I Heartbreak The Ramones by Nick Cooper – Book Review

I Heartbreak The Ramones by Nick Cooper

Published by Earth Island (478 pages)

In his tale of touring with ex-Ramone Marky in The Speedkings, Nick Cooper explains why he heartbreaks The Ramones. Nathan Brown heartbreaks this book.

The phrase Caveat Emptor, roughly speaking “buyer beware”, springs to mind. The first thing to state quite clearly is that this is not a book for Ramones fans.

The book is called I Heartbreak The Ramones because the author Nick Cooper’s experience of touring with Marky Ramone in The Speedkings led to increasing dissatisfaction and dislike. Sounds like a good premise for a book, at first glance.  However, this book needed a good editor, for several reasons

First off, it was way too long. Levels of detail were provided that didn’t need to be included: blow-by-blow accounts rather than highlights. The page count came in at a whopping 478 pages for bands that, in the grand scheme of things, are a footnote. Meanwhile, Love In Vain, the story of The Ruts and Ruts DC covered a far more important story (one of the most important bands to come out of punk rock) in just 416 pages. City Baby about Ross Lomas’ time in popular 80s punks GBH was a mere 320 pages.  Dee Dee Ramone’s Legend Of A Rock Star memoir was only 288 pages, and he was an original Ramone. There’s someone who did live the rockstar lifestyle. You get the picture.

Then there was the use of “slant-eyed” to refer to Japanese people. I’m not being politically correct. I can deal with people being “edgy”, but this is straight-up racist claptrap. This wasn’t the only time racist language and rhetoric reared its ugly head but I’m not going to waste my time rooting out the other examples.

There were a few occasions of paragraphs being repeated. More than once sentences stopped midway through. This is a basic proofreading issue, and while I overlook typos in DIY publications, it underlines the fact that this book from a proper publisher needed an editor.

On the flipside, there were moments where I enjoyed the narrative – particularly a couple of chapters about Cooper’s formative years in the Belgian DIY punk scene and I felt some affinity with the writer. I felt for him when he revealed the emotional upheaval of the death of his grandfather. However, there were plenty more times in the book when I felt a dislike for someone who came across as being between an obnoxious narcissist and a mid-life crisis ex-rocker like Les McQueen of League Of Gentleman fame telling disinterested teenagers “It’s a shit business”. Lemmy famously said about rock stars “People don’t want to see the guy next door on stage; they want to see a being from another planet.” but the reverse isn’t necessarily true: the guy next door acting like a rock star is usually an embarrassment.

Maybe Cooper wrote what he thinks a rock’n’roll book should be about but it just came across as cliche-ridden. I felt the same way about moments in autobiographies by Joey Keighley (Joey Shithead from DOA), John Lydon and Hugh Cornwell. There is a point at which people big themselves up so much that you start to doubt their honesty about any of what they’ve written. The difference is that those three were all a big deal, so I started actively interested in them. Despite this, it didn’t do them favours. Nick Cooper wasn’t in DOA, the Pistols or The Stranglers…

It got to the stage where I didn’t want to read the bloody thing. That takes some doing. Just as I was about to put it down forever, Cooper would redeem himself with something more interesting and I’d feel it was worth another crack. However, the negatives outweighed the positives.

Edited down to size, and perhaps knocking the author’s ego down to size simultaneously, this could have made for an interesting read. As it stands, it’s a journey of self-indulgence from someone who isn’t even the star attraction of the book. Clearly, without the Marky Ramone connection, no one would care, hence the title. As I said, caveat emptor.

There is definitely an interesting story in how touring with a former Ramone turned sour, and a few of the touring tales were worth retelling, but it became buried among the swarf.

I’m sorry to say that I Heartbreak this book which is below Earth Island’s usual standards.

Available from Earth Island

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Words by Nathan Brown. His Louder Than War author archive can be found here.

This post was originally published on here