Why am I passionate about this?
I've written about a dozen books, all about football (or soccer, depending on your denomination), but that was never the plan. The plan was always to write about music. The first piece I ever published in a proper magazine was a profile of Wayne Kramer, formerly of the MC5. It ran in the German edition of Rolling Stone. The honeymoon didn't last long, though, as I gradually ran out of ideas what to pitch to the magazine, until one day I asked: "Would you be interested in a non-music piece about how football has grown out of the Dark Eighties and become hip?" They said yes, and that was that.
Uli's book list on life in a dysfunctional family (i.e. The Ramones)
Why did Uli love this book?
The first proper book about the Ramones came out in 1993 and was written by Jim Bessman.
It's not without merit, but as an authorized biography, produced in collaboration with the band, it fails to cut really deep. Ten years later, when the respected English journalist Everett True (not his real name, which lends a nice touch to this tale of four fake brothers) put pen to paper, things were very different.
The band had broken up and two founder members were dead. Maybe that's why it's such a harrowing read in parts – the details of Joey's death are particularly poignant, not least because True is clearly in his camp, not Johnny's. I think definitive is the unavoidable term here.
1 author picked Hey Ho Let's Go as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
The death of Joey Ramone in the summer of 2001 and Dee Dee Ramone in June 2002 provided ample evidence of the high regard that his band was held by fans and critics. Once regarded as a joke, their music little more than an adrenaline rush of one minute five second noise, The Ramones have come to be regarded as having influenced almost every star struck guitarist who knew just three chords and wanted to write a song.