GABBA GABBA HEY! A Conversation With The Ramones: what material should supplement the book's interviews?

My book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is due out May 9th from Rare Bird Books, and available to preorder right here right now. The book presents the never-before-seen expanded text of my 1994 interviews with Joey, Johnny, Marky, and C.J., and the interviews are the book's reason for being. Obviously.

Still, if this thing was going to be a real book, I felt strongly that the interviews needed to be supplemented by...something. I didn't want any add-ons to detract from the interviews that are the heart of the book. But I knew it needed a little bit more than just the interviews.

I wanted everything? No. Just something to believe in.

When I first began kicking around the notion of a Ramones book, I had a vague plan in mind. The book's layout would be a foreword (including my reminiscence of how the "Sheena Is A Punk Rocker" 45 changed my life), an introduction, the interviews, some additional comments from Joey Ramone, my 2001 obituary of Joey, obituaries of Dee Dee and Johnny Ramone, an overview of the Ramones' album discography, a few more essays, and an afterword.

My first pickings at the process of turning this into a book occurred in 2013, when I began the long process of transcribing the interviews. I wound up putting the project aside, and returning to it in 2021. I finished it before the end of that year. By that time, Rare Bird had already agreed to publish the book.

The book sold to Rare Bird based on the unedited interview transcripts. Rare Bird's Tyson Cornell left it up to me to determine if and how to supplement the interviews. As I worked on the manuscript, trying to squeeze in too much extra stuff felt increasingly...wrong. The book was short, but it felt like I was at risk of padding it, detracting from the core appeal of the interviews themselves. Given the Ramones' well-known dedication to 1-2-3-4! efficiency, it would have been inappropriate to bloat the book with the literary equivalents of extraneous guitar solos and extended dance mixes.

Eyes on the prize. I streamlined the blueprint, scuttling my album-by-album analysis and removing some personal essays, all material that seemed to devalue the importance of the interviews themselves. I added a brief and (I think) relevant dream sequence about the Ramones, a Greatest Record Ever Made! entry about the Ramones' version of "I Don't Want To Grow Up," retained the Joey Ramone obit, and included a summary of the Ramones' career and fate post-'94, which notes the passings of Dee Dee, Johnny, and Tommy. With that, I had a book. 

I never completed the album-by-album commentary; I may go back and finish that as a blog post one of these days. The other excised essays were posted here previously:

The Ramones: The Power Pop Hall of Fame

Virtual Ticket Stub Gallery: The Ramones, the Runaways, and the Flashcubes

Love At First Spin: Rocket To Russia

Archie Meets Ramones

I like each of these pieces just fine, thanks. But they would have been redundant in context, and none of 'em would have been right for Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones. I hope the decisions I made have resulted in a better book, honoring the Ramones' legacy and giving fans the precise Blitzkrieg Bop we crave. Proper sedation awaits. Hey-ho...ya know?

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Carl's new book Gabba Gabba Hey! A Conversation With The Ramones is now available for preorder, courtesy of the good folks at Rare Bird Books. Gabba Gabba YAY!!

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.