Dee Dee Ramone (real name Douglas Colvin) played bass and wrote songs for a band called the Ramones at the forefront of a ground breaking development in rock and roll—punk rock. The band formed in the early 1970s in Forest Hills, Queens, where the founders were neighbors, and went on to burn lasting currents in American rock culture.
Dee Dee was the Ramones’ “house junkie”, developing the worst substance abuse problems among that famously dysfunctional family, and his writing style exposes his varied life like a raw nerve, as may be said of the many (largely autobiographical) songs he wrote for that band. His childhood in Germany as an army brat was the inspiration for songs like “Blitzkrieg Bop” while “Teenage Lobotomy” details a slap-happy postmodern teenage outlook.
Fans might complain his narrative falls short of an exhaustive or accurate history of the band, but Lobotomy is also the story of Dee Dee’s lifelong struggle with heroin addiction and final victory over that monkey, which coincided with the arrival of a new Argentine girlfriend Barbara, later to marry him, and his regained self-respect after breaking out of the self-regulating cocoon of Ramones membership. As often happens in such cases, this apparent liberty turned out a mirage (Dee Dee died of a heroin overdose in 2002). Nevertheless, rather than bogging down in tedium like some other accounts of addiction, Dee Dee’s wry humor captures an exciting and dangerous mood in creative culture increasingly lost to corporate attempts at homogenizing buyers.
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