Blowing Joey's Ears...

OneTwoThreeFaw! Joey and Johnny Beating On The Brat, 1979

Of course, over the years I've had my less-than-stellar moments in the studio (and elsewhere). One of the first, and worst, was before I even moved to Boston.

It was the time I fried Joey Ramone's ears.

It must have been late '84 or early '85 when the Ramones came to Dallas to play at The Twilight Room, which was a decent size club with a nice stage. I'd say there were 800, maybe 1000 people there.

My band-mate and production partner at the time, Lisa, was an old pal of Joey's, having been in cutting-edge college and commercial radio for some years.

So we had access to Joey.

My sister and I had a nice studio called "Castle Audio" in nearby Carrolton. Lisa and I were working on a studio project under the name White Noise. We had tracked this sort of ska-punk version of Led Zepplin's "D'yer Mak'er", which would have been perfect for Joey to sing on. Astonishingly, when asked if he'd add a couple layers of vocal tracks, he agreed.

So after the show at the Twilight, Joey Ramone showed up at my studio. It was about 2:am, and in comes this bigger than life geek, wearing the pink granny-glasses, leather jacket and Chuck Taylor sneaks. He was this too-tall, bent over sloth of a guy; a slow-moving gentle giant. With the play-doh face and thick lips, re really did look like a cartoon of himself. And what a sweet sweet man. In his syrupy, nasally Queens drawl, he agreed to everything we were telling him was about to happen. He was so eager to please, even though he had the sniffles.

I had everything all cued up and ready, including a nice Neumann recording mic, on a stand and live. Headphones were hangin' there, too.

First, we played him the track a few times over the JBL studio monitors (a move that would later prove our undoing). After he got the hang of the part, we thought it was time to roll tape. That's when Joey made one small request.

He wanted a Shure SM57 on a straight mic-stand, so he could stand in his exact stage-pose. Y'know the one: feet wide-apart, head forward, soulders back with one hand at the mic and one way down the stand, and the mic jammed right up there, lost in the mop of black hair. The stage-mic didn't need to be plugged in, mind you. I already had a $2000 recording mic on a boom, all ready to rock. So the $100 Shure would be simply a dummy. It would be Joey's "Linus Blanket".

This was not a problem. I quickly obliged. But in doing so, I forgot to do somehing else.

I forgot to extinguish the studio speakers. Something I had never ever forgotten to do.

So Joey put the headphones on, leaned in, and in the control-room I hit the big red button on the tape recorder.

What happened next was the loudest, most shrill, most siren-like feedback the world has ever known. Ice picks. Flying knives. To poor Joey, with his headphones on, it must have felt like power-drills boring through his ear-drums, straight to the pain-receptors of his brain.

He instinctively threw the headphones to the floor and covered his ears. It took me a few seconds to figure out where the Gawd-Awful din was coming from, but I did, and in about 5 seconds, it was over.

Joey had been deafened.

I felt like shit warmed over. Full shame and embarrasment.

He stood there, rubbing the feeling back in to his ears, which were ringing like a firehouse bell, I'm sure. And to his credit, he offered to go ahead with the session. "I'm awright," he said, "I can do it."

But after that, the magic was gone; the moment was lost. We let Joey go back to his hotel to bed. I'm sure his ears were still buzzing as he tried to sleep.

Sweet wonderful Joey.

And I blew out his ears....