Joey Ramone “Don’t Worry About Me”
My buddy Travis’ dad had a 1982 Chevy Vandura with purple, carpeted interior and piles of Zappa tapes strewn alongside packs of cigarettes. The instantly vintage van looked and smelled not unlike what I imagine The Mystery Machine would have looked and smelled like if Shaggy and Scooby had driven cross country, following The Dead for a year. Once a week I’d carpool to and from Hebrew School with Travis and his dad in that musty, but awesome, vehicle. And on the rare occasion that my parents were not home by 6pm, I’d go back to Travis’ to hang out for a while. His house was the opposite of mine — messy, smelly, chaotic, weird and snack filled. It was always a treat to get waylaid there, but perhaps never more so than that one day, in the fall of ‘82, when Travis’ dad brought home a brand new Betamax player.
Along with this futuristic device, Zappa dad had procured three movies on video cassette. Up to that point in my life, I’d never watched a movie on a cassette player. So, I was completely amazed when we popped “Grease” into the contraption, pressed a button, and watched Danny, Sandy, the T-Birds and The Pink Ladies sing, dance, flirt and fight for ninety minutes. Next, and with great trepidation, we started tape number two: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show. “ Ten minutes in, however, overcome by fear and confusion, I begged Travis to hit eject, which he graciously did, albeit not without some name calling (“loser” and “dork,” if memory serves). Still rattled, I took a gander at the cartoonish characters on tape number three. Hopeful that it would be silly fun and that it would not terrify me the way Doctor Frank-N-Furter and Riff Raff had, I nodded for Travis to press play on our third and final film: “Rock and Roll High School.”
At eight years old, “Rock and Roll High School” was both already beneath me and completely beyond me. Because I’d seen The Monkees on TV but not The Beatles, and because I’d just watched “Grease,” I wondered if The Ramones were like The T-Birds making fun of The Monkees. I’d no idea what a B-movie was, what “Animal House” or “Beach Blanket Bingo” were and I certainly could not tell you anything about Punk Rock. As a result, I naturally assumed that The Ramones — and especially Joey, the most cartoonish of the bunch — were a joke band. That they were comic and violent in the way that Tom and Jerry were funny and violent.
Half a decade later, I came to realize that while I was partially correct — that The Ramones were in fact an excellent joke band — they were also an actual, and actually serious, Rock and Roll band. By the time of my thirteenth birthday, I came to understand that Joey was not a cartoon like Tom and Jerry or a monster like Frank-N-Furter and Riff Raff, but a living legend. That his real name was not “Joey Ramone” and that Johnny, Dee Dee and Marky were not his brothers. That he talked that way because he was from Queens and that he moved that way because he was extra tall and extra gangly and extra sensitive and that underneath the speed and volume of his songs, Joey had a knack for melody. And, of course, that, as much as any band, The Ramones had invented Punk Rock.
Sometime in 1992 — five years later still — I noticed Joey start to sink just as his band began to transcend. Joey Ramone, the actual, forty-one year old human being, was a drunk, addled child in the body of an aging giant. He was a Howard Stern doppelgänger, but with worse posture, a bad blowout and pink, tinted sunglasses. Yes, he was an icon, and a hero to many — but for what he had done, not for what he was doing. Meanwhile, The Ramones had become a brand more than a band. The logo. The leather. The speed. They were Punk Rock Royalty. Fathers to The Sex Pistols and The Clash and every band from every bridge and tunnel who made their way to CBGBs. During this period, The Ramones’ international fanbase swelled while their commercial and critical fortunes faltered. Over roughly twenty years, the band released fourteen studio albums. And while the second half contains plenty of very good songs and some pretty good albums, all of their greatness was spent between their self-titled debut (1976) and “Animal Boy” (1986). They’d been hampered by drink and drugs since the very beginning. But, as they entered middle age, The Ramones were undone by heartache and pain.
And that’s the version of Joey Ramone I came to know — aging, breaking Punk icon. Too young to see or hear him during his prime but old enough to witness his slow, sad undoing, my image was not Joey at CBGBs or Joey in “Rock and Roll High School” or even early Nineties Joey, Gabba Gabby Heying his way towards retirement, so much as it was Joey fighting Marky and avoiding Johnny on the Howard Stern Show. It was forty-something Joey looking sixty-something and collapsing in on himself. Whereas before all I could see was hair and leather, now all I saw were bruises and wounds. The obsessive compulsions that filled his head. The genetic affliction that stretched his limbs. The parasitic ghost twin that haunted him. The lymphoma that would eventually take his life. But, mostlly, all I could see was the broken heart.
By 2005, the year in which first watched “End of the Century” (the documentary feature about The Ramones) Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee were already gone. For years it had been an open secret that The Ramones were functionally dysfunctional. That they were brothers but not friends. That they stuck together while they fell apart. That their abiding love had been consumed by deeper resentments. And while those dynamics are obviously common to aging Rock bands — from The Stones to Metallica to Van Halen to you name it — the distance felt more poignant in the case of The Ramones. That those guys — Johnny, Joey, Dee Dee, Marky and kind of Tommy — had become Rock stars was completely unfathomable. They seemed incapable of most everything, except for being the greatest band in the world. But for however unfathomable their success was, their independence was even more so. It was simply hard to imagine that any one of them could function on their own, outside of the band. Whereas the Sex Pistols seemed anti-social, The Ramones seemed unsocial. Like they, as individuals, had no relation to society. Every one of them — but especially Joey.
