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Brain Drain: Johnny Ramone and his brush with death after a deadly brawl in 1983
08.26.2019
09:53 am
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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

Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.26.2019
09:53 am
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Hey! Ho! Halloween! Ramones fans decked out in costume at a gig in a college gym, October 1978
10.30.2018
08:45 am
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A flier for a Halloween-themed dance party in a gym belonging to Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) on October 28th, 1978.
 

“The Ramones are on the verge of making it big. Their dreams will come true in their quest for stardom. Now that bands like Black Sabbath and Foreigner are letting the Ramones be their opening act, it will eventually lead to the others’ demise and the Ramones’ rise. Johnny is confident that the kids will see the difference in energy, and finally let bands like Black Sabbath fade and die.”

—the words of a journalist for the Commonwealth Times going by the name “Million Dollar” Gamble in a review of the Ramones’ Halloween gig at the Franklin Street Gym.

In September of 1978, the Ramones released their fourth album, Road to Ruin which included the sing-along anthem, “I Wanna Be Sedated,” a song Joey Ramone often referred to as his favorite recording with the band. It was also the band’s first record with Marky Ramone (Marc Steven Bell) who replaced original drummer Tommy (Thomas Erdelyi). In their review for the record in 1978, Rolling Stone called it a “really good album” noting while Road to Ruin didn’t have the power of their 1976 self-titled debut, this was in no way an indication the Ramones were “losing their grip.” Since 1976 their tour schedule was relentless taking them around the world—in 1978 alone they played approximately 147 shows often playing bigger venues and college campuses sharing bills with Blondie, The Heartbreakers, Richard Hell and the Voidoids, The Cramps, and Patti Smith. One such show went down in the gymnasium of Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) the Saturday before Halloween on October 28th, 1978. VCU billed the event as a “Halloween Dance” and if you were a student attending in costume, tickets were only $2.50 with the promise of a certain “golden beverage” being on hand at the show.
 

Illustrations and signatures from Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, and Marky Ramone published in the Commonwealth Times, 1978.
 
As a veteran participant of all things Halloween (I went out to a party last weekend dressed as Ronnie James Dio because of course, I did), I can assure you the Saturday preceding Halloween is serious business for revelers like myself. So when VCU put out the word the Ramones were playing the annual Halloween Dance and there was going to be beer, you better believe the kids came out in costume to see it all go down. A few weeks later, and as noted by “Million Dollar” Gamble, the Ramones would play a gig with Black Sabbath and Van Halen during VH’s first world tour. This event also relates back to what Gamble said in the quote at the top of this post indicating it was time for bands like Black Sabbath to “fade and die” as the original version of Sabbath was about to implode anyway. In addition to the review of the show, I also came across a very cool recollection from a former VCU student named Doug who was not only at the show, but held the dream-job position of “dressing room security.” Get ready, because Doug’s story is really, really something:

“My favorite Ramones memory was at a 1978 VCU Halloween concert in Richmond. I had just joined the school Concert Committee and was assigned to dressing room security. Basically, the job entailed hanging out with the Moans before and after the show and attending to their simple needs. I remember running back to my dorm room to get my crappy black & white TV so the boys could watch the KISS movie (Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park) before their turn on stage. I also did a horrible poster for the show with a silhouette of the band from their first album cover. Tommy had left by then, so when I got the band to autograph it, Marky Xed out Tommy’s head before he signed.

Other fond recollections include watching Dee Dee use his switchblade to carve the lining out of Joey’s new leather jacket ‘cause it was “too hooooot.” Sitting in and asking a question or two during the prerequisite backstage interview. Joey whining cause he couldn’t find his mineral water. Johnny being quiet and sweet. Marky acting dumb and silent. And Dee Dee drawing vaguely fascist graffiti on the chalkboard.

Ah, youth…”

As they say, not all heroes wear capes, but, as this was a Halloween-themed event, perhaps Doug was wearing one that night. At the very least I hope he wears one when he tells this story. Thankfully, a photographer with the Commonwealth Times was there taking snapshots of fans at the show, as well as a few black and white shots of the band on stage in the gym, which you can see below. I also included the official video for “She’s the One” shot in 1978 which, until recently, had resided inside a nondescript 16mm film canister for 40 years. Rhino unleashed the video in conjunction with the release of a 40th anniversary box set for Road to Ruin late last month. Hey! Ho! Let’s GO!
 

