CJ Ramone: Punk, Family and a New Album

 Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 22, 2013.

Chris Ward was in the midst of trying to learn 40 songs at break-neck speed. It was 1989 and five weeks after his release from a Marine brig in Virginia, he was about to go on tour as the bass player for one of the most influential, and by many accounts, the first punk rock group of all time: The Ramones.

“It was like ‘how did this ever happen?’ It was the ultimate … rock star dream,” he said in a phone interview from his Long Island, N.Y., home. 

He was in his early 20s and had been a fan of the band that was formed in Queens, N.Y., in 1974 by Douglas Colvin, John Cummings, Jeffry Hyman and Thomas Erdelyi, better known as Dee Dee, Johnny, Joey, and Tommy Ramone. 

By 1989, Dee Dee, Johnny and Joey were still playing together, but had gone through several different drummers. Mark Bell, AKA Marky Ramone, was the drummer at the time. 

Dee Dee was burned out from the road by this point, but continued to write songs for the Ramones while Ward was hired to replace him as the band’s bass player and sometimes-singer. Ward was reborn CJ Ramone and would end up in the band until their retirement in 1996. 

He said it was a strange sensation going from watching them from the audience to being on stage playing with them. 

“One day I'm bouncing up and down in front of Johnny, and the next I look over, and there's Johnny and Joey and I'm playing on stage with them,” he recalled. “I was 21 or 22. I grew up listening to them. It was tremendous … overwhelming.”

CJ Ramone’s first show with the band was on Sept. 30, 1989, in Leicester, England. 

“Whenever I'm in a situation that's stressful … I just get out of my head,” he recalled of his early days with the band and of his first show in particular. 

“Yeah, I made some mistakes that night. … Johnny was mad as hell and yelled at me for five solid minutes after the show. I stood there listening and then I ran back stage, drank some beer and celebrated. I knew I had it. I got the whole Ramones thing on stage, he said.”

For the other band members, the rock and roll lifestyle was commonplace, but for C.J., who was younger by nine years and unused to it, he was enthralled by the famous people they hung around with. 

“I was so not cool when I was in the band. … I was going on pure instinct,” he said. “When I met Lemmy (the lead singer of English rock band Motörhead), I was out of my mind. I told him, ‘We have to have to party!’” They did, he said. 

But even in the midst of rock and roll excess, he never “fell into the rock-star thing” he said, keeping the same friends he had always had, living in a small house and refraining from splurging on extravagant purchases. He did buy himself a motorcycle, he admitted. 

Following the break up of the band in 1996, Ramone stopped playing music altogether for a short time. 

“My son [Liam] was born in 1997 and a year or two later was diagnosed with autism,” he said. 

Ramone said he was told by his son’s doctors that his son needed him to be at home. Ramone is heavily involved in the autism community. 

He said Metallica asked him to play bass for their band twice, but he turned the mega-selling and multi-Grammy-winning heavy metal band from Los Angeles down after he was told by his son’s doctors that he would be doing his son a great disservice if he took the job. 

“So I packed it in,” he said. 

He said he doesn’t regret the decision. 

“I had already done it all. Playing with Metallica would have been amazing, but I already played with the greatest rock and roll band in history,” said Ramone.

While he later started two other bands, Los Gusanos and Bad Chopper, both now defunct, before recording and touring as CJ Ramone he had always hoped The Ramones would re-form. 

“I had always waited for the [phone] call telling me we were going to get back together and going on tour. … Instead, I got the other calls,” said Ramone. “With Johnny and Joey, they were both sick [so] it was expected. … Dee Dee’s death was probably the biggest blow because it was sudden.”

Joey died from lymphoma in 2001. Dee Dee died from a heroin overdose the next year. And Johnny lost his battle with prostate cancer in 2004.

Ramone said he was one of the last people to see Johnny before he died. 

“I got the chance to say good-bye and thank him,” he said. 

He also saw Dee Dee before his death in 2002. According to Ramone, in the past Dee Dee hadn’t always been nice to him, but that night was different. 

