No Sissy
"Then I took out my razor blade
Then I did what God forbade
Now the cops are after me
But I'll prove that I'm no sissy"
— Dee Dee Ramone, from "53rd and 3rd"
It's a song from the Ramones' first record, one of the most important
first albums (or albums, period) in rock history. It's a song about
male hustlers in New York, and while Joey sings the verses and chorus,
Dee Dee busts in for this bridge that I've always loved, maybe more
than any four lines of Ramones lyrics. This little glimpse of violent
desperation, the speaker's psyche and his concern with masculinity, and
especially the dexterity of vocabulary (letting "razor blade" and "God
forbade" follow each other in rhyme and meter, then onto
"sissy"-weaponry, religious sin, and street slang) seem a rarity in
rock, and especially punk, lyrics. And that jagged, brilliant flash
lasts all of 13 seconds.
That strange mix of high thematics, crude craft, awesome compression,
and eclectically-street style is this guy's artistic identity. A press
release from Thunder's Mouth Press touts this third volume of Dee Dee
Ramone's rock 'n' roll trilogy as the "rock 'n' roll equivalent of
Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground. Some might snort at putting
the author of four major-league works of classic literature beside a
guy who made a name for himself by starting the first punk band,
publishing his journals, and making paintings that are nearly
indistinguishable from his comic strips.
Me, I'm all for connections between classic and cult literature, especially when the figure is Dee Dee Ramone, a guy who lived the wild, self- and other-destructive life,
starting and pretty much staying with the streets while he turned to
music, writing, and painting for solace, and somehow, surviving and
thriving longer than just about anyone from the punk era. Now, I look
around at the vast majority of majority of the last 10 years of rock
music, and even those closest to punk's spirit have little of its
substance (and I defy anyone to tell me the best of punk had zero
substance). Charles Bukowski once wrote "there are no daring lives
anymore, none at all", and now that Dee Dee's gone -- a drug overdose
after years of fighting to stay clean -- that might be the truth.
That said, he's not Dostoevsky. All this book is, is a journal
Dee Dee kept on his last European tour, playing all Ramones songs that
he wrote, plus a couple of oldies covers, and there doesn't seem to
have been an inch of craft, artifice, or revision in the writing -- yet
that's what journals are about, the lack of calculation, the abundance
of imaginative play, and devotion to the moment's eternity.
One thing this book does is show why he was known for his sick sense of
humor, reportedly laughing his tail off in the back of the van while
dutifully making an entry for every day of the grueling tour (33
entries for 33 days on tour: 27 shows, 4 travel days, and 2 days off).
Another friend mentions how Dee Dee had some trouble distinguishing
reality from fantasy. This mix of delusion and dark comedy appears most
startlingly and casually in a scene with Norwegian border patrol; after
the group has been ambushed, questioned, and are about to be
strip-searched, Dee Dee writes:
Instead of pulling down my pants and bending over I dropped
her with a spinning back fist that just about took off her jaw and when
she fell from the blow I was on top of her. I grabbed her pistol and
emptied it into the other two cops as Minna [their tour manager] and
the boys stomped the lady cop to death where she lay. It looked like a
long day at a slaughterhouse after we got through with them. There was
blood and guts all over the snow. We hid the bodies but we couldn't
really clean up the scene of our crime and left evidence lying around
everywhere that we had done it.
There are other scenes which I'll only mention -- mischievous orgies,
underage groupies, groupies with fetishes (most of which are wearily
ignored), the torturous murder of a cat in a hotel room, arguments over
marijuana and beer, bad club food, the obligatory trashing of various
seedy hotels, constant bickering within the band and management,
relentless travel troubles. There are "sweeter" moments too -- cravings
for and joyful trips to foreign McDonald's and Burger Kings, yearning
for the Denny's in L.A., reading British horoscopes, missing his wife
Barbara while in the midst of lustful, escapist, and narcotic
temptations of his rock lifestyle. Yet, as he reminds himself, "It's
better to put it on paper than in your veins."
The coolest fact for me is that despite all the headache he goes
through, and as many times as he laments being chained to his image and
habits, as many times as he talks about quitting music for good to
become a Hollywood recluse painter-writer, Dee Dee still enjoys the
hell out of playing live every night. Even when the crowd is abusive
and the club's specialty is exploitation, Dee Dee can turn to live
music for something genuine to do, and once or twice a week it seems,
he is absolutely thrilled by the communal performance.
After the tour journal is a section of Dee Dee homage -- Johnny Ramone,
Tommy Ramone, Daniel Rey, fans, newspapers, among others, pay tribute.
It wraps up with Dee Dee's "Horror Hospital", a violently wacky,
defiant, and weirdly poignant "true story" comic strip about Sid
Vicious sneaking out of the Chelsea to score dope, only to be abducted
by the evil Doctor Fickelstein's, whose mission is to give Sid, yes, a
lobotomy.
All I can say is it's weird, and kind of cool, on some level asserting
the rights of an individual to be the sole ruler of his own mind and
body. Despite the fact that his sturdiest and most spectacular work
still seems to be those first couple of Ramones albums, this book shows
us the guy wouldn't quit living and working by and with his own rules.
And he just flat wouldn't quit.
— 23 April 2003
