Commando by Johnny Ramone
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This book was both hilarious and completely unexpected. As a Ramones fan (they were my first real show, opening for White Zombie in '95), I had always focused on the music. To the extent I knew anything about their personalities, I knew a few things about Joey, but really very little about Johnny.
So it was a bit of a surprise to find out that Johnny was not quite what I expected from a punk rock icon. After a stretch of hair-raising juvenile delinquency, he worked five years as a construction worker, which strongly influenced his attitude towards the band. He treated the Ramones like a regular job, counted his pennies, and insisted on doing things right. More surprising was that he barely drank, wrote down everything, and had some pretty intense right-wing politics. He also actively planned for retirement, talked his bandmates into opening brokerage accounts at Fidelity to invest their earnings, and actually retired when he hit his "retirement number" at 47 (it appears that Johnny was, in effect if not in name, an early adopter of the financial independence/retire early model, although modern FIRE-types would probably scoff at his incredibly conservative 80/20 bonds/stocks portfolio, which he also discusses in the book). In later life, he drove a Cadillac and told off a kid who asked him if driving a Cadillac was punk.
So pretty much the opposite of what I'd imagined going in: no drama, no wild party narratives, no inside baseball. Just careful fiscal stewardship, milk and cookies, and actual baseball. Which is not to say the book doesn't have plenty of entertainment value. Johnny was a first-class hater so his put-downs are memorably funny, and the lengths to which he was willing to go to pull a prank or save a buck were ridiculous (the section on him buying fake subway tokens in bulk was laugh out loud funny). The book is a kind of double-vision account of what was, in some ways, a very conventional working-class-boy-does-good success story, but superimposed on the highly unusual backdrop of a punk-rock memoir.
At one point in the narrative, he mentions that, mid-career, he didn't even keep a guitar at home, so he was showing up half an hour early to the studio to do his songwriting. Here's a guy who Rolling Stone rated as the 16th best guitarist of all time, and he didn't even have a guitar in his house. Near the end, after the group's breakup, he noted that he kept a guitar, but only because he thought they might still do some recording later on.
I think those two bits really showcase who he was: in both cases he tosses out the comment without a trace of affection or affectation. I think a guitar really was, to some extent, just a tool to him, like a drill or a hammer, that he used at his job. He didn't keep a guitar around to play for fun or to work on side projects, because that was what he did at work all day. After he retired, he hung on to one, but only in case he ever had to go back to work.