributed Sire label) and the other half of the band's managerial team, strides in, and Joey lifts his head and whispers to her urgently. She nods and then issues a booming command to all assembled: "Excuse me everybody! Please clear the room! Joey wants to be alone to wash his face!" As the throng moves toward the door, Joey's furtive eyes meet mine - a rare moment - and his face erupts in a crimson blush that temporarily obscures the swollen zit nestled against his pug nose. But the awkward instant is suddenly dispelled by the appearance of a bold devotee, who bursts through the stream of departing fans and starts jabbering into Joey's ear. "I really loved 'California Sun,' man, I really really did!" he gushes. "Could you write an autograph for my friend?" Joey nods shyly and dries his hands on his grimy, sweat-soaked shirt. "Say, 'To Ian; from Joey Ramone,'" the fan insists as the skinny star begins scribbling on a scrap, of paper. "And, er, could you please print it, cause he only understands printing..." The Ramones are dumb - and so is their public. You read it everywhere - this magazine included - and heare it at parties whenever someone dares to play one of their records. Throughout the recording industry their enemies are legion, many dismissing the four as hopeless mooks. Joey Ramone in particular has frequently been singled out as a Grade A Fancy ninny whose motor responses supposedly were so atrophied by idolescent glue sniffing that now he can't even find his ass with both hands. Those allegations seem to take in a certain gravity when Joey's viewed in concert. During the show at the Walnut Street Theatre, he clutches his tipped mike stand with abject desperation, weaving around the unsteady axis like a drunk looking for the keyhole. As always, his deathly pale visage is almost entirety hidden by a curtain of matted hair, and his bird legs are locked with spastic rigidity as his jeans droop past his hipless waist.

The set has opened with Dee Dee roaring his ritual "One, two, three, four!" countdown to kick off the Ramones' biggest (Sixty-Six in Billboard) chart single ever, "Rockaway Beach," as their large red, white and blue eagle banner is lowered behind the drums. Following in quick succession are astringent treatment's of "Blitzkrieg Bop," "I Don't Want You," "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "Don't Come Close" and "Sheena Is a Punk Rocker." By this time, "the packed house - a surprisingly diverse mix that includes the safety-pin-through-the-nose crowd but also a host of Ivy Leaguers and even some -middle-aged longhairs in down parkas - is in a flat-out frenzy, thrusting their fists in the air as Joey leads them in between-songs chants of "Hey! Ho! Let's G0!" "Needles and Pins," the latest single, lifts the proceedings to fever pitch, and a wildly flailing Marky purses his lips as if he's going to puke from the exertion. Combining the stunning attack of the early Kinks with the energy, flamboyance and spectacular pacing of the Who, the Ramones give of themselves with a kooky totality that is strangely moving. Witnessing the event, even one who is not really an avid fan has to wonder whether the Ramones' harshest detractors have ever seen them in live performance. Thematically, songs about decapitation, teenage lobotomies, headbangers named Suzy, sniffing Carbona spot remover and wanting to be sedated may be an acquired taste, but it's difficult to understand why more hard-rock enthusiasts - especially the heavy-metal helots cannot find a place in their hearts for the Ramones' explosive sound. No concerts so well executed as their own could come off without some lucid thought being paid to musical craft and presentation, and it's a genuinely triumphant moment when a roadie rushes out at the climax of the Philly date to hand Joey a black and yellow banner emblazoned with the exhortation: GABBA GABBA HEY! "Gabba Gabba Hey is from the 1930s horror film, Freaks Tommy Erdelyi (formerly Ramone) explains to me one evening over sandwiches in an East Village eatery. "There's a party going on in the film and one of the midgets has married this pretty woman - she's not a freak. During the celebration, they start chanting, 'Gooble gobble, we accept her, one of us! Or something like that. So when we wrote the song 'Pinhead' [on the Ramones Leave Home LP], we decided to use the chant, but we changed it to give it more power. We were trying to tell the audience that we're all one."

Unfortunately, Tommy and the other band members are currently estranged. Fed up with the grind of the road ("I couldn't stand it, my nerves were shot"), he left the group after the release of the Ramones' third LP, Rocket to Russia. Born in Budapest, Hungary, Erdelyi, now twentyeight, immigrated to the United States with his older brother and parents when he was four. Tommy served as manager of the group during the period when the nucleus was Joey on drums, with Dee Dee and Johnny splitting the lead and rhythm guitar chores. The boys auditioned several bassists before Dee Dee agreed to give it a try, and Joey was drafted as the vocalist, because, as Tommy admits, "He had the best voice." That left the drummer's slot open, and Tommy eventually shrugged, sat down and started pounding the skins. "The truth of the matter was that my function with the Ramones was as a producer and an organizer," Erdelyi reflects. "My least contribution was as a drummer." He began his career as an assistant engineer at various Manhattan studios, working on John McLaughlin's Devotion album and some of the later Jimi Hendrix sessions that would resurface on Crash Landing and other LPs reconstructed after Hendrix' death. As producer of their legendary sixteen-song demo and coproducer of all four Ramones LPs released in the States (a live collection entitled It's Alive is due to be issued overseas), Erdelyi sees himself as the Ramones' seminal theorist and the man who played the chief role in honing their musical concepts. "There was never anything like the Ramones before," he assures me. "It was a new way of looking at music. It took the rock sound into a psychotic world and narrowed it down into a straight line of energy. In an era of progressive rock, with its complexities and counterpoints, we had a perspective of nonmusicality and intelligence that takes over for musicianship. "Going back to the first album, which was the seed, we used block chording as a melodic device, and the harmonics resulting from the distortion of the amplifiers created countermelodies. We used the wall of sound as a melodic rather than a rift form; it was like a song within a song created by a block of chords droning. "I'll tell you what else was distinctive," he says, gathering steam.

"The hypnotic effect of strict repetition, the effect of lyrics that repeat, and vocals that dart out at you, and the percussive effect of driving the music like a sonic machine. It's very sensual. You can put headphones on and just swim with it. It's not background music." Was all of this conceived beforehand or are these just Tommy's accumulated after-thoughts? "Well," he demurs, "it was always a combination of talent and intelligence." "Wait a minute," I say, "Johnny told me that the first LP sounded so primitive because that was the best you guys could play at that time." "Yes," Erdelyi concedes, "but there was always intelligence behind it. If every untrained musician doing the best he can decides to make a record, he's not going to get a Ramones LP out of it." Intrigued by this high-minded analysis, I decide to schedule a symposium down at Joey Ramone's dingy Lower East Side loft to give the other members of the Ramones the opportunity to explain themselves and their rock perspective. The band assembles around a rickety table at one end of the long rectangular room. Flopped across a mattress in one corner is sad-eyed Danny Fields, who says he's "a young thirty-five" but looks a bit older. A Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Pennsylvania and a Harvard Law School dropout, Fields is a veteran of the rock wars, having signed the MC5 and the Stooges to Elektra while working there as director of publicity. After being fired from Elektra, he says, for defending the MC5's right to have the word fuck on their album jackets and in their print ads, he moved to Atlantic Records as a publicist and got fired again; he says, for openly detesting Emerson, Lake and Palmer. He subsequently resurfaced as the editor of 16 Magazine, wrote a music column for the Soho Weekly News, and then Gabba Gabba Hey! A raconteur of considerable renown, Fields maintains a curious silence during the talk. As I gaze across the table at the current Ramones lineup, I am struck by the great differences in their personalities and backgrounds. All are twenty-six years old and similarly dressed, but that's about all they have in common apart from their music. Johnny Cummings, the authoritative, business-minded guitarist, was born on Long Island.

An only child and a self-confessed teen-age reprobate, he drifted from one military academy to another during his secondary-school days, searching for some sort of "discipline" in his life. The son of a construction worker now retired in Florida, Johnny has since found inner peace as a Ramone, a Betamax junkie and an avid reader of film biographies and history books. Dee Dee (Douglas) Colvin, who is secretly married, was born in Virginia but spent fourteen years as a service brat in Germany, where his father, an army career officer, was stationed. Hard-jawed, with dark chilling eyes, his meek, courtly manner cannot conceal the streetfighter's savvy that earned him the ugly knife scars that mar his upper torso and - he later reveals - his buttocks. Marky Bell is a timorous outsider from Brooklyn, where his father labored for eighteen years as a longshoreman before becoming a lawyer. He is the most seasoned musician, having drummed over the years with transsexual Wayne County; Richard Hell and the Voidoids and a defunct group called Dust that recorded two albums in the late Sixties for the Kama Sutra label. Joey (Jeffrey) Hyman, the lovable scarecrow, is a native of Forest Hills. His father and mother have been divorced since the early Sixties. He has a younger brother named Mitch, who is a guitarist with rock critic Lester Bangs' band, Birdland. Contrary to popular belief, Joey is the most clever and quick-witted of the Ramones. We begin by discussing Forest Hills, which Johnny describes as "a middle-class, mostly Jewish neighborhood - if that means anything." He then mentions that Michael Landon, the star of TV's Little House on the Prairie, is from the same area. I interject that Paul Simon also lived in Forest Hills, and Marky corrects me: "Paul Stanley - of Kiss." When I say no, I no, I mean Paul Simon, he gives me a blank stare. "Aw, you know Paul Simon," Johnny chides the drummer, but Marky replies with another blank stare. "Don't mind him," Johnny tells me with exasperation. "He's from Brooklyn." "Speaking of celebrities," says Joey. "I once played for about five minutes with Keith - you know, the guy who did that [1966] hit song, '98.6'." Everyone expressed great surprise at this revelation ... except Marky. MARKY: [Confused] Keith Allison?

JOEY: No! No! The "98.6" Keith! I auditioned for him, playing drums. He took me out for a beer and it was exciting, ya know? When I first got to his loft he was blow-drying his hair. I brought my double-bass Keith Moon set of drums up there. But he was fucked up because he made me play in a room all by myself, without accompanying me or anything. He said, "Alright - play!" So I played "Toad" or something, ya know? The fuckkin' jerk! How did you pick the name Ramones? JOEY: It had a ring to it, like "Eli Wallach" does. Just sounded good. JOHNNY: We thought of Spice and other names but felt, "That's ridiculous." DEE DEE: We never gave it too much thought. Where did your American eagle logo come from? JOHNNY: I don't know if what we've got is the American eagle, but that's what we thought of at the time. DEE DEE: It looks good up there. I mean. Patti Smith has the American flag... JOHNNY: ...and we have a kind of presidential seal. MARKY: Yeah. "In God We Trust." JOEY: [Snickering] We weren't thinking of God. JOHNNY: You want a strong symbol, and that's it. DEE DEE: [Earnestly] We want to make it clear that it has nothing to do with facism or anything like that. JOHNNY: [Alarmed] Nobody asked ya! DEE DEE: It's just a sign that I think... JOHNNY: [Firmly] Nobody asked ya! You still look like teenage trouble-makers, young thugs. Were you? JOHNNY: I guess we were sort of juvenile delinquents, but Forest Hills ain't the South Bronx; it's a nice neighborhood. So if you walk around like this [he indicates his leather jacket, T-shirt, jeans] you're already looked upon as a hoodlum. I mean we were just general nogoodnicks. DEE DEE: But we didn't have an organized gang. JOHNNY: We once tried robbing a drug store on Queens Boulevard - unsuccessfully. It was in a whole row of stores and we broke into the laundromat from behind by mistake. The next time we tried robbing a bakery on 63rd Drive; somebody climbed in the window above the door. The police came to my house the next day and asked somebody to identify me, but the person said I wasn't the one. The other kid finked on me - but I don't care 'cause he's gotten killed since then.

I didn't become bad until I got out of high school. Sniffing glue was probably the start of my downfall. My first drug experience was sniffing glue. We tried it and then moved on to Carbona. "That's why we wrote songs about it. It was a good high but it gave you a bad headache. I guess it destroys your brain cells, though. JOEY: Then "Carbona (Not Glue)" got pulled from the Leave Home album because Carbona was gonna sue us for using their name. We thought it was a substance, not the name of a product or company. Speaking of song writing, I thought in the beginning that the brevity of the songs was tongue in cheek, a gimmick. JOHNNY: [Bewildered] The what of the song was what? The brevity of the songs was... JOHNNY: What's brevity mean? Shortness, conciseness. JOHNNY: Oh, well, we were new at writing songs and new at playing our instruments, so we couldn't write anything too complicated, really. It was nothing intentional. We decided to sing about something that we found amusing. DEE DEE: And daring. JOHNNY: All our songs are written by all of us. We wrote two songs the very first day we were a band. One was called "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You" and the other was called "I Don't Wanna Get Involved with You." "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You" made it on the first album, but "I Don't Wanna Get Involved with You" didn't. You never recorded it? JOHNNY: No. It's very much like "I Don't Wanna Walk Around with You," almost the same song. We might someday record it" What's the basic lyric? DEE DEE: [Blandly] I don't wanna get involved with you That's not what I wanna do Come knocking on my door I'm gonna knock you on the floor I don't wanna get involved with you That's not what I wanna do. How would you describe your own music?

DEE DEE: We're playing at our level of ability. JOHNNY: We're playing pure rock & roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it. And we try to be entertaining and bring back the feeling of kids coming and having a good time - united with us. But we never considered the whole local new-band scene here or in England. We never had the weird pointy haircuts. These are our regular haircuts. Linda Stein said she felt that the Sid Vicious murder case has hurt you bookingwise. JOHNNY: We've had a lot of job rejections. We had a lot of radio stations taking us off and rejecting us. We just had a job offer at Notre Dame with Foreigner, and Notre Dame turned us down. We got pulled off stations after the Weekend show with the Sex Pistols. It had nothing to do with us. We don't look or act like them. We weren't out to ruin the music business. There's room for every-body. When we started we were more or less looking at the hard rock groups of America like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent and Kiss as our competition. JOEY: [Brightly] Alice Cooper helped my life because he was my first hero. I related to the guy - until I found out he really was the way he was. You mean before he started playing with George Burns? JOEY: Yeah, right. JOHNNY: [Serious] Joey, wouldn't you like to be playing golf with George Burns? JOEY: [Sheepish] I dunno, but I guess I respected Cooper because that's all he wanted to do in the first place: get big so he could play golf with the stars. JOHNNY: It's nice to play golf with George Burns, if you wanna. I played golf in military school for about a year. The other night Joey said that he would kill himself if the new record didn't do well. Things have been rough eh? JOHNNY: Yeah, But we've been on salary since we started recording. It's not much, it's meager but it's been okay. When we started it was about fifty dollars a week. Now it's $150 a week - actually that starts next week, a raise from $125. We get ten dollars a day when we're traveling, and occasionally get a royalty check for songwriting. Why did Tommy leave the band? JOHNNY: He just couldn't take touring. DEE DEE: It's very hard to tour.

