“Bastard”: When Clem Burke named and shamed the worst person to darken the CBGB’s door
Even if you’ve never been to New York City, even if you were born years after it was shut down, you can still place yourself in the CBGB.
The very mention of the name fills your nostrils with the smell of beer swill, it sticks your feet to the carpet like the wrapper to a warm toffee, and rambunctious chatter abounds in the air. Then, of course, there’s the music.
If the uprising of the 1960s represented a period in cultural history that will be looked back on in millennia as a rock ‘n’ roll renaissance period, CBGBs is arguably where it caught its second wind. From the Talking Heads to Patti Smith and Television, countless great bands were all borne from this subterranean cesspit of punky excellence.
But that output can, perhaps, make us view the internal operations with equally rose-tinted specs. Alas, late, great Blondie drummer, Clem Burke, pretty much proclaimed: let it be known, there were turds in the punchbowl of this magical punk happening. The CBGB had its fair share of heroes, but it was also built on gritty realism, and that meant villains in the midst, too.
The established might have owed much to the Ramones, but not every Ramone was created equally, and Burke had this to say about Johnny, “Bastard. I mean, I knew those guys right from the beginning. I was friends with Joey, but can’t say I was friends with Johnny,” he told Classic Rock.
He’s certainly not alone in this opinion, even though Burke had a reason to be unnaturally endeared to the befringed bastard. Johnny had proposed that the band recruit Burke to play drums, imbuing the young rocker with plenty of kudos even if it never worked out. Johnny was the sole reason for that.
“I was asked to join The Ramones about four different times,” he recalled. “When I finally said yes, I told them I didn’t want to do it permanently. I did think maybe, but Johnny? His politics?” The politics in question can be neatly surmised by the Ramones song, ‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’, about how Johnny ‘stole’ Joey’s long-term girlfriend.
This caused a 22-year stand-off of silence, even though the pair occupied the same six square footage as each for most of the duration of that time. It was a stand-off of multitudes, too. Johnny would enforce a sort of bilateral ‘you’re talking to me or Joey’ embargo.
As Burke recalls, “So if I’m talking to Johnny, I’m not talking to Joey and if I’m talking to Joey, I’m not talking to Johnny.”
This led to a level of toxicity that was never truly allayed by artistic expression on Johnny’s part, either. “He used the guitar as a means to an end,” Burke opined, “and I don’t think he particularly cared for it. He refused to rehearse, so I’d spend a lot of time going through stuff on my own. They’re all dead now, which is terribly sad. But being in the Ramones was not a happy place to be.”
In some ways, that showed in the beauty of their blitzkreig music: a wry rally cry against weary discontent.
