Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

How I Pass the Time, Or Maybe an Improved Version of How Songs Are Easy

At 28, I'm only starting to learn the things I needed to know at 17. How to sort of make a zine, how to silkscreen, how to write songs, how to not take any of it personally. I'm still not great at any of those callings, and I've never identified as an artist in any sense, though I do like the mythlore of being receptive to ideas and inspiration.

If I go for a stroll or a bike ride on Ashland, a miserable street for cycling and exhaust choked for walking, there's a passable opportunity to receive a song idea.


It starts by my whistling. I pair whistles with bits of phrasing I see, almost exclusively store slogans and grocery prices that have been painted on white butcher paper. A melody arrives and I record it onto my phone. I rush home and jangle it out onto guitar. I break into a sweat, play it over a few times. 

Outside people are dropping candy wrappers to the cement and waiting at red lights. They have no idea what's happening in my apartment. Incredible.

Four out of five instances my song's will have such a bad melody that I can actually hear my high school friends ridiculing it, "What're you gonna send these off to Walt Disney?" 

Etc. Then the occasional song will make it to Krayola practice. My accomplices, according to no grading system I can determine, will give it the pass or rejection slip. The rate of acceptability must parallel some sort of barometer. I can only knit my hands over my eyes and invoke the Lord's name many times until it's over and a new song comes.  

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things (3)

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things

How I Think of Dee Dee Ramone in Particular and Songery in General

Over the next few days and in the year since, I knew I didn't care about who wrote what, "Chinese Rock" or whatever song. Really, I just think -- wouldn't it be exciting to be walking around your neighborhood, to get onto the subway, to do anything with a hit song in your head? The type that other bands wanted to rip from you and set to record across town? Does it feel heavy until you record it? Do you whistle it for months before anyone else knows? All I want is this light drama in my life.

And I don't mean popular songs like Train's "Hey, Soul Sister" which I had to learn the name and performer of so I could hate it clearly, but maybe famous songs like Cannonball or Great Big Kiss, Heatwave or Civilization's Dying.

Learning of the plagiarism legend around "Chinese Rock" established in Poison Heart and 70s NYC cult rock biography Please Kill Me feels a bit like watching tennis. Bass player Richard Hell -- who referred to any time he spent with Thunders as babysitting -- told Dee Dee that he would write a song better than Lou Reed's "Heroin," and Dee Dee decided he would outdo both Hell and Reed by writing an even greater drug-themed song. To his testament he gave proof in shaking out the chorus and verse to "Chinese Rocks."

Oddly, The Ramones were leery of taking a song about hard drugs. This delayed prudery caused an odd shift. Without any documented slap to the face of his pride, Dee Dee tossed the song as a hey whatever/you take it to Richard Hell, who renounced his Anti-Reed vow and wrote two lines for a new verse to "Chinese Rocks." Hell then gave it to The Heartbreakers, quit The Heartbreakers, and frowned later on when Johnny Thunders and company took writer's credit for it in their next album's liner notes.

To settle things, Dee Dee writes in his autobiography that Johnny Thunders was a lowlife, a wonderful insult. Apparently, no sooner does he lose that song then Stiv Bators of The Damned stoleThe Ramones piece "Poison Heart." Bators rushed it to demo in a London studio only to die promptly afterward.

Sure, all you ingest is potato chips and methadone, you can wax a car with all the grease in your hair, and receding gum lines make you look like a sad Dracula, but a dozen creeps around the city want your choruses.

I can't distinguish the pulp from the history. But still, to have such professionally unreliable people grating out this music. It gives me pause. 

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things (2)

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things 

(Part 2 of 3) How to Care About It in the Wrong Way 

During a summer rainstorm that you could hear from inside a windowless bar on California near Diversey, I got stuck in a longer conversation between my neighbor, Brian, and a skinhead.
        We were lined up at the stools and initially talked about leather jackets. I wanted to know where Brian bought his. My old jacket got ruined through rips and soakings.
In minutes I lost all footing in the conversation, which had turned to Johnny Thunders, who I knew of only as a tattoo on the arms of bleach headed punks.

        Brian and the skinhead worked me through Johnny Thunders' history with the New York Dolls, into The Heartbreakers and up to his New Orlean's death and posthumous rising stardom in books and record shops.
        Then I remembered what I read in Poison Heart, and I said, "Hey, didn't Johnny Thunders steal a song from Dee Dee Ramone? Was it Chinese Rocks?"
        Then skinhead looked into space.
        "Oh no!" he said. "That has never been established." 
        Seeing this, the bartender stopped pouring a draft and watched us from a few feet away as the skinhead explained to me with the aggression of a man abused that Thunders, as a songwriter, played miles ahead of DeeDee. 
        And further, that the man who fronted The Heartbreakers would never stoop to steal a song in all his life. 
        "Especially not from a Ramone!"
        "But maybe he'd steal your watch for heroin," I guessed. Then I got a dirty look. Eventually, Brian was talking hockey and then I knew it was really time to leave. 

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things

Dee Dee Ramone Figures Into Things

(Part 1 of 3) Where Songs Can Come From

Rather than visit the library or plan a quicker way to teach Huck Finn, I usually slink around collecting stories about bass players, almost exclusively from punk bands. I do it unprofessionally and lazily, but putting the years in perspective, its graduated from coincidence to hobby. How Sting claps slowly, and like a caveman. Or the way Kira Roessler who played bass for five Black Flag albums used to respond to groping fans at shows: by smashing them in the jaw or eye socket with her heavy bass's body, all without missing a note any of the thousands of notes she touched off without a pick.

A recent continuation of this collection has been reading DeeDee Ramone's first book, Poison Heart. My experience oscillated between wanting to light some sage or a sizeable candle to put DeeDee's soul to rest and giggling over his ritual of loss: his headhitting, his life of setback and willpower to whirlpool himself into disasters. (Here place two examples from text).

Born to an unlucky young German mother and an older alcoholic US vet in 50s Berlin, you get the feeling that Dee Dee never had a chance to be anything other than a Ramone. Not a hotdog vendor with a cart in the park nor a candy store owner and not a doorman in a suit, career choices he regretted not choosing.

Regrets like these cause Dee Dee to dash through apartment doors away from police and Phil Spector, and to leap from the tour van into Florida swampland or congested intersections, his fellow bandmates yelling, "Dee Dee, no!" but only half able to dismiss one of the lead songwriters.