JOHNNY: He was getting to be catatonic. JOEY: [Chortling evilly] Tommy cracked like an egg! Say, Dee Dee, when did you get the knife wounds? DEE DEE: [Embarrassed] That was something stupid I did. I don't want to say it 'cause it was bad. JOHNNY: But now we're nice. How, did you fellas manage to change your dispositions? JOHNNY: We got into a group and we became nice. They are very, very nice boys," says Joey's mother, Charlotte, as she serves me milk and cookies one afternoon in the pleasant East Village apartment she shares with her second husband, a psychologist. A slim, attractive woman in her late forties, the former Mrs. Noel Hyman is an accomplished artist and an avid collector, as evidenced by the tasteful arrangements of paintings that cover every wall of her home. "Forest Hills is a very conservative, conventional place. I think we were the black-sheep household of our street," Charlotte muses. "It was a meeting place for both of my boys' friends because we also had the basement there open to them, and there was always a lot of music going on. "You know, they taught me how to smoke pot when they were about thirteen. I realized they were doing something down there, and I didn't want them to do it outside where they could be busted." Did Joey's father ever smoke pot with the boys? "I don't think so," she says evenly. "I don't think he would like to hear that I allowed them to do it at home, either. But at that time we were divorced." Was the house basement also a haven for glue sniffing? "Not that I know of," she says with a laugh, "but I'm sure there were things that they did that I didn't know about. It's very possible. The little devils tried everything." It appears her tolerance was as unique as her sons' behavior. Was she upset when Joey quit school to play his music? "Uh huh. Naturally, like any good Jewish mother, I would have wanted my son to finish high school and go to college." Does she recall any early songs that Joey wrote and showed to her? "He showed me everything, but there were so many. I know they all had that little anger in them and I thought it was a great release for him to get it all out of his system."

Where does she think that anger came from? "Naturally, it was anger against his parents. Probably his father more than me," she adds with a nervous chuckle. "When he'd come upstairs from the basement after playing the drums, I used to say to him, 'You just beat the hell out of me, didn't you?' He'd say, 'Yeah.'" Is Charlotte a Ramones fan? "Don't you know I'm known as Momma Ramone?" she asks, a little hurt. I really like them. I guess I have to confess that the first album sounded a little strange and unprofessional, but I caught the energy and I found that fascinating." Does Joey/Jeffrey ever speak to her about his career? "No, nothing in particular. Occasionally he lets me read some of his fan mail; all these little girls from all over the country writing to him, telling him they're madly in love with him and that they can't wait to see him. "And then he gets these propositions" she confides breathlessly, "from forty-year-old women who want his fair body. I think he gets a charge out of that." Along time ago I used to get drunk and hang out a lot around mental institutions, because the girls there are all loose and they are...fun, you know?" Joey tells me later that evening, by way of detailing the parameters of his love life. "So I kind of fell in love with this girl, and every week they took her upstairs to the fifth floor to have shock treatments. They would strap her into a wheelchair. Before they took her up she was fine. Then she came down and she was like a zombie and didn't even know who I was." "Have you seen her since?" I wonder. "No. She turned into a real alcoholic. I think that's what happens to you when you have a lobotomy. You have to escape all the time." "A lot of what you've experienced is recounted in the band's songs," I tell him. "Johnny told me earlier that when you guys were growing up, you could never get any dates with girls." "Well," Joey explains, "there's a lot of people that really get into being in high school; they go to dances and all that shit. I always hated those people. At that time you didn't really get much - nobody really had any girlfriends and there was just like one Brooklyn chick, named Lois, that everyone was going to and she'd give me a blow job down in the basement.

Everyone would go there on a Friday night and the guys would line up. She was also the kind of chick that was hideous looking. She was about twenty-seven and, well, it was very hard to get her to fuck. So I'd turn her on to LSD and shit like that." "Sounds very romantic, " I offer. "Oh yeah," he laughs. "I used to like, on Sundays, take her to my house. At that time I was living with my mom. It was very rough trying to get her down the street to my house without anyone seeing." "Ever have a long-term romantic relationship?" "I never had any, like, ones with girls that really liked me. Most of them were short term. These days we get a lot of weirdos coming to a show. We get all these kids who are loners." With their fortunes currently on the upswing, the Ramones are sure to attract a lot more lost souls. Road to Ruin is the group's biggest-selling album, with worldwide sales just above the 250,000 mark. But the real breakthrough for this beleaguered band has been in concert bookings; the Ramones have made significant strides in landing lucrative gigs since signing an agreement with the powerful Premier Talent. The deal, Danny Fields points out, was made on the same day that Elvis died, and it's just now paying off, with the Ramones finally opening for big acts like Black Sabbath. In addition, the group recently completed the starring role in a Roger Corman film tentatively titled Rock & Roll High School. An epic that concludes with the student, body blowing up the school building, the movie is slated for spring or summer release, along with a soundtrack album that - barring legal complications - will include a song by Paul McCartney (a big hero of Johnny's) and Wings, originally written for Heaven Can Wait called "Have We Met Somewhere Before?" But all these exciting developments raise an inevitable question: Will success spoil the Ramones? "Well, it's all a game," says Johnny, "but you gotta play to win. We're gonna do it our way though, 'cause we don't wanna disappoint our fans." "Like, it's weird, you know?" says Joey. "We're very influential. Once when we played in Minneapolis, I think, there were all these kids in the club and everybody was tripping on LSD or something. And they all started banging their heads against the floor, just like in the song ["Suzy Is a Headbanger"]. All of them; it was like, really sick. About 300 people were there."

"Maybe some of your fans will send you their heads when they're done banging them?" "That would be great," says Joey with a wry chuckle. It would spruce up my bathroom."

I Dont Wanna Grow Up

Or Be A Ramone Again
Joey Ramone has many fond memories of the Ramones, but don't hold your breath waiting for a reunion. July 1999 If the Ramones didn't exactly invent punk rock -- the Stooges, V.U. and countless garage bands from the Sixties and even Fifties beat them to the punch -- the leatherjacketed New York foursome certainly rewrote the book. The just released Hey Ho Let's Go!: The Ramones Anthology (Rhino) offers up fifty-eight reasons why, from the immortal "Blitzkrieg Bop" through to "R.A.M.O.N.E.S.," the band's own take on the anthem Motorhead wrote in their honor. Three years after "brothers" Joey, Johnny, C.J. and Marky played the Ramones' last show in Los Angeles and went their separate ways, Joey Ramone looks back -- and explains why, as much as the world may want or even need a Ramones reunion - it just ain't gonna happen. What's your take on this anthology? Do you see it as the definitive Ramones? It's really well put together. It's like the ultimate tribute to the band. Rhino wanted to make it really unique as well, so they were going for some really obscure stuff, mixes that were never released and things that make it kind of unique. It opens up the band to a more broad audience of fans as well as newcomers as well. Ramones records are continually handed down from generation to generation, and they've inspired all these new kids to start their bands like Green Day, Offspring, Rancid.

It continues like a pollination type of thing. The Ramones, right from the inception, were kind of the blueprint on punk rock. It inspired everybody from the Sex Pistols and the Clash. And it wasn't just one kind of musical form, either. I met Lucinda Williams who is a big Ramones fan and people I never would have expected that we touched with our music. There's countless people who are into all kinds of different styles if music and who are Ramones fans. So when you find that out it's always kind of exciting and wild knowing that. What did you personally take away from this project? Well, it's been three years now since our last show and ... I've got really mixed feelings about the band as far as individuals go, but as far as the music goes, it's timeless and very inspiring. I don't really listen to it that much, but I see how it affects other people. There must be about 100 Ramones web sites and newsgroups on the Internet. And I check them out from time to time, and I guess that's what keeps it continuing on after the Ramones have absolutely disbanded. There's is a real intensity there. Have you got the reunion bug yet? No. I have no intentions of reuniting. Sometimes I miss playing with them, because there was such an excitement in the music, and the fans were the best. So maybe I miss that. And maybe just knowing what's going on today musically -- I mean, music really sucks again. Today it's strictly business. They sign everything, they'll sign a million bands in a shot. It's not like it used to be where nobody would get signed, and if you got signed there was a reason why you got signed. It has nothing to do with the music today. There's only a handful of unique artists out there. And a lot of kids tell me that they missed the Ramones all together because they were too young, so I feel bad for them. Sometimes I wish that they could see the Ramones. One thing about the younger kids: they get it. I mean, like when we started out, we were like our own island. There was us and Fleetwood Mac, or us and Journey, or "Disco Duck," all that shit. But the younger kids, they love it. It's like their music. They totally understand it. So sometimes you wish that they could have a taste of it. But, I don't really see any reason to reform. It's not like we were the best of friends, so it's not like I miss their company.

Do you see any of the other Ramones much? No, I try to see the least of them that I can. Once in a while I talk to C.J., once in a while I talk to Dee Dee, I never hear from Johnny -- he never calls me, and that's fine. And the other one I could give a shit about. But um, no. I guess that answers your question. (Laughs) So how do you fill that Ramones-shaped hole in your life? I know you manage a band called the Independents. What else keeps you busy? I'm producing Ronnie Spector's new record. Creation in the U.K. put out an EP earlier this year, and we just recently got a deal with Kill Rock Stars and it's going to come out here in September. I was always a big fan of the Ronettes. Ronnie's the best. She's like pure passion; no one sings like her. Her voice is probably more amazing now than it's ever been. She just is totally genuine and has that street credibility. She's the original bad girl; before there was Courtney Love or anybody there was Ronnie Spector and she retains that. It's really enjoyable working with her. I wrote a couple of the songs and I'm doing a duet with her, actually - a song called "Bye Bye Baby." And Brian Wilson wrote "Don't Worry Baby" for her years ago, as a follow-up to "Be My Baby," but Phil [Spector] wouldn't let her record it because he didn't own the publishing on it. But she always wanted to, so I said go ahead. It came out really great. Didn't you also just do a movie? Yeah I'm in a film called Final Rinse. It's an indie film that just premiered at the Seattle Film Festival. I really liked the premise of it -- it's a serial killer rock & roll murder mystery. Me and the Independents are in it. I play the MC of a club. It's a small role, but it's cool. It was a fun thing to do. It's a totally off-the-wall, cult kind of indie film. Any news on your solo career? Well, I keep myself busy. I just do what excites me. I recently did a single with an indie artist named Helen Love. It's coming out on Sire this summer. And I do shows from time to time that I concoct in support of new bands and just to create a cool social scene and just to have some fun.

It seems like nobody knows how to have fun anymore, except pick some friends and blow out their fellow students' brains or whatever it may be -- it's ridiculous today. So everybody has a good time, and that's what it's all about. That's what rock & roll is supposed to be about: having a good time, no bullshit. You know what I mean?

Remembering Joey

April 2001 At 2:40 p.m. on April 15th, Easter Sunday, Joey Ramone -the singer and spindly frontman of the world's greatest punk band, the Ramones -- died at New York Presbyterian Hospital after a six-year battle with lymphatic cancer. That night, in the middle of U2's show at the Rose Garden in Portland, Oregon, Bono took a moment to tell the audience how his own life and band had been changed by Joey and the Ramones -- by that voice and by the big rock & roll heart beating inside each song. Bono quickly found out he was not the only one in the room who felt that way. "I told the people, 'I want to talk to you about Joey Ramone,' and the whole crowd went up in this roar," Bono recalls with whispered awe. After telling the audience how the Ramones "got us started as a band," Bono sang "Amazing Grace" and then, with just the Edge on guitar, went into Joey's plaintive diamond "I Remember You," from the Ramones' 1977 album, Leave Home. "The shock was," Bono says, "the crowd sang it, the whole tune. Then I said that Joey had passed away that day. "The roar stopped right there. The place went silent. It was a very powerful thing to be a part of." Joey Ramone was only forty-nine years old when he died; his illness was a cruel trick played on someone who believed, right until the end, that rock & roll saves lives. A month before his death, while undergoing treatment in the hospital, Joey called Seymour Stein, the president of the Ramones' longtime label, Sire Records, saying that he was going to send Stein some demos by a new band that he was excited about.

Producer Daniel Rey, who had worked on a number of latterday Ramones records and was recording Joey's first solo effort, remembers Joey's stubbornly cheerful spirit in those last weeks: "He was talking about getting out of bed so he could be in shape to go on tour." In fact, Joey was a fragile beanpole who was prone to sickness and injury throughout the Ramones' twenty-two-year career. But under the lights and on record, for 2,263 shows and on nearly two dozen studio, concert and best-of albums, Joey radiated a gladiator conviction out of all proportion to his physique and the endearing hiccup in his voice. The mid-1970s sight of Joey onstage, standing tall and firm amid the original torpedo rain of Johnny's guitar, Dee Dee's bass and Tommy's drums, is one of the most improbable and indelible images in live rock: Joey's praying-mantis frame leaning into the howl of the audience; his legs locked in challenge and his hands gripping the mike stand like a spear; his face and oval spectacles mostly hidden by a thick curtain of black hair. When I first saw the Ramones, in April 1977 in a tiny club on the Philadelphia campus of the University of Pennsylvania, I thought Joey looked like a skyscraper in a leather jacket, the Empire State Scarecrow. But he had the courage of King Kong. "We weren't going to let anything knock us down," he told me two decades later, in a February 1999 interview, referring to the Ramones' long war against bad luck and mainstream indifference. "There was always something thrown at us. The odds, the obstacles, the bullshit that would always be in the path of the band - it was always that way. You just gotta press on." The Ramones -- Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, Tommy and later members Marky, Richie and C.J. -- were never properly paid for inventing punk rock. Joey received only one U.S. gold album in his lifetime, for the 1988 compilation Ramones Mania. Only two albums -- 1977's Rocket to Russia and 1980's End of the Century, the latter produced with maniacal enthusiasm by Phil Spector -- cracked Billboard's Top Fifty. But Danny Fields, who co-managed the Ramones with Linda Stein from 1975 to 1980, says the band's impact was immediate: "We would struggle to get into Toronto, to play some basement in the warehouse district, then come back and find that eight bands had started since we'd played there."

