The Most Senior Living Ramone Publishes His Memoir

All the original Ramones–Joey, Dee Dee, Johnny and Tommy–are all gone now.  The most senior member of the group still alive is Marky Ramone, who replaced Tommy on drums in 1978.  He was with the band through the rest of its existence.  He’s a great guy, too. I’ve met him several times, including for a dinner out one night in Hamilton during which he told some great stories, some funny, some serious.

Marky has finally put all those stories into a book called Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone, saying that his primary goal was “to set the record straight.” He’s not happy with the way a number of other books have portrayed the band, so as the heir to the legacy, he felt the need to step in. From Billboard:

“It was time to quell all the exaggerations from all the other books and tell what really happened,” Ramone (nee Marc Bell), the sole surviving Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inducted member of the punk rock pioneers, tells Billboard about Punk Rock Blitzkrieg, which he spent five years writing and will be published on Jan. 13. “It’s not just about the Ramones; it’s my whole life story leading up to that, and afterwards. But, y’know, 95 percent of the time I was in a van with those guys, stuck in assigned seats, and you can’t jump out the window or anything. So I wanted to tell people what it was really like.”

Billboard has an exclusive excerpt from the book. Read it here.