Did Phil Spector almost murder the Ramones?
The making of the Ramones‘ fifth studio album, End of the Century, was torturous. After four albums without commercial success, neither Sire Records nor the band themselves knew why their strong reputation and popularity weren’t translating to album sales. A Hail Mary idea was conceived: why not ask legendary producer Phil Spector to produce the band?
Spector was a Ramones fan. Having originally offered to produce 1977’s Rocket to Russia, Spector appreciated Joey Ramone’s love of 1960s girl groups and had a strong rapport with drummer Marky Ramone. The band flew to Los Angeles to work with Spector, but his exacting methods and mood swings soon created tension. Early in the sessions, there were even accounts that Spector held the members of the band hostage in his mansion.
“Phil Spector, he invited us back to his house, and we were like, ‘Great! Let’s go up there and see what it’s like,'” road manager Monte Melnick recalled in the documentary Ramones: End of the Century. “Then he started raving and putting on weird horror movies and things. We wanted to go, but he didn’t want us to go. He said, ‘You’re gonna stay here for a while.’ He had his guns and things in the house. He kept us hostage for a while up there.”
“He always carried three guns around with him… We were prisoners in his house for about six hours, and we thought we were gonna get shot,” Johnny told Spin in 1986. “I said, ‘Let’s go,’ and he pulled out a gun and said, ‘Do you wanna leave?’ I said, ‘No, that’s OK, we’ll stay for a while.’” But by the end of the album’s sessions, Johnny was confident enough to call Spector’s bluff.
“[I said] ‘What are you gonna do, shoot me, Phil? Go ahead. I don’t care. I’m leaving,'” Johnny recalled in End of the Century. “He’s a little man with lips in the shoes, the wig on top of his head, and four guns. He’s an asshole to everybody, treats everybody horrible, and we reluctantly agreed to do the album with him because we thought it would help us.”
However, Marky Ramone disputes most of these accounts, claiming that Spector never posed any actual threat to the band and never held them hostage. “Well, it was a potential danger. Phil Spector, my buddy, never pointed a gun at us in the studio – that’s just hearsay,” Marky told SongFacts. “There is a video where Johnny Ramone says, ‘Phil, what are you going to do? Shoot me?’ And he was talking about Phil Spector. But he wasn’t there pointing the gun at him. He knew he had guns on him, so that’s really what he was alluding to.”
“But the thing is that Phil had a license to carry, and he would take them off and put them down. You’re not going to wear them the whole day in the studio. So that probably intimidated him and Dee Dee,” Marky added. “Me and Joey loved him – we got along with him great. But it turned out the way it did – it was an experiment, and that’s the result. But I never was intimidated by Phil. I always admired his production as a little boy, and I just realised that we worked different – that’s all it was. He worked very slow, we worked fast. And that’s probably what caused some of the animosity in the studio.”
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