Mickey Leigh (w/ Legs McNeil): I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Punk Rock Family Memoir (2010)
Dee Dee Ramone (w/ Veronica Kofman): Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones (1998)
I'll never read Johnny (Reagan Youth) Ramone's memoirs and I already covered Marky's here on Rockin' Reads, so today I'll write a few words about Dee Dee's Poison Heart and the closest thing we're ever likely to see to a Joey autobiography: Mickey Leigh's I Slept with Joey Ramone.
As Joey's (born Jeffrey Hyman) little brother, Mickey was able to shed unprecedented light upon their joint upbringing in Queens, including the life-affecting physical and mental ailments (O.C.D., etc.) that shaped the future Ramones frontman.
An aspiring musician himself, Mickey was the Ramones' first roadie, then spent the ensuing decades living in and out of Joey's shadow, trying unsuccessfully to launch his own career, while enjoying a complicated but close and generally loving family relationship.
Mickey's need to intertwine his own story with Joey's (not that you can blame him) feels unwarranted or just plain uninteresting, at times, and the book could definitely have shed about 100 pages of mid-life family gossip, bickering, and Ramones drama.
But Mickey's earnest affection for his brother is rarely in doubt, and we'll surely never read a more intimate recounting of Joey's personal life and the painful final days that led up to his tragically early passing in 2001 at age 49.
(Also, let's not overlook the valuable contribution of co-author Legs McNeil -- himself a punk veteran and demi-legend, well beyond his essential punk rock oral history (with Gillian McCain), Please Kill Me.)
And then there's Dee Dee ...
If you had to choose just one of the four "bruddas" to epitomize the world-class dysfunction that afflicted the Ramones' career, it would have to be the notoriously self-destructive, simultaneously shrewd and innocent, just plain enigmatic Dee Dee.
1998's Poison Heart doesn't necessarily solve the man's mystery, but it lays bare Dee Dee's kamikaze approach to life in uncensored, no-holds-barred fashion, and kudos to co-author Veronica Kofman for effectively capturing his voice -- even the whining!
A true roller coaster ride, it follows the boy born Douglas Colvin from the post-war streets of Berlin to Forest Hills to Manhattan, where he shared illicit adventures and illicit substances with all the key punk rock players and extended figures in New York's bustling art scene.
As told in Dee Dee's totally tactless, devil-may-care style, all of the Ramones' dirty laundry is aired here (no friend, enemy, or bandmate is spared); some of it, like the sordid details of the Joey/Johnny rivalry, for the first time.
In the end, self-sabotage and drug-abuse may have been the greatest constants in Dee Dee's life, which sadly culminated in his not-at-all-surprising death from an overdose in 2002, barely one year after Joey left us.
Putting it simply: both Joey and Dee Dee were, in their own ways, a hot mess!
But, as these two books remind us, these two tortured but lovable characters wrote the bulk of the Ramones' incomparable punk rock canon, which, like its flawed creators, will henceforth overshadow all of their professional disappointments and personal tragedies.
"Hey! Ho! Let's go!"
Featured Records:
Ramones: Animal Boy (1986)
Ramones: Subterranean Jungle (1983)
Ramones: Pleasant Dreams (1981)
Buy from: Amazon / Amazon
