Danny says the song wasn’t really written about him. “It originally was ‘Tommy Says,’” the Ramones first manager tells me, “because he was their de facto manager in the early days, and they changed it to ‘Danny Says,’ but I never booked them in Idaho.” This is the kind of history lesson I get during the course of our two-and-a-half hour vodka date in the West Village: I suggest something I think I know about my all-time favorite band, and then I get the real story. “Irony is the subtitle of that band and everything in it,” he does say. So I listen twice as carefully.
Perhaps the most punk thing Danny Fields wants to do is set the record straight—though Fields himself would tell you he’s always hated the word “punk,” and in fact, very little of the story’s straight. But there is some truth in objecthood: I’ll always have my Ramones albums (especially now that they’re on mp3), and Fields has his photographs, a collection of which now sees new light in My Ramones, Fields upcoming photo book. Out in May from First Third Books, it contains primary source records of the band’s first tour, the one where Fields wasn’t sending anyone to the Gem State.
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In the alley behind CBGB’s (where, months later, I shot the cover for Rocket To Russia). This site is no longer disgusting in the same way it was then. The alley has been scraped clean and upscaled, and is now named Extra Place, which is what it is – a new little street, on which there’s a restaurant where dinner for two can cost a thousand dollars.
“It’s a wonderful song,” Fields admits of “Danny Says,” somewhere into drink two. “It should have been a hit—it’s a Phil Spector production, it’s the title of of the movie… It has a life of its own.
“Another irony: I didn’t make a penny.”
But least of all is Fields bitter. He speaks fondly of the original fourpiece and their adventures together, from London to California, pausing only to correct my research-based inaccuracies. (And my grammar; Fields was a Harvard man, after all.) Everything I swear I know about the Ramones, it seems, is only partially true. I mention Johnny Ramone’s conservatism and get a groan, one that seems to have augmented over years of answering the same question: the late guitar player—and band leader—was an American second, and a thorn in your foot first. Next.
The Ramones as punk originators in the United States? “London can own them. Ramones came, but it took Joe Strummer and the Pistols […] all those bands. If it weren’t for this, it would have just stagnated along, but now it blew up, and there was punk.”
Ramones with Chrissie Hynde and Captain Sensible
It’s especially relevant today—though Fields would disagree—being that it’s the year of Punk London, a very mainstream celebration of a counterculture as we know it turning 40. On July 4, Fields will speak at the British Library about the Ramones’ first visit, the show said to have ignited whatever the anarchist word is for “movement.”
“It’s good timing ‘cause eyes that never were on them are on them now. All the eyes and ears one would have wanted to have been on the Ramones back then, are now, because of the 4-0 big deal thing. Why not before? Who cared before?” Fields says of My Ramones coincidence with the launch. “And a bunch of the pictures sort of got famous in their own right, they were used when the occasion was right, or when a newspaper needed a picture, or something like that. So yeah, that’s why now.”
Recording Ramones, the first album
Though, due to poor album sales, Fields was eventually ousted in 1980, his time with the band, as documented in My Ramones, is paramount in the annals of music history, punk and beyond. A Ramones poster Fields is particularly proud of, which you can find below, sums it up best: “Ramones Get Noticed,” reads its title. What follows is an assemblage of both encouragement and vitriol from those who wanted to see the Ramones succeed and those who’d have seen them pack up and go back to Queens. Over the years, many of their detractors have asked Fields to remove their negative comments, a phenomenon he finds as fascinating as it is amusing. “I can’t change history,” he annuls. “I can just change the take on it, or emphasis on the irony, because people think it means something else, like Brooklyn T-shirt irony. Not that kind of irony.”
Though all four original members are deceased, and what lives on does so on actual Brooklyn bodies and in stadium-sized chants of “Hey ho, let’s go,” perhaps that’s where Johnny, Joey, Tommy, and Dee Dee were most at home, that place where Fields is eternally their manager: somewhere simultaneously always and at once in between and completely removed from whatever it is you think.
Check out a selection of images from My Ramones, and their accompanying stories, below:
Joey at the pool of the Sunset Marquis.
The Ramones get to experience a pickup truck, probably for the first time in their lives.
Showtime at Randy’s.
In every issue of “16,” there was a pin-up page called “Hunk of the Month”. If the subject was shirtless, we called him “Adonis of the Month.” The swimming pool at the Sunset Marquis gave Dee Dee the opportunity to audition for Hunk or Adonis of the Month, or maybe a new category. And what is Dee Dee wearing?
The picture of Dee Dee reading and Johnny turning around in his seat, totally unbidden to do so, is one of my favorites. It was on the bus the Ramones shared with the Talking Heads, riding along the valley of the Rhone river. Neither Ramone is interested in scenery; they never were.
Johnny’s widow, Linda Ramone, keeps this picture on the wall of her “Ramones room,” which had been Linda and Johnny’s bedroom in their Los Angeles home. “His eyes follow me all the way around the room,” Linda says in director Mandy Stein’s documentary Too Tough To Die: A Tribute to Johnny Ramone.
The Ramones in front of the Supreme Court of the United States. Here I had to walk backwards while going for this shot; luckily, I could just keep moving, since there was not a guard or a tank or a tourist on the entire plaza.
Click to enlarge. “It was great fun creating this advertisement, “RAMONES” get noticed…” As an ad for Leave Home, the Ramones’ second album, it ran in Rolling Stone, Rock Scene, and the Village Voice. The quotes were culled from album reviews (i.e. “notices,” in showbiz) of Ramones, the title of the band’s first lp; so, it should properly read “RAMONES gets noticed…” (You know, like getting a review is the same as getting reviewed, perhaps?) But the writers’ quotes certainly seemed about the Ramones, as well as Ramones; and many of them are too amazing to worry about what might be proper, or not.” Image courtesy of Danny Fields
Click here to pre-order Danny Fields’ My Ramones, shipping out May 9, 2016 from First Third Books.
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