Me, Mom, and Daddy, sittin' here in Queens
"We're a Happy Family," delivered in Da Bruddahs' style, is packed with dark details
I just finished reading Stephen B. Armstrong’s lively book I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock ‘N’ Roll High School, which is chock full of the travails of filmmaking on the fly, low budget woes and eleventh hour inspirations, late ‘70s Hollywood stories, and plenty of Roger Corman hi jinx. The book sent me back to the Ramones records from that era, and in addition to being reminded of Dee Dee Ramone’s great soundtrack song from which Armstrong took his title, I was reminded, again, of just how sublime and eternal are the band’s first four albums, among the most indelible, powerful, and historic of consecutive LP runs in American rock and roll, and that’s saying something.
This time around, I was struck most graphically by the opening twenty-five seconds or so of “We’re A Happy Family” from Rocket to Russia (1977), a two-minute streak of a song that sounded especially anxious and hysterical to me this time around. The three-chord riff that kicks it off is bedrock, and the title phrase’s an obsessive chant: you can hear it either as a outward-facing family in maniacally-grinning unison or as one of the parents or one of the kids in their bedroom, repeating it to themselves with their ears plugged as a desperate mantra to ward of psychosis. Sadly, all of the band members who made this record are dead; subsequent biographies and articles have explored the chaotic past of Dee Dee and the outsider status suffered by Joey Ramone in his adolescence. Joey reportedly stayed in a mental institution, and Dee Dee’s dysfunctional childhood and drug abuse have been well documented.
All of which is to say that despite the Ramones’ cultivated cartoonish affect—the matching surnames and outfits (the latter a half-serious take on a juvee cliché); the unwavering sound (loud and fast, one ballad per album); the demented comic strips on the album covers and sleeves—the band was nearly always drawing on episodes of genuine unwellness and a collective maladjusted past. (Dee Dee and Joey were the band’s main songwriters). True, many of Dee Dee’s lyrics and his later books (Poison Heart: Surviving the Ramones, 1998, and Chelsea Horror Hotel, 2001) were often exaggerated, and tended toward fiction—but what was it that Van Gogh reportedly said? “Exaggerate the essential, leave the obvious vague.” As I wrote recently, I always took the psychopathy in Ramones songs seriously, despite the often comic and ironic way they were put across; Dee Dee amplified details from his lousy past, and they no less true for being inflated, and, paradoxically, flattened, into crowd sing-alongs and anthems for Pinhead mascots.
The greatest Ramones songs distilled dysfunction and derangement into details so precise and evocative they were nothing short of cinematic. (Think “53rd and 3rd,” “Carbona Not Glue,” “Rockaway Beach,” “Babysitter,” “I Just Want to Have Something to Do.”) Here’s a house in Queens, sometime in the late ‘70s. All’s well from the sunny sidewalk. There’s a family inside,
Eating re-fried beans
We’re in all the magazines
Gulpin’ down Thorazines
We ain’t got no friends
Our troubles never end
No Christmas cards to send
Daddy likes men
Later, that same day:
Daddy’s telling lies
Baby’s eating flies
Mommy’s on pills
Baby’s got the chills
I’m friends with the president
I’m friends with the pope
We’re all making a fortune
Selling Daddy's dope
Of course, it’s hilarious. Johnny Ramone’s buzzsaw riffing and the rocking, utterly dependable rhythm section of bassist Dee Dee and drummer Tommy Ramone propel the song forward in eighth-note mania, so you’re so busy banging your head and/or air guitaring that, half-grinning, you don’t notice the lyrics beyond their absurdity, beyond the lunacy and black humor.
But let’s switch slides. Now we’re reading “We’re a Happy Family” as notes for a short story, or a playlet, or a novel steeped in gritty, socio-economic storytelling. Those narrative details are brutal, and dark. All the family can afford to eat is food that’s cheap and shitty; they’re collectively delusional, and abusing a mood-regulating prescription drug that treats schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; no one ever comes over to pay a friendly visit; they don’t send out Christmas cards; Dad’s in the closet, and he sells dope to keep the family afloat; Mom’s pilled-up and checked out; the baby’s sick with fever, eating insects….
