Hopely you enjoyed. THANKS RICHARD ADLER. I really loved this story.
Btw, you can read of these days also long versions by Tommy Ramone on my third book, Ramones: Soundtrack Of Our Lives.
AND REMEMBER Copyright© 1997 -> of this story by Richard Adler and Jari-Pekka Laitio-Ramone
Tommy and I lived in an apartment building in Forest Hills, NY. I lived on the second floor he lived on the third floor. Tommy and I started playing guitar at 14 years old and we formed a band called The Tiger 5 in 1964. Tommy and I loved The Beatles so we started playing all Beatles songs.
The band played at Junior high school dances and parties. In 1966 we met John Cummings now called Johnny Ramone. John was a bass player with very different musical tastes. He was a Rolling Stones fanatic. He also liked The Who, The Yardbirds and Iggy and The Stooges.
Tangerine Puppets photo taken 1966!!!! The following people are in this picture. from left to right: Tommy Erdelyi (Ramone), Richard Adler, Bob Rowland, Scott Roberts and John Cummings (Ramone).
Once we all went to see The Beatles at Shea Stadium and John brought a bag of rocks (stones) and threw them at The Beatles all night. It's amazing nobody got hurt. These were rocks as big as baseballs.
We formed a band called The Tangerine Puppets. We recorded one demo record for a producer named Phil Edwards. He gave us 2 songs and we had one take to get it right. The songs were "Drop in the Bucket" and "He's Got the Whole World in his Hands".
The Tangerine Puppets played at a dance in Rego Park one night in 1966 and John's amplifier started making noise and the sound was cutting in and out. John started kicking the side of the amp with his foot. Our lead singer went over to help him and started to kick the amp too. Except he was kicking it from the front and stuck his foot right through the speaker. John got so mad. He put down his bass right in the middle of the song and as the rest of the band was playing John started punching and kicking our lead singer right on stage in front of the audience. He was beating him up until we could put down our instruments and stop him.
Once we were playing at a sweet sixteen party at the "Living Room"in New York City and John got mad at me for something and pushed me through the drums, again right in the middle of a song. Drums went flying, our drummer went flying and I ended up sitting in the bass drum still playing my guitar.
In 1967, we played at Forest Hills High School, we all wet to Forest Hills High School. We were the main attraction in the talent show. This show was during school hours. We were playing "Satisfaction" by The Rolling Stones when John who jumped around a lot on stage saw the President of our class standing in the wings, he ran over to him and hit him in the balls with his guitar neck. He told the kid that it was an accident but we knew John hated this kid and that it was no accident. In the summer of 1967 we played at Palisades Amusement Park with some local NYC disk jockeys. We played about 4 songs and again during "Satisfaction" a strange thing happened. We had run over our allotted time and we did a very long version of this song. The DJ was trying to tell us to stop but we just kept on playing. Finally the DJ came on the stage and took the microphone out of our lead singers hand and stop us from finishing the song. John was so mad we had to hold him back or he would have killed this DJ. The band finally broke up in the summer of 1967 and the rest as they say is history.
I used to hangout with Mitch Hyman and met his brother Jeff who played the drums. Jeff is now called Joey Ramone. Joey and Johnny both lived in Birchwood Towers in Forest Hills. I always liked Jeff but he was the strangest looking kid in the school. Tall, skinny, with long straight hair, granny sun glasses and his posture reminded me of a question mark.