The cover of the New York Post, August 15th, 1983.
“I’m all for capital punishment. I think it should be televised.”
—Johnny Ramone speaking about his wish for Seth Macklin of the punk band Sub Zero who attacked Ramone leaving him with a fractured skull and near death in 1983.
In the year leading up to Johnny Ramone’s near-death-experience in the early hours of August 14th, 1983, tensions between Joey Ramone (Jeffrey Ross Hyman) and the eldest Ramone escalated. One particular incident deepened the division between Johnny and Joey: Johnny’s pursuit of Joey’s girlfriend Linda Danielle, who would later become Johnny’s wife. The band was always suffering both personally and physically. Marky aka Marc Bell was dismissed for his binge boozing, and then there was the 24/7 problem that was Dee Dee Ramone. In December of 1982, the band headed into Kingdom Sound in Long Island to record their seventh album, Subterranean Jungle. The Subterranean Jungle Tour (with Richie Ramone/Richard Reinhardt on drums), would begin in early February and roll all around the country until the band returned for a gig in Queens on August 13th. After the show, Johnny had a run-in with Seth Macklin, a 22-year-old punk rocker from the band Sub-Zero (also known as Sub Zero Construction), over a girl Macklin thought was his own—27-year-old former dancer and punk rock style icon Cynthia “Roxy” Whitney. In her 2015 book, Too Tough To Love: My Life with Johnny Ramone, Whitney chronicles the 20 years she spent as Johnny’s mistress. Whitney and Johnny had been a “thing” since the late 70s when she started showing up at shows outside of the band’s native New York area.
Jealousy almost killed Frank Zappa in 1971. Now it was trying to take down Johnny Ramone by way of Seth Macklin’s foot crushing his skull over a chick.
Johnny really never spoke much about the incident publicly, and the band would not perform live again until December of 1983. Following the incident, both The New York Times and The Daily Courier (a newspaper published out of Prescott, Arizona) both ran stories detailing Ramone’s run-in with Macklin. According to both publications, just before 4:00 am, Macklin, who thought he was dating Cynthia exclusively, spotted her with Johnny. Cynthia, on the other hand, was of the mind she and Macklin had an “open relationship” and at this point had been seeing Johnny on and off for several years anyway. In his police statement, Macklin asserted it was Johnny who swung at him first with Cynthia’s handbag, which sounds dubious at best. Macklin then said he hit Johnny “two or three times” in self-defense before the guitarist fell to the sidewalk, hitting his head on a car door on his way down. According to the police report (as Johnny has maintained and was reported by The New York Times), Macklin kicked him in the head after assaulting him, causing the fracture and rendering him unconscious. Johnny’s injuries were so dire he underwent emergency surgery at St. Vincent’s to stop the bleeding in his brain.
The article published in the Courier on Johnny’s fight with Seth Macklin of Sub-Zero.
In his autobiography Commando (published after his death), Johnny sheds some light on the incident, which, he admittedly did not remember much about—mostly because he spent the majority of it unconscious. What he does remember clearly was arriving at his old apartment on 10th Street in Manhattan in the band’s van after the show in Queens at around 3:00 am. Across the street, he saw Cynthia hanging out on a porch stoop bombed out of her mind chatting with a punk Johnny had not seen around before. Though Johnny and Cynthia were “not together” at the time, he felt uneasy seeing her in a potentially bad situation and approached Macklin telling him to get lost, urging Cynthia to get back inside. Johnny remembers nothing else about the fight. His first memory was instead waking up in the hospital with no hair, a bleeding cerebrum, knocking back anti-seizure medication. The story made the cover of the New York Post on August 15th, with sensational taglines like “Battered punk rock star battles for life,” and “Superstar stomped in 10th St. rage over woman he loves.” After three or so months of rehabilitation and healing, Johnny returned to the band, but, in his own words, people close to him felt he had changed.
Remarkably, Johnny’s doctors were able to determine he hadn’t suffered any kind of brain damage. The attack did make Ramone “more cautious” around people trying to cozy up to the band. It also made Johnny even more guarded about his personal space, especially his head. He was also very fucking pissed-off at Macklin and testified in court against his assailant who had been charged with first-degree assault in the case—only to serve a few short months in jail for almost murdering Ramone. Here’s a passage from Commando in which Ramone expresses the dark thoughts he had about Macklin:
“I was very angry. I wanted him killed. I’m all for capital punishment. I think it should be televised. I think they could make it a pay-per-view event and give the money to the victims’ families. So then, I started fantasizing about getting a gun. I thought it would be great to have someone mess with me and kill him. I mean Bernhard Goetz was a hero. He did what everyone else wants to do. He was Charles Bronson. In real life, who the hell would approach Charles Bronson? They go for the Bernhard Goetz’s of the world. In the end, though, I never owned a gun. It was just a fantasy. I was no Charles Bronson.”
The second page of the New York Post story. Johnny and Cynthia are pictured. Seth Macklin is the man wearing a hat.
Before Johnny passed, he did an interview with New York Magazine rating each album in the Ramones’ discography. His comments on his first post-brain surgery album, Too Tough To Die (produced by former Ramones’ drummer Tommy Ramone/Tommy Erdelyi and a nod to Johnny living through some bad-brain-bullshit) are quite interesting in the context of this story. It is also perhaps another indication of a temporary shift in Johnny’s frame of mind. At least as it pertained to the band’s strained interpersonal relationships:
“All of a sudden, we all got along and stopped worrying about making a hit record. This was our best record of the eighties.”
In the name of “research,” I spent time cruising through the Ramones catalog circa 1981-1984 and was reminded of the groovy jam “Chop Suey” which Johnny hated. It was recorded in 1981, but lots of us 80s kids will remember it from the completely bonkers flick Get Crazy (1983, Lou Reed. NEVER FORGET!). It features the vocals of B-52s Cindy Wilson and Kate Pierson and well as Debbie Harry. Also elevating the cool factor of this song is it pinpoints a time in the band’s career (again according to Johnny) where nobody was talking to each other. “Chop Suey” was a byproduct of all kinds of awkwardness. And I love it.
“Chop Suey.”
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Hey! Ho! Halloween! Ramones fans decked out in costume at a gig in a college gym, October 1978
Ramones drop some truth on a little know-it-all (a young Marilyn Manson?) on Nickelodeon, 1981
The Ramones tread very, very softly when talking about working with Phil Spector, 1982
Johnny Ramone compares the Clash to Joan Baez on Minneapolis TV, 1978