“He told me, ‘You were always cool to me.’ It was out of character for him. I waited for him to crack a joke. He didn’t and I didn’t know what to say. A couple of weeks later, he was dead.”

The dynamic of “fan/friend, friend/ mentor” between himself and the other members was “like the ‘Twilight Zone.’ It was so odd. I’m still trying to get my head around it,” he said. 

His first solo album recording under CJ Ramone, “Reconquista,” Spanish for reconquest, is meant as a tribute to Joey, Johnny and Dee Dee, and was influenced by that band’s sound, but, he said, there are hints of his two later bands that come through on the album as well. 

“Reconquista” was recorded three times, said Ramone, and was released digitally last year. After two attempts that ended in results he just wasn't satisfied with, he called up his friend Steve Soto of The Adolescents, a punk band from Southern California, who helped him produce the album that he had intended to make.

Recorded in Orange County, Calif., with the help of a who’s who of punk and new wave musicians from such famed bands as X, Bad Religion, Blondie and Social Distortion, among others, Ramone said it was fun to record and the results made him proud. 

Before the recording session when Soto mentioned the list of people who wanted to help out on the record, Ramone was at first a little taken-aback. 

“In the back of my mind I’m thinking: ‘How much is this going to cost?” he said. “None of them asked for a dime. They did it because of The Ramones name. In honor of them. That's the power of the Ramones.”

The album was released through PledgeMusic, an online direct-to-fan, fan-funded music platform which bypasses record companies. 

“It’s about as DYI as you can get,” said Ramone. “It's anti-corporate music business.”

With a wife, Denise, and three kids — Liam who is 15, Lilliana, 12, and 3-year-old Mia Dove — he has scaled back his touring schedule and when he can, brings the family on tour with him. 

“We're playing at Fuji Rock Festival in Japan this summer and I'm bringing the family,” he told The Eagle. 

As if on cue, his 3-year-old daughter broke in to the interview with a question for her father about “Dora the Explorer,” a children’s TV show. And by the sound of it, Ramone was washing dishes as we spoke by phone. 

Ramone’s two older children were with first wife, Chessa, Marky Ramone’s niece from whom he’s divorced, and his youngest was by his second wife, Denise. 

His oldest daughter, who herself is a multi-instrumentalist, was into punk, but is listening to progressive music these days. “But every once in a while, she breaks out some Green Day,” said Ramone. 

He was happy to see punk attain such popularity in the 1990s with bands like Rancid and Green Day, but inevitably, the music industry got its hands on it and helped produce mediocre music, said Ramone. 

Punk rock was originally created by and for disenfranchised youth, he said. 

“As long as their are young, angry and alienated teenagers their will be punk rock,” he said, 

Beyond that, punk surmounts age differences, he said. At his shows he has fans both young and old. 

“I don’t think there is another type of music that transcends the generations, … and that’s a very wonderful thing.” 

He said when he played in Glasgow, Scotland, he met several people in their 50s who were had been in the scene since the 1970s and were still dedicated to the punk ethos.

“For them it’s not a musical style, it’s a lifestyle,” he said. 

Ramone hopes to continue to play and record for “the rest of my days.”

“I’ll always play The Ramones’ songs live. [The fans] love to hear it,” he said. “I do The Ramones justice.”

MLK in Berkshire County

Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Jan. 22 edition of the Berkshire Eagle.

Two years before his famous "I Have a Dream" speech and seven years to the month before being cut down by an assassin's bullet, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. visited Berkshire County, MA. and gave three talks to Williams College students in a single day to explain his ideas on civil disobedience.

"Frankly, we are breaking laws in the South," King told one rapt audience at the college in Williamstown on April 16, 1961. "But there are two types of laws -- just laws and unjust laws. I believe that if society brings into being unjust laws, a moral man has no alternative than to rise up."

