STORY OF TANGERINE PUPPETS
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Richard Adler told me and to my Ramones homepage stories of
early days of Ramones members. He wrote these things already in 1997 and
this photo wasn't published anywhere before. Now it is "copied" to many,
many sites...
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.