If Dee Dee was chaotic but fun, and if Marky was dependable but goofy, and if Johnny was difficult but brilliant, then Joey was neurotic but romantic. Tommy Ramone wrote “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend,” but — let’s be honest — it’s Joey’s song. “Oh Oh I Love Her So” is pure Joey. So is “My-My Kind of Girl.” And so, of course, is their cover of The Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You.” Johnny was the muscle and Joey was the heart — that’s practically canon, in the same way that Johnny was aggressive while Joey was passive and Johnny leaned to the right while Joey hunched to the left. Based on some combination of The Village Voice, Howard Stern and “Please Kill Me,” I’d assimilated these facts. But what I’d not known until “End of the Century” was that Linda Danielle — Joey’s first true love and the woman who’d one day become known as “Linda Ramone” — left Joey to date, and then marry, Johnny.
By most accounts, following the breakup and ensuing re-coupling, Joey and Johnny never really spoke again. Small talk, sure. Side eyes and muttering, probably. But it seems that the two co-founders, the brothers from other mothers — one who obsessed and flailed and crooned and one who battled and hammered and barked — never had a reckoning, a heart to heart or even a proper conversation for the rest of their lives. Johnny and Linda stayed married until Johnny’s death in 2004. But their union was tragic confirmation of everything that Joey had ever feared — that the romantic beta loses to the tyrant alpha.
The Ramones soldiered on for many years after the great schism, but Joey only barely did. While his band teetered and his heart ached, his drinking (and drugging) got worse. And then, in 1995, Joey was diagnosed with lymphoma, the disease that would eventually take his life. During that window between diagnosis and funeral, the band released their swan song, “¡Adios Amigos!,” toured the world one more time and went their separate ways. Joey, meanwhile, privately battled his cancer, played a smattering of solo shows, worked with Ronnie Spector and, finally, during the last year of his life, laid down some tracks for what would become his posthumous, solo debut.
“Don’t Worry About Me” is almost exactly what you'd expect from a Joey Ramone on death's doorstep solo album. Which is to say it’s alternately frightened, bored, unfinished, funny, maudlin and brilliant. Alongside Marky Ramone on drums, Dictator Andy Shernoff on bass and friend of the band, Daniel Rey, on guitar and at the boards, Joey croons, bleats and tawks his way through eleven tracks, all (but one) of which clock in under four minutes, but none of which are under two. The (by Ramones’ standards) mid-tempo nature of “Dont Worry About Me” — the seeming lack of rush — suggests a pace afforded by age, poor health and, most of all, no Johnny Ramone. Johnny had zero time for bullshit. But, especially at the very end, Joey had all the time in the world for it.
Like many Ramones albums, Joey’s solo record features iconic covers — an endearingly radical take on Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” and a more predictably loyal take on The Stooges “1969.” The former made a minor splash, soundtracking the final credits to Michael Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and surviving as a bittersweet score to Joey tributes across the internet. But it’s the originals and not the covers that most distinguish “Don’t Worry About Me.” The title track, which closes the album, is in some ways the apotheosis of Joey Ramone. It’s not fast or loud, though it’s fast and loud enough. But it’s a nihilistic (or at least, fatalistic) shrug masquerading a heavy heart. It’s a dying romantic lead singer asking fans not to worry when, in fact, their love and affection is all that he wants. Too shy and insecure to ask, he half-heartedly demands the opposite.
On an album that was not properly “completed,” there are unsurprisingly a few charming, but probably unfinished essays. “Mr. Punchy” would make for an above average Richard Hell track but if Joey Ramone is the standard, it falls short. “Spirit in My House” is plodding and a little silly. And “Like a Drug I Never Did Before” is earnest but unremarkable. Roughly half the record is merely very good, three chord Punk, distinguished primarily by the undeniability of its singer. When it lags, it does so with the defense that it sounds like a well made demo. But when it lands — as it does on more than one occasion — you feel like you are getting the “real Joey Ramone.” In fact, sometimes you feel like you are getting the “real Jeffrey Hyman.”
“Stop Thinking About It” is sunkissed, fuzzed out Punk Rock that recalls those first post-Pixies Frank Black records — melodic and harmonic like The Beach Boys, it could also be a sped up, broke down Brian Wilson song about analysis paralysis. “Searching for Something” is a ragged, acoustic jangler about Susan, who left the city and made her way upstate to get clean at an ashram with the help of her guru. It’s the kind of story that you’d imagine Johnny rolling his eyes at but which Joey approaches unironically. It’s the antithesis of Punk Rock and it’s completely endearing.
And then there’s “Maria Bartiromo,” the impossibly catchy, brilliantly dumb ode to the former CNBC turned CNN turned Fox News “Money Honey.” What’s most amazing about this song? Is it simply the fact that Joey turns the seven syllables of the financial anchor’s name into a chorus? Is it that he asks, “What’s happening on Wall Street?” And then, “What’s happening with AOL?” And Yahoo, Intel and Amazon? Is it that Joey is tracking his stocks? Is it imagining Joey, bedridden, clicker in hand, gazing doe-eyed at Maria? Is it that the two became real life friends?
No, it’s that in 2013, twenty-something years after Linda left him for Johnny and eleven years after Johnny blessed George W. Bush at The Ramones’ Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction, Maria Bartiromo left CNBC for Fox News, and eventually fell into the open arms of Donald Trump. This is the story, the irony and the tragedy of Joey Ramone, who’s heart was broken three times over — once by Linda, once by Johnny and finally by Maria. Near death, Joey loved somebody who loved the opposite of him.