`There was vomit everywhere. On the floor, in the sink and overflowing from the toilet bowls. This is sick, I thought to myself. Sid (Vicious) and I both immediately threw up as well. I hadn't seen anything yet, though, not until Sid produced a horrible syringe with old blood caked around the needle. I gave Sid some of the speed and he tapped it into the syringe to load it up for a hit. Then he stuck the needle into the toilet and drew up water from the bowl into the hypo so he could coldshake the speed that was in the outfit. The water had vomit, piss and snot in it. Sid didn't seem to think that this was in any way out of the ordinary. His main concern seemed to be to shoot up and he was prepared to put up with any amount of discomfort for the rush. Now I've seen it all I thought . . ."
Thus almost begins Dee Dee Ramone's autobiography, Poison Heart (Surviving The Ramones) which is only the best music-related book since Heroes And Villains (The Beach Boys very much unplugged) and Waiting For The Sun - Barney Hoskyn's absorbing account of the Los Angeles music scene. Dee Dee spent 15 years with De Brudders before being given the Brian Jones treatment and now that he has recovered from a drug and drink habit that would have killed off the average-sized elephant, he's together enough to write his tragi-comic account of life in the studio and on the road with the best American punk band of all time. You file this one under "E" for essential reading.
With their leather jackets, ripped jeans and 35 songs played in the space of 10 minutes, The Ramones were unlikely icons even during the heady, anything goes, days of the mid to late 1970s but the iconoclasm starts here and it starts with the vengeance of a bass player scorned. A disturbing, if at times unintentionally hilarious descent into chemical and psychological breakdown, Dee Dee writes it as he saw it - no fancy prose work, no laboured metaphors or allegories and you guessed it, no happy endings. Dee Dee writes like he played, straight up.
"My memory about dates and specific events is fuzzy. I was heavily into sedatives and prone to falling asleep at any time. It was hard to communicate with me - I had no interest in anything," is how he frames his story. But take this remarkably lucid vignette as an example of his descriptive powers: it concerns the breakdown of fellow Ramone, Marc during the Subterranean Jungle sessions.
"Sometimes it got so bad with Marc, we couldn't rehearse. He would drop his pants down to his ankles, stick his bare ass in the air and start to shake it. He would fold his arms into wings and start flapping them up and down, as if he were trying to fly for everyone. Finally he would peck with his nose and start running around the room in a frenzy, shouting `Chicken beak boy, Chicken beak boy'. One time I came into the studio and John and Joey were waiting for me by the door. `Don't go in there, Dee Dee' they said. `OK, what's happening dudes?' I replied. `Go home' they said, `Marc has flipped his wig. He's in there now doing that chicken beak boy dance. It looks bad'. I took the rest of the day off."
When the touring, drugs and intra-band hatred finally got to Dee Dee, he freaked out a la Brian Wilson on an airplane journey.
In between all the excesses, there's plenty of reflection on his upbringing on a US forces base in Germany, his teenage years in New York where he hung around Max's Kansas City and CBGB's thrilling to the likes of Television and The New York Dolls, buying his first guitar, writing his first songs and surviving The Ramones. Thrills, pills and bellyaches - you won't read a better book all year.
Poison Heart (Surviving The Ramones) by Dee Dee Ramone is published by Firefly, price £11.95.
All the young Goths: gathered together on a mammoth 36-track compilation, the Nocturnal album brings you from Sisters of Mercy to Mission via The Cure and Fields of Nephilim. Out now on Procreate records . . . First sighting of the new Ash album will come when they play (minus the funky David Trimble) at The Olympia on July 9th - only a handful of tickets left . . . Recommended: Bobby Carcasses, Cuban vocalist, composer, arranger and trumpeter and his country's premiere entertainer, plays Whelans next Thursday night (25th) with backing from Latin Salsa ensemble, Saoco.