If you independently read that unhappy account as an outline for a short story, you wouldn’t be smiling, however sarcastically. You’d remind yourself that it’s fiction, and stop yourself from calling Family Protection Services. “The short story is kind of a precision tool,” fiction writer David Means remarked, adding, “It allows me a certain type of freedom to go in and out of the American landscape….” Shorn of the song’s, and the band’s, sardonic, mocking angle, the details in “We’re a Happy Family” are starkly shitty, and seriously problematic. The story of the family-with-dark-secrets in the average house on the average suburban block nearly writes itself.
“The mental illness on the album was probably there because of the mental illness in the band.” That’s engineer and producer Ed Stasium on Rocket to Russia, quoted in Everett True’s book Hey Ho Let’s Go: The Story of the Ramones. Stasium was quick to add, “I’m joking.” But allow me the cliché that all jokes are half true. The working title for the album was Ramones Get Well.
“I don’t know where the mental illness thing came from,” Tommy says in the same book. “I think we were all trying to get as mentally unsound as possible. The guys were major fans of B-movies—and maybe they were major fans of institutions. I’m not sure.” “Joey and Dee Dee didn’t think of themselves as freaks.” So observed Arturo Vega, the band’s longtime graphic designer. (He died in 2013.) “But they were aware people considered them outsiders.”
And it’s something that is now related directly to mental patients as in outsider art. I think they thought it was funny that there were people like that, and that people like that were OK in this world. That was the message: it’s OK. Everything’s going to be all right.”
In I Slept with Joey Ramone: A Family Memoir, Joey’s brother Mickey Leigh wrote, “Nobody knew what the real Joey was like, except for people that got really close to him.”
There was a side to Joey that was wonderful. People thought he was such a sweet guy. To a certain extent, he was. Then there was the other Joey, the one who said, “You’re an asshole! Get me my fucking coffee! Don’t you know how to make a fucking egg?”
He added, “If you’d like to meet that Joey, play the Ramones song ‘We’re a Happy Family’ and turn it up loud on the fade-out at the end.”
When you do, you hear a minute or so of brilliant suburban vérité, as a mic’s pointed at an average day-in-the-life of this loud, crazy family. In truth, it’s Joey and Dee Dee, at Stasium’s goading, horsing around in Mediasound Studio on 57th Street, where Rocket to Russia was recorded. Rising to the surface of the song as the title’s repeated obsessively are what sound like sibling squabbles, a cranky, bitchy Dad, a braying, hectoring Mom, doors slamming, maniacal reverb (but in whose head?), an unruly pet, a baby wailing, etc..
Marvelously, this ending passage, minus the band, was included on the 2017 40th anniversary re-release of Rocket to Russia. Listening to only the spoken parts is edifying! It turns out that the kids are really clamoring to go to “the disco” and to see Star Wars. (“You’ll never get into the Earl with five dollars!”) That reverb is actually a TV commercial echoing awfully into the living room. That bitchy Dad is heard to warmly say that he’ll follow his wife to the ends of the earth— “I’d even go to Jersey just to be with you!”—before he starts complaining about “minimalism”and that he can’t find his underwear. Joey and Dee are audibly cracking up, and clearly enjoying themselves, which is hard to pick up on the finished track.
In track-by-track notes written for Louder Sound magazine on the occasion of the album’s re-release, Stasium remarks that he and Tommy “had a blast doing the audio montage…bantering in the outro section,” before helpfully adding,” Carefully listen for a toilet flush, lion, alarm clock, my DJ impression, a bunch of friends at an actual party, my daughter Sara crying and my dog Finchley barking.”
As Stasium recalls, “The original LP faded before Joey says ‘Where are my safety pins’ as the band didn’t want to be associated with the hard-core punk piercing trend.” Always careful with their image, the Ramones on “We’re a Happy Family” leaven a dire portrait of a depressive family household with humor and knowing sarcasm, sending up the whole thing as a kind of Pop Art sonic joke. I’m convinced that, rather than imagine the source material of out whole cloth, they might’ve been haunted by it.
See also:
Time had come
You don't know what it's like
demanding and hopeful and desperate and lonely
Top photo: “The Ramones,” by David Gahr via Flickr [cropped]
Advertisement: “Thorazine Ad,” Katexic Clippings Newsletter via Flickr
Nice commentary on "Happy Family." (Remember, it's also a Chinese/American food dish.)
Anyway, like you wrote, sad that none of them are around anymore...
Fantastic. This really packs a punch. Among many other things m, I am reminded that this song, blaring on my friend Todd’s old family hi fi, introduced me to the word THORAZINE.