And Joey could pinpoint the Ramones' influence down to the subtlest musical detail, like the "Hey! Wait!" chorus in Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box," a clear echo of the "Wait! Now!" vocal break in Joey's "I Just Want to Have Something to Do," on 1978's Road to Ruin. "We knew the band was good," says Johnny, who has lived in California since the Ramones split in 1996. "I knew that every time I walked onstage" -- even, he insists, as personal tensions between he and Joey got worse through the 1980s and 1990s. "When no one spoke to each other -- me and Joey basically didn't speak for a long time -- I would still get up there every day, look at Joey, start to play and know, 'Yeah, I'm still in the best band in the world.'" Joey Ramone was born Jeff Hyman on May 19th, 1951, in the Forest Hills section of Queens, New York. When his parents divorced in the early 1960s and his mother, Charlotte, subsequently remarried, Joey found comfort in his transistor radio. "Rock & roll was my salvation," he declared in that 1999 interview, "listening to the WMCA Good Guys and Murray the K," an era and experience Joey would eulogize in "Do You Remember Rock 'n Roll Radio?" on End of the Century. He also started playing drums after Charlotte bought him a snare with supermarket stamps. "I rented a high-hat [cymbal]," he said, "and I'd play along with the Beatles and Gary Lewis and the Playboys on my record player." By 1973, Joey was singing with a glitter band, Sniper, and writing hard-pop bullets such as "I Don't Care" and "Here Today, Gone Tomorrow" that he would later bring to the Ramones. Neighborhood pals unanimously disgusted with bloated Seventies superstar rock, Joey, Johnny (John Cummings) and Dee Dee (Douglas Colvin) made their official debut as the Ramones on March 30th, 1974, at Performance Studio, a rehearsal facility in Manhattan. The band's name was cribbed by Dee Dee from Paul McCartney, who used the stage surname Ramon in the early Beatles. Joey played drums and split the lead vocals with Dee Dee. It didn't take long for Thomas Erdelyi, who co-owned Performance with future Ramones road manager Monte Melnick, to realize Joey belonged out front. "The guitar had a raunchy, ripping quality, the bass had a driving-piston feel, and Joey's singing gave it all a velvety coating," says Erdelyi, who took over the beat and became Tommy Ramone. "Once I got behind the drums and focused on that propulsive, straight-ahead thing, all the elements clicked together."

With the hooligan-mod haircuts, black motorcycle jackets and bone-hard genius of songs like "Blitzkrieg Bop" and "Judy Is a Punk," Tommy says, "our art was complete." It was also invincible. Anyone ever moved and transformed by the Ramones has a first-time-I-saw-'em revelation tale. For me, it was that Philly gig -- sitting in the first row, right in front of Johnny's amp, transfixed and virtually deafened by his jackhammered chords. For Bono, it was a show at the State cinema in Dublin in 1978. "When you watched Joey sing," he says, "you knew nothing else mattered to him. Pretty soon, nothing else mattered to me." For Danny Fields, it was a typical lightning set at the Ramones' home away from Queens, CBGB on the Bowery, in 1975. "I was sitting in front," Fields says, "overwhelmed by watching Joey sing 'I Don't Wanna Go Down to the Basement' -- 'I don't wanna go down to the basement/There's something down there.' It was a great lyric -- and you believed him. The song was about primal fear, with an incredible beat, rush and power. I thought, 'This band is great, and that guy is great.'" But the magnetic simplicity of the Ramones' music, look and worldview sowed the unfortunate misconception that the Ramones themselves were simple -"da brudders and all that," Fields notes with still-acute irritation. "They were really very smart." Joey, in particular, was blessed with a native genius that came out in sharp, funny ways. His mother ran an art gallery in Queens, and Arturo Vega, a painter who first saw the Ramones at Performance Studio and went on to become their lighting and artistic director, says that while Joey "wasn't very verbal, he could understand what makes a good piece of art. He would have a way of transporting philosophical themes into something very practical." When Vega was designing the Ramones' infamous logo -- a parody of the presidential seal, with the eagle holding a baseball bat and gripping a hey ho let's go banner in its beak -- Joey suggested putting apples in the olive branch. "I said, 'OK, American as apple pie,' " Vega remembers, laughing. "And Joey goes, 'No, apples are delicious.' " Joey also told Vega the first apples he drew were too red, that they looked like tomatoes. "That was his gift: making things simple," Vega says. "Which is what punk rock is." Joey's aw-shucks demeanor offstage -- in conversation, he often sat in a protective hunch, his broad Queens accent regularly punctuated by a shy, cartoonish chuckle -- masked a fervent professionalism.

He took vocal lessons from an opera coach, diligently did breathing exercises to strengthen his delivery and used a vaporizer to open up his vocal cords before every show. Joey nearly died for rock & roll on the night of November 19th, 1977, when the vaporizer literally blew up in his face just before the Ramones hit the stage at the Capitol Theater in Passaic, New Jersey. Joey underwent emergency treatment, then did the show. "He was onstage looking like Bob Dylan, with cream all over his face -- the Rolling Thunder look," says record producer Ed Stasium, who was there that night. "Joey was a trouper." After the last encore, Joey was rushed to the New York Hospital Burn Center, where he stayed for a week. He wrote about the whole nightmare, and the soul-sucking grind of the road, with typical humor in one of his best songs, "I Wanna Be Sedated." Seymour Stein points out that the Ramones were the only band he ever signed that could go into the studio with next to no money for recording -- and still come out under budget. "If they didn't come out the first night with seven or eight songs done," he says, "they were embarrassed. They didn't even want to talk to me because they thought I would be upset." Joey was especially attentive to the details of record making, according to Stasium, who started working with the Ramones as an engineer on Leave Home and produced or co-produced later gems such as Road to Ruin and Too Tough to Die. "In the studio, he was a workhorse -- he was there for everything," Stasium says of Joey. "What amazed me about Joey was that he knew just what he was going to do. His songs were embedded in his mind and in his soul." When Joey would double-track his vocals, "it was exactly the same, all the nuances. I remember doing 'Pinhead' -- he would do one line, then go back and do the other line, and it would be exact. And he didn't think, 'I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that.' He just sang it." Joey lived in the same lower-Manhattan apartment for many years. When I went to interview him there in 1999, the place looked less like a home than like a record store that had just exploded. Singles, albums and CDs surrounded Joey in no discernible order; rock magazines, books and memorabilia compounded the chaos.

But when we were done, after three hours, he reached into a pile of debris with razor-sharp radar and pulled a copy of a new EP by his friend and idol, Ronnie Spector, that he had co-produced and that included her version of his gorgeous ballad, "She Talks to Rainbows." He handed it to me with sheepish but unmistakable pride. Joey repeatedly wrote and sang of true love: "I Remember You," "She's the One," "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend." Although named after Fields, much of the exquisite "Danny Says," on End of the Century, was based on a brief idyllic period in Joey's life. "I'd met someone kind of special," he explained, "and when we woke up, we really did watch Get Smart on TV." But Joey never married. (In addition to his mother, Joey is survived by a younger brother, Mickey Leigh, also a musician, who played in a band with the late rock critic Lester Bangs and has led his own group, the Rattlers.) Indeed, Joey never appeared to have much of a life outside of being a Ramone -- and he didn't seem to mind. He was a reassuring fixture on the New York club scene, checking out new groups and promoting his favorites, like D Generation and the Independents, to friends and associates. He spoke rarely, in public or private, of any frustrations he might have had with his own band's struggle for just financial reward and historical recognition. "The Ramones had a continuity and a credibility," he told me. "We did it for ourselves and our fans." The faithful loved them for it. "The wonderful thing was being out with Joey in New York, walking the streets with him," says DJ Vin Scelsa, a longtime friend of Joey's and one of the Ramones' few supporters on commercial New York radio. Two years ago, Scelsa took Joey to see the rock musical Hedwig and the Angry Inch. "Everywhere we went, it was 'Hey, Joey, how ya doing?' Everybody knew him, all around the streets of SoHo, the East Village, the West Village." Joey responded to the greetings with a poise and appreciation that, Scelsa says, "was noble and natural. He didn't condescend to the fans." In 1995, the Ramones issued their goodbye studio album, Adios Amigos, which opened with an inspirational bash through Tom Waits' "I Don't Wanna Grow Up." That same year, Joey was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer; the Ramone who had most embodied and determinedly lived the life of an eternal teenager had been blindsided by mortality. "It was tough working around Joey's illness," Daniel Rey says of the sessions for Joey's solo record, which started in 1997.

"If he wasn't feeling great, he didn't go to the studio, because it didn't feel rock & roll to him." By the end of last year, Joey had completed ten tracks, including "Maria Bartiromo," a tribute to the CNBC financial analyst (Joey had become a keen student of the stock market in recent years), and a spunky, Ramones-ish cover of Louis Armstrong's signature ballad, "What a Wonderful World." "The album shows Joey's versatility," says Marky Ramone (Marc Bell), who drummed on seven tracks. "His voice seemed a lot richer, more manly. It was like he was saying, 'I'm comfortable with myself.'" On December 30th, Joey was hospitalized after he fell while walking down the street in New York. He was released for a few days in February, then readmitted. Joey never went home again. But he never stopped being a Ramone or believing that in rock & roll he had been given an eternal, unbeatable life - and that he had a responsibility to share it with everyone he knew. "There weren't too many avenues for Joey to be a hero," says Fields. "He wasn't going to be a fighter pilot or a trial lawyer or a senator. He found rock & roll, and it found him, his heroism." As recently as that 1999 interview, Joey still spoke of the Ramones in the present tense, as an undeniable force of nature: "The Ramones were, and are, a great fuckin' band. . . . When we went out there to play, the power was intense, like going to see the Who in the Sixties. "When I put the Ramones on the stereo now, we still sound great," he said proudly. "And that will always be there. When you need a lift. When you need a fix." With Joey's passing, we need that fix more than ever. DAVID BYRNE: Joey embodied this weird tension. Onstage, you could tell he was a super-sweet guy. And yet the whole image was dress-up rebellion. I remember being surprised at one point after having gotten to know the Ramones a little bit at CBGB: They were the only band I knew of that had an art director. Joey and Arturo [Vega] worked very closely together. There was a loft right around the corner that we could all visit and hang out. Arturo had these giant popart posters of supermarket price signs. I thought, "This is much more planned out than it appears to be." Recently, I read an interview where they said, "We figured out what we would look like before we figured out what to play." This was like a high-concept packaged-band thing, but they did it to themselves. It was brilliant.

BILLIE JOE ARMSTRONG of Green Day: If it wasn't for the Ramones, or Joey in particular, there wouldn't be a Green Day, an Offspring, a Rancid, a Blink-182 -- there wouldn't be any punk band, period. There are bands that are influenced by the Ramones that don't even know it yet. The Ramones sounded like rock & roll in its purest form -- they beat it back into purity. I saw them about ten years ago on the Escape From New York Tour; me and my girlfriend at the time went. The Ramones aren't only the sort of band that you would go and mosh to. It's also a band that you can have romance around, too. I remember looking around and seeing people make out in the audience. It was that sort of Fifties inspiration. It's a bunch of street guys who aren't afraid to sing a sappy love song, too. I was on the road in Japan, and a friend told our tour manager to ask me to call Joey, because he was really sick. I didn't really know what to say. I just called up and said, "Hey, uh, I just bought 'She's the One' on seven-inch vinyl for forty bucks out here." And he kind of laughed and said, "I heard you guys were bringing up kids onstage and starting bands, and the song that you have them play is 'Blitzkrieg Bop.' That's really cool." And then he said, "Well, I have to go, there's some people here I have to talk to." And that was it. JOE STRUMMER of the Clash: The Ramones record came crashing into the London scene like a B-52 packed with atom bombs, nose-diving into the squat lands. Its influence cannot be overstated. When the group itself hit town to play at the Round House, a cool thing happened before the performance. Various members of the Clash and the Sex Pistols had already been thrown out of the venue, due to local difficulties with the promoters. So it seemed a fitting trans-Atlantic moment of mutual respect when the Ramones opened their dressing-room window, which gave out onto an alley, and pulled each of us up into the venue. Then they went out onstage and blasted off into legend: "One, two, three, four, hey, ho, let's go!" BOB MOULD: I first heard the Ramones in '76, when their first album came out. I got it for my sixteenth birthday, actually. When I heard it, I was shocked. The whole concept was so minimal and Joey's voice was so odd, so flat, in an era of shrieking metal guys. I was hooked instantly. It made me feel like, "I need to be in the city! I need to be in a band!"

