The punk rock street fight in 1983 that almost cost Johnny Ramone his life
The history of punk is littered with snot, spit and flecks of dried blood.
The very visceral nature of the genre not only garnered such bodily excretion but also encouraged it. It was a facet of the style and the revolutionary way of thinking that would endear a generation of angst-ridden teens to adopt everything the subculture had to offer. It makes sense then that much of the history of punk is rubber-stamped with the odd brawl or ugly confrontation.
Whether it was when Sid Vicious threw a bottle at Todd Smith or when The Clash’s bassist Paul Simonon squared off against The Stranglers’ own bass behemoth JJ Burnel amid a flurry of late-night drinks, punk has always packed a punch.
That moment happened in the wee hours of a Ramones show, and the foursome from New York were also subjected to such activities. While Vicious’s altercation was perhaps the most singularly striking of all those historical events, Johnny Ramone almost ended up in an early grave after a street fight left him fighting for his life.
There was always a degree of tension that ran through the Ramones. While Dee Dee was a one-man wrecking ball crew who had even engaged in sex work on the streets of New York, the rest of the band offered a similarly disorientating array of clumsy personalities. Joey Ramone, for instance, spent decades playing opposite a Johnny whom he loathed.
So, while he might not have been the most beloved of the bunch, the group would have likely floundered as a band without the stern words and iron fist of Johnny Ramone. To give him his credit, he was at least central to the running of the ragtag ensemble.
The eldest member of the band, Johnny, was a known Republican and a ruthless authoritarian. His stance seemed incongruous considering his position as one of the founding fathers of punk rock. But he prided himself on thumbing his nose at expectations more so than anything else. He would exert his dominance over most of the band, but especially the group’s lead singer, Joey, in this same snotty, asocial manner.
A notably shy frontman, Joey and Johnny spent most of their time in the band on opposite sides of every spectrum they could get their hands on: musical, political and romantic. It would culminate in Johnny “taking” Joey’s girlfriend Linda Danielle, who would become Johnny’s wife and be the subject of the Ramones’ song ‘The KKK Took My Baby Away’.
However, when Johnny Ramone fractured his skull in 1983 and was nearly killed following an altercation over a woman, it was neither Joey nor Linda who were involved. However, their troubled entanglement did somewhat forecast what lay ahead. It would be a very similar set of circumstances that led to him cracking his cranium.
In 1983, the Ramones were touring their new album Subterranean Jungle when they performed a hometown show in Queens, New York. As ever, the group were on late and left the venue even later, with Johnny Ramone getting back to his apartment in Manhattan in the early hours of the morning.
Approaching his door, he would note his longtime mistress, though they “were not together” at this time, “bombed” out of her mind and sat on the porch opposite with a young punk by the name of Seth Macklin. Cynthia Whitney would eventually write Too Tough To Love: My Life with Johnny Ramone, and it is an apt title considering what followed.
Macklin was the frontman of the punk group Sub-Zero and was, to his knowledge, in an exclusive relationship with Whitney. You can perhaps see how this one is going to end up. Crash, band, wallops ensued. In the police report, Ramone said he had felt worried about the state of Whitney and called her over to him to go inside his apartment to protect her from Macklin.
Naturally, the Sub-Zero singer was angered by this suggestion, and a fight broke out almost instantly. While Macklin claimed to the police that Ramone was the first person to attack, allegedly swinging Whitney’s handbag at him, the fact that Ramone spent the next few days in the hospital probably suggests otherwise. The Ramones explained that he was caught unawares.
The 22-year-old singer said he hit Ramone “two or three times”, but only in self-defence, before the famed guitarist fell to the ground, hitting his head on a car door before making an impact with the concrete. Ramone claimed to The New York Times that it was at this point that Macklin kicked him in the head, rendering him unconscious and fracturing his skull.
Subsequent statements from the authorities have expressed how dangerous this could have been. Remarkably, Ramone would avoid any serious damage to his brain despite the magnitude of the impact. Malick, meanwhile, was charged with first-degree assault and, according to Johnny Ramone, was sentenced to a few months in jail the following year.
The guitarist rarely talked about the incident, bar one extremely explosive passage in his autobiography Commando, during which he explained, “I was very angry. I wanted him [Macklin] killed. I’m all for capital punishment.” So, you begin to see where some of Joey’s lyrics poking fun at Johnny’s irate takes come from.
Evidently, the unforgiving punk wasn’t holding back. But he grew even more gratuitous with what followed. “I think it should be televised,” he wrote. “I think they could make it a pay-per-view event and give the money to the victims’ families.”
It certainly sounds like he would’ve paid to see Macklin in such a troubling position. “I started fantasising about getting a gun,” he continued. “I thought it would be great to have someone mess with me and kill him. I mean, Bernhard Goetz was a hero. He did what everyone else wants to do. He was Charles Bronson.”
The questionable punk then concluded, “In real life, who the hell would approach Charles Bronson? They go for the Bernhard Goetz’s of the world. In the end, though, I never owned a gun. It was just a fantasy. I was no Charles Bronson.”
Thank god for that, I suppose.
