Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,795

This is the grave of Dee Dee Ramone.

Born in 1951 in Fort Lee, Virginia, Douglas Colvin grew up an army kid, moving around all the time. That had the social implications that it does for a lot of kids, making him feel like an outcast and a loner who had a hard time making friends. His father was stationed in Berlin on and off over the next fifteen years, so he stayed there longer than anywhere else, including after his parents divorced, due at least in part to the father being a drunk. In 1966, his mother moved herself and the kids to Forest Hills, in Queens.

Colvin soon made friends with a couple of kids named John Cummings and Tommy Erdelyi. They began playing together in a band. They named themselves the Tangerine Puppets, which is the name of a Donovan song and shows you where these kids were in the late 60s. They did not stay in the Donovan musical world forever. They were on the margins of the musical scene in New York as the 60s turned into the 70s. Cummings had an audition to be the guitarist for Television. They didn’t choose him, but he decided to get his old bandmates together and start a little band called Ramones. They came up with fake names for the band and Colvin decided to be Dee Dee Ramone.

Now, Dee Dee wanted to sing. However, he couldn’t handle the vocals because whenever he tried, he shredded his voice. So Joey took over that part of it. He wanted to play guitar too, but ended up at bass because of the band bringing in a guy named Richie Stern to play it. He couldn’t and they got rid of him but just went with three musicians, which required Dee Dee to move to bass. Well, whatever, it’s not like we are talking about Miles Davis’ sidemen here in terms of musical ability, which was of course part of the point. All of the four guys in Ramones were more than good enough at what they did to change rock and roll forever.

When I think of punk bands, Gang of Four is my all time favorite and that’s probably never going to change. Between the leftist lyrics and the jagged guitar licks like someone just stuck a knife in your neck, man, I love Gang of Four. I could have more of that guitar forever. And I never really went through a Clash stage. They are just a band I respect more than love. Politics are good of course and at their best, their songs are first rate, but they always had too many songs on their albums and since I really don’t care for reggae much, well, given how much reggae is on Clash albums they were never going to be my favorite. But if I just want the best of punk boiled down to a 32 minute album–the perfect length for a punk album–then I am going Ramones.

Dee Dee is a huge reason why. He wrote the best songs! Dee Dee also came up with the band name. He is who called off the “1-2-3-4” to start the songs (which let’s face it, these guys needed). Because he had worked for awhile in a newspaper promotion bureau, he knew a lot of artistic guys and he had Arturo Vega, the Mexican artist, be a kind of unofficial member of the band, including designing their publicity materials and album covers, handling their stage lighting and effects, and all that stuff.

When Ramones played their first show in 1974, they got a lot of attention in the critical world. The American fanbase was too busy still listening to bullshit art rock and the type and it took awhile for punk to really get going, but commercially, a lot of people were ready for some straight ahead rock and roll after seven years of increasing wankery and pretension, whether not very good musicians thinking they should play in 13-8 time or the Grateful Dead going on for 48 minute versions of “Dark Star.” Ramones so deeply understood the fundamentals of rock and roll and that’s what they provided a public that by the late 70s, wanted more of that, or at least a certain sector of the public. I suppose it’s hard to make punk fit with that other icon of late 70s American musical culture, disco, outside of the copious drugs in both scenes. But then talking about the “American public” is ridiculous to begin with.

These songs were so scuzzy too, largely because Dee Dee was so scuzzy. He wrote “53rd and 3rd,” about a male prostitute, based on his own experience. He wrote “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “I Wanna Sniff Some Glue,” “Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment” (with Joey), “Rockaway Beach,” so many of their classics. And of course Ramones began to transform the world with their output of awesome 70s albums. The 80s were less great for the band and by the time of Halfway to Sanity in 1987, they were geezers who needed to hang it up. But whatever, who transformed the musical world in the 70s more than they? Not many.

Unfortunately, the Ramones lived the punk lifestyle big time. Dee Dee started using a heroin and became a hopeless junkie. He was hardly the only one in that scene to end up that way. Sigh. He made some questionable musical decisions later as well, most notably his brief attempt as a hip hop artist in the late 80s, as Dee Dee King. No bueno. Dee Dee rejoined the band at the end and their last album, 1995’s Adios Amigos! includes several of his songs. For about one week, Dee Dee was in GG Allin’s band. It happened to be the same week that Todd Phillips filmed Hated: GG Allin and the Murder Junkies, his documentary on the lunatic. It was clear that Dee Dee really had no idea what Allin’s act even was. Dee Dee had a lot of solo albums too, though I’ve never heard any of them.

As for Dee Dee’s politics, well, let’s just say it’s better not to evaluate your musical artists by their politics because Dee Dee was a right-winger. Unlike British punk, much of American punk was decidedly apolitical and that very much includes Ramones. Whatever, I really don’t care what the politics of these weirdos were.

Dee Dee’s decades of hard drug use finally caught up with him in 2002, when he died of a heroin overdose. He was 50 years old. He was supposed to play a show that night, but when did these guys let professionalism get in the way of their habits. And to be fair, this was central to their persona from Day One, so they weren’t hypocrites or anything. It was just who they were.

Dee Dee Ramone is buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery, Los Angeles, California.

If you would like this series to visit other American punks, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Dee Dee would want you to and I won’t even steal the money for heroin. Johnny Thunders is in Queens (Jerry Nolan is in the same cemetery) and Darby Crash is in Culver City, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.