Six months earlier, King had backed up those words when he was arrested, along with about 300 other protesters, during a sit-in at the segregated restaurant at Rich's, a department store in Atlanta. King was sentenced to six months of hard labor at the Georgia State Prison, but was released through the intervention of then-presidential hopeful John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

King's visit to Williams College in April 1961 was part of a barnstorming tour of colleges in Western Massachusetts. His visit to Williams came a day after he was at Smith (where his daughter, Yolanda, would later receive her bachelor's degree) and a day before an appearance at Amherst College.

At Williams, King addressed a dinner for a student religious group, gave a sermon at the college chapel, and participated in a question-and-answer session with students. In total, more than 1,000 people saw him during his visit to the school.

King told his listeners that the idea behind the sit-ins concerned resistance without violence, hatred of segregation without hatred of the segregationist, and a desire to raise the consciousness of the opponent rather than to humiliate him, according to a Berkshire Eagle article that appeared the next day. The reporter described King, then 32, as "a short, handsome man" who was "an intense, direct and inspiring speaker."

The sit-ins of segregated lunch counters began in 1960 with four black college students in Greensboro, N.C., and quickly spread throughout the South.
"This movement is more than a lot of noise about hamburger. I don't think these students are hungry. It's a demand for respect," King told his audience.

King invoked the Boston Tea Party in his discussion, calling it "one of the highest expressions of civil disobedience" and said that "those of us who break segregation laws feel we are in noble company."

The response from the students was overwhelming.
"Dr. King's talk at the dinner drew a standing ovation of more than a minute for its spiritual and intellectual quality," the Eagle reporter, Arthur Myers, wrote.

It would be three more years before a federal Civil Rights Bill was passed that banned discrimination against blacks at hotels and restaurants, barred employers from discriminating based on race and allowed the federal government to sue school systems that refused to desegregate. King continued to fight for the rights of minorities and the underclass until his murder on April 4, 1968 as he stood on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tenn.

In 1974, Massachusetts, along with Connecticut, passed laws making his birthday a state holiday a decade before it became a federal holiday. Illinois was the first state to make King's birthday a legal holiday.

Dr. Swift and FDR

 If you are like me and wonder how accurate a historical film or bio pick is (sometimes to the detrement of fully enjoying the movie) historian Dr. Will Swift will be discussing that very subject in regard to "Hyde Park on the Hudson," a film that premiered this fall at the Toronto Film Festival and went into general release last month.

The film, starring Bill Murray as President Franklin Roosevelt and Laura Linney as his cousin, and lover, Daisey Suckley, recounts a weekend in 1938 in which King George VI and Queen Elizabeth were guests of the president at Hyde Park, the Roosevelt's family home in Dutchess County.

Swift, the author of "The Roosevelts and the Royals," will parse out truth from fiction and give the real story of that well-known weekend.
The event will be held this Saturday January 19th at 3 p.m. at the Chatham Public Library

The program is sponsored by the Friends of the Chatham Public Library. A reception will follow Will Swift's talk. For more information go to http://chatham.lib.ny.us/.

  
   

Mohawk History, Mohawk Pride

Editor's note: A different version of this story appeared in the Nov. 10, 2012 edition of the Berkshire Eagle. 

Jerry Thundercloud McDonald recalled the first time he entered his clan’s longhouse when he was 12, following the death of his mother.

"It was like watching a moving picture show," he said of the dancing and singing. "I was very inspired to learn about the tribal history of our people."

He recently shared the history of the Mohawk Nation and the Six Nations Iroquois Confederacy through song, dance and storytelling. The versatile singer, storyteller, dancer, choreographer, and actor, was dressed in traditional costume, which included a headdress and a variety of hide clothing.

McDonald is a member of the Wolf Clan and lives in the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne, a tribal area along the banks of the St. Lawrence River that straddles upstate New York and the Canadian provinces of Quebec and Ontario.

The longhouse, the center of tribal activity at Akwesasne and elsewhere, is a place of "joy and inspiration" where McDonald learned "a great deal of respect," he said.

McDonald discussed the various traditional instruments used in Mohawk ceremonies, from the water drum, which as the name suggests is filled with water, to the big drum, a moose-hide-covered instrument you can feel in your chest when he beats out a rhythm.

