Anytime I got involved with him for an album, the songs were already done. "I was never around him when he wrote, so I couldn't say. How did Joey write songs? Did writing come easily to him? Honestly, I can say that I felt his presence throughout the entire project." Plus, Joey was a good friend of mine, so like I said, I knew what he would want.
You know, I worked with the Ramones on 10 or 11 records. Was it strange to work on the tracks without Joey being around to hear what you were doing? The Ramones (from left, Johnny, Tommy, Joey and Dee Dee) onstage at New York's CGBG, 1977. Thunderbolt is a tremendous drummer, and he knew Joey, so he did a couple of things. We knew that Richie would be great, and Bun E. "I'm certainly no drummer, so we got some real players. But we needed individual personalities, and that's when the other folks came in. As it turned out, we used most of my guitar and bass parts on the record. After I did the Identify Beat thing, I put down the guitar, listened to it, made an arrangement and got the parts together. I laid out the blueprints for everything.
That was the original intention, to get his friends together and be on the record with him. How did you go about picking the other players on the record? Was everybody a friend of Joey's? The guy was spot-on with his pitch - no correction necessary." He did his voice exercises, paid attention to how he sang. He could nail a one-take vocal, no problem. "At this point in his career, he was growing. I moved them around a little bit, double-tracked them where I could… There were some spots where Joey would sing with himself and do harmonies. Those were pretty much all we kept from the original recordings. Joey's vocal performances were good on the demos? So if there were three choruses and one vocal all the way through, I could take those three chorus vocals, line them up, and pick and choose." It was… tedious! But that enabled me to make a grid and fly stuff around.
THE RAMONES PODUCER PRO
On Pro Tools, there's a function called Identify Beat, and I went through the drum machine and vocal tracks and I literally identified each beat. "I bumped all the stuff up to Pro Tools, and from there I worked with the drum machine and the vocals. Even on a Fostex cassette recorder, it held up pretty well. I was fortunate that the original recordings had a drum machine on them. I made solos where there weren't solos, intros where there weren't intros, endings where there weren't endings. "I tried to add what I thought Joey was going for. The songs that were fragmented, what did you do to them to flesh them out? He said, 'Eddie, right after my fuckin' band breaks up, I get cancer!' Those were his words to me."Ībove: listen to the song What Did I Do To Deserve You? I remember he called me right after he had been diagnosed with lymphoma. He was working with his band, The Independents. But until the last six months, he was fine.
I hadn't even spoken to him probably in six months at that point - he got really sick. I wasn't able to see him in his final months or weeks. When he did come out to the coast, we'd always get together. We spoke on the phone a couple of time a month.
I had moved to California, and he was in New York, but we always kept in touch. Were you talking about doing a record together? You and Joey spoke regularly in the years before his death. Ya Know? In addition, the veteran producer shared his memories of crafting the Ramones sound in the '70s, along with his reflections on being in the studio with Phil Spector for the album End Of The Century. We caught up with Stasium recently to talk about the recording process of. Carlos, Dennis Diken (from the Smithereens), and others. Working with Ramone's brother, Mickey Leigh, and manager, Dave Frey, Stasium produced 10 of the album's 15 tracks, utilizing four-track demos that Joey was recording in the months before his death and breathing new life into them with the help of an array of talents who all have a connection to the punk legend: Joan Jett, Little Steven Van Zandt, Richie Ramone, Bun E.
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