I don’t know what’s scarier: That most of my recent blogs have either been about dead people (Dan Melnick); books largely about dead people (“Pictures at a Revolution”); or the living dead (my story about the Rolling Stones and the creation of “Exile on Main Street”).
Actually, now that I think about it, with Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards’ -- who many have assumed to be a walking cadaver for years -- announcement Monday that he was quitting drinking (he didn’t mention anything about heroin or cocaine but, hey, we take what sobriety we can …) many now assume he actually is dead.
No, actually, the story today sort of combines all three -- I wanted to mention the just-published book “I Slept with Joey Ramone” (Touchstone, $28), a pretty beguiling and sensuous title that is only betrayed when you realize it’s written by his younger brother Mickey. And what Mickey meant was that they shared the same apartment for many years.
Oh, well. There go all those groupie stories I was hoping to hear.
In fact, according to the book, Joey Ramone (the tall, awkward lead singer of the group The Ramones) was lucky to be alive and walking the streets, let alone have groupies.
Born Jeff Hyman in 1951 in Queens, New York, he was an early victim of the divorce plague that hit America in the ‘50s. His family moved around, Mom remarried (his brother Mickey’s last name is Leigh) and, as Mickey tells it, was lucky not to be institutionalized—actually, he was, for several weeks for observation of what we now call OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder). As Leigh writes: “By 19, he hardly left the house anymore. He just stayed in going through his repetitive rituals … It could take him 10 minutes to put a container of milk in the refrigerator” in just the perfect place.
He was saved only by meeting another Queens kid, a guitar-playing friend of Mickey’s named Johnny Cummings (later Johnny Ramone). Turns out Cummings vision of a rock band involved songs of often less than two minutes with endless repeating guitar and vocal lines. Who can forget “Judy is a Punk Rocker” which repeats that line on an endless loop or “I Want to Be Sedated.” In short, Joey was finally, really, home.
How do I fit into this story? Well, as a young undergrad at Columbia University in those days, I’d been working my way through college as a roadie for famed producer Marty Thau, then managing the New York Dolls. (Being a roadie simply meant that I was one of the only kids he new who had a car in New York, so he could count on me or one of my other car-owning buddies to pick up drunk punk stars and get them to the studio or gig on time, maybe move some speakers and otherwise be at his beck and call.)
Now, Marty is something of a legend, and not just in his own mind. Legitimately, he helped found the seminal ‘60s record label Buddhah, which featured acts like Melanie and when he left in the early ‘70s with something like (we heard) a million dollars—whew, everyone was rich!
Following Buddhah, Marty decided to get into management, since there seemed to be real opportunity there.
