Do you like to embellish a story – say like Dee Dee Ramone had a flair for doing?
Yeah, the first two books (Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones and Legend of a Rockstar) that he wrote are 75% fact, 25% fantasy. The third one he wrote The Horrors of the Chelsea Hotel (aka Chelsea Horror Hotel) is pure fantasy. In order to write the great songs that he did you had to have some kind of child like fantasy mind which he did have. It depends on the reader – it’s entertaining but it’s not factual. The book that I’m writing is going to be bare bones, for real, I don’t live in a fantasy world – I’m not that kind of a person. I will write everything that went on and what happened and not have any sour grapes. Like the fact that Dee Dee left and then he started putting the Ramones down in his book. We didn’t throw him out, he left. So there were a lot of sour grapes in his book. But he was my closest friend in the band and that’s his business. If people want to believe those two books that he wrote – fine. But coming from someone who knew him as well as I did they aren’t perfectl