Photos from the VCU gym show.
 
More after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Cherrybomb
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10.30.2018
08:45 am
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The Ramones vs. the Sex Pistols: ‘These guys ripped us off!’
03.06.2018
08:44 pm
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On the very first day of recording sessions for their third album Rocket to Russia—August 21, 1977 to be exact—Ramones guitarist Johnny Ramone showed up at the former Episcopalian Church that housed Media Sound Studios in Midtown Manhattan, bringing with him a copy of the Sex Pistols’ “God Save the Queen” single. He was pissed off, complaining that his band had been “robbed” by the infamous British punk group’s ferocious buzzsaw sound. Johnny told Ed Stasium, their audio engineer, that the new Ramones album needed to have sharper production than the Sex Pistols.

“These guys ripped us off and I want to sound better than this,” he said.

Rocket to Russia was the group’s third album in less than two years, and came hot on the heels of Leave Home, released in January.  Both were produced by Tommy Ramone and Tony Bongiovi, the cousin of Jon Bon Jovi. Although Rocket to Russia was the band’s highest-charting album to date, reaching number 49 on the Billboard 200, its sales were still considered a disappointment as the album had been heavily hyped, there was a massive interest in this new thing called “punk rock” and the reviews were nearly unanimously positive for its hook-laden tunes. Although the group was an incredibly popular touring act—their appearances almost single handedly starting new punk scenes overnight in cities across America—one of their best songs, “Sheena is a Punk Rocker” was only able to reach #81 in the Billboard singles chart.
 

 
The summer of 1977, when the “Sheena” single was released, was when the mainstream American media first started taking major notice of punk. Downtown New York bands were getting signed left and right by major record labels and Max’s Kansas City and CBGB were packed to the gills most nights. However, the punk stories that got the most airplay were obviously the most notorious, involving violence at shows, “gobbing,” rioting, hard drugs and so forth. Not only did the members of the Ramones see themselves as “robbed” by the Sex Pistols’ guitar sound, they even blamed the Sex Pistols for their own lack of record sales, believing the British group’s loutish behavior had caused the public to see punk as an alarming development, tanking Rocket to Russia‘s potential for breaking them in America. 

In Brian J. Bowe’s 2010 book, The Ramones: American Punk Rock Band, Punk magazine’s Legs McNeil seems to agree with this notion:

“Safety pins, razor blades, chopped haircuts, snarling, vomiting—everything that had nothing to do with the Ramones was suddenly in vogue, and it killed any chance Rocket to Russia had of getting any airplay.”

Rocket to Russia was the final Ramones album to be recorded with all four original members, as Tommy Ramone would depart his drum stool in 1978 to work with the band behind the scenes.
 

 

 

Ferocious live footage of the Ramones at the State Theatre in Minneapolis from ‘Wylde Rice,’ a super-hip Minnesota PBS show of the time. Backstage, the boys discuss the punk scene in England, dismiss the notion of punk “politics” and the reporting of violence at punk gigs as overblown. They start off with a great “Rockaway Beach” and later rip through “California Sun” and “Blitzkrieg Bop.” Shot on January 21, 1978 as they toured in support of ‘Rocket to Russia.’ None other than the Runaways were their opening act!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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03.06.2018
08:44 pm
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‘Chinese Rocks’: Members of MC5, Blondie, and Replacements pay tribute to the Heartbreakers


 
As much as any band could, the Heartbreakers both aesthetically and individually personified the bridge between proto-punk and punk rock. They coalesced in 1975, when New York Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan joined forces with Richard Hell, who’d just left Television. The quartet was completed a few months later with the addition of guitarist/vocalist Walter Lure.

The next year, their best-documented lineup was formed when Hell was replaced by Billy Rath (Hell would go on to form a namesake band, and it’s easy to wonder if he didn’t do that to make it difficult to oust him from a THIRD epochally crucial group), and this version of the Heartbreakers would record their lone album, L.A.M.F. (Like a Mother Fucker), which was one of punk’s great letdowns. A terrible mix buried confident performances of fine songs, and the shittiness of the record prompted Nolan to quit the band.

