Though Joey Ramone sang lead on so many of the Ramones' classic two-minute punk bangers, it was bassist Dee Dee Ramone who, as half of the band's rhythm section, delivered each memorable, song-opening "One, two, three, four!" It was a long, hard road for the man born Doug Colvin to get to that point. "People who join a band like the Ramones don't come from stable backgrounds," Colvin wrote in Lobotomy: Surviving the Ramones. "Punk rock comes from angry kids who feel like being creative."
As he detailed in that memoir (via Rolling Stone), Colvin's childhood was indeed both unstable and angry. His father was an Army master sergeant, and the job required the family to frequently move back and forth between the US and Germany. His father routinely beat Colvin and his sister, and as for his mother, Colvin called her "a drunken nut job, prone to emotional outbursts." The result: a couple who fought constantly and ferociously and whose lives "were complete chaos." Young Doug bore the brunt of their animosity and rage, and by the time his parents split up when he was a teenager, he'd found escape in two avenues: the songs of the Beatles and heavy drugs, according to The New York Times. Colvin ultimately dropped out of high school, and before he joined the Ramones, he made ends meet by dealing drugs and, per Vice, prostitution.
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