This wasn't like sitting at your pot dealer's house in the suburbs listening to Rainbow. This was "I can do that! I should! I will!" kind of music. CORIN TUCKER of Sleater-Kinney: My band mate Carrie [Brownstein] made me this mix tape with a bunch of Ramones songs on it when we were first starting out as a band and getting to know each other. They could say all this cool stuff without being really testosterone-driven, like a lot of punk bands. I thought their songs were really pretty. My favorite song is "Danny Says," the song about being on the road. Their songs romanticized being in a band and being really in love with music. We wrote our song "I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" because we had this shared love of Ramones songs. Although that song is about sort of stealing male power away, we wrote it about men we truly respected. I know he came to one of our shows. I'm really honored. That just makes me feel like we did something right with our band. THURSTON MOORE of Sonic Youth: The Ramones, and specifically Joey, were probably the most significant musical force for people like me, who were disaffected geeks in the early Seventies and didn't have any relationship to disco and overblown rock. Joey was six feet six and skinny, with what my grandfather used to call a subway tan -- just super pale -- and he was the lead singer. I mean, the lead singer was supposed to be Robert Plant. I was a tall, geeky nerd in school, and then all of a sudden here was this guy. They dressed like street toughs, even though they weren't tough guys. And that kind of fantasy was unbelievably smart, even though they were exclaiming that they were dumb kids from Queens. To actually go see them play in '76 and '77 was amazing. You entered the room, and it wasn't full of safety-pinned punk rockers, like in the Spike Lee movie about the Son of Sam killer. It was just young artists and experimental musicians, really digging what was going on with Television and Patti Smith. And the Ramones, in a way, were the most avant-garde of them all, just by being more suburban. EXENE CERVENKOVA of X: The impact of the Ramones is something we've lived with for so long, you just take it for granted. Now that it's gone, you just have to be in awe of what they did -- especially Joey, because he really was the icon. He was everybody's saint. His death creates a void like no one else -- not Sid Vicious, not Darby Crash.

It reminds me of when Allen Ginsberg died. He's just irreplaceable. This is the big hit for everyone I know in music. DAVE GROHL of Foo Fighters: Someone introduced me to him at CBGB once, and I couldn't even see his eyes -- he was eight and a half fucking feet tall. But he was an incredibly nice person, not very much different from the guy you see in Rock 'n' Roll High School. He seemed to always have a twisted sense of dignity, and he will be sorely missed for sure. RODNEY BINGENHEIMER KROQ DJ: The Ramones were my first guests on my very first radio show at KROQ, and throughout the years I've had the Ramones on my show, or at least had Joey phone in. Joey was the sweetest person. He was your pal, he had the kindest soul, and he really just appreciated music. He was shy. You could just call him up anytime, and he'd talk about anything. I'll miss getting those Christmas cards. He would always end it with "Rock n' Roll." That was the way he signed off: "Rock n' Roll." ALLAN ARKUSH Writer-director, "Rock 'n' Roll High School": When I was making Rock 'n' Roll High School, there's a scene where the school principal sets records on fire. And all of a sudden, a whole bunch of the key albums were missing. We'd gotten tons of crappy records, but we also got some important records, to get close-ups of. And we couldn't film it. Sheepishly, Joey came forward and said, "I found this pile of records, and I thought these were the really good ones, so I wanted to save them." It was Highway 61 Revisited, Sticky Fingers and Who's Next. Those were three of the records that Joey liberated and saved. These were my personal copies that I'd been willing to sacrifice for the movie, but Joey just couldn't stand it. DAVID JOHANSEN: Joey was a good cat. Nothing but good. He had a great life, and he was able to stick to his vision and follow it. That's a gift not many people get. I used to rehearse down the hall from them when they were first getting started. They were perfect. What I love about Joey and what I remember about him is, we'd be standing in some place watching a band or at some crowded party, and he'd come up and stand next to me and not say anything.

After about five minutes, he would say, "It's weird, isn't it?" We would just observe the same thing for five minutes in silence, then he would say, "It's weird, isn't it?" That's what I remember. Lots of times I used to play on a double bill with them, up and down the coast and in Boston a lot. One night the show was over and we were all packing up. We were getting in our vans, and I said to Joey, "So where are you going?" like, asking what hotel they were going to. And he said, "Hotel! We're going home. You think we're going to spend money on a hotel?" I just got this idea, like, light bulb, and started going home within a 600-mile radius after that. So I learned a couple of tricks from him. DONNA R. of the Donnas: I started listening to the Ramones when I was nine. The music is so catchy that even little kids can get into it. It's pretty brainless, but that's what's so cool about it. Joey changed the way everybody looks at rock & roll, and what's so cool is that he didn't take credit for the revolution he started. Thousands of frontmen wanted to be like him. He'd pronounce things in a weird accent and hold the mike in that weird way he did, with his front knee bent. He started a revolution. There's a lot of bands out there who claim that in rock & roll, but nobody deserves it more than the Ramones.

The Immortals The Greatest Artists of all time

#26 The Ramones


By Lenny Kaye April 2004 Every rock & roll generation needs reminding of why it picks up a guitar in the first place, and four non-brothers from the borough of Queens had a concept that was almost too perfect. Their look -- ripped jeans, tight T-shirt, high-top sneakers, bowl haircut and a black motorcycle jacket -- was a cartoon version of rock's tough-guy ethos. When they first started, they played what they knew how to play, which wasn't much, and worked it to their advantage. They opted for speed rather than complexity, they aspired to be the Beach Boys, Alice Cooper and the Bay City Rollers, and their rotational three chords and headlong lunge kept them skidding through the simpleton catchphrases of their singalongs. They posited themselves unashamedly against the enigmatic mind games of progressive rock, the long solos, the Ring Cycle lyrics and symphonic synthesizers. Not for them the miscegenation of other musics; the Ramones were pure, unadulterated -- and hardly adult, in their adolescent concerns of sniffing glue and beating on brats with a baseball bat, even if the brats were themselves.

Their only-child sibling rivalry meshed like any television reality show, clocking in at under half an hour, with a ready-made laugh track. Johnny was the stern older brother, disciplined, military; Dee Dee was the blunt instrument, the Ramone who took it to the corner of Fifty-third and Third; Tommy was the producer, familiar with the byways of the music business, and like any good producer, he knew that you build a great track from the drums out. Joey was the beating heart. The Ramones had their act so together that they would change it only in increments for two decades after they took it out of the CBGB nest in 1975. They were easily understood, translatable. When the band got to England on Independence Day 1976, returning the favor of the English Invasion in a fun-house mirror, the die was cast, punk rock and anarchy tangling, a frontal assault on here-we-go-again pop subculture. The Ramones always believed in their music's message of self-deliverance. They celebrated rock & roll, patriotic flag-wavers, simultaneously harking backward and forward. Their music wasn't angry, though it did have firepower and relentless energy. If anything, the Ramones affirmed that if they could do it, you could do it; just be resolute. Count to four. They've all left the band or left the planet by this time, and this is a say-hey to Joey and Dee Dee, who are now immortal in more ways than one. But when I think of a Ramones moment, I remember not the early years -- when the bands played for each other on the Bowery and each was like a different world -- but a late afternoon in May, somewhere in New England, a daylong festival, maybe the early Eighties, sun shining, a holiday weekend. I'm standing backstage with Johnny, and we're talking about nothing much, where we've been, guitars we've known, the Red Sox, and finally the conversation stops, and we just look around, quiet in the midst of electric noise, seeing where rock & roll has brought us on this beautiful afternoon, playing the music we love.

Johnnys Last Stand

Shortly before his death, Johnny Ramone looked back at his punk rock life September 2004 Moderately sized and immoderately pink, Johnny Ramone's ranch house sits high in the Hollywood Hills, guarded by a regiment of cactus and a stuffed, snarling wild boar. Inside, the mounted menagerie includes a duck, a pheasant, a raccoon, a brown bear and a two-headed calf, who are kept company by three unstuffed but very old cats. The limegreen walls are almost completely covered with dozens of perfectly spaced framed posters advertising horror and science-fiction movies of the Thirties, Forties and Fifties. "The worst movies had the best artwork," said Johnny, indicating War of the Colossal Beast and Attack of the Crab Monsters. Other rooms contain lesser collections of Disney, sports and serial-killer memorabilia. A side room is reserved for the Elvis memorabilia, the coolest of which is probably the champagne bottle autographed "Mr. & Mrs. Elvis Presley" on May 1st, 1967. "Lisa Marie was born exactly nine months after that," he said. "She's a friend of mine." There's no Ramones memorabilia visible anywhere. I'm here because one night in May -- four months before Johnny Ramone succumbed to cancer -- I got a call from Kirk Hammett, the lead guitarist for Metallica. This was a surprise; I had never met Hammett, and rock stars almost never call me out of the blue. He was phoning because he had an unnamed friend who had cancer really bad. I could see where the conversation was going: I had been getting these calls ever since I wrote a Rolling Stone feature about Adam, the teenage "energy healer" in Vancouver.

I told Hammett that I could alert Adam's family that he was sending an e-mail, but that was it. "I'll just tell you who it is, then," said Hammett. "It's Johnny Ramone." This was a kick in the stomach. We talked for a while about loving the Ramones, how their music changed everything when their first album came out in 1976, how Johnny's machinegun down-stroking excited Hammett as a kid learning the guitar. And we talked about the Ramones finally receiving the recognition they deserved with their 2002 induction to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and how Joey Ramone had died the year before of lymphoma, and how bassist Dee Dee Ramone died a few months later of an overdose. And now this thing with Johnny. It was too awful to think about. "We bonded over old horror-movie posters," Hammett said of how he and Johnny got to be friends when the Ramones and Metallica toured together during Lollapalooza '96. "The stuff is super-rare. There's a whole network of collectors, and Johnny is the only one I like to talk to, because he isn't full of typical collector bullshit. He knows what he's talking about." I asked if he thought Johnny's hobby had anything to do with his politics. Hammett pondered a moment. "Let's put it this way," he said. "Anyone with an affinity for the Republican Party and serial killers -- that's an explosive combination." I said yes, I would put in a word with Adam. I also asked if Hammett thought Johnny might want to talk for publication; a few weeks later I'm at Ramone's house. "It only hurts when I sit down or stand up," said Johnny, wincing as he leaned back on the couch. Johnny was born John Cummings in Queens, New York, in 1948 (not 1951, as the official bios state), to a construction-worker father and a waitress mother. In 1974, he settled on his famous Ramones bowl cut, and he retained it in its entirety for thirty years, until his first round of chemotherapy. The hair came back, but so did the cancer, so he was bald again and self-conscious. Of all the Ramones, he was the most obsessed with how the band presented itself, onstage and in the press. Pale and fragile, he didn't much resemble the guy who owned the stage at Joey Ramone's right hand. "It was more traumatic the first time it fell out," said Johnny. "Between that and everything else that was happening, yeah, it was very hard. You don't have much choice. You just have to make the best of it. Sometimes you wonder, 'Is this worth it?' I don't know. They tell me I'm doing better.

It's just a matter of getting over all these side effects. There's always something, though. I'm always sick." Besides being the maximum punk in the first punk band, Johnny was also the first straight-edge punk, remaining sober and enjoying excellent health through an addictively amok era of music until a diagnosis of prostate cancer six years ago. On the Gleason scale of virulence, which measures the severity of the cancer and has a top score of ten, he had a nine. In the beginning of last year, it was determined that the cancer had spread to his bones, lungs and bladder. Opting at the start for radiation and then for chemotherapy, he was seeing the doctor that Rudy Giuliani and Robert De Niro saw for the same malady, and he organized benefits for the Cedars-Sinai Prostate Center played by Pearl Jam and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. "I worry that they're thinking, 'Oh, God, here's that guy again,' but they seem excited to see me every time," he said of the Cedars-Sinai staff. "I always bring them a present. I want to be able to call them when something is wrong and say, 'Hey, I got this today, what's going on?' Two weeks ago I called them up, and I said, 'I'm tired and I'm weak.' They said come in, and my blood counts were so low that they gave me a transfusion on the spot. I told the doctor, 'I feel like I'm dying.' The doctor said, 'You are. If you had waited a few days, you would have died.' " But he does seem to be holding it together. "Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah," he said, dressed in a bathrobe and sweat pants, leaning to his left at a forty-five-degree angle. "It's just this pain. Pain doesn't make sense to me. It should go away. They just did a scan, and there's nothing down there, so I don't understand why there's this swelling, this secondary infection. And your insides are wiped out by the chemo, from your mouth all the way through you. I don't like any of the painkillers. I tried them and I still had the pain, and I was fogged up. I hate being fogged up. I've always wanted to be on top of the situation as much as possible." Had he learned anything from being sick? Johnny paused for a long time and muttered something unintelligible. Then he paused again for a long moment. "It's hard to say if I was having any fun, ever. I just wanted to do nothing. Have dinner, relax, not be in pain -these things are enjoyable now. I've had a good life. I'd like to live. I'd like to feel better. But I've had a great run. I've done a lot of stuff and left a mark." Johnny did a few sessions of "distant healing" with Adam on the phone from Vancouver, but it didn't work out.

Predictably, Johnny was never truly sold on the idea. But you couldn't fault Hammett for trying anything to save the guy who scowled through 2,263 concerts and fourteen studio albums from 1976 to 1995, spreading joy throughout the world to people who really needed it. All Johnny wanted in return was enough money to retire, which he indeed accumulated with a tight fist and business savvy, immediately selling his venerated Mosrite guitars and Marshall amps and moving to California. The Ramones, with minimal publicity thirty years after forming, are bigger than ever. The royalty checks keep growing by about ten percent a year. T-shirts with the official Ramones eagle holding a baseball bat can be seen on teenagers across the country. Rhino is releasing a box set of CDs and another set of DVDs. A biographical documentary, End of the Century, has finally come out after seven years of preparation. A musical, Gabba Gabba Hey!, with eighteen Ramones songs, has had a successful showcase in Australia and with luck will debut in the U.S. next year. More and more people seem to be discovering that this strange band from Queens, possessing no gold studio albums and no face pretty enough for heavy rotation on MTV, left a body of songs that could fill several musicals. "I guess the world caught up with the Ramones," says Tommy Ramone (ne Erdelyi), the band's original drummer, who worked on the musical with Australian novelist Michael Herrmann and New York director Andy Goldberg. "We were ahead of our time. When something is different, as we were, people can get intimidated or jealous. Now it's just the body of work, and people can finally understand what the band was about." The documentary presents an extremely bleak picture of life within the band. After four nearly perfect albums in the late Seventies (Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, Road to Ruin), Joey and Johnny came to hate each other. Partly it was a personality clash, with Joey as the liberal-hippie romantic who was always late and Johnny as the conservative-punk pragmatist who was always on time. But mostly Joey held a grudge over Johnny appropriating and ultimately marrying his girlfriend Linda Danielle. The perfect albums dried up (though great songs intermittently appeared), and the band toured relentlessly -- Johnny and Joey unhappily cooped up in a small van -- as the only way to make serious money. Johnny comes off as a monstrous taskmaster, driving the band to perform even as Joey's health failed from a number of maladies.