That album has been remixed and remastered a fair few times, and it contains some of punk’s earliest enduring anthems, like “Born to Lose” and “Chinese Rocks.” That latter song was eventually performed by the Ramones on their 1980 LP End of the Century under the title “Chinese Rock,” and the song is partly noteworthy for a years-long dispute over exactly who wrote it. It’s long been accepted that the song was a collaboration to some degree between Richard Hell and Dee Dee Ramone, a reality reflected in the End of the Century credits. But on the original pressing of L.A.M.F., Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan are credited as songwriters—a credit that’s absent from the many subsequent reissues. If that claimed writing credit was an attempted money-grab, karma for that larceny was pretty instant—L.A.M.F. didn’t really generate all that much money at first. According to Dee Dee Ramone in his memoir Lobotomy:

For a while dope was called “Chinese Rock” in New York. When you would walk around the Lower East Side people would smirk at one another on the sidewalk and let you know with hand signals that they have the Chinese Rock. It was supposed to be good luck if someone had rocks. I must’ve had a lot of luck.

Jerry Nolan and Johnny Thunders used to call me quite frequently. Jerry would come over to my place and pick me up and then we would go cop some dope. The Heartbreakers we’re just getting together with John, Jerry and Richard Hell. I guess those guys were all dope fiends then… Richard Hell had mentioned to me that he was going to write a song better than Lou Reed’s “Heroin,” so I took his idea and wrote Chinese rocks in Deborah Harry’s apartment that night.

I wrote the song about Jerry calling me up to come over and go cop. The line “My girlfriend’s crying in the shower stall” was about Connie, and the shower was at Arturo Vega’s loft. The intro to the song was the same kind of stuff I had put in songs like “Commando” and the chorus of “53rd and 3rd.” I wrote those songs before “Chinese Rocks” and the Ramones had already performed and recorded these tunes.

When Jerry was over at my place one day, we did some dope and then I played him my song, and he took it with him to a Heartbreakers rehearsal. When Leee Childers started managing them them and got them a record deal, “Chinese Rocks” was their first single off L.A.M.F. …but the credits are false. Johnny Thunders ranked on me for fourteen years, trying to make out like he wrote the song. What a low-life maneuver by those guys! By then, I was really too fucked up to care.

Much more after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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11.21.2017
02:09 pm
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‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’: The Ramones on ‘The Tomorrow Show,’ 1981
09.12.2017
08:45 am
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Tom Snyder’s late-night talkfest The Tomorrow Show was one of the more reliable sources of stimulating programming in the 1970s and early 80s. Snyder was a lanky Midwesterner with an emphatic speaking style and a certain fearlessness about presenting off-kilter content on TV. When John Lennon and the Clash appeared on the show in 1975 and 1981, respectively, the result was frankly riveting television. It didn’t always click to that extent, such as the Ramones’ visit to the Tomorrow studio, primarily because Snyder himself was on vacation, with regular guest host Kelly Lange stepping in.

Lange seems like a perfectly nice lady but in all honesty she didn’t really make much sense as a guest host for a show that highlighted the “provocative” so strongly, and she was certainly not a very good choice to interview the Ramones! The Ramones were supporting Pleasant Dreams and they were firmly in their permanent state of disappointment in terms of generating sales after the Phil Spector-produced End of the Century, which was widely interpreted as a move to shake things up.  Pleasant Dreams features at least one stone-cold Ramones classic, in “The KKK Took My Baby Away,” but the sales didn’t live up to expectations.

The Ramones’ segment on The Tomorrow Show starts with a rendition of “We Want the Airwaves,” after which we get a few minutes of fairly innocuous chitchat. After the conversation the Ramones re-take the stage and play “I Wanna Be Sedated” and “The KKK Took My Baby Away.”

According to Marky in his book Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone, the band didn’t care too much that they hadn’t gotten Snyder himself for the interview:
 

We liked The Tomorrow Show because an interview with Tom was not standard fare.

Tom sat you down like a guest in his own living room and plunged headfirst into your situation like a half-journalist/half-shrink. If three million or four million people happened to be watching, so be it. He laughed hard, he scoffed hard, and he set the bar for a good interview right around the bar for good sex—nothing short of sheer exhaustion was acceptable. Once Dan Aykroyd of Saturday Night Live had captured the manic flap of the head and arms in his brilliant impression, Tom Snyder was permanently etched into the brain of everyone who stayed up past eleven thirty.

