![]() Joey's barking vocals and Johnny's nitro guitar will bring a tear to your eye. Spector's furry little head is still down in the bass drum mic for the blitzkrieg bash of "Let's Go," the cymbal crashes bewildering, but nothing can ruin this song. ![]() The succeeding "I'm Affected" and "Chinese Rocks," Johnny & Dee Dee confections? Johnny's guitar boost on the former deflates under the producer's percussive obsession, while the latter came out, well, weird - not that it stems the song's throttling riffs for one split second. The compression, the horns - that Spector mulch. You can hear Spector and slave-to-pop Joey Ramone twisting the radio dial intro to one of the great opening songs in the history of two sides, "Do You Remember Rock & Roll Radio?" When the bandstand jock intones, "This is rock & roll radio, c'mon let's rock & roll with the Ramones," and the rock & roll drums pound to the foreground, it's every call to arms since Troy. "But you know, we did an album with Phil Spector, so." His production worked on certain songs like 'Rock & Roll Radio' and 'Danny Says,' but on the harder stuff, songs that were mine and Dee Dee's - 'Let's Go' and 'This Ain't Havana' - his way was not effective. "Unfortunately, a great producer of early-Sixties pop doesn't really translate into a great producer of late-Seventies hard rock. At some point, we realized we weren't having the success we thought we'd have with the first four albums, and we realized we needed to do something. "I think I said somewhere that I was trying to avoid working with him. "Yeah, yeah," says Johnny from retirement in Los Angeles. Why hire a notorious eccentric when you've got Joey and Dee Dee, and why a producer known for his grandiloquent "wall of sound" when you invented wall of sound? Why? Because he's Phil Spector, that's why. He sang about crazy stuff.Įnd of the Century El problema with 1980's End of the Century is, of course, Phil Spector. Or "53rd & 3rd," about being a Green Beret from Vietnam and turning into a male prostitute. Like "I Wanted Everything," about robbing a supermarket. JR: He'd sing about the craziest things people never sang about. Like I said, he was the most influential punk rock bassist of all time. He lived across the street.ĪC: People still don't know some of his great songs, like "Strength to Endure" and "Main Man" from 1992's Mondo Bizarro. JR: We were friends about five years before we started the band. I'd seen Dee Dee a week before on Hollywood Boulevard, and as far as I'd known, he was straight other than smoking pot. Johnny Ramone: That was more shocking, because with Joey, I'd known he was ill. We are very, very sad."Īustin Chronicle: Losing Joey was a shock, but then losing Dee Dee so soon aft. "You wouldn't want us to be sad," mourned the band's lifelong visualist Arturo Vega in his inscription for the singer. The first four reissues, 2001, followed in the wake of our pal Joey's trip to the pet semetary. Blood brothers and neighbors more than 30 years later on the opposite coast when Dumb Dumb died of a heroin overdose in June.īlitzkrieg bassist celebrated by his bookend stage foil on Rhino's second and new chapter of the Ramones redux, P2: End of the Century, Pleasant Dreams, Subterranean Jungle, and Too Tough to Die. ![]() Johnny Cummings from Queens, who became instant buddies with the bowl cut across the street, Douglas "Dee Dee" Colvin. A man as blunt as his riffsmadeinheaven, vanishing breed known as Ramone. Piston-pounding, jackhammer, paint-mixing-machine guitarist. See? From the bangs and down-turned mouth himself. There were really good songs on all the albums, but they don't know any of the stuff from the mid-Eighties on." "Friends who are Ramones fans, they don't know any of the songs. Like Keith Richards, Johnny was always the sonic heart and soul of the Ramones. "I agree," fires back Johnny Ramone at the initial assertion. The 52 years of combined recordings that followed? Delete them along with Dylan's Christian conversion and Chuck Berry's Toilet Tales. Peak streak, Beggars Banquet, Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main Street, and the first (hit it Dee Dee) 1-2-3-4: Ramones, Leave Home, Rocket to Russia, Road to Ruin. Both Hall of Fame benefactors coughed up catalog milestones next - Tattoo You and End of the Century, respectively - but scientists agree. Same deal as the Rolling Stones: You stopped listening around 1978 Some Girls for the Stones, Road to Ruin with the Ramones. We said we were in it till the end." - Johnny Ramone, excerpt, "A Tribute to Dee Dee Ramone"Įverybody thinks they know the Ramones. "We sat outside our job for two years talking about starting a band before doing it in 1974. This is the Armadillo, 1977, c'mon let's rock & roll with the Ramones (l-r): Johnny, Joey, and Dee Dee.
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