Dee Dee RamoneLobotomy: Surviving the Ramones

Johnny Ramone, Marky Ramone and road manager Monte Melnick all have written much better books about the Ramones. I recommend those before reading this.Dee Dee's book is a bitter mess. The poor guy has almost nothing good to say about the band and makes the story of the Ramones sound like it was about as fun as a stint in prison. He cant remember anything correctly and bungles many facts about the group. Not to say it's all bad, but there are better books about the band out there.

If you're looking for a happy ending for any of the Ramones, you never really followed their lives. Johnny's book is as close as you'll get.Dee Dee, on the other hand, hand a crap hand dealt to him and if it werent for the Ramones, he would have died unknown and unloved . That's as much happiness you'll get out of this book.He lived a tough life and suffered so many bad breaks even with the success he had over the years. I kept hoping for a ray of sunshine in an otherwise crappy life, but then it wouldn't be a story about a Ramone.

Dee Dee Ramone writes an honest autobiography. The first part seems to be written in Dee Dee's own voice. Somewhere it seems as if somebody took over and changed the style. Still it comes across as Dee Dee's story from his heart.Heads up. Mr. Ramone was a serious consumer of drugs. Like many Rock & Roll autobiographies, scoring and consuming drugs and the aftermath consumes a good chunk of the book. As is often the case, that is Rock and Roll.

The writing style is very stream-of-conciousness, jumping randomly from one topic to the next, a lot like I imagine Dee Dee's thought process. No one comes off looking very good in this book. People who were described in other Ramones books or in other punk rock books as just people in the CBGBs orbit come off looking like terrible people here. It's worth a read. However, it's both easy to read and exhausting to read.

When I was a kid, I was a John Lennon guy. Then I became a Paul guy, and eventually a George guy. But from the very first time I heard a Ramones record, I was always, always, a Dee Dee guy. There’s a lot of great insight into Dee Dee in this book. There’s also a ton of stuff that seems to be incoherent blather. But if you care about the brudders at all, this is completely worth the effort.

I liked the Ramones, my daughter liked the Ramones. This book tells an interesting yet desperate tale- a tale of drugs and misery and punk rock. I'm a musician, I've had my ups and downs but nothing like this. This guy certainly led a Naked Lunchesque lifestyle and I don't envy him that

If you're a hopeless rock biography dork like myself, check it out. It's not very good, but that might be why it's interesting. It's basically the third 15 minute block of a Behind The Music stretched throughout his career.

As a life long fan of the Ramones, it was so interesting to read this point of view. With the way it was written, it truly feels like you are sitting in a room just talking to Dee Dee. It's a quick and intriguing read.

It was a Christmas present, so unable to write a review

good read

Excelente

This could have been a very good book, however, Veronica Kofman's writing style is anything but smooth.The narrative is very choppy and it doesn't seem like there was an editor involved in the process of shaping the story.Dee Dee comes of as being something of a sniveling, whiny brat. His drug paranoia is quite obvious to the reader, and for all his complaining about the other band members, he doesn't go into much detail about why he hates them so much.Could have been much better.

It's a great little book for Ramones fans mainly because Dee Dee talks about some things that aren't in a lot of more mainstream Ramones books and documentaries.Take the excellent End Of The Century movie. That covers, childhoods and backgrounds of Joey, a bit on Johnny being "bad," and the band members bond through music. Then proceeds to talk about beginnings of the band, Tommy Ramone leaving and Marky Ramone coming in, recording Too Tough to Die and End Of The Century and Richie Ramone's stint as drummer, CJ replacing Dee, Adios Amigos, the last tour, concerts and reactions to Joey's death. My gripe with the movie is the lack of talk about the band's 80's work, such as Animal Boy an Halfway to Sanity, which do have really cool tunes on them. I found the best thing about this book is that Dee Dee addresses the final years in the band amongst the drudgery of touring, trying to score and rehab.Dee Dee talks a lot about his struggles with drugs and mental illness, and his life after after the Ramones, which does have a real melancholy feel to it, after describing his last encounters with his friends Jerry Nolan, Stiv Bators Johnny Thunders and how Dee Dee talks rather hopefully about living a full life and not dying from drugs, making the book a bit bleaker, due to Dee Dee's death in 2002.Dee Dee also talks about his childhood in Germany as an army base brat in detail, the lyrics from Today Your Love, Tomorrow The World seem a lot more biographical in a sense. There are some terrific punk rock stories, involving people like Sid Vicious, Nancy Spungen and the legendary Connie.However, the book is flawed. Dee Dee was a hardcore drug addict so take what he says with a grain of salt. Some of the things he writes have been contradicted by other Ramones books- but with that there is no real way of knowing the truth of certain events, such as him leaving the Ramones and his issues with the rest of the band around that time.This book also suffers from something out of Dee Dee's control, specifically when it was released. Dee Dee wrote this book in 1997, the year after the Ramones broke up, and nothing really happened between the break up and Joey Ramone's death except for an anthology release in 1999. To get a first hand account of his view of Joey's passing would have been something. Johnny Ramone talked about it briefly in his book Commando, but Johnny's book tends to show him in the best possible light, while slamming pretty much everyone else in the band.Summing up, it's a good book written by the most influential punk bassist and the tone Dee Dee sets for the book and his future in 1997 was rather upbeat and optimistic, making reading the book after his death rather conflicting.