“SOMEBODY CALLED ME ON THE PHONE…”

I spent a hefty chunk of this last rainy and potentially miserable weekend lying in bed, drinking wine, listening to a selection of jazz and brain-melting psyche and breaking my embargo on pointless music books to enjoy Dee Dee Ramone’s autobiography, Poison Heart.

Having faithfully devoured Everett True’s excellent Ramones book and the recent movie, I think I’ve got enough info on the story of the Ramones to let it slide, but Dee Dee’s book isn’t really so much about all that as it’s about, well, the weird world of Dee Dee.... and it’s fucking incredible!

It immediately becomes clear that Dee Dee is completely off his nut, and the book reads likes he’s hammered it out in one sitting, Kerouac style. He vaguely tells the story of his dysfunctional, violent and drug-addled life, rambling and raving and going off on bizarre digressions about movies he went to see when he was eight years old, what kind of amplifiers he likes the best, the best ways to cop dope in post-war Germany, why the Stooges were so cool and so on. He tells endless sensational anecdotes about ugly New York sleaze, dysfunctional junkie relationships (it doesn’t seem like he ever had a functional one with anybody), rancid apartments, feral drag queens and that sort of thing. His writing has tons of weird passion invested in it and he picks out the strangest, most unexpected details of things, presumably just throwing down every half-remembered, trivial bit of information he can dig up. Clearly historical accuracy wasn’t exactly a priority here, and he seems to get a lot of fairly basic facts about his own band wrong, but that just adds to the charm.

The effect is akin to a remedial school drug-punk Bukowski letting rip on all cylinders, and the results are moving and hilarious in equal measure.

I highly commend this book to everybody - it’s less the second-rate rock biog one might reasonably expect, more a lost and unheralded literary classic by a uniquely twisted modern primitive thinker.

Dee Dee, if you’re up there somewhere, you are the king.