The official name of The Tomorrow Show was Tomorrow with Tom Snyder, but that applied to tomorrow, not today. Tom was out, so for our afternoon taping we were getting the substitute host, Kelly Lange. Lange had done the news with Snyder out in Los Angeles and was a fairly regular stand-in, but she was no Tom Snyder. We didn’t care. We were happy to get a national spot.

 
Sensitive Joey, however, may not have been able to shrug it off so easily. According to Joey’s brother Mickey Leigh in his book I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir, Joey said of the appearance, “We waited all these years to come on The Tomorrow Show and meet Tom Snyder, and we find out he was on vacation. Tom doesn’t even show up!”

One of the best things in this clip is the tight close-up of Marky’s nervously bobbing Chuck Taylor—if you watch you’ll see what I mean.
 
Watch the video after the jump….....

READ ON
Posted by Martin Schneider
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09.12.2017
08:45 am
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Killing Joke, Nick Cave, The Damned & Billy Idol lip-synching for their lives on 80s television


Jaz Coleman of Killing Joke looking a bit confused about how the band ended up on German music television program ‘Musik Convoy.’
 
As a frequent flier on the astral plane that is the Internet I never get tired of flipping through pages upon pages of YouTube in search of footage worthy of sharing with all you Dangerous Minds music fanatics. I cannot lie, I feel like I’ve hit the motherfucking JACKPOT today when it comes to these amazing clips that are also somewhat amusingly strange. And that’s because you are about to see musical gods like Nick Cave, Killing Joke, The Damned and Billy Idol lip-synching for their very lives back in the 80s on the short-lived German music television show Musik Convoy.

Musik Convoy was only on the air for a year but during that time they managed to get quite the cast of characters to “perform” on the show including a 1984 visit by The Cure who performed “Shake Dog Shake” with a beautifully disheveled Robert Smith, his signature red lipstick and hair askew. There are so many strange moments from the collection of videos in this post I just can’t pick a favorite. Like Nick Cave pretending to belt out an emotive version of “In The Ghetto” when you know—and he knows that you know—that he’s totally faking it. Or Billy Idol literally dancing with himself for two-plus minutes while miming “Eyes Without a Face,” or Robert Smith’s distinct indifference with his strange white microphone during another of the Cure’s appearance on the show. And since I’m feeling generous I also threw in twelve-minutes of the Ramones from Musik Convoy performing in front of a mostly solem, confused looking crowd of “fans” and soldiering through four songs: “Howling at the Moon,” Mama’s Boy,” “Wart Hog,” and “Chasing the Night.” I’ve said it before, the 80s were certainly full of fantastically weird times.
 

Nick Cave performing ‘In the Ghetto’ on ‘Musik Convoy,’ 1984.
 
More lip-syncing with the bad boys, after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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11.16.2016
09:48 am
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Punk rock knitting: These cult figure sweaters are easily the most amazing sweaters money can buy


Kraftwerk sweater by by Amimono Horinouchi
 
I’m not the sort of person to really care all that much about, or even notice, expert knitting or “crafting” or embroidery or anything remotely like that. This very sentence will probably mark my first time using the word “felted” and it might very well be the last. I’ve got no business being in a Hobby Lobby. I’m not putting it down, but it’s not my area of interest.

That was until I saw the jaw-dropping sweaters made by Amimono Horinouchi, a 49-year-old knitwear artiste based in Tokyo. THIS is where my own esoteric interests hit the Venn diagram with wool sweaters hard. When I saw the Kraftwerk sweater, my eyes practically bugged out—they’re all so amazing: Debbie Harry, Ramones, Bowie, YMO—but what could possibly top that insane Kraftwerk sweater???

And then I saw the one on his website of Throbbing Gristle-era Genesis P-Orridge and was completely and utterly floored.

Amimono Horinouchi‘s knitwear might be “fashion,” but it is also art.

According to his Etsy page, which has prices in dollars, the bags sell for less than $200, and the sweaters go for about $600 which I think is a great bargain. He also takes commissions and will even do a sweater of your beloved dog or cat. I’d love to see him working in large tapestries. Incredible!

Follow Amimono Horinouchi on Twitter.
 

