Like the characters he created in some of the best Ramones songs, he is destined for self-destruction, and can’t let self-awareness get in the way. But, in the end, he doesn’t seem to understand himself. He had style, and an inborn talent for expression. He was a natural-born writer - of lyrics, of memoirs, eventually also of novels and even more memoirs - but rational reflection was beyond the scope of his aesthetic principles. We think of writers as highly self-conscious or psychologically deliberative human beings, but Dee Dee Ramone breaks that stereotype. There were the bread and milk trucks that delivered to little grocery stores. There were the trucks that delivered the morning papers to Queens. The orange sun was warming up the oil and gasoline on the concrete. All the delivery trucks were lined up along the highway. It was about six in the morning and we got to one of those toll booths in Connecticut. One of the best Ramones escape fantasies I had was around this time. Like being a doorman, or a candy-story owner, or having a hot dog stand. By then I was having a lot of escape fantasies about jobs I could do to support myself, so I could quit the Ramones. I would put on a strong cup of coffee, roll up six or seven joints of Buddha Thai and I’d dream myself out of Whitestone. Of all the rock memoirs I’ve read, I don’t think I’ve ever read another by a rock star who is so completely unhappy with his choice of a career in music. Most tellingly, even after he has long departed from the Ramones, after he’s burned his bridges with every other member of the band and the management team, he is still cajoled to write songs for them, and resents the financial pressures terribly (he feels like a songwriting slave). He wrote constantly, naturally and unceasingly during every period of his life. He and Joey shared the band’s composing duties, but Dee Dee easily held up his half with “Chinese Rocks”, “I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement”, “Listen To My Heart”, “53rd and 3rd”, “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment”, “Rockaway Beach”, “Questioningly”, “Warthog”. (The band was never the same without Dee Dee playing that steady simple bass, though admittedly the complexity of their rhythm technique improved).īut Dee Dee was a writer. He eventually hates being in the Ramones so much that he quits the band without a backup plan. In the pages of his book, he loses lots of friends (but keeps a few - Stiv Bators, Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell - luckily one of them is still alive), and has a few really bad relationships with women. Whereas Joey, Johnny, Tommy and Marky adopted professional attitudes towards the band, Dee Dee searched out dysfunction, torturing himself into corners every chance he could get. He always had a chip on his shoulder - a chip the size of CBGBs. It was about sitting on a park bench drinking wine and snorting dime bags of heroin.ĭee Dee Ramone’s life never improved, even when he became the bass guitarist for one of the greatest bands of all time. For me, it wasn’t about going to see Jefferson Airplane at the Central Park band shell and taking LSD. He saw epochal rock concerts during the golden age of hippiedom - the Who in Central Park, Jimi Hendrix at Cafe Wha - but it all went down hard for this young bohemian:ġ969 was the year of the summer of hate. He had awesome natural musical instincts (though he remained completely untrained as a bass guitarist, fulfilling the ideals of the punk-rock savage). He did not go to high school, and instead dove into New York City’s music, fashion, hard drug and male prostitution scenes. Raised on a German army base where his American father was stationed, Dee Dee came to the USA as a teenager with his German-born mother, feeling like an alien in every way. These scenes appear in the early chapters in Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones, which was edited by Veronica Kofman and published by a small outfit called Fire Fly in England in 1997, five years before Dee Dee died. He often watched his drunken father beat up his mother, and after she left him to raise Dee Dee alone he quickly adopted patterns of severe substance abuse and found himself wanting to beat his mother up himself. Douglas Colvin of Forest Hills, Queens, better known as Dee Dee Ramone.)ĭee Dee Ramone was an unhappy child. ![]() Today, let’s look at the revealing confessions of Mr. ![]() I’ve recently launched a new series on Litkicks, “The Great Lost Rock Memoir”, which will mine the rich archives of neglected rock memoirs. ![]() These include many worthy or surprising works published by small presses that are out of print or nearly forgotten today. ![]() Rock musicians have been writing memoirs for decades, often without receiving the publicity that new books by the likes of Keith Richards and Neil Young have recently received. But many readers may not realize that the rock memoir format has deep, twisted roots. (Rock star memoirs are a hot book trend these days.
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