CHRIS STEIN: Everybody encouraged me to write a book after Debbie’s memoir came out. I wrote a lot during COVID, when we were a little isolated. I haven’t really written anything this long previously, but I enjoyed the process. Did I have a routine? No, I don’t adhere to many routines in life! As a rule, I don’t read music books. I remember once being on an airplane and seeing some guy who looked like a fucking lawyer reading Keith Richards’ Life and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s kind of amazing…’ But I’ve read Debbie’s book and some of Richard Hell’s I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp, which was brilliant. Dee Dee Ramone isn’t known for being a writer, but his three books are fabulous.
I started taking photographs seriously around 1968, ’69, so those helped jog my memory while I was writing the book. Certain other memories or events are firmly implanted! The ’70s was an interesting time. The ’60s influenced all of us profoundly – the British Invasion, the music coming out of California – but at beginning of the ’70s, corporate music took hold for the first time in America. Radio began representing big interests. Music started becoming about finance. We had our own home-grown artists in New York, of course. Dylan, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Velvets. When I was a kid, I played with this band called The Morticians, who went on to become The Left Banke. So I had a relationship with the New York music scene early on.
To a certain extent, there’s a point where the book is a memorial of some people who are no longer here. It’s part and parcel of getting to my age – everybody starts slipping away. Lou’s last apartment was upstairs here. Joey Ramone and I were very close. I have this life-size painted plaster statue of Mother Cabrini, the first American saint, that I’d bought at a junk store on the Lower East Side for 10 bucks. I had to drag it home on a very hot day and up five flights of stairs. Dee Dee was living in my apartment at the time. He got scared of it – he stabbed it with a kitchen
