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Tommy Ramone don't wanna be a pinhead no more (that's assuming you thought he was a pinhead in the first place -- in which case more fool you). In fact, he don't wanna be Tommy Ramone no more.
Meet Tommy Erdelyi, record producer.
Tommy Erdelyi looks just a little bit like Tommy Ramone: the same small, solid build, acned complexion, potato nose and sideways grin. But Erdelyi wears a faded denim jacket wholly appropriate to the weather whereas no Ramone would be seen dead in anything other than black leather. Erdelyi sports neat brown loafers and unblemished jeans in place of the Ramonic splendour of ripped denim and torn canvas, and the masked-man shades are replaced by tinted glasses of almost Old Eltonian proportions.
He looks like an American student on holiday.
In fact, he's in London with Talking Heads (his Sire stablemates whose debut album he had a hand in producing) and to do some studio work with a group called The Squares (about whom more later, presumably when they get to be rich and famous and This Week's Thing, etc). He's also just completed work on The Ramones' live double album ("the whole show, from beginning to end") and studio album, the first Ramonstrosity to feature new drummer Marc Ben -- formerly of Richard Hell's Voidoids -- and hereafter known as Markie Ramone.
Those who cherish the notion that one of Dolly Ramone's four idiot bastard sons -- even a lapsed one -- could never handle a craft as technically and creatively skilled and exacting as record production and engineering will no doubt be mildly startled to learn that Erdelyi's current activities represent less of a new departure than a return to basics.
See, Tommy's original participation in the Great Ramones Adventure was originally in the role of manager/producer/songwriter collaborator.
"At the time when the group first got together, doing what The Ramones were doing was unheard of. To ask any legitimate drummer to play that was a real hardship. They were all so into heavy metal that they'd forgotten about the basic feel of rock and roll drumming, which is a backbeat.
"They'd just pound away and I'd think oh, no..."
"With the last drummer we tried, I'd sit down and show him what to do, and whenever I did that there'd be a certain spark because I knew what I wanted to hear and it blended in right. We didn't look any more after that, because I thought, 'This is really a lot of fun.' Because I'd never played drums before in my life..."
Pause for incredulity.
"Me and my partner had Performance Studios, and so when The Ramones -- who were my friends -- got a group together I said they could come down and work there. And there were a set of drums down there."
(The group had originally been a trio with Dee Dee singing lead and Joey playing drums. Tommy describes Joey's drum style as being "very unusual" and wishes that he had a tape or video of that particular grouping. In his managerial capacity he'd brought Joey out from behind the drums, which is what created the need for a new ass in the drum chair in the first place.)
"Before that I'd never been behind a drum set in my life."
In fact, he'd played lead guitar alongside Johnny Ramone-to-be in their Forest Hills high school band, The Tangerine Puppets. But that is most definitely another story.
More to the point is his extensive studio experience.
"I started at a place called Dick Charles Recording Studio, where most of the staff of the original Record Plant came from. From there I went on to The Record Plant, and I was an assistant engineer on Jimi Hendrix's stuff, Mountain...but you won't find my name on any albums. The only group that ever gave me a credit was Thirty Days Out."
"I was really very young, and working with Hendrix was really a thrilling experience. Looking back on it now, it seems almost like a fantasy. He was working with the Buddy Miles Band of Gypsies. I guess it was one of the last stages just before he -- uhhhh...you know died. He put down a lot of tracks, most of which ended up on the Crash Landing album and other posthumous stuff."
"He'd come back in the studio and play back the stuff we did last night and say 'Oh, that's awful' and I'd thought it was great. He'd put down a guitar track and say he wanted to do it over. And he'd do it over and over and over on different tracks. Later on when the record was finished without him, they'd just leave all those guitar tracks on there."
It was frustrating, therefore, for an old studio hand like Tommy to get treated like a dumb punk when The Ramones made it into the studio for the first time.
"When we got a contract, they handed us a producer: Craig Leon. We figured we were lucky to get a recording contract, because it was very hard to get signed in those days. We were the first band on our scene to get signed, so when they handed us a producer, we had to say okay."
"He used the same techniques that I'd developed when I produced our demo, and I didn't have as much to do with the production as I wanted to, because the record was done very fast and I didn't know the producer, so I had to behave, but by the end of the session I managed to get a little bit of control."
As he has, in fact, with each successive record: demonstrating more convincingly each time that he knows exactly what he's doing.
So there was Tommy, suddenly finding himself as a performer, playing an instrument that was new to him and doing it all in a completely whacked-out left-field (for the time) band like The Ramones.
"It wasn't just music in The Ramones: it was an idea. It was bringing back a whole feel that was missing in rock music -- it was a whole push outwards to say something new and different. Originally it was just an artistic type of thing; finally I felt it was something that was good enough for everybody."
"People thought everything was an accident. These four morons are really cute and they're doing something really neat, but obviously it's an accident. First of all, it wasn't four morons; second of all, none of it was an accident; and third of all, it's four talented people who know what they like and who know what they're doing."
"They're very natural people who're not trying to do something that's either above them or below them or contrary to their taste, you know. It's not a put-on...or if it is, it's not aimed at anyone. From their point of view, it's aimed at the ironies of living...kind of."
One thing that always impressed me about Da Brudders was their ability to play long, tight sets of short, tight songs without ever referring to set-lists unobtrusively taped to amps and drums and monitors.
"It's just drilled into us: we played the stuff often enough. In the early days Dee Dee would shout '1-2-3-4' and everybody would start playing a different song. Then we'd throw the instruments around and walk off, and that wasn't a put-on either. Nowadays, it hardly ever happens."
"What the hell. It's all the same song, anyway."
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