Genesis P-Orridge
 

Debbie Harry
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Richard Metzger
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10.27.2016
12:27 pm
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Debbie Harry covering The Ramones 27 years ago
10.24.2016
09:16 am
Topics:
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What we have here is some ultra-rare footage of Debbie Harry performing the Ramones classic “Pet Semetary,” a song which was written for the Stephen King movie adaptation of the same name. This performance from October 23, 1989 was part of Debbie’s Def, Dumb, and Blonde solo tour. The Ramones original had been released five months earlier on their Brain Drain album and had become one of their biggest radio hits. The song has since become a staple of Blondie’s live set.

Though there’s nothing particularly unusual about Debbie Harry covering the Ramones—they were pals and CBGB compatriots, this clip is remarkable for the quality of the performance and the fact that, for a Ramones song, it sounds an awful lot like it should have been a Blondie song.
 

 
Debbie’s cover here was recorded at The Roxy in Los Angeles. Though the framing and video quality makes it difficult to verify who exactly is in Debbie’s band here, information online suggests that she had been touring around the same time with a lineup of Chris Stein (guitar), Leigh Foxx (bass), Carla Olla (guitar), Suzi Davis (keyboard), and Jimmy Clark (drums). The image and sound quality here is less than stellar in this rare footage, but the band rocking hard.
 

 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Blondie bombshell Debbie Harry’s awkwardly awesome late-night disco-diatribe against nuclear power

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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10.24.2016
09:16 am
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Ramones, Butthole Surfers, Violent Femmes and more, covering Saturday morning cartoon theme songs


 
In 1995, MCA Records released Saturday Morning Cartoons Greatest Hits, a compilation of then current alt-rock stars and also-rans transforming the 30-60 second theme songs from classic children’s shows into three-minute pop songs, accompanied by a full length home video that featured all the songs on the comp with the linking device of Drew Barrymore watching them all and commenting with her central-casting Gen-X friends. It dovetailed both with the vogue for alt-rock tribute comps and the ongoing popularity of the Television’s Greatest Hits series, which by then had been around for ten years.

Though they win points for sporting cool Glenn Barr cover art, both the CD and video were pretty crummy overall, but naturally, amid the dross of tepid mid-’90s radio alt (Sponge, Semisonic, Collective Soul, Sublime—I’ll bet you just can’t wait to hear it now, right?) there were some terrific moments. How could the Ramones doing the unforgettable theme to those endearingly cheap 1967 Spider-Man cartoons be bad? IT CANNOT. Violent Femmes went on a marvelously weird tangent. Instead of covering the Jetsons actual theme song, they did a deep cut: “Eep, Opp, Ork, Ah-ah!” by the in-universe teen idol Jet Screamer. It’s pretty great. The Reverend Horton Heat did a roaring psychobilly medley of the Jonny Quest theme and another deep dig, “Stop That Pigeon” from the short-lived Dastardly and Muttley in Their Flying Machines. The Butthole Surfers, though they were well past the height of their powers by then, did a mindwarping take on the Underdog theme. And there’s perhaps the album’s most perfect pairing of artist and material, the Aussie folk-pop band Frente! doing a really charming “Open up Your Heart (and Let the Sunshine In),” a 1954 song about rejecting the Devil, which became huge when the infant Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm sang it on The Flintstones.
 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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10.12.2016
09:22 am
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‘Pass The Dust, I Think I’m Bowie!’: True tales of Black Randy, first wave Los Angeles punk icon
07.08.2016
05:30 pm
Topics:
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kufguytj
 
The many roads that led to the happening that was to be referred to as “punk” are varied and often way more interesting than punk itself. It’s still a wonder to me to see the various ways so many very opposed situations all wound up in one place, at one time. In other words, to skew a quote from the the old TV show Naked City “There are eight million stories in punk city. This is one of them.”

My personal introduction to Black Randy was when I arrived (by bus!) in Los Angeles from New York with some friends and bandmates to visit our new found buddies who had come to New York six months before. We let them stay in our sorta squat (in actuality it was the storage space of the drummer of The Lovin’ Spoonful, who our friend babysat for!) and they said to come to LA. These new pals consisted of Brian Tristan (later to be known as Kid Congo Powers), Trixie Plunger, Mary Rat, Rod (from LA band The Mau Maus) and Hellin Killer. Lifelong friends, all. In LA we bounced between the three places most people in our circle did: The Screamers house (aka The Wilton Hilton, where Brian/Kid literally lived in a closet); The Canterbury on Cherokee, off Hollywood Boulevard, an entire apartment complex stuffed to the gills with punk rock kids in every room and across from infamous punk club The Masque; and Joan Jett’s house, then a looney bin party pad.
 
