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Friday, February 03, 2006

Dee Dee and me

All right, I admit it, the fix was in from the start.  The Ramones won not only because they are, in fact, the country’s greatest rock and roll band, but also because my college-era band opened for them in 1982.  So there.

The exact date was April 14, 1982, and the venue was Wollman Auditorium, nestled in the southwest corner of the campus of Columbia University.  My band was Normal Men, generally New Wavey folks influenced by Elvis Costello, Roxy Music, Au Pairs, ABC, Echo and the Bunnymen and such.  It was our first major gig after six or seven well-received one-set wonders in the hothouse environment of fraternity gigs and lit-mag benefits that made up Columbia’s large and intense music scene.  The crowd was about 900 or 1000, or another power of ten beyond anything we’d seen before.  And, I’m happy to say, we rocked the house.

So after we broke down and began loading out, I ran into Dee Dee on the stairs, gave him the shock-of-recognition stare, said, “hey, you’re Dee Dee Ramone.” Whereupon he said, “you’re in the opening band, right?” I think I may have been carrying equipment at the time, but even if I wasn’t, my skinny tie (yes, dear friends, I was indeed wearing a skinny tie—a yellow one at that) would have identified me.

“Uh, yeah,” I wittily replied.

“How’d you guys do?” he asked.  This, I thought, was really above and beyond nice.

“Good, I think,” I managed to say, “we got two encores—the first one real, you know, the second one kind of a family-and-friends encore. . . .”

He actually brightened, and said, “wow, two encores, that’s great,” quite encouragingly, without faux surprise or condescension or anything.  At which point I thought it was incumbent on me, since this famous and influential rock star person had expressed some apparently real enthusiasm for our meaningless little opening set, to say something about his band and what it had meant to me, so, before the pause got too awkward, I said, “Um, can I just say, like, I think you guys changed pop music.”

Dee Dee’s eyebrows shot up.  “Really?” he said, as if no one had ever volunteered such a sentiment before.

“No shit,” I said, for having said the obvious, “I mean, your stuff came out when we were all sitting around listening to Boston and Steve Miller and shit, and, uh, it was like another world.  I mean, you know, punk just wouldn’t have happened without you.” I should have added that I was actually from Queens and knew whereof I spoke, but I didn’t have the presence of mind.  Anyway, he seemed sincerely touched, said, “wow, well, thanks a lot, man,” or something to that effect, to which I said, “no problem, you know, thank you,” because the truth behind this exchange, or at least one of the truths behind this exchange, was that I was already feeling stupid and guilty for talking to one of the Ramones as if they were already a museum artifact.  But he shook my hand and wished me luck, and I said, “have a great set,” and that was that.

Now, the reason I felt guilty about this is that by 1982, most of us hip and wannabe-hip kids at Columbia already spoke of the Ramones that way anyway.  Like yes, their first four records ripped the fabric of our lives and all, but c’mon, everyone jumped off the bandwagon after End of the Century, and that was already three years in the past, and the Ramones were fairly predictable stuff by that point.  And yeah, in one way it was cool beyond belief to open for them, but then again, the only reason they were playing Columbia was that they weren’t so huge an act that they couldn’t do so.  To wit: the year before, 1981, there was a rumor that the Clash were going to play the same place, Wollman Auditorium, but the gig was scrapped because there was no way that the school could handle the scalpers and the off-campus madness.  Later that year, of course, the Clash played their epic seventeen-show gig at Bond’s at 45th and Bway, and the crush and the buzz of that scene convinced everybody at Columbia that they were right not to have tried to squeeze the Clash onto campus.  The Ramones, by contrast, were a safer bet, and people were already speaking of them as if the spring concert were up between them and Chuck Berry.  Opening for them was a plum awarded to us by Columbia’s Band-Booking Powers That Be, and therefore a form of recognition that we had arrived locally, but it wasn’t even on the same scale of cool as the opening gig played by the Ex-Husbands, Columbia’s official coolest band during 1980-81 (they took over the mantle from the Casuals, who held the coveted distinction in 1978-79).  The Husbands, after all, had opened for Johnny Thunder and the Heartbreakers at Trax on 72nd Street, for goodness’ sake (and had gotten an encore, too).  And the Casuals, for their part, had played some similarly prestigious thing at Max’s Kansas City, though I forget who the headliner was.  Compared to those gigs (and I assure you that nearly everyone in the local music scene gauged themselves by those gigs), the Ramones at Wollman was minor-league.  Or so people said at the time.

Back then, I participated in that discourse too, knowing as well as anyone of my age and level of pop-cultural capital that the Ramones were basically done.  But at the same time I still thought it was a fabulous opening gig, one about which I was pretty much scared witless.  Nothing like screwing up in front of 900 people, you know, let alone in front of some of punk’s biggest Culture Heroes.  I remember wearing two sets of wristbands and repeatedly spraying my hands with antiperspirant during the set to make them sticky so I wouldn’t drop any sticks.  (Some of our songs were quite fast, and required crisp, precise drumming.  But I apologize for contributing to the depletion of the ozone layer.) And everything I said to Dee Dee was, of course, completely true.  I just felt very weird at the time talking to him as if he were already historical—which, however, he was.  But, in retrospect, he was already historical in the good sense, and he did seem genuinely pleased to be running into some college kid backstage who would say so.

I wouldn’t go into this level of detail except that, well, things have gotten distorted with time.  1982 is so very long ago that it sounds much cooler now than it was at the time to be opening for the Ramones—almost as if I’d been on the same bill with them at CBGB in 1976.  And people who came to punk late ("late" now meaning not “by way of Hüsker Dü in 1984” but “by way of Nirvana in 1991") are thus more impressed with this tidbit than they should be.  Ditto for my actual performances at CBGB in 1981-83, all five of them, none of which occurred on a night better than a Wednesday and none of which featured Dee Dee and his band. . . .

Brief epilogue: Dave Terhune, Normal Men’s lead singer and songwriter, now helps lead this talented bunch of losers as they rock various venues in New York, while guitar-and-sax man Larry Gallagher released his first CD about two and a half years ago; he also put in a few years with Joey Cheezhee and the Velveeta Underground.  Me, the last time I played in front of people was at Larry’s wedding.

But now I have the kind of story that 44-year-old guys tell themselves (and whoever else will listen) as they slip into their bathrobes and sit down with a nice cup of green tea.  Gabba gabba hey, everyone, and may Dee Dee and his mates rest in peace.

Posted by Michael on 02/03 at 03:00 PM
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