The Ramones changed rock ‘n’ roll forever. That’s a given. A fact that’s pointed out often, as it should be. What’s not pointed out often enough, however, is another fact: Richie Ramone changed the Ramones.
The drummer was a 26-year-old New Jersey kid named Richard Reinhardt who’d drifted through a series of cover bands and never-quite-made-it acts before joining the world’s most famous punk rock band in 1982—and immediately brought some much-needed fire back to the group. Although the Queens quartet had been instrumental in launching the punk explosion not long after they formed in 1974, by the dawn of the 1980s their music had begun slipping. There’d been some patchy albums, second drummer Marky Ramone wasn’t holding up his end and was let go, and in came Richie to record their ferocious return to form, 1984’s Too Tough to Die. He’d make two more studio albums with the Ramones, 1986’s Animal Boy and 1987’s Halfway to Sanity (for which he’d sing back-up vocals and pen such songs as “Somebody Put Something in My Drink,” one of the group’s greatest), and play nearly 500 shows with them before abruptly leaving in 1987. Marky would return for the remainder of the group’s career, but Richie, an incredible musician who’d essentially saved the band, dropped off the map. Few knew where he’d come from or where he’d gone to; even his ex-bandmates would barely acknowledge he’d existed. But wherever he was, he clearly had a story to tell. And, as fate would have it, I, Chronogram‘s arts editor, would come to help him tell it, as the coauthor of his newly published autobiography, I Know Better Now.
“I chased off the idea [of writing a book] a few times, I really had no interest,” he tells me about the queries made to the two of us about the project from a literary agent in the winter of 2017. “I thought, ‘Okay, maybe, but not now. Later on, after I’m not playing anymore, and I can just put my feet up.’ Like On Golden Pond or something. [Laughs.] But then people around me convinced me and I thought about it some more and I figured I should strike while the iron was hot, with so many more people wanting to know about the Ramones these days. Another reason I didn’t want to do it at first was ‘cuz there were already all these other books out about the Ramones and they’re mostly the same stuff, about all the fighting [between band members] and all that. I didn’t want [the book] to turn into that. But since you grew up in the same place as me [Northern New Jersey] and you knew a lot about the band, I could tell it was a good fit.”
Writing the book took a full year. During that time, in addition to touring heavily with his band, Richie and his girlfriend lost their home and many of their possessions to one of the California wildfires and his father passed away. Throughout the process, what became increasingly clear was that Richie is one of rock ‘n’ roll’s true survivors, a vital figure who’s seen it all, had his peaks and valleys, done what he had to do to get by, played in one of the greatest bands of all time, and is still rocking hard today. Working on the book together was a new adventure for us both, one completely unlike anything either of us had done before; Richie telling his amazing life story in full for the first time, and me allowing that story to pass through me and onto the page—while staying out of the way as much as possible. It’s Richie’s story, and my chief aim was to make sure that that story was always being told in his voice.
“People tell me [reading the book] is like sitting in a bar and sharing a beer with me while they listen to me talk, which is awesome,” says the drummer. “The Thanksgiving before my dad died, I read the first four chapters to my family when we were sitting around the table after dinner. That was…pretty emotional.”
For this humble writer and fan, hearing that means more than anything.
In this excerpt, it’s early 1983 and the Ramones have just returned to the East Coast from Los Angeles, where they shot a video for the song “Psycho Therapy,” and Richie’s about to play his first concert with the band.
After two days of LA insanity, pretend and real, it was time to fly back to New York to start the tour—and a whole other kind of insanity. My first show with the Ramones was on February 13, 1983, at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica. By then, in the US the band were playing colleges as often as they could, because a lot of those gigs paid better than clubs; colleges usually have a “student activities” grant that comes out of the funding they get every year, and the money from that tends to be pretty good.
That was something I learned about right away that I didn’t really know before. Something else I learned about right away was all the stuff that happened backstage just before a Ramones show. Remember a couple of chapters back, I mentioned how there was something the band would do before playing, to keep from cramping up? Well this is it.