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When entering the Canterbury I was warned by Screamers drummer KK Barrett about a guy named Black Randy who was crazy and to “definitely not shake his hand”! The next morning we went out and in the lobby of the Canterbury, on the huge maybe seven ft by eight ft art deco-ish mirror was a thick covering of human feces. THIS was a typical Black Randy gesture to humanity. I was then told that when he went to get assistance from the government due to his mental problems (SSI aka “crazy money”) he had his pockets stuffed with his poop and went in with his hands in his pockets and gratefully shook the worker’s hands when greeted…of course causing a mini riot at the welfare office and speeding up his paperwork just to get him the hell out of there! This is why you do not shake Black Randy’s hand. He was also known to poop in party hostesses’ purses and worse. His phony phone calls are legendary and can be heard here!

I then found out Black Randy had a band. This I had to see!
 
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I saw Black Randy and The Metrosquad at the Masque. At his very first show there the first words out of his mouth were “I’m glad to see there aren’t any punks here tonight… because I HATE PUNK.” Being from New York it reminded me of James Chance and the Contortions. It had a similarly fast and funky element, but unlike Chance’s bands, the subject matter was scathing and funny with lots of gay, street and political references. Songs about Idi Amin, porno, fighting the police, narcs, sex and death. His backup singers—the Blackettes (think the the James Brown Revue on glue) were the scream of the then new crop of punque chicks including Exene Cervenka, Alice Bag, Lorna Doom, Belinda Carlisle, Jane Wiedlin and others.
 
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To quote Furious.com:

Black Randy and his Metrosquad were a supergroup of the Hollywood punk era: the lineup included members of the Randoms, Eyes and the Dils as well as one of the other founding partners of Dangerhouse, David Browne. Musically, they were nothing like the hard-fast-loud sound of punk- if anything they were a ‘60’s Soul/James Brown style funk/soul band that played rather fast. They also had echoes of early Blondie and the Who, with their tough and tight rock and roll. They were a funny band, a joke band in the sense that humor was key to understanding what they were about. The band’s’ music, with its circus-like Woolworth Doors organ vibe, played the collective straight man to Black Randy’s drunken, buffoonish, drawling, sneering voice. His voice is one of the few truly filthy voices I’ve ever heard in music—every word he says is dripping in self-hatred and general loathing, a venomous nicotine and beer-stained voice that’s just laughing. His voice is sleazy enough that you don’t just think that he just slept in a porn arcade (as the lyrics to his anthem “I Slept in an Arcade” discuss), you think he INHABITED it. The band was perfectly in sync with Black Randy, playing covers of “Shaft” and “Say It Loud (I’m Black and I’m Proud)” while he took aim at the songs, exaggerating the swaggering manhood of one and the simple-minded racial pride of the other to grotesque proportions.

Black Randy as a lyricist was a satirist who made everything he took aim at disgusting and outrageous, but still rooted in the real world. This is important, as many artists will take satire into fantasy (such as Eminem), making the situations so outlandish they become unreal. Almost all of Black Randy’s lyrics are internal narratives of a person’s feelings at a certain moment.

 
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The other main member of The Metrosquad was David Brown who started the first and best Los Angeles punk label, Dangerhouse Records, who put out classic 45s by The Germs, Avengers, Dils, Eyes, X, Weirdos, Deadbeats and more. The only LP released on Dangerhouse was the incredibly titled Pass The Dust, I Think I’m Bowie by Black Randy and The Metrosquad. The reason to celebrate is that the LP has just been reissued by another classic early punk/post punk/hardcore label, Frontier Records (Suicidal Tendencies, Redd Kross, Christian Death, T.S.O.L., Circle Jerks, Long Ryders, Three O’Clock, Damned, Adolescents, etc.), helmed by founder Lisa Fancher and still going strong. It’s been a long time since this LP has been available on vinyl. Get it while you can here.
 
