Synopses & Reviews
"If there is a logic to this life, then I'd like to know what it is. I'm at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City again. I've taken a lot of drugs in this hotel, and now I'm going to get off drugs in this hotel. I am two weeks into withdrawl and all the demons from my past are tormenting me."
So begins Dee Dee Ramone's autobiography, as he sits in the same hotel where Sid stabbed Nancy, trying to make sense of a life of perpetual degradation and excess.
Life for Douglas Colvin started as a dysfunctional kid on a US forces base in Germany, from where he moved back to New York to form one of the the key, some would argue the, US punk bands of the seventies. After adopting the uniform of leather jackets and ripped jeans, they became the gang that was The Ramones. With the characteristic chant of "One, Two, Three, Four", they tore into Sheena Is A Punk Rocker and Blitzkrieg Bop like they were the street punk gluesniffers from hell.
Poison Heart is Dee Dee Ramone's perspective on 15 years touring with the band, following the ups and downs caused by the chemical and psychological imbalances it produced. It is a harrowing tale, both tragic and comic, littered with many of the colourful characters that made up the New York punk scene as well as cameos from John Cale and Phil Spector.
Remarkably, unlike his cohorts Johnny Thunders, Sid Vicious (who idolised Dee Dee) and Stiv Bators, Dee Dee Ramone survived to tell his own story rather than filling the obituary columns. Ultimately, it was not so much about a battle to keep the band on the road, perhaps that was the easy part, more fundamentally it concerned a much more basic struggle that of staying alive and sane.
Review
"One of the great rock and roll books
This is the true, pathetic, awesome story of The Ramones" ***** Q Magazine
Review
"Kerouac he ain't, but Dee Dee's style has a certain rough-hewn charm, and his story knee deep in sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll is too incident packed to be anything less than gripping" Mojo
Review
"Poison Heart is like a Richard Price novel: full of delinquency, violence, addiction, brutality and ear splitting rock 'n' roll" Scott Rowley, The Band