McDonald described how the Great Law of Peace, the oral constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy -- a union of five tribes that some scientists believe dates back close to a thousand years, (a sixth tribe joined the confederation in the 18th century) -- helped inspire the Founding Fathers in their writing of the U.S. Constitution, including the ideas of checks and balances and the separation of powers. Several of the nation’s symbols, including the Eagle holding arrows (look for it on the back of the dollar bill) comes directly from the Iroquois tradition, according to McDonald.

McDonald was also a so-called "skywalker," one of many Mohawk men who have worked in New York City doing skyscraper construction work, scampering along thin steel beams thousands of feet in the air. His last job was on the new Yankee Stadium, he said. He once fell several stories while working and woke up to find he has crushed his left clavicle.

His father, whom he never met was also a skywalker, as had been his father before him.

Powys finds a home

John Cowper Powys was happy. He was cold, but happy. He stood watching the sunrise from his Hillsdale, N.Y. home that December morning in 1930 taking the moment in.

He and Phyllis Playter, an American he had met in Missouri nearly a decade earlier and who was 22 years his junior, were now living a much different life, far from the crowds of New York City and his hectic schedule. No more crisscrossing the country lecturing on other, much more famous writers. Now the 58-year-old Powys would be focusing on his own work in this Utopian setting thanks to the success of his novel “Wolf Solent.”


Born in Derbyshire, England in 1872, the son of a vicar, Powys seemed to be destined for the staid life of a country schoolmaster. By 1904 he was married and a father, but America — and the freedom from restraint and convention — called.

In the United States, Powys became an itinerant, and much sought after, lecturer.  Over the course of the next two decades he would speak on a myriad of subjects, from philosophy to politics to literature, especially literature. During a lecture on the writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky, where Powys first met Playter, two of the other attendees allegedly fainted from the sheer sensual power of the presentation.

Powys gave about 10,000 lectures in his career by his own account and also picked up a number of influential friends and admirers along the way, including the writers Theodore Dreiser and Henry Miller.

During his time as a lecturer, Powys also wrote prodigiously, but didn’t find success until his 1929 novel “Wolf Solent,” a 900-page epic that became a bestseller, opening the way for him to take up writing full-time and to move to the hamlet of Harlemville, which lies in the town of Hillsdale.
In their little farmhouse at the foot of Phudd Hill, which Powys dubbed “Phudd Bottom,” the couple spent four productive and happy years. Powys would write two novels, “A Glastonbury Romance” and “Weymouth Sands,” as well as an autobiography and a book on philosophy: “A Philosophy of Solitude.”

While Powys was busy with his literary efforts, he still had time to explore the area and found joy in the county’s flora and fauna, old farms and his neighbors.
Some of his neighbors, according to at least one account, thought Powys a bit odd. The writer was idiosyncratic to say the least. The often disheveled-looking Powys was known to tap his head against his mailbox in the belief it would ensure the safe delivery of his mail and he would bow to the rocks and trees on his sojourns.

He was adverse to technology, drawn to the abnormal and multi-phobic, but to many he was, and remains, an overlooked and important writer — a “gigantic mythopoeic literary volcano” in the words of poet Philip Larkin.

For four years Powys made Hillsdale his home. He and Playter would move to England in 1934 and then to Wales the following year where Powys remained until his death in 1963, a few months shy of his 91st birthday. Playter followed him to the grave in 1982.

A Sailer's Life in Fiji

 John Gaul, lying in his bed in Lakeba with a sore leg, began to write his life story. After more than 30 years in Fiji he was once again communicating with his family and his brother had asked him to relate all that had transpired in the three decades since they had last seen one another. And what a life it had been.

Gaul left Hudson, N.Y.  in 1855, a scrappy 14-year-old full of wanderlust and a deep sadness over the recent death of his mother. He found his way to New York City and then sailed to Fall River, Mass., most likely working for his passage. From there he walked to New Bedford, a 15-mile trek, and shipped out on a whaler, the Elizabeth, headed to the South Pacific.