Playing in the Ramones was like being an athlete. Even though John [Johnny Ramone] never partied—at least not that I ever saw—and the rest of us did, we all had to warm up before we went on. That was mandatory. Yeah, you get to move around and play a little during soundcheck. But if that’s all you do, when it comes time to do the show, you’re still basically going from sitting all bunched up in the van all day, straight into having to play insanely fast. And play pretty much nonstop, for a full hour, because, live, the Ramones would just go from one song right into the next for the whole show. And you can’t just go from zero to a hundred miles per hour like that. If you do, your muscles are just going to totally lock up on you.
So, while Joey would be off in the corner doing his little vocal warm-ups or sniffing his nasal sprays, John, Dee Dee, and I would be in the middle of the dressing room, going through our nightly warm-up routine. We traveled with a small practice amp that John and Dee Dee would plug into, I’d grab a pair of drumsticks, and the three of us would sit in a circle. With me playing the beat on my thighs, we’d spend about twenty minutes running through, like, five or six songs, just to get the blood flowing and get our arms, hands, and legs used to moving fast. This works pretty well, and I still do it now before every gig.
There was this other thing that was part of the pre-show stuff that John and Dee Dee always did, though—something I thought was weird, and probably most Ramones fans will, too.
“Aw, jeez, we gotta go play for these dirty kids again,” John would say, sounding like he was really tired and annoyed about having to play the show. “We gotta do this again? Aw, Jesus Christ, not again. These dirty kids again….”
And Dee Dee would say back to him, “Yeah, man, these fuckin’ dirty kids. Oh, man, what the fuck. Again, we gotta do this? Shit….”
It sounds crazy, but that was how they psyched themselves up to play. By getting it into their heads that the people coming to see them were all a bunch of dirty losers who they didn’t want to be there playing for. They didn’t really think that, of course. They loved their fans. But I guess working themselves into the frame of mind where they were unhappy about playing, and wanted to take that out on the audience, helped get them in the mood to play harder and more aggressively. Like I said, it was weird.
So, after experiencing all that for the first time, it came time to play. And that was weird, too.
We always used a recording of the theme from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly as our intro music the first couple of years, until we switched to that cut from the album The Spirit of ’76 by the Eastman Symphonic Wind Ensemble. The four of us walked on, and the whole house just started cheering like crazy. It sort of felt like it all was happening in slow motion. I went into auto mode, doing what I was there to do. I stepped up onto the drum riser, and, not being able to see anything through the thick cloud of smoke, I waited. The lights went up, Dee Dee counted us off, and we went into it.
We opened with “Durango 95,” a new instrumental John wrote that the band hadn’t recorded yet. (We did it later on Too Tough to Die, and it stayed in the set as the regular opener after the ’83 tour.) I wasn’t worried about that tune as much as I was about some of the big Ramones hits, which, with me being the new guy, the audience would be listening to more closely. Remember: I’d had to learn, like, 35 songs, with only two rehearsals.
Anyway, a few songs in, everything was going great. We’d blasted through “Teenage Lobotomy,” “Psycho Therapy,” “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Do You Remember Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio?,” “Outsider” off the new album, and a few others, and they all felt really good. When I looked out at the crowd, everyone was bouncing up and down and going crazy, totally loving it. I was digging it, too. I wasn’t so nervous anymore.
And then, about halfway through the set, John stopped the band.
It turned out I was off. I forget what song we were doing, but I knew right away it was my fault, and I felt like shit about it. I can’t remember if it was because I was playing too slow or too fast or what. Any other band would have just played through until everybody found their place, and then maybe dealt with the mistake after the show, to make sure it didn’t happen again at the next one.
Not the Ramones, though. It had to be right. From the beginning. If it wasn’t, the other guys would get so thrown off that they’d have a really hard time figuring out where they were. Especially John, and he ran the band. He gave me a look and said something to me about how I was playing it wrong. Dee Dee turned from me to the mic and told the audience, “Sorry, we have a new drummer tonight.” And then he just counted it off again, and we started the song over.
The rest of the set went fine, and I don’t remember having any other problems. But it was crazy, to me, how they stopped the song like that.
So, that was my first show with the Ramones. Definitely an unusual night. And there were many more to come.
I Know Better Now is published by Backbeat Books. The above excerpt from the book is reprinted with permission.
This article appears in March 2019.
