True to the wild, anarchic spirit of punk rock, the Ramones played a gig as filthy as the notoriously filthy CBGB bathrooms in New York’s hallowed underground in 1975 when they accepted a spontaneous offer from their first manager.
“They wanted to be in my column in the SoHo Weekly News, but I kept saying, ‘I can’t go,'” legendary Ramones manager Danny Fields told The Post about seeing the iconic New York band at the club they first played 50 years ago, on Aug. 16, 1974. “But when I finally did go, I went back to their dressing room before they went onstage and said, ‘Hello, it’s Danny. I’m back.'”
When the Forest Hills, Queens native’s foursome – lead singer Joey, guitarist Johnny, bassist Dee Dee and drummer Tommy Ramone – took the stage, their fateful entrance would shake up Fields and the music world.
“The first words out of Joey’s mouth were, ‘I don’t want to go to the basement,'” Fields recalls of the lyrics that became the title of the seventh track on the Ramones’ 1976 debut album.
“And I said, ‘Seriously?!’ It was the cleverest, funniest thing I’d ever heard. So I knew right away they had a sense of humor.”
Fields, too, was immediately impressed with their sense of style.
“They looked similar because of the presentation,” he said. “They were dressed the same. They all had leather jackets and jeans. They tried to get the same hairstyle. Intuitively, this is a clever thing they did, and you can see that as the process of introducing them goes on.”
But in the end, what he witnessed on that grimy stage was a magical musical mayhem.
“I was speechless,” Fields said. “I thought it was the most perfect band I’d ever seen. They just nailed everything. They played great song after great song and just never stopped.”
After the show, a “shocked” Fields returned to his dingy dressing room.
“And Tommy said, quite nervously, ‘Do you think you could write about us in your column now?’ And something just clicked inside of me and I said, ‘I want to manage you.’ I don’t know where that feeling came from.”
Then, in a frenzy, the Ramones made Fields a counter-offer he couldn’t refuse.
“Johnny Ramone said to me, ‘Hey, we need $3,000 for a drummer. If you come up with the $3,000, you can be our manager,'” Fields said.
That amounted to roughly $20,000 at today’s inflation rate, sending Fields scrambling to raise cash. “I went to visit my mother, who was recently widowed in Florida, and I said, ‘Can I borrow $3,000?’ She pulled out her checkbook and said, ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.'”
It certainly was. Fields was no fool, but the drums weren’t the reason. “The drums were enough money to get them through the next few months.”
Still, that locker room deal paid off big time for everyone involved.
The Ramones, who shared their surname after the pseudonym for the hotel Paul McCartney used during his time with The Beatles, were signed to Sire Records by A&R man Craig Leon, who backed the quartet after discovering them at CBGB.
“I just thought they were so funny,” says Leon, who also produced 1976’s The Ramones. “They were like a cartoon rock band, the opposite of everything that was going on at the time. They were all so serious. They were doing rock operas and mocking regular rock ‘n’ roll.”
In fact, although all of the original members are now deceased, the Ramones, who live on as immortals in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, spearheaded the punk revolution that began at CBGB 50 years ago.
Photographer David Godliss, who shot the band regularly at their home club from 1976 until the original line-up’s final show on May 4, 1978, described the band’s impact this way: “We all thought the Ramones would become as famous as the Beatles.”
