Just a minute guitar break

Meeting Joey Ramone

During high school there was a record store that sprung up one day in Rockaway, NJ, about 10 miles from my hometown of Parsippany. I guess in keeping with the period popularity of an electronics chain called Crazy Eddie, the guy who owned the store decided to call the place “Meshugana Dave’s.” Meshugana being the Yiddish word for “crazy.”

The place was like paradise. Just about every LP in the store was $1!

Dave really was meshugana. We later found out he had done some time in a psychiatric facility. And why I equate Meshugana Dave with Joey Ramone to this day is simple: The most cherished piece of vinyl I bought from him (which I still have to this day) is a copy of The Ramones album “Road to Ruin” on yellow vinyl. There’s nothing like hearing “I Wanna Be Sedated” while staring at a spinning yellow disk.

That yellow vinyl disc helped make me a lifetime Ramones fan. Some considered them loud or pointless, and I don’t think they gained the popularity they merited until more people looked at them in the rearview mirror. But I always felt like I “got” them.

I always had this feeling that Joey Ramone was having fun on stage, although it was really hard to tell. He always kept his sunglasses on, hair in his eyes and a still expression only broken by what seemed like a huge mouth enunciating words like “Cretin!” “Mental!” and “Lobotomy!”

While in college, at Syracuse University, I was working at the student-run radio station, WPJZ, 89.1 FM. The station decided that it would broadcast live from an annual dance marathon the school held. The marathon was to be held at Manley Field House, a 10,000-seat arena that was home to the Syracuse basketball team prior to construction of the 50,000-seat Carrier Dome. The dance marathon was to carry on for about 48 hours and feature bands.

And the one band I was interested in was The Ramones.

Since we had equipment on hand to do interviews with people who were participants in the dance marathon, I figured it would be a great excuse to set up credentials to get backstage and interview Joey, Johnny, Marky and Dee Ramone.

There was some fear among administration types about having The Ramones play. There were rumors that people just “went crazy” at their shows and that “fights always broke out.” So staff at Manley Field House put up in front of the stage one of those fences of chicken wire that was reinforced with wood slats. They set it about 10 feet back from the stage, so that no one could get close and potentially do a stage dive.

The show was great. As was their tradition, The Ramones ran through their three-minute, three-chord songs like they were on speed, with only the shouting of “One-Two-Three-Four” between them to signal any shift in momentum.

But about 50 minutes into the show, people broke through the fence. All they were doing was dancing in that 10-foot space in front of the stage, but that was enough for event organizers to shut the lights and blare through a speaker system that the show was over.

What a bunch of wusses.

Shortly after the show ended, I and another guy grabbed the radio station’s remote microphones with the intent of getting backstage to interview The Ramones. But as we got further into the bowels of Manley Field House, the concrete walls started playing havoc with the wireless equipment and our signal couldn’t be received. But that didn’t stop us from going backstage to hang a little.

The guys seemed a little annoyed that the show was stopped. I think it was Marky that eventually said, “What’s with this town?” Either Marky or Dee Dee said they’d seen much worse at some of their other gigs, which were never shut down.

There was a keg of beer tapped for the guys back there. We poured a few for the band and managed to have one for ourselves, but the supply ran out kinda quick.

And there was Joey. Tall, leather jacket, hair in the face, slumped over slightly. A real presence. I think we asked him who he was listening to lately and how was the tour going. The oddest question I asked him was, “Since you guys are from Queens, do you like the Mets?”

Joey, in his most sincere way possible, said, “Well, we don’t watch a whole lotta sports, ya know, but I guess we like to see the home teams do well.”

Stupid question, I guess. But he seemed more than willing to hear me out. And for that I always remained amazed by him.

The band seemed ready to leave. It didn’t seem like they had an entourage to shuttle them around town. For all we knew they could have just driven up to Syracuse in a van. Marky, noting that the keg was empty asked “Where can we get a beer around here?” And it was already after midnight.

The only places I knew were on campus. Marshall Street is Syracuse’s answer to a bar district. I said something like “Varsity has beer and good wings, I guess you could try that.”

Somehow I couldn’t really picture Joey, Johnny, Marky and Dee Dee walking down Marshall Street, clad in their classic leather clothes, stopping in at varsity and asking for 40 wings and a pitcher of beer.

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I met Joey again a few years later in an auditorium at the New School in Manhattan. It was there that Vin Scelsa, host of the long-running New York radio show, “Idiot’s Delight,” was taping an episode live for broadcast. On the bill this night were Mark McEwen, a former NY disk jockey who did the weather on the CBS Morning Show for several years, Douglas Brinkley, now known as Jimmy Carter’s personal biographer, who had just put out a book called “The Magic Bus” about traveling the U.S. with a class of college students, and our old friend Marshall Crenshaw.

(Ironically, for those of you who may have read my earlier essay on Marshall for “Just a Minute Guitar Break,” that night marked the first of my two meetings with him.)

Joey must have been watching from the back for most of the show. Because of his height, he had to be at least 6’ 3”, he probably didn’t want to have people yelling at him to “take of that hat” or something like that. Toward the end of the broadcast, Vin, who was very friendly with Joey, introduced him. There he was; looking as if time had stood still. The leather jacket, the sunglasses, the hair in the eyes.

Joey stayed to chat it up with anyone who stayed after the broadcast. His was more than willing to oblige me with an autograph. We talked a little bit. I told him how I last saw him when interviewing him backstage in Syracuse, “You know, when the show got shut down?”  And he may have responded something like, “Yeah, I guess that used to happen a lot to us.”

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