"In order of monsterliness, Dee Dee was first," says Danny Fields, who managed the band from 1975 to 1980. "A genius poet, and charming, which is how he got away with his disastrous alcoholic fibbing. Joey was second, and Johnny was third. He had to whip four very difficult people, including himself, into shape to make enough money for all of them to retire. Joey could have quit at any time, and there were many layoffs for his medical problems. Now Johnny's a sweetie. You should see him with his cats." "I think we all liked each other in the beginning, but the dynamics were overpowering," says Tommy, who was also the Ramones' first manager and producer. "It's one of the reasons that I had to leave the band after four years in the van with them. I would have drowned. It could get very moody, very volatile." One great irony the movie misses is that Johnny mellowed greatly in retirement, developing a hitherto little-noticed gift for friendship. The guy didn't even have a telephone for the first five years of the Ramones' existence, because he didn't want to be bothered with other people's problems, and he went home right after every show. His friends in recent years included actor Vincent Gallo (who shares his right-wing political views), Eddie Vedder (who doesn't) and other musicians such as John Frusciante and Rob Zombie. "He's almost a father figure, or a mentor to me," says Robert Carmine, the twenty-one-year-old singer for Rooney, who one night slipped Johnny a demo tape that Johnny liked. "He never had a kid. The Ramones were his baby that he was obsessed with. When he retired, he needed something else to focus on, and that's his friends and his wife. He's given me a lot of great advice: Play to the back row, not the people in front; get a straight mike stand, not a boom stand; own your section of the stage; watch the money; learn what other people did that was cool. He's turned me on to such great old music, like Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. "He's a much kinder person now than when he was in the band," Carmine continues. "But the thing with Joey is ongoing. We watched the documentary together in his house, and he couldn't stay in the room when they were talking about the Joey stuff. He's still got that pain and anger that he can't quite let go of and become the person he's mostly become." "I only wear sneakers when I exercise," said Linda, Johnny's wife, banging around the hardwood floors in high heels and a flowery miniskirt reminiscent of Carnaby Street in London in 1967.

"The rest of the time, I wear high heels. They get a little higher at night. This is how high during the day. So I have a day heel and a night heel." "Chuck was saying how unsentimental I am," said Johnny. Well, I just can't believe he sold his Mosrite, on which he did ninety-five percent of his playing. "The whole band was like that," said Linda. "No sentiment. Well, maybe Joey a little. I see bands now huddle in a circle before a show and say, 'Let's go out there and get them!' That would be the most bizarre thing in the world for the Ramones." "We said nothing before a show," said Johnny, stroking one of his cats. "We sat there in chairs, or lay there. When it was time to go on, we walked onstage and that was it." Miserable musicians often make the happiest music. "I don't know how that works, bringing happiness to a song, no matter what the song is about. I don't get it. I have fond memories. It must have been a lot of fun. But I didn't know what fun was. I played the show. I felt good if it went the way it was supposed to. If we weren't good, it would bother me. Some of the records I knew weren't great, and to me that felt like a sickness. Did I have fun at CBGB in the early days? I don't think so. I don't know when it was fun. And then all of a sudden on the last tour, it was like, everyone is going to miss us? I thought everyone would forget us. That was fun? I can't tell." If it was never fun, how did he know when to stop? "I wanted to get to twenty years, do one more album, one more tour, and that's it. I felt that we weren't as good as we had been. One day we were having a discussion up at the office, me and Joey and management, and I complained that Joey threatened to quit every time we disagreed on something. Joey denied doing that. Then somebody said we should fire the publicist because the publicist didn't talk to anyone but Joey, and Joey said that if we got rid of the publicist, he would quit. And I said, 'Ya know something? I quit. One more album, one more tour, and whenever that winds down, I've had it. I'm not changing my mind. I've had it with your loyalty being to the publicist.' It was coming to an end anyway, but that finalized it." Was the girlfriend thing the main problem between Johnny and Joey? "No, we couldn't get along anyway. It didn't help the situation, but we couldn't agree about anything. I don't know. We were just different. He had constant health problems, not just the lymphoma at the end. He had that disease where you touch things over and over."

Obsessive-compulsive disorder? "Yeah, OCD. And constant foot infections. If he's sick every time that you have to start a new album, you know it's got to be mental there. 'You're sick with a cold? Every album?' And his ideas wouldn't be practical. He would come up with ideas and they would lose money, so what's the point of doing them?" Had he seen Joey since the band broke up? "Two in-store signings at Tower. That was it. We found out he was sick just before Lollapalooza. We were told that lymphoma is very treatable through medication, but then the complications set in. So I said, 'Hi, Joey, how ya feeling?' He said, 'I'm doing great. Why? What do you want to know for?' So I didn't bother saying anything more. Whenever I tried to say something to him, like right before a tour was starting, I'd realize within a minute or two that it was hopeless." Did he go to Joey's funeral? "No, I was in California. I wasn't going to travel all the way to New York, but I wouldn't have gone anyway. I wouldn't want him coming to my funeral, and I wouldn't want to hear from him if I were dying. I'd only want to see my friends. Let me die and leave me alone." But they had created all this great music together. "We had a job together. Doesn't mean I have to like him. So two in-store signings." The End of the Century documentary concludes shortly after Joey's death from lymphoma and a few months before Dee Dee's death from an overdose, as the Ramones are inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2002. Dee Dee promises not to sit at Johnny's table for the ceremony. "What it doesn't show is that Dee Dee sat down at my table right after he said that," said Johnny with an audible sigh and a visible slump. "And he stayed at my table the whole time. He was crazy. Nothing he said was the truth." The band had been asked if it would perform with another singer taking Joey's place. "I said, 'No way. See us like we were, or don't see us at all. Go buy the DVD,' " said Johnny. "I would never perform without Joey. He was our singer."

Rock Is Sick and Living in London

October 1977 "Instead of perfume, there will be rottenness." Isaiah 3:24

Dividers? Conquerors? The filthy rotten punks are avin fun.

A little before midnight, my taxi arrives at a club called the Vortex. The weather is atypically dry, and the neighborhood, like the rest of London, is a shopping district with its eye on the tourist trade. Half a block away ten or twelve teenage boys dressed like horror-movie morticians jump up and down and hit each other. Their hair is short, either greased back or combed to stick straight out with a pomade of Vaseline and talcum powder. Periodically, one chases another out of the pack, grabs the other's arm and twists it until he screams with pain. Then they rush back laughing and leap about some more. Sitting oblivious against a building, a man dressed in a burlap bag nods gently as a large puddle of urine forms between his legs.

Shouting epithets at themselves in a thick proletarian accent, the boys finally bob down the street as another cab pulls up to the entrance. A man with curly, moderately long, red hair, a pale face and an apelike black Sweater gets out. It is Malcolm McLaren, manager of the Sex Pistols, the world's most notorious punk band who I have flown from New York to meet and see perform. McLaren has been avoiding me for two days. I introduce myself and suggest we get together soon. He changes the subject by introducing me to Russ Meyer, the softcore porn king of Supervixens and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls fame, who is directing the Sex Pistols' movie. "You're a journalist?" asks Meyer. "Do you know Roger Ebert? He won the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism and he's writing the movie with me. You should talk to him. At the Chicago Sun-Times, he's Dr. Jekyll. With me, he's Mr. Hyde. He's really into tits." McLaren seizes the opportunity to disappear into the Vortex and is lost to me for the rest of the evening. The dense crowd inside consists of a few curiosity seekers and 400 to 500 cadaverous teenagers dressed in black or gray. Often their hair is dyed shades of industrial pink, green and yellow. Several blacks, also drably dressed and with rainbow stripes dyed into their short Afros, speckle the audience. The music over the loudspeakers is about twothirds shrieking New Wave singles and one-third reggae tunes, which the kids respond to with almost as much enthusiasm as the punk rock. The dancing is frantic as a band called the Slits sets up. The style is called pogo dancing jumping up and down and flailing one's arms around. It is as far as one can get from the Hustle, and it is the only way one can dance if one is wearing bondage pants tied together at the knees. Most are pogoing alone. Those with partners (usually of the same sex) grasp each other at the neck or shoulders and act like they are strangling each other. Every four or five minutes, someone gets an elbow in the nose and the ensuing punch-out lasts about thirty seconds amid a swirling mass of tripping bodies. Unlike in American punk clubs, which occasionally become as crowded but where most people still try to avoid jostling each other, no one here hesitates to violate another person's physical space. Everyone is fair game for a push. The dance floor is phenomenally stuffed with sweating humans, and getting more stuffed with each new song. Roadies onstage and a few fans hurl beer glasses at each other.

The Slits turn out to be an all-female teenage aggregation whose efforts almost any current American rock audience would reward with a shower of bottles. The guitarist stops in the middle of the fourth song to announce, "Fuckin' shit! Listen to this!" and plays an ungodly out-of-tune chord that no one else had even noticed in the cacophony. The singer, apparently the only one with pitch, has to tune the guitar for her. "Fuckin' shit!" explains the singer, plucking the strings. "We never said we were musicians." When the audience becomes restless, she calls them "wankers" (masturbators) and launches into a tune called, "You're My Number One Enemy." The crowd loves it, dancing with even greater abandon with the exception of one pogo stick who stops in midhop at the sight of my notebook and demands to know what paper I'm from. I say I'm American, not one of the wanking English press. "Well, maybe you're all right," he snorts in a barely understandable brogue. "At least you're not takin' fuckin' pictures. The newspapers all sensationalize it. We aren't fightin'. We're 'avin' fun." So what about all the reports of teddy boys (1957-style greasers) fighting punks on King's Road? "The scene has been going on long enough to attract the idiots who believe the papers," he shouts in my ear. "They're just tryin' to live up to their image. Regular violence is a lie!" Perfectly on cue, the kid is slammed into my chest as another scuffle erupts on the dance floor. "'ere it comes again," he says, happily jumping back into the fray. The Slits draw an encore and invite their opening act, Prefix, a male group who shave their marble white bodies in emulation of Iggy Pop, to jam on "Louie Louie." The audience likes it so much that several of them storm the stage and nearly succeed in toppling the eight-foot stacks of PA speakers before the security men beat them into submission. Heading for the exit, I recognize the Sex Pistols' drummer, Paul Cook, also weaving his way outside. Unaccompanied, he is wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, straight-legged blue jeans and dilapidated sneakers. The nose is wide, the skin pallid. Conditioned by six months of reports about the Sex Pistols' proclivity for violence, I half expect him to assault me. But his hand is limp as we shake and his eyes do not meet mine when I introduce myself. He is, of all things, shy. "It's just a laugh, not really that violent," he says when I ask about their dancing.

"You can take ft which way you want: some laugh, some get paranoid. They want to prove they aren't posing." "A lot of people have missed the satire," I say. "Some of the press are even trying to link you with the fascists." "I can't be bothered with that shit," he replies. "It's just what they want to read into it. When we first started playing, before all the articles came out, people would come up and say they'd never seen anything so funny in their lives." The next afternoon I spend reading clips in the Sex Pistols' office two dingy gray rooms on the top floor of a small office building a few blocks from Piccadilly Circus. McLaren's assistants are also dingy and gray and do not introduce me to anyone. When they say hello, they do not shake hands or give a peck on the cheek; they choke each other. The three-foot clip file reflects a band so clouded in mythology that the truth is impossible to discern. This appears to be in everyone's interest the press prints anything they can think up, the people are titillated in the midst of excruciatingly dull economic stories by reports that the younger generation is renaming itself Johnny Rotten and throwing up on old ladies, and the Sex Pistols' image as Forbidden Fruit is enhanced. This summer, however, the Pistols have been careening into overexposure in their homeland. The four major music weeklies Melody Maker, New Musical Express, Record Mirror and Sounds have mentioned them on the cover of almost every issue for months. Taking punk lyrics at their literal word, the dailies regularly proclaim the movement the end of Western Civilization. McLaren has since denounced them for "killing" the New Wave, which may have something to do with why he is letting me languish in my hotel room waiting for his phone calls rather than talk to the band. All this for a group that has released three singles? In the history of rock & roll, there is no stranger tale: in late 1971, Malcolm McLaren, then a 24-year-old art student, and his wife Vivian Westwood, who was either teaching or working for Social Security (she doesn't remember which), opened a boutique for teddy boys called Let It Rock. They started with little money, but the shop proved an enormous success because of their shrewd buying of vintage rock records in discount bins and unused stocks of old clothes. The teds' rigid conservatism proved boring, however, so McLaren and Westwood changed the name of their store to Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die and catered to the rockers, another cultural fragment that favored chains, black leather and motorcycles.

