FEATURE
single-coil pickups. Johnny went through a
number of Mosrites over the years, but from
1977 until the band’s last show in 1996 he
played a white model with a stop tailpiece
and a DiMarzio Super Distortion humbucker
in the bridge position. For a brief period
in the early 1980s, Johnny had a deal with
Hamer and was seen in an advertisement
playing a double-cutaway model with dual
humbuckers, and he was spotted playing a
Rickenbacker 450 on the TV variety show
Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert.
Dee Dee played white Fender Precision basses
with maple necks and black pickguards for near-
ly his entire career. Because of his rough playing
style, he went through two or three basses per
tour (the band routinely played 250 nights per
year). In a mid-1980s interview, he described
how he and his roadie would caulk the controls
and cavities to keep out the sweat. Melnick dis-
agrees: “Dee Dee never put caulk on his bass. I
don’t think he knew what caulk was.”
The standard onstage guitar setup for the
Ramones, from the beginning in small clubs
to the end on major festival stages, consisted
of three Marshall heads running five 4x12
cabinets—three stage-right, behind Johnny,
and two stage left behind Dee Dee. During
Dee Dee’s tenure (1974 to 1989), the classic
Ramones bass rig was two Ampeg SVT heads
running two Ampeg 8x10 cabs, one on either
side of the drum riser. This gear enabled the
Ramones to create the prototypical punk
sound: rough, raw, brutal. Joe Strummer of
the Clash said once about a Ramones show,
“They only played for 30 minutes…because
you just couldn’t take that 31st minute.”
THE sEx pis Tols: dEBAUcHing FEndER,
giBson, And EVERyonE ElsE
What happens when you turn a Fender Twin
Reverb up to 10? Is it possible there was a
time when having ’40s pinup decals on a guitar
was considered lewd? Could rock ’n’ roll ever
be so provocative as to elicit death threats
from elected officials? These are serious questions when they relate to the brief, momentous
tenure of the Sex Pistols—perhaps the most
notorious, infamous punk band of all time.
Starting even lower on the socio-economic scale
than the Ramones, and making the Clash look
like a bunch of rich kids, the Sex Pistols began
as an anarchistic daydream of their manager,
Malcolm McClaren—a London shopkeeper and
raconteur looking for fame, money, and freedom.
He had been exposed to the nascent New York
punk scene in the last days of the New York Dolls
and the early days of the Ramones. In fact, he
managed the Dolls for a short period. Failing to
collect monetary compensation for his duties, he
took payment in the form of Doll’s guitarist Syl
Sylvain’s white Les Paul custom, which he took
with him when he flew back to London in 1975.
In the hands of one Steve Jones, of
Shepherd’s Bush, London, that Les Paul would
become the basis of the Sex Pistols sound.
In the process, it also became a template for
punk sound and a classic rock ’n’ roll look.
The Sex Pistols set out from the very beginning to be revolutionary, to upset the status
quo, to be outrageous and to tear down the
pretensions that had poisoned rock. Their
1977 album debut, Never Mind the Bollocks
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