Punk On The Rocks: Q&A With Steven Lee Beeber

When most people think of Jewish music, their immediate thoughts most likely to go to Fiddler on the Roof rather than The Velvet Underground. Steven Lee Beeber wants to change all that. Beeber is the author of the 2007 book The Heebie-Jeebies At CBGBc: The Secret History of Jewish Punk, which explores the high rate of Jewish participation in the New York punk scene along with the influence of Jewish culture on the resulting music. A professor at the Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College and editor of the anthology Awake! A Reader For The Sleepless, Beeber’s writing has been featured in publications like MOJO, Spin, Jewcy and Conduit. Hot on the heels of Heebie-Jeebies‘ German translation, Beeber took some time out to answer some questions about punk rock, Hollywood and holiday music.

OurStage: What made you want to write a book about the role that Jews played in the formation of punk?

Jeffrey Hyman aka Joey Ramone graces the cover of "Heebie-Jeebies"

Steven Lee Beeber: As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more interested in my origins. The further you go, the more you realize where it was you actually began. While thinking about issues related to this, I suddenly stumbled on the insight that Lou Reed, Jonathan Richman and Joey Ramone were a kind of Jewish trinity of pre- and early punk. Then it hit me that Bob Dylan and Tuli Kupferberg (of The Fugs) — two more extremely pivotal pre-punk figures — were the same. When I put together that the common thread uniting all of these was New York (Richman’s Modern Lovers, though based in Boston, made their name there), it suddenly also hit me that punk began in that city. Thinking about Lenny Bruce’s comment that “It doesn’t matter if you’re Catholic, if you live in New York you’re Jewish,” I became intrigued. Once I realized that Lenny was a kind of Jewish patron saint to the early punks, that many of those punks actually happened to be Jewish and that, most importantly, punk was the only real rock movement (as opposed to jazz, folk and hip hop) to come out of NY, I was on my way. Combine the use of Nazi imagery, ironic humor, Jewish jokes and a leftist embrace of downtrodden outsiders and the plot thickens further. From there I started doing some serious research and what I found astounded me.

OS: In Heebie-Jeebies, you mention that there were a number of members of the punk and pre-punk scene who weren’t exactly forthcoming about their Jewishness. Did you find that punk’s Jewish bent was secret to fans and artists alike?

SLB: Yes and no. About half of fans and performers considered it a kind of in-joke, while the other half only came to realize this after the fact. A classic example is The Dictators, five Jewish guys with at least two giant Jewfros who some saw as “the Henny Youngmen of punk” and others as a possible Italian street gang. These Juidoes (Jews “passing” as Italians) were themselves both aware and unaware of their collective Jewishness, singer Handsome Dick Manitoba, for instance, seeing himself as an inheritor of the Jewish Borscht Belt tradition and songwriter Andy Shernoff only feeling Jewish after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War. Perhaps most surprising, though, was the story of Tommy Erdelyi “Ramone,” the original drummer, manager and largely un-credited creative genius behind The Ramones. Tommy was born in Budapest in 1949, only a few years after his parents barely survived the Holocaust. He moved to America with them in 1956 largely due to the continuing anti-Semitism they experienced, and once he arrived here, he was thrown into a far more religiously Jewish world than he had ever known during his secularly Jewish upbringing. As a result, many of his preoccupations with thuggish behavior, the place of outsiders, the use of humor as a weapon and the worthy target of Nazism popped up in his music. Also, as a result, he largely kept his Jewishness to himself, even longtime manager Danny Fields (himself Jewish), being unaware of it until we met.

OS: I read on your blog that Heebie-Jeebies is being made into a documentary. How did this project come about? Will you be talking to some of the same people you interviewed for the book?

SLB: Actually, I may have been a bit premature in announcing this, so perhaps I should only say that negotiations are in the works. With that said, we are definitely planning to interview many of the same people I spoke to for the book, though seeing as there were nearly 150 people total, not all of them. We also will be including unseen archival footage, photos and ephemera, including such items as Heinrich Himmler’s ceremonial sword, now owned by a certain Jewish punk rocker who for now will remain nameless.

OS: While there are enough Christmas hits for radio stations to fill their playlists with every December, the only well known Chanukah-related songs seem to be Adam Sandler’s “Chanukah Song” and the ubiquitous and annoying “Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel.” What Jewish-influenced punk song would you like to see become a holiday standard?

SLB: Good question! Putting aside the fact that the best Christmas songs were written by Jews (White Christmas by Irving Berlin, for instance), and ignoring that Joey Hyman “Ramone” covered Christmas, Baby Please Come Home by Phil Spector, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, I guess I would nominate the punky anthem The Brews by the Hebraically-inclined NOFX. Sample lyrics:

Friday night we’ll be drinkin’ Manishewitz …
Stompin’ shaygetz, screwin’ shiksas …
Cause hey, we’re the Brews
Sportin’ anti-swastika tattoos …
Oi Oi we’re the Brews
The Fairfax ghetto boys skinhead Hebrews

For more about The Heebie-Jeebies At CBGBs: The Secret History of Jewish Punk, click here.