McLaren was not, he says, at all interested in contemporary rock music, but was greatly impressed by the swagger of the New York Dolls when they visited Too Fast one afternoon in 1974. He followed them to a Paris performance and, from November 1974 to June 1975, tried to manage them when their old management and record company were mired in feuds. Burying their old image as trendy transvestites, McLaren dressed them in red leather, draped their amplifiers with hammer and sickle flags and asked the question in their advertising, "What are the politics of boredom?" This proved less than a hit with both public and critics. The dolls hung it up forever in the middle of a gig in Florida, and McLaren flew back to England a sadder but wiser rock & roll manager. Meanwhile, Westwood had changed the name of the boutique to Sex and was selling bondage clothes and T-shirts decorated with large rips and grotesque pornography (the government actually prosecuted them for their pictures). It became a hangout for budding punks who listened to the jukebox and stole the clothes. Among them were four proletarian kids Steve Jones, Paul Cook, Glen Matlock and another guitar player who wanted to start a band. McLaren suggested the name Sex Pistols. Jones began as the singer (Cook played drums, Matlock bass) but didn't know what to do with his hands, so they gave him a guitar, which he learned to play proficiently in two months. The other musician was given the boot, leaving an opening for a singer. One of the regulars at Sex was a kid named John Lydon, who was distinguished on three counts: 1) his face had the pallor of death; 2) he went around spitting on poseurs he passed on the street; and 3) he was the first to understand the democratic implications of punk rather than pay ten pounds for an ugly T-shirt with holes in it, he took a Pink Floyd T-shirt, scratched holes in the eyes and wrote I HATE over the logo. McLaren stood him in front of the jukebox, had him mouth Alice Cooper's "I'm Eighteen" and declared him their new lead singer. Jones noticed the mung on Lydon's never-brushed teeth, and christened him Johnny Rotten. From the beginning, the Sex Pistols had trouble finding venues for their chaotic performances. But Rotten, blessed with demented anger heretofore unseen outside a war zone, proved to be the spark that set off the forest fire of punk bands now raging through Britain.

EMI, the largest and most prestigious English record company, signed them and released the Pistols' first single, "Anarchy in the U.K.," in November 1976. In a tune similar to the Who's "I Can See for Miles," Johnny Rotten declared himself an anti-Christ who wanted to destroy everything. The BBC was not amused and gave it no airplay. "Anarchy" was not even in the charts by December 1st, when the Sex Pistols became household epithets in one night. Appearing live on the British Today show at the supper hour, the Pistols responded to interviewer Bill Grundy's command, "Say something outrageous," by calling him a "dirty fucker" and a "fucking rotter." The newspapers put them on the front page for a week with screaming headlines like TV FURY OVER ROCK CULT FILTH and PUNK? CALL IT FILTHY LUCRE. Members of Parliament denounced them. "Anarchy" entered the charts at Number 43, but record company workers refused to handle it and EMI was fast buckling under the public pressure. The Pistols added to the outrage by refusing to apologize and by doing long interviews in which they denounced the star system and sacred luminaries like Mick Jagger and Rod Stewart for being old and rich. They went on tour, traveling around the country in a bus, arriving at gigs only to discover that they had been banned in the township. Out of twenty-one scheduled dates, the Sex Pistols played three. On January 4th of this year, they flew to Amsterdam for a club date and got involved in an incident at Heathrow Airport. One witness claimed the Sex Pistols were doing something so disgusting that she could not repeat it for publication. Steve Jones claimed he had a simple case of indigestion, but the papers had a field day, and it became generally believed Jones had been vomiting on old ladies in the preflight lounge. EMI dropped them at a cost of 50,OOO pounds and 5OOO copies of "Anarchy" to break the contract. Glen Matlock also left about this time, charging that the group was so manipulated by McLaren that they had become like the Monkees. The group charged Matlock with being into old farts like Paul McCartney. Sid Vicious, an old school chum of Rotten's, inventor of pogo dancing, reputed mean hand with a bicycle chain and totally inexperienced hand with a bass guitar, was the replacement. On March 10th, A&M signed the Sex Pistols, advancing them 50,000 pounds, and dropped them a week later for another 25,000 pounds.

In between, the Pistols were apparently involved in incidents of vandalism at the company's headquarters and in a pub fight with the head of programming for the BBC. It is also thought that A&M was the target of heavy pressure brought by disc jockeys, distributors and its own employees. This summer they signed with Virgin for British distribution and released "God Save the Queen," a raunchy denunciation of the monarchy, just in time for the Queen's Silver Jubilee. The song quickly went to Number One on the New Musical Express charts. They followed up with a twosided hit, "Pretty Vacant," an original about not caring for anything, and "No Fun," an Iggy Pop cover that Rotten starts as a sociology lecture and ends as a sort of hymn to the general worthlessness of the universe. They have just completed a much anticipated album, Another Load of Bollocks from the Sex Pistols, due out in Britain between this writing and publication time. Though competition is thought to be hot, McLaren still has not signed an American deal. In the meantime, the Sex Pistols are concentrating their efforts on a feature movie to take their message directly to their audience and bypass the journalists, record companies and disc jockeys. The boutique has been renamed Seditionaries to accommodate the new political mood and its line of T-shirts now includes swastikas. Both Rotten and Cook were assaulted this summer by "patriots" who sent them to the hospital briefly. "Fuckin' 'ell! They were unlucky, that was all," says Steve Jones, who has arrived in the office to look at some pictures. Jones is by far the healthiest-looking Sex Pistol, with an I'm-a-stud-from-the-coal-mines look about him, though his handshake proves as limp as Cook's. "It ain't hard to suss it out if a geezer's going to beat up on you." I mention the recent Swedish tour of small clubs and the gangs of "razors" youthful thugs who drive big American cars and assault immigrants who disrupted some concerts by ripping the safety pins out of the cheeks of some of the Sex Pistols' fans. "Yeah, they like the music, they just don't like the safety pins that's wot a Swedish bloke told me. They're just fuckin' idiots," says Jones. "I wanted to go outside and smack 'em, but the bouncers wouldn't let us. They think we're the crown jewels."

The phone rings and it is McLaren. I fall on my knees before his assistant and write "PLEASE!!" on my notepad. She has mercy and lets me talk to him for a moment. To my great surprise he invites me to his apartment late that evening. I express my heartfelt thanks and take off with Jones to the studio, where the Sex Pistols are doing the final overdubs on the album. At the curb, Jones pats a passing woman on the behind, much to the distress of the woman and a roadie who is worried what I'll write. "I don't care!" exclaims Jones. "I like slappin' birds' arses!" A Chinese man grabs the cab he'd been motioning and Jones shouts, "Fuckin' little slit eye got it! Oy! Oy! You cunt!" In the taxi, I ask his impression of Russ Meyer. "Seems like a nice bloke," he says. "Very aware of everything. There's going to be plenty of sex in this film, lots of birds with tits." One of the things that strikes me about the punk movement, I say, is that it seems antisex kids making themselves so ugly and mutilated that no physical attraction is possible. Sid Vicious described himself in one article as a "sexless monster," totally bored with the whole subject. "Sid said that?" says Jones. " 'e was puttin' on." "I felt like a sexless monster because at the time my head was shaved and I was wearing this vile tuxedo that was four sizes too big. I had no money to buy clothes, and people would run away when I walked down the street. It was a right laugh," says Sid Vicious in the lounge of the recording studio. Queen is recording at the same time, and Freddie Mercury's high-pitched howls waft through the notquite-sound-proofed door. "I didn't like fuckin' then, and I still don't. It's dull." Vicious' voice has a tone of goofy absurdity, something like Ringo Starr's (though he'd hate the analogy), that elevates almost everything he says to high humor. Pencil thin, he is dressed in a black leather jacket with no shirt underneath and enormous black combat boots. His teeth appear not to have been brushed in several years. His hair is about two inches long and sticks straight out at odd angles. Several bright red scars highlight his solar plexus. "One night nobody was payin' any attention to me, so I thought I'd commit suicide," he explains, belching loudly. "So I went in the bathroom, broke a glass and slashed my chest with it. It's a really good way to get attention. I'm going to do it again particularly since it doesn't work.

They all said I didn't cut myself enough to be realistic and ignored me." Vicious laughs at the non sequitur, adding, "You better not make a fool of me in this article." Vicious went to college, the English equivalent of American high school, with Johnny Rotten. "We were right thick cunts, we were," he says. "'e was the vilest geezer I ever met all misshapen, no 'air, 'unchback, flat feet. Everybody 'ated 'im. Everybody 'ated me. We 'ated each other, too, but nobody else would talk to us, so we'd just get drunk and criticize each other. 'e used to tell people 'e had to cut his piles off with a razor blade because they were 'anging out 'is pants, and they'd believe 'im. 'e used to tell them that niggers 'ad 'air on the roofs of their mouths. They believed that too." Vicious dropped out of school after somehow finagling a scholarship ("I didn't know about the dole yet") which he used to start some sort of illicit business that he declined to specify. He first touched immortality when attending the early Sex Pistols' concerts. "They were the only group I ever wanted to see," he says. "I didn't know how to dance, so I just jumped up and down and bashed people. Then everybody else started doin' it, but they didn't get it right, so I quit." "Did you really get into all those fights attributed to you?" "Don't believe everything you read in the press. If somebody starts with me, I try to mess them up, but I don't look for trouble." "When did you first pick up the bass?" "I never played seriously until I joined the group. Learned quite fast, I suppose. Before I started playing, I never really noticed the bass couldn't tell it from a piano. I heard records as just a wall of sound. I'd have to think before I could pick anything out." I say how surprised I was the other night to see teenage punks responding so enthusiastically to reggae music. "Yeah, I like reggae," he says. "But I don't know what it is. I never quite find out what things are." "It's true you hate the traditional rock stars who've made big names for themselves?" "I absolutely despise those turds. The Stones should have quit in 1965. You never see any of those cunts walkin' down the street. If it gets so you can't see us that way, I don't want it." "But the entire American music industry is poised to turn you into the next big thing. They'll suck out any integrity the band has."

"But how can they? I only know one way to live. That's like now. In Sweden, they wouldn't let us out the door. Those fat cunts, they said the crowds would tear us apart, but nothin' 'appened. I won't be filled with that shit." "Will you have anything to sing about when you're rich?" "I don't think we'll ever be millionaires. I don't really think about the future. I 'aven't got a clue." Two groupies, dressed like That Cosmo Cadaver, interrupt. "Can we stay with you tonight?" they ask. "John wouldn't let us." "Of course not," says Vicious. "You're not worth anythin' to me. There's nothin' you 'ave that I want. And I can't stand the sound of your friend's voice. I'm very mercenary about these things." "So I see." When she doesn't respond in kind, Vicious immediately changes his tune. "No, it's just that I don't 'ave a place to stay meself. Every time I'ave a place, I get bored in a week. I sleep where I can." "With all the money you make, you 'aven't got your own flat?" "I 'aven't seen any of it." Vicious pulls out his pockets. One coin falls to the floor. "Look, I don't even get paid till Friday, and then it's all gone by Monday. I 'aven't seen any of the money." Malcolm McLaren, who has a reputation for being two hours late to everything, is also two hours late to meet me at his apartment. Vivian Westwood ushers me into their bedroom, where I wait until she finishes cutting a halfinch or so of her two-inch hair, presumably to make it stick out better. The room is modestly furnished in black and white, a constantly recurring color theme that along with the incessant rain, bad telephones, warm beer, incompetent hotel service, yellow journalism, cretinous newspapers, lack of time with the band, money that weighs more than it's worth, cricket on television, geographically separate streets having the same name within London's city limits, riots between Marxist and neo-Nazi splinter parties, and a hangover is convincing me to change my name to Chuckle Suicide and go Sid Vicious one better. The only color in the room is a poster of the equally depressing Red Ballet. The bookshelf includes Orwell, Dickens, de Sade and Wilhelm Reich's The Mass Psychology of Fascism. First in a pile of albums on the dresser is The World of Billy Fury. Westwood appears a few years older than her husband and wears no makeup over her sheet-white skin.

She wears a white blouse and black bondage pants tied together at the knee and thigh. Finishing her hair, she sits on the black bedspread and gives a history of her boutique. They are, she says, still awaiting a decision on the government suit against their pornographic T-shirts. "We've always been about provoking," she says. "If you want to find out how much freedom you have, make some kind of explicit sexual statement and wait for it all to crash down around you." She says Rotten was the first to rip his own shirt, but, contrary to some accounts, gives Vicious credit for first using safety pins: "A mate who owed him money ripped up his apartment one night shredded the rug, the walls, his clothes, everything. He had to use the pins to hold his trousers together." When McLaren finally arrives after midnight, he is still wearing the mangy black sweater I saw several nights back. The long strings of matted wool keep reminding me of Johnny Rotten's piles hanging out of his pants. I ask why he presented the New York Dolls as communists. "It was just an idea that came out, like a can of new soup," he says. "Rock & roll is not just music. You're selling an attitude too. Take away the attitude and you're just like anyone else, you're like American rock groups. Of course, maybe there's just too wide a market there for a good attitude. The Sex Pistols came about because on the streets of Britain they're saying, 'What is this 1960s crap, paying five of a sixpence when I'm the dole?' The kids need a sense of adventure, and rock & roll needs to find a way to give it to them wham out the hardest and cruelest lyrics as propaganda, speak the truth as clearly as possible." "What did the Dolls as communists have to do with the truth?" "I don't know," McLaren admits. "I'm not a communist. I'm rather anarchistic. I was trying to make them more extreme, less accessible. Most bands won't do that sort of thing, but they must find a means to provoke." "Aren't there easier ways to break a band?" "I love to go the hardest route. It keeps you up. It keeps the truth happening. Too many of the new groups are getting sucked up by the record companies too early. The movement will get diluted." Since his own problems with record companies are by now legendary, I ask about his negotiations for an American deal.

"Well, Clive Davis called the other day: bullshit artist number one, this guy," he says. "I said, 'Weren't you the bloke who told the press not to identify itself too closely with the punk movement?' He said he didn't mean the Sex Pistols you must look on groups as individuals, not as part of a movement. I said I believe in movements: 'Get it straight. We're not part of your talent roster. We'll have none of your stars.' He said Patti Smith was on Arista and she was a punk. 'I don't want your old hacks,' I said. 'You should have signed the Kinks in 1964 when they had something to say.' (Reached in New York later, Davis commented, "This cannot be typical of what McLaren thinks because he's told me that he's heard many good things about Arista, and I or my representatives have had about 20 conversations with him. This sounds like a hatchet job, like an isolated and fragmentary quote, since it is from a man who is very interested in signing with me and my company. My reaction is amusement.") "These record company presidents, they're all whores. Two months ago, their doormen would have thrown us out. We sell a few records and they phone and want their pictures taken with us. Mo Ostin [of Warner Bros,] is flying in with his lawyer tomorrow, and I couldn't get past his secretary before. I've been in and out of CBS many times. Walter Yetnikoff [president of CBS Records Group] sang me 'Anarchy in U.K.' at breakfast at the Beverly Wilshire to prove he knew the group. He said he wasn't offended by Johnny Rotten saying he was an anti-Christ. 'I'm Jewish,' he said." (Walter Yetnikoff commented later: "I was saying it as a gag. I'm not looking to pick a fight with Christianity.") I ask why he places the press right down in the sewer along with record company presidents. "Because the music press are basically Sixties culture freaks. They imply we're not original, they try to maintain this facade of knowing every song, every riff, every lyric, as if they invented it. One recent headline had us as 'John, Paul, Steve and Sid,' like we were the Beatles! That's fucking disgusting! They were trying to make us fun. It shows the vampire nature of the Sixties generation, the most narcissistic generation that has ever been!" "So why are you putting up with me?" "My man in America told me to. If we do Rolling Stone, we might not have to do another interview for two years. This band hates you. It hates your culture. Why can't you lethargic, complacent hippies understand that? You need to be smashed.... This is a very horrible country, England.