The sailor’s life was hard: filled with violence, poor food and little sleep. Gaul recalled the beatings he took at the hands of the captain and mates over trivial matters. At one point he was tied to a mast and whipped for fighting with another crewmember. According to Gaul, the fight broke out when he sat down to eat before a Portuguese sailor. The man shoved Gaul out of his seat and Gaul retaliated by slamming a keg of molasses onto the man’s head, nearly drowning him in the thick fluid as the sailor stumbled around blindly before finally being freed with the help of several other men. 

Gaul gave as good as he got, nearly killing one of the mates with whom he had an on-going dispute. The mate would beat the boy savagely any chance he got, but was unfortunate enough to be caught sleeping on his watch by Gaul who stole some gunpowder, piled it near the man’s head and set it alight, burning the man’s hair and face.

Gaul, tired of the beatings, jumped ship, was caught, beaten, and tried again. This time he made his escape by swimming to shore with a sailor from Pennsylvania. Gaul made it to Upolo, one of the islands that make up Samoa, then known as the Navigator Islands by westerners, but his friend wasn’t so lucky. He was killed by sharks as the two made their way to land.

It wasn’t long before Gaul was once again at sea, this time on a schooner shipping coconut oil. This captain seemed only marginally better than the first, since he beat Gaul for complaining about being worked too hard without food or water, but afterward made Gaul a mate, with a $5.00 a month raise. From there Gaul moved on to another trading vessel plying the waters between Australia and Fiji.

Gaul eventually settled in Fiji, a group of islands in the South West Pacific where cannibalism was still practiced at the time. His descriptions of the custom border on the fantastic and are more likely based on hearsay than on personal observation.

According to Gaul, the native people would dig up the dead and feast on their bodies and would steal one another’s children to eat. He also alleged that Ratu Seru Epenisa Cakobau, who united Fiji under his control in the 1850s, had an island where he would fatten up his victims before eating them. The King Of Bau, as he was known, had in fact repudiated the practice of cannibalism and took up Christianity in 1854, before Gaul settled in Fiji. While cannibalism was practiced there it was usually reserved for special occasions, such as the eating of one’s enemies after a battlefield victory, and the practice died out not long after Gaul’s arrival.

By the 1860s Gaul was married with children — he would eventually have four — and had taught himself to read and write. He said that the little schooling he had in Columbia County before he ran away hadn’t stuck. Gaul held a series of jobs from cotton plantation manager to store clerk, but continued to be drawn to the sea, often working as a sailor when land-based jobs dried up.

He was a conundrum when it came to his views of the aboriginal people of the islands, often describing them as savages, thieves, and “very saucy” to “whites.” At the same time, he married a native woman and treated her well, became fluent in the language and seemed to think more highly of the native people than the missionaries, drunken Europeans and the officials of the British colonial government installed in 1874 when the country became a British possession.

At one point he tells of fighting on the side of a tribe that lived near him against their enemies. Gaul led a charge during a pitched battle that helped secure victory for his neighbors. The next day the tribe, celebrating their success, invited Gaul to the festivities, but he refused and when they left gifts at his doorstep he sent them back.

Gaul was very protective of his wife and children and fought both whites and natives on several occasions when he thought his family’s honor was being trampled. He obviously loved his wife a great deal and described how when a letter from his father eventually reached him, his wife memorized it and would recite it to her children before bed. She, along with thousands of other native people, died from a measles epidemic that struck the islands in the 1870s. Gaul never remarried.

Ten years later Gaul finally wrote home and his personal history may have remained merely correspondence between two long-separated siblings, but for a writer named William Drysdale.

Drysdale was a roving reporter for the New York Times when he received Gaul’s narrative, possibly from Michael Gaul, and published a series of articles in the summer of 1890 on John Gaul’s life. Drysdale was a distinguished newsman during the boom years of the industry in the mid-1800s who started his career at the New York Sun before finding his way to the Times where he remained for two decades. He would eventually become a well-known (at the time) children’s book author.

In 1888, two years before Gaul’s story was eagerly being read at breakfast tables across the country — the story ended up in newspapers as far away as California — he returned to New York, 35 years after he left, and was reunited with his father and two brothers.

