“Everything I liked”: Marky Ramone’s introduction to the Ramones
Looking back, it is a good job that the Ramones weren’t actually related, as the constant demand for new drummers would have put quite a strain on their parents’ relationship. Tommy Ramone might have been the original, but in terms of sheer longevity, it was Marky Ramone who gave the band their definitive backbeat; it was a match made in punk rock heaven.
Unlike most rock bands, particularly one as divided as the Ramones, their original drummer did not leave in a cloud of drug-fuelled ego battles, nor was he sacked for ‘musical differences’. Instead, Tommy Ramone decided that his talents were better suited to the production desk, leaving the core line-up of the pioneering New York punks back in 1978.
His absence, of course, left a hole in the band that could never be filled by any run-of-the-mill CBGBs drummer, so it was rather lucky that the group crossed paths with Marky Ramone.
As far as the punk scene was concerned, Marky Ramone – or Marc Bell, to give him his birthname – was vastly overqualified. Whereas the majority of other East Village percussionists were figuring it out as they went along, Marky came into the fold of the Ramones, having already played with the likes of Richard Hell, Jayne County, and having come close to earning a spot in the New York Dolls. On top of that, he had worked with The Rolling Stones’ manager Andrew Loog Oldham, gaining a glimpse at an entirely different realm of rock and roll.
Inevitably, then, the new drummer had to dumb down his playing style a little when he entered the line-up of the Ramones, but he never resented that fact. After all, as he declared in the film End of Century, the group was exactly the kind of thing that the drummer had been yearning for. “When I was growing up as a kid, that’s the kind of music that I liked,” he expanded in a 2005 interview for Perfect Sound Forever.
“It didn’t exist then,” Ramone continued, “but the 4/4 time, the two and a half minute song, I always liked that, and I liked the simplicity of drummers from the British invasion, like Ringo Starr, Dave Clark, and at that time things were getting very bloated.” It is no surprise that he fit in with the Ramones then, given their unparalleled appreciation for 1960s pop and the British invasion period.
Although from an outside perspective, Marky had to simplify his playing style to fit in with these harbringers of punk rock revolution, the reality was that they were asking for exactly the kind of drumming that the percussionist had always dreamed of playing, so it wasn’t much of a chore.
“When I heard that album [Ramones], it reminded me of everything that I liked,” he explained. “It was The Kinks, it was The Who, it was Phil Spector, it was The Beach Boys; everything rolled into one 4/4 straight-ahead music.”
Adding, “That’s when I tried my hardest to be able to fit in and do this.”
Marky certainly succeeded in fitting in with the band’s sonic ethos, and although a few other drummers – namely Richie Ramone and, very briefly, Elvis Ramone (Clem Burke) – took on the mantle of banging out the Ramones’ beating rhythm over the years, nobody embodied the raw rock and roll spirit of the band’s sound better than Marky Ramone.