We invented the mackintosh, you know." McLaren gestures as if he is opening his coat for a lewd display. "We invented the flasher, the voyeur. That's what the press is about." Seeing no need for elaboration, I change the subject to why he selected Russ Meyer, of all people, to direct the film. "Right from the beginning, I knew he was the right guy. He was an action director, and he was an outcast from the regular studios. I liked his sense of color. We didn't want a grainy, black and white, Polish, socialist, realist movie..." The phone rings and McLaren answers. "What's that? Elvis Presley died? ... Makes you feel sad, doesn't it? Like your grandfather died ... Yeah, it's just too bad it couldn't have been Mick Jagger." Russ Meyer, a grandfatherly man with a small, wellmanicured mustache, shows me into his nicely furnished apartment the next day and motions to a slightly pudgy young man on the other side of the room. "This is Roger Ebert," he says. "He won the Pulitzer Prize for film criticism and he's writing the movie with me. At the Chicago Sun-Times, he's Dr. Jekyll. With me, he's Mr. Hyde. He's really into tits." Ebert laughs and says, "Remember, without me, there wouldn't be any mention of Bambi in this movie." Meyer turns around and motions to the couch behind me. "This," he says, "is John." Sid Vicious could not have described him more accurately: all misshapen, hunchbacked, translucently pale, short hair, bright orange undoubtedly the vilest geezer I have ever met too. He is wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with DESTROY and a swastika, black leather pants and these bizarre black shoes shaped like gunboats. His handshake is the limpest of all. "You, uh, prefer to be called John?" I ask. That's right," he says, "I despise the name Johnny Rotten. I don't talk to anyone who calls me that." His voice could turn the Lord's Prayer into brutal sarcasm. Having learned, probably, that if you stare at anyone long enough he will think you know he's a fraud (because everyone is a fraud), Rotten glares with demonic self-righteousness that threatens to reduce me to incoherence. The overall effect, though, stirs a maternal instinct I didn't know I had. The idea of this sickly dwarf bringing the wrath of an entire nation down on his shoulders is, well, heartwarming. Maybe, just maybe, if someone this powerless could cause that much uproar, maybe words still mean something. "You got any comment for the world on the death of Elvis?"

"Fuckin' good riddance to bad rubbish," he snarls. "I don't give a fuckin' shit, and nobody else does either. It's just fun to fake sympathy, that's all they're doin'." "Is it true you used to tell people you had to cut off your piles with a razor blade?" "Yeah, I didn't go to school for about three weeks. The teachers sent me flowers. I'm an atrocious liar." "How did you get that way?" regret the question by the time it's out of my mouth, but there's no taking it back. "Through dating people who ask that kind of crap. Assholes who believe that sort of thing don't deserve to be spit on." "You look like Mel Ferrer," says Meyer to me. "Has anyone ever told you that?" "No," I reply. "They usually compare me to Charlie Watts." "We're lookin' for a journalist who looks like Mel Ferrer for the movie," says Rotten. "He gets murdered." He glares at me again. This time I glare back, and we end up in an unstated contest for about ten seconds. He seems to withdraw more than lose concentration, not leaving me much of a victory. Meyer asks him about certain English slang words to give the script some authenticity. "A tosspot is even lower than a jerk-off," Rotten answers. "A weed is a pansy, if you don't know that, it's just an indication of how fuckin' stupid you Americans are." "Just a minute, boy," laughs Meyer. "In '44, we saved your ass. "Like fuck you did..." Rotten trails off, suddenly realizing he's put himself in the position of defending his country. "You can slag off England all you want. There's no such thing as patriotism anymore. I don't care if it blows up. There's more tourists in London than Londoners. You never know what accent you're going to get when you ask directions." "Hasn't anyone defended you from the standpoint of freedom of speech?" "Not a one," he replies. "England was never free. It was always a load of bullshit. I'm surprised we aren't in jail for treason. Where's the bog?" "Down the hall to the left," says Meyer. "There's ale in the refrigerator and on the counter, if you want it warm." "No, the bog, man," says Rotten. "You know, the shithouse, the wankhole." "Oh! The bathroom!" says Meyer. "Straight down the hall." Rotten trots off. "Hmmm what do you think about 'Bog' for a movie title? 'Bog,' with an exclamation point."

When Rotten returns from the bog, I ask if he shares Vicious' views on love. "Love is two minutes and fifty seconds of squelching noises," he says. "It shows your mind isn't clicking right." Meyer suggests that we go have dinner and asks Rotten what kind of food he likes. "I don't like food." "Come on," says Meyer. "You have to eat something to survive." "Very little." "What do you eat when you eat very little?" "Whatever is available. Food is a load of rubbish." Rotten finally agrees to a fish restaurant named Wheeler's Alcove and the five of us Meyer, Ebert, Rotten, me and this roadie who showed up halfway through the talk stuff ourselves into a subcompact that would be cramped for two. "You can't blame him for being difficult," whispers the roadie. "Journalists ask the most unbelievably stupid questions. They've been calling all day asking how he felt about Elvis." On the way, we stop at a store so Rotten can pick up the following day's groceries two six-packs and a can of beans. At the restaurant, Ebert entertains me with a joke about an elephant having his testicles crushed by two bricks until the waiter arrives. "I'll have a filet with nothing around it and a green salad on the side, mush" orders Rotten. "Yes, sir, but don't call me mush," says the waiter who appears to have just gotten off the boat from Pakistan. Rotten leans over the table and delivers his most enraged stare. "And I'll have a Guiness on the side, mush!" The waiter tries to take the other orders, but Rotten insists: "Did you hear I want nothing around the filet, mush?!" The waiter finally hustles off to the kitchen, much relieved to get away. "What's a mush?" asks Meyer. "Someone whose face is all beaten in and looks like a cunt." "He didn't like that. He'll spit in your salad." "I know it. That's why I said it. The mush couldn't take a joke." As the food arrives I ask Rotten about the close friendship of reggae and punk. The first single by whites ever carried in some of the record shops in Brixton, the Jamaican ghetto, was "Anarchy in the U.K."

But neither movement seems to have made much of an impact on American blacks, who still very much believe in the middle-class dream, at least according to a New York Times poll which showed that of any racial group, blacks have the most optimism about New York. "Punks and niggers are almost the same thing," says Rotten, oddly echoing a theme of the last decade which substituted "students" for punks. "When I come to America, I'm going straight to the ghetto. And if I get bullshit from the blacks in New York, I'll just be surprised at how dumb they are. I'm not going to hang out with the trendies at Max's and the CBGB. I'm not asking the blacks to like us. That's irrelevant. It's just that we're doing something they'd want to do if they had the chance." Rotten seems to be at his most sincere of the evening. He leans forward, almost urgently. "Listen, this band started by nicking every piece of equipment. I still sing through David Bowie's microphones. Punk fashions are a load of bollocks. Real punks nick all their gear from junk shops." I ask Meyer if, as a Hollywood outcast, he feels any kinship with the punks. "Not really," he says. "I don't consider myself an outcast. I'm the only independent who can compete with the major studios. I thought this would be a good transitional thing to get out of the straight bosoms-and-brawn thing. They're also paying me one percent of the U.S. gross." "You mean you don't believe in what they're saying at all?" "Don't you know that all directors are whores? John, wouldn't you make yourself look like a cunt for a million dollars?" "How could you make me look like a bigger cunt than I am?" says Rotten. "The joke's on you." Next morning I call McLaren at home and he promises me a ride to Wolver Hampton, a suburb of Birmingham, to see the first date of the Sex Pistols "guerrilla tour" of Britain. Since they are banned everywhere, they will be playing under assumed names. Tonight it is to be the Spots, an acronym for "Sex Pistols On Tour Secretly." In the meantime, I make a phone call to Bernard Brooke-Partridge, Conservative member of the Greater London Council and chairman of the Arts Committee the man primarily responsible for banning the Pistols in London. "I will do everything within the law to stop them from appearing here ever again," he says. "I loathe and detest everything they stand for and look like. They are obnoxious, obscene and disgusting."

"Doesn't the question of who should decide what's disgusting in a free society enter in here?" "I am the person who decides," he says. "The electoral put me here. My power is not in question. If the Sex Pistols want to change the system, they are free to stand for election from my district." "In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution says the government is not allowed to make such decisions." "We have our own way of doing things here. The Sex Pistols are scum trying to make a fast buck, which they are entitled to do under the law. I am entitled to try and stop them. We'll see who wins. "Now, I've seen many of the groups play. I've nothing against Mick Jagger and his ilk. Some of his gestures appeared lewd, and they were probably meant that way, but the audience was not tearing up the seats. I will say this for the Sex Pistols: there's one band that's a damn sight worse: the Bay City Rollers. McLaren does not phone me back with instructions on how to get my ride, so I end up taking the train at the last minute. Wolver Hampton turns out to be an industrial sumphole, resembling Cleveland if Cleveland had been built 200 years earlier. The Club Lafayette is in the middle of a tough, working-class neighborhood. Word has obviously gotten out, as a line five to eight wide extends around the block. Inside, it is already packed with people in their late teens and early 20s. Except for one kid who appears to have dyed his skin green (could it have been the dim light?) and a few others in punk paraphernalia, the crowd is dressed normally. They pogo to the recorded music, however, with even greater intensity than their counterparts at the Vortex. The fights are both more frequent and more violent. One battle seems to swirl around the entire floor, bodies tripping like a line of dominoes until it stops at the foot of the stairs in back, directly below Malcolm McLaren. A half-smile on his lips, he is an island of serenity, magically untouched by the chaos. "You've got to control yourselves a bit more," pleads the DJ over the loudspeaker, "or the Spots will not perform. Please be cool!" The crowd responds with what I'm told is a soccer chant. At midnight, the Sex Pistols finally emerge from the dressing room. The crash around the foot-high stage is literally unbelievable and skirmishes with the security men immediately erupt.

The ten-foot stacks of PA speakers are rocking back and forth and are dangerously close to toppling over. The band cranks up and Rotten growls the demonic laugh at the beginning of "Anarchy in the U.K.": Rrrrright nowwwwww! Ahahahahhh! I am an Anti-Christ I am an anarchist I don't know what I want But I know how to get it I wanna destroy passers-by Cause I wanna beeee Anarchyyyyy. Some kid has put his fist through one of the speakers and a few more have escaped the security men to step on wires and knock over electronic equipment. The song is barely intelligible over the explosions and spitting noises from shorts, just the way anarchy ought to sound. The crowd pogos frantically. Paul Cook is completely hidden from view, but sounds fine, limiting himself to a basic repertoire of rock licks. Steve Jones' guitar work avoids frills but gets the job done with taste. His expression is deadly earnest like a high-school basketball star stepping up for a crucial free throw which he breaks only to spit on the audience every few minutes. Sid Vicious' bass playing is highly energetic and completely without subtlety. He's been up for two days prior to the gig and, hilariously, looks like he's trying to cop some zzz's between licks. Still clad in his swastika T-shirt, Rotten is perhaps the most captivating performer I've ever seen. He really doesn't do that much besides snarl and be hunchbacked; it's the eyes that kill you. They don't pierce, they bludgeon. You're bustin' up the PA," he says, more as a statement of fact than alarm, after the song is over. "Do you want us to continue?" Several burly roadies join the security men to form a solid wall in front of the band. Rotten is completely hidden from view, so he climbs on top of a monitor and grabs the mike in one hand and the ceiling with the other for balance. Someone in the balcony pours beer on him. The band manages to get through "I Wanna Be Me," "I'm a Lazy Sod" and "No Feeling" with the sound system relatively intact. "Pretty Vacant," their current hit single, draws an unholy reaction the crowd shouting the chorus at the top of their lungs:

"We're so pretty/Oh so pretty/Va-cant/And we don't care!" For the first time, I see Johnny Rotten crack a smile only a brief one, but unmistakably a smile. Grasping a profusely bleeding nose, a kid collapses at my feet. Another pogos with his pants down. The "God Save the Queen" chorus "No Future, no future, no future for you" sparks a similar explosion and closes the set. "No fun" is the encore and, true to its title, blows out the entire PA. I grab a poster advertising the Spots and head for the dressing room. Uncool fan that I have become, I ask for autographs. Cook complies; Jones complies; Rotten complies; Vicious asks, "Why should I?" "I don't know," I say. "I just wish you would. That was the most amazing show I've ever seen." Vicious thinks a moment and signs it. "Usually I don't do this," he says. "For some reason, I'm glad you liked it." I'm glad I liked it, too. Sid Vicious is about as close as rock & roll is going to come to Huckleberry Finn in this decade. I hope he can light out for the territories before he turns into just another ego. I can't dislike Malcolm McLaren for figuring out that reporters are vampires, lurking in the night, ready to suck out every last corpuscle of titillation, leaving the victim to spend eternity as a Media Zombie. If he were merely a manipulator, he wouldn't have chosen such genuine fuckups for the band. If he were merely a greedhead, he could have found an easier way to run the Sex Pistols for number one group in the world. As it is, he chose not the politics of boredom, but the politics of division, Richard Nixon's way: amputate the wanking Sixties liberals from their workingclass support. Kids destroyed schools to the tune of $600 million in the U.S. last year. That's a lot of anger that the Southern-California-Cocaine-And-Unrequited-Love Axis isn't capable of tapping. And Johnny Rotten, it seems to me, told the entire United Kingdom he had to cut his piles off with a razor, and the damn fools believed him. America's get-well card is in the mail. It'll be a right laugh. But I keep thinking about that brief smile during "Pretty Vacant" at the Club Lafayette. Did that mean, "Look how great I am!" or "Look at them have a good time!"? Those have always been divergent roads in rock & roll. The Sex Pistols took the latter, the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.