Gaul was uncomfortable with life in America, telling Drysdale that he never should have left Fiji where “as long as you lived you knew where your dinner was coming from, and when you were dead you did not care.” It was unclear whether Gaul ever returned to the land where he had spent so much of his life, thousands of miles from the country he had left behind as a child.

Sanctuary for the winged wounded

Editor's Note: A different version of this story appeared in the Berkshire Eagle July 17, 2011. For pictures, directions, and more information on Berkshire Bird Paradise click here. For more information on the work of Barbara Chepaitis click here.

Mitch, a steppe eagle from Afghanistan, has become quite a celebrity over the course of the past year, but remains humble, sharing his living quarters with a golden eagle named Thor and Buddy, a red-tailed hawk.

"I think he considers Thor like a father figure," said Pete Dubacher as we watched the birds.

Dubacher runs Berkshire Bird Paradise in Grafton, N.Y., where Mitch will be living out the rest of his life, thousands of miles from where he was shot by an Afghani soldier and rescued by a U.S. Navy SEAL team.

Dubacher’s role in Mitch’s rescue began with an unexpected call.

"Last June I got a call from Afghanistan," Dubacher said. "I thought it was a prank."

It wasn’t.

A special operations unit had taken the bird in after it was shot in the left wing at a rifle range. The team, while working in a combat zone, spent four months caring for the eagle they named "Mitch" after the snake in the movie "Road Trip."

"It shows compassion," Dubacher, a Vietnam veteran, said of the soldiers’ actions. "It’s a testament to our country."

The soldiers had heard about Dubacher’s work and asked him to take the eagle.

"Of all the places in the country, they called me," said Dubacher. "I’m a nobody. I’m in the middle of nowhere."

In truth, Dubacher has made a name for himself nationally for his dedication to the thousands of birds he’s rescued
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over the years.

He’s been caring for birds since 1972, a hobby that quickly spiraled into a life’s work.

"People would call me and ask me to take these birds," he said. "I can’t say no. If I don’t take care of them who will?"

By 1975 he had converted his parents’ 20-acre farm into a bird sanctuary.

He admits it’s not an easy life. He does most of the work himself, which helps keep costs down, but is hard on him and his family.

"You make a lot of sacrifices. I have no social life. You put everything into it, but I’m loving what I do," he said.

After the phone call from Afghanistan, Dubacher called his friend, the writer Barbara Chepaitis, to help in trying to coordinate getting Mitch to America.

"She doesn’t take no for an answer," he said.

Chepaitis spent the next 137 days tirelessly taking on numerous government agencies.

"I delved into it with gusto," she said. "It felt impossible to get one good thing done. I devoted myself to proving that wrong."

Her fight went all the way to the White House, she said, and by September Mitch was allowed into the country. After a month in quarantine he was at his new home in upstate New York.

The experience taught the writer that "change is possible if you are persistent," something she also finds in Dubacher.

"His perseverance is what inspires us all," she said.

Dubacher, she said, works on the edge between "all possibility and all risk," a place she was drawn to as a writer.

She ended up writing a book about Dubacher and his work, "Feathers of Hope," and is now working on a book about Mitch -— "Saving Eagle Mitch: One Good Deed in a Wicked World."

And as for Mitch he has adjusted well to his new life, according to Dubacher, and is once again healthy, although unable to fly.

Mitch is just one of more than a thousand birds as well as tortoises, squirrels, deer, and orchids at Berkshire Bird Paradise and Dubacher seems inspired by them all.

He also raises bald eagles he releases into the wild, helping to repopulate the species in the region.

Saturday, he was doing a "soft release," with a 13-week old bald eagle, beginning the process of teaching it to live on its own.

"I’m so proud right now," he said watching the eagle soar across the sky. "I’ve got goose bumps."

Turning away from the scene he seemed reflective.

"I'm blessed to be able to pull this off," he said. "When you do things for the right reasons, put your body and soul into it, there's a power out there that will take care of you."