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As an afterthought, I have a really interesting tidbit of info that no one knows: Black Randy had a long history, like so many of the older first wave punk rock innovators. He was a video tech in the earliest days of that field. He was friends with the guys who became LA synth cult icons The Screamers (Tomata Du Plenty and Tommy Gear) long before that when they were doing insane drag performances. I don’t mean Judy Garland impersonations, I mean more like terrorist performance art. In 1974 they had put a show together called Savage Voodoo Nuns which was booked into a new club in the worst neighborhood of lower Manhattan (The Bowery) called CBGB, by Ramones friend (and later their t-shirt designer and lighting director) the late Arturo Vega. Read a review of that show here. They also wanted bands on the bill so Arturo wrangled his friends The Ramones (their second show) and another new band on the scene called Blondie to play.

Continues after the jump…

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Posted by Howie Pyro
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07.08.2016
05:30 pm
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Johnny Ramone compares the Clash to Joan Baez on Minneapolis TV, 1978
07.05.2016
10:00 am
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Local news stories about underground music can always be counted on to cluelessly pander to the paranoid grandparent demographic, which makes this 1978 Minneapolis public TV segment on the Ramones such a gem—it takes punk’s aesthetic merits seriously and keeps to a minimum the then-typical hysterics about audience violence. An announcer calls punk “the theory of minimal art applied to rock ‘n’ roll,” right there much more gravitas than the subject usually got from hinterlands journos.

The interview segment sees the band talking about the punk bands in England (the voice-over announcer misidentifies England as punk’s “ancestral homeland,” apparently not knowing the Ramones were Ur-punks who beat the Brits to the punch by a couple of years). Dee Dee dismisses them with a blanket “they stink,” and Tommy downplays that scene’s vaunted political engagement, singling out the Clash & Sex Pistols as exceptions, while heavily qualifying the latter group. Johnny handwaving the British punks’ political leanings as “a bore” and lumping them in with Joan Baez is funny in hindsight, as most of us know by now what an arch-conservative he turned out to be.

Watch this fun 11-minute feature after the jump…

 

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Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.05.2016
10:00 am
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Sha Na Na feud with the Ramones
09.15.2015
08:05 am
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Do you remember Rock ‘n’ Roll radio? Do you remember shitty ‘70s variety show TV?

Do you remember when goofball nostalgia act Sha Na Na invited the Ramones to a “Greaser’s Feud”?

Formed in 1969, Sha Na Na managed to secure an inexplicable spot at Woodstock that very same year—preceding Jimi Hendrix, no less. It was only their eighth gig. Their brief appearance in the film version of that festival catapulted them to retro-greaser stardom, and according to their website, they’re still an active group.

In the late seventies Sha Na Na also inexplicably managed to land a TV deal. Their show ran from 1977 to 1982 and consisted mainly of silly sketch comedy and musical numbers featuring guest stars. And if the Internet’s memory is correct, the Ramones stopped by to participate in the Sha-Na-Nanigans on May 9th, 1979. The skit they appear in is a parody of the game show Family Feud called “Greasers Feud” hosted by Sha Na Na member Jon “Bowzer” Bauman. Oddly enough, Bauman would later go on to host game shows in real life, including The Hollywood Squares.

The Ramones all have awkward speaking parts in this little skit, but moments later, they launch into a rousing version of “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School”—which to my ears, sounds like a different recording than the album version even though it is clearly canned miming.

Of course, one of the best things about this video is seeing members of Sha Na Na dressed as women and dancing in the street to punk rock.

Naturally, no one could have guessed that a group formed in 1969 would outlive all four founding members of the Ramones, but if that’s what it means to win “Greasers Feud,” then Sha Na Na definitely has a leg up on the competition. However, in a strange coincidence I just discovered completely by accident that Sha Na Na founding member Dennis Greene died just days ago.

So, if Marky Ramone can manage to stay alive for a few more years, he may very well prove to be the last greaser standing.

 

 

Posted by Christopher Bickel
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09.15.2015
08:05 am
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This Ramones vs Marvin Gaye mashup is pretty awesome
08.21.2015
10:50 am
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I have extolled on DM before the virtues of remix/mashup genius Mark “Go Home Productions” Vidler. For over a decade, he’s been, to my reckoning, not just the most prolific mashup creator, but the absolute best at it. Vidler is possessed of an extraordinary gift for finding transcendence in what can too often be a very gimmicky, punchline-y form.