The Immortals

The Greatest Artists Of All Time #56 The Sex Pistols


By Billie Joe Armstrong April 2005 The Sex Pistols released just one album -- Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols -- but it punched a huge hole in everything that was bullshit about rock music, and everything that was going wrong with the world, too. No one else has had that kind of impact with one album. You can hear their influence everywhere from Joy Division to Guns n' Roses to Public Enemy to the Smiths to Slayer. Never Mind the Bollocks is the root of everything that goes on at modern-rock radio. It's just an amazing thing that no one's been able to live up to. It's a myth that these guys couldn't play their instruments. Steve Jones is one of the best guitarists of all time, as far as I'm concerned -- he taught me how a Gibson should sound through a Marshall. Paul Cook was an amazing drummer with a distinct sound, right up there with Keith Moon or Charlie Watts. There are bands out there still trying to sound like the Sex Pistols and can't, because they were great players. The difference between John Lydon and a lot of other punk singers is that they can only emulate what he was doing naturally. There was nothing about him that was contrived. As far as the bass player goes, I don't think it was necessarily a mistake to replace Glen Matlock with Sid Vicious. Matlock was cool, but Sid was everything that's cool about punk rock:

a skinny rocker who had a ton of attitude, sort of an Elvis, James Dean kind of guy. That said, there's nothing romantic about being addicted to heroin. He was capable of playing his instrument, but he was too fucked up to do it. The things that Lydon wrote about back in '76 and '77 are totally relevant to what's going on right now. They paint an ugly picture. No one ever had the guts to say what they said, to talk about someone getting an abortion. The only person who did anything similar to it was Bob Dylan, and even Bob Dylan was never that blunt. When I first heard them, I was fourteen or fifteen and into a lot of heavy-metal and hard-rock music. I think I was at a girl's house. I remember hearing those boot stomps to "Holidays in the Sun." And then the guitar came roaring through like thunder. By the time Lydon's vocal came in, I definitely wanted to destroy my past and create something new for myself. That's sort of the impact that they always had on me and my music. Anytime that I'm trying to create something, I always refer to the Sex Pistols, because it shows you what the possibilities are as far as music. You don't have to emulate what the Sex Pistols do, but thanks to them, you can take it anywhere.

The Sex Pistols

Still Rotten Thirty Years After Their Debut


June 2007 On a warm afternoon in February 2006, John Lydon sat in a beach restaurant near his home in Los Angeles, and he broke out in happy song. Lydon, newly turned fifty, wore a plaid vinyl jacket, a boater hat, tartan sneakers, Union Jack socks and an exaggerated smile that seemed both easy and self-conscious. A ruddier version of the same face, two decades younger, scowled from a T-shirt stretched across his belly. "I'm staring at you," he said. His hat had a hole in it from a cigarette burn. This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of the Sex Pistols' debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols, but on this occasion Lydon was choking on another milestone, the band's imminent induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame (they didn't attend). He was talking about the humor in the Sex Pistols, which he said had been missed by all the people who came after. "We're music hall," he said, his cheer rising. "This is part of British culture. You're brought up, you sing along in the pubs, there's a piano in the corner, it's an ongoing process.

You can sing songs from 200 years ago and everyone will know it, just like you can sing something brand-new, everyone will know it, because it fits into a thing. And basically, Sex Pistols songs lend themselves absolutely to" -- and by now he was positively beaming -- " 'Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the lamppost overnight?' " He was a grown man, consigned to explain and reanimate what he had done at nineteen, and he took to it with the forced whimsy of a vaudeville announcer, playing his own straight man when needed. Three decades after Never Mind the Bollocks immortalized forever Lydon's hypervigilant disdain, he said, no record company was interested in signing him, though at PTA meetings he was still Johnny Rotten. I asked what the Sex Pistols had set out to do back in 1975. "Attack. Attack. No recriminations, no defensive strategy. Attack: 'You're all wrong, you've got no fucking right to tell us who or what we are, or what is our place.' "I think I brought a bit of barefaced honesty to music, which I don't think was there before. The closest that would describe what I was feeling, and what my culture was, would be John Lennon's 'Working Class Hero.' It was about complacency: 'No, I don't know my place, and nobody's going to tell me what it is, either, I'll work that out for myself, thank you -- not happy to be a slave worker, I've got a brain. Yes, I've got a shovel, but I've got a brain, too, and I like to use it.' Still shoveling shit, though, really." At the last bit of wordplay he seemed pleased. The story of the Sex Pistols begins properly at the end, January 14th, 1978, at the Winterland Ballroom, in San Francisco. Sid Vicious, the band's bass player, had descended into the role of walking emergency, with the plea GIMME A FIX carved on his bare chest and a hardening sense of his destiny as a Sex Pistol. "I wanna be like Iggy Pop and die before I'm thirty," he'd said earlier in the tour - and though Iggy is still among us, Sid was gone in a little more than a year, of a heroin overdose thought to be provided by his mother. The guitarist, Steve Jones, was sick of Sid's uselessness and Lydon's unconcealed scorn. Lydon by this point openly despised the manager, the band and the state of things. "I don't like rock music, I don't know why I'm in it," he'd told a radio interviewer that afternoon. "I just want to destroy everything." And the manager, Malcolm McLaren, was bored with the group's increasingly calcified routine. He'd imagined them destroying show business, but show business was all they had. "As you design these things, you think you're the master of your own destiny," he said later.

"But at the end of the day you're creating Frankenstein, and it will ultimately go out of control." Unable to hear himself onstage, Lydon glared at the crowd, half camp, half Antichrist. Though he didn't know it at the time, it was his last day as Rotten for years to come, because McLaren claimed ownership of the name for the next few years. He had twenty dollars in his pocket, no credit card, no airline ticket, no plan -- no future. In other words, the Sex Pistols were being the Sex Pistols, and it was crashing down on them, with the clarity of Rotten's famous last words. "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" In their twenty-six-month public existence, the Sex Pistols managed one album, a handful of singles, a few dozen club gigs, one mildly profane TV appearance, several arrests, two sackings from record companies, some hasty local bans and one dance fad (the pogo, invented by Sid). When they were scaring the English public, three members lived with their mothers and one lived in a rehearsal space with no hot water because they couldn't afford proper homes; Rotten wrote "God Save the Queen," the band's most notorious song, at his parents' breakfast table, awaiting his baked beans. Their best-played shows drew a couple hundred people or fewer, and even for their last gig, at the cavernous Winterland, they split sixty-seven dollars. They were gone before any of them turned twenty-three. No one managed to destroy more with less. Of their contemporaries, the Buzzcocks wrote better songs, the Ramones were more conceptually perfect and the Clash were less internally conflicted. Siouxsie and the Banshees dressed better. But it is the Pistols who breathed the viral promise that punk's elements, including their own inadequacies, represented something more: a rejection not just of work and rules but of the rebellions of the previous generation, which were then being fed back as a new pleasure industry. "I hate shit," Rotten said in the band's first interview, just four months after their first gig. "I hate hippies and what they stand for. I hate long hair. I hate pub bands. . . . I want people to go out and start something, to see us and start something, or else I'm just wasting my time." He could not have known how far his provocation would carry. When a square British television announcer warned viewers, "Punk rock . . . to many people, it is a bigger threat to our way of life than Russian communism or hyperinflation," even the kitsch proved prophetic:

In 1991, thirteen years after the Pistols' breakup, visitors to post-communist Budapest would have seen the graffiti "Sid Vicious!" in Vrsmarty Square, a new youth culture claiming its identity in the freshest language it knew. At a cafe in West Hollywood, Steve Jones had his own take on the meaning of the Sex Pistols. It was midafternoon, and he had just finished his daily radio show, Jonesy's Jukebox, with a guest appearance by Slash from Guns n' Roses. Jones wore a black anarchy T-shirt, tired eyes and mild regret that he was lapsing on his resolution to cut down on coffee. "How'd it go with John?" he asked. "Had he been hitting it?" (Lydon for his part had said, affectionately, "Steve thinks thinking's a problem.") Jones has lived in Los Angeles for the last twenty-six years, sober for the last sixteen, but he has little contact with Lydon. "Do you think it's lame if we go?" he asked, regarding the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. "I think it would be a good thing if we go and play. That would be the most punk thing to do. And just let the swindle continue. I think it's not the punk thing to do to slag it off. That's the obvious thing. That's like the mentality from twenty, thirty years ago. I'm all about making money. I'm not into that about selling out. Sold out? We sold out years ago when we signed with Warner Bros. That's a load of shit. I wanna make some dough. We've never made dough. Everybody else has made dough. Green Day has made millions of dollars off our coattails, and all these other fucks. Which is fine, but I want to make a little dough." He smiled at the old recurring differences, never resolved. "I hate being in the Sex Pistols," he said, with humor more than malice, like half of a cantankerous older couple. "I just want to lead a nice, easy, normal life now. It's never like that. It's like a dysfunctional family. It's the same shit as any other band. Just that a lot of bands say they don't do that." At fifty-one, Jones is keenly attuned to the motion of any female figure on either side of Santa Monica Boulevard and more than willing to share details of his experience with Viagra or the curative powers of amatory dress-up. What he had not shared, until recently, is that even during the Pistols days he secretly preferred colossal mainstream bands like Queen, Boston and Journey to the bands on the punk scene.

In the circus that was the Sex Pistols, Jones and Paul Cook, the drummer, never got the attention that went to John, Sid or Malcolm, and even within the band, they were often demeaned as "the sidemen." But to listen now to Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols is to hear the power of their conventional virtues. Now that the songs aren't imperiling the empire, they flat rock. For Jones, the son of a hairdresser and a professional boxer, who left home when he was fifteen, the Pistols grew out of old-fashioned rock & roll yearnings, born of limited options and the escape offered by crime. "I definitely didn't feel wanted as a child," he says in Julien Temple's 2000 documentary The Filth and the Fury, one of several moments when the band's dramatized mayhem gives way to reveal the genuine damage to children behind it. "I actually got put back a year because I was so stupid." So he excelled at crime, or at least persevered. He stole clothes from the stores where idols like Rod Stewart or Bryan Ferry shopped, then progressed to stealing from the stars directly: a fur coat from Ron Wood's house, clothes and a TV from Keith Richards', two guitars from Rod Stewart's, a PA system from a David Bowie gig and assorted drums, microphones and other gear. He didn't necessarily want to learn to play at first, just be part of the action. "All the equipment that I stole, that was the beginning of me being in music. I just wanted to be involved in music, that was it. That was the only way I knew how, to steal musical equipment. And clothes." One of the stores he stole from was a clothing shop on Kings Road run by McLaren and his partner, Vivienne Westwood, which had a jukebox and a couch where people could hang out. Sex, as the store was soon called, was a destination for style-conscious rock stars and a gathering place for young misfits of mid-Seventies London. Westwood's designs, which included fetish gear and swastikas, foreshadowed some of the contradictions later explored in the Sex Pistols: They signaled liberation through the constriction of pleasure, not the free circulation, and they mocked consumerism and materialism while embracing the purest form of materialism, the fetish. When Jones and Cook took up the stolen instruments, they asked McLaren to manage them, though his limited experience as manager of the New York Dolls -- he put them in red leather and communist insignia -- was a disaster. "I certainly did not want to manage them," McLaren said later. "It was more preventing Steve Jones from thieving in the store."

McLaren, born in 1946, was a student of Fifties rock & roll and the working-class dandyism of British Teddy Boys, named for their revival of Edwardian fashions. To the fraying ends of the 1960s he brought a lightning-fast intellect that combined pop theory, prank politics and visions of hip capitalism. McLaren loved a catchy slogan and the promise of calamity. The idea of the Sex Pistols, he said, was an outgrowth of the store. "I was selling rubber masks and tying that to a jukebox playing tracks from Muddy Waters to Iggy Pop," he said, speaking from his office in Paris. "This really did have an idea before the Sex Pistols, it was already blowing up. And the Sex Pistols just gave it a platform for it to be seen outside the niche of the little shop. It spun it into the domain of the media. In this way, I forced and manipulated and created the Sex Pistols, and doing so, I suppose what I was hoping they would become was fatal attractions, dangerous people to know. I liked the thought that they would forever play as if they were on the verge of collapse into chaos and disaster. And I thought, once bitten by that disaster, you become twice as excited." McLaren speaks in long, discursive paragraphs, and though his account of the Sex Pistols is no more plausible than Rotten's bit about music hall, it has the virtue of capturing the feelings the band elicited. Unlike Lydon, McLaren is a mythmaker, not a debunker. "I didn't see the Sex Pistols as a group," he said. "It's funny to say. You just saw them as an idea. They were a constant, moving idea. Unlike a sculptor that uses clay or a painter uses paint, it was much more organic because they were real, but they were still an idea, and they were used as an idea." Years before the Sex Pistols, he presaged them in a manifesto for an art-school film. "Be childish," McLaren wrote in the manifesto, which is quoted in the exhaustive history England's Dreaming: Anarchy, Sex Pistols, Punk Rock and Beyond, by Jon Savage. "Be irresponsible. Be disrespectful. Be everything this society hates." Whatever else they were, from the moment they formed in McLaren's shop in the summer of 1975, the Sex Pistols were this manifesto come to life.

2009 PERSONS UNKNOWN ;-) FOR MORE PUNK EBOOKS AND ARTICLES GO TO: http://persons-unknown.blogspot.com/

You might also like