This month he’s released a new EP (free for download, as there’s really no way to sell stuff like this without a licensing nightmare) called “Sleazy Egyptian.” It’s a hodgepode that features collisions between the Bangles and the Stranglers, Basement Jaxx and the Beatles, and Daft Punk, Chic, and Mousse T. But the standout—and the track most likely of interest to DM readers—is this rather amazing union of Marvin Gaye’s “Ain’t That Peculiar” and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop.”
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
‘Mission: Impossible’ vs ‘Norwegian Wood:’ the world’s first mashup, 1968
Mashup: Velvet Underground / Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell - “Venus in Furs” / “Ain’t No Mountain”
Bunnymen vs White Stripes, Bee Gees vs Killing Joke and more: New mashups from Go Home Productions

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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08.21.2015
10:50 am
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An Archies/Ramones comic book is an actual thing that is going to happen
07.12.2015
12:27 pm
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Um, holy shit: this weekend, at a San Diego ComicCon panel called “Comics & Pop Music: Making New Noise,” Archie Comics’  Alex Segura and Matthew Rosenberg announced an impending special issue wherein the fictional bubblegum pop band the Archies will meet real-world ur-punks the Ramones. Via Comics Alliance:

Segura: “Matt got in touch with the Ramones’ people, and they were super into it. So I reached out to Gisele [Lagace, illustrator], whom I’d worked with before on the “Occupy Riverdale” story and other things. We’re all huge Ramones fans, and though it took a while to work out the details, once things started moving, it actually went pretty quick. It’s gonna be a super-fun oversized one-shot, with covers by some truly amazing artists (whom I can’t announce just yet), and it syncs up nicely because it’ll be the 75th Anniversary of Archie, and the 40th Anniversary of the Ramones… It’s really kinda like a dream come true to be doing this.”

While the pairing may seem counterintuitive at first glance, the Ramones drew a lot of inspiration from bubblegum music. I recall once reading a quotation that I can’t just now find—Joey Ramone saying the band formed with the intention of being “a nouveau bubblegum group with guts.” And indeed, it’s mighty easy to imagine songs like “Rockaway Beach” or “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend”  being 1910 Fruitgum Company, Archies, or Ohio Express covers, which they of course are not. And Johnny Ramone once offered this info to the Guardian:

“I hate to blow the mystique,” Johnny Ramone once confessed, “but we really liked bubblegum music, and we really liked the Bay City Rollers. Their song Saturday Night had a great chant in it, so we wanted a song with a chant in it: ‘Hey! Ho! Let’s Go!’ on Blitzkrieg Bop was our Saturday Night.”

This won’t be the first time the Ramones have been cartoonified. Dangerous Minds told you about the wonderful animated video for “Chain Saw” just a few months ago, in fact. Here’s another, an amusing mashup of the Ramones with the Flintstones.
 

 
Hat-tip to Derf

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Eye-popping Bad Brains and Ramones’ cartoons that will rock your world
Sex Pistols and The Ramones as Hanna-Barbera cartoons

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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07.12.2015
12:27 pm
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Ramones and the New York Dolls cookies
05.26.2015
09:21 am
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New York Dolls cookies
New York Dolls cookie set
 
I don’t know about you, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t think I’ve ever met a cookie I didn’t like. And thanks to punk rock cookie purveyor American Cookie Craft, I’ve now met cookies I love so much I don’t think I could ever consume them. Irony, thy name is Joey Ramone covered in sugary icing.
 
The Ramones cookies
The Ramones cookie set
 
Both sets of these punk rock cookies are modeled after the cover art for each of the band’s eponymous debut records. In addition to the confectionery versions of Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy, the Ramones set also comes with two extra cookies with the band’s name on it. I’m especially fond of the extra cookie that comes with the Dolls’ set that is beautifully decorated with their iconic pink lipstick logo. The cookies come in Vanilla Bean, Victorian Lavender or Chocolate, and may be customized to your liking. Keep in mind that the price of punk has gone up significantly since the 70’s. Both sets of six cookies will run you $24.99.  They’ve also got other sweet treats that culture vultures will debate eating or displaying of the Grateful Dead, Frida Kahlo, Yellow Submarine, Young Frankenstein and Vlad the Impaler.
 
Joey Ramone cookie
 
More cookies after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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05.26.2015
09:21 am
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