Brooklyn-raised drummer Marc Steven Bell, better known to punk fans worldwide as Marky Ramone, has spent most of his life behind a drumkit, helping shape the sound of punk rock through countless performances with the Ramones. And he is set to honor this buzzsaw legacy at the Plaza Live on Thursday.
As a young boy, there was a moment when Ramone watched the Beatles perform on television and immediately understood something was different about this band.
It wasn’t just the music. It was the way the four musicians looked and sounded together, each one contributing to the larger sound and spirit.
“I saw the Beatles as a little boy on The Ed Sullivan Show, like millions of other people, and I was very impressed, very influenced. I looked at them as a bunch of cartoon characters, but very animated. But the way they looked together impressed me because they looked like a unit,” Ramone tells Orlando Weekly.
That idea of a band functioning as a tight-knit and visually seamless gang would eventually become central to Bell’s own career, especially his pivotal transformation into one of the brothers Ramone.
When he first saw the Ramones live in 1975 — at CBGB, of course, the legendary New York dive bar and music venue — he knew then that the band would be crucial to the then-nascent punk rock scene.
“The Ramones looked like a unit, a band, and that to me was very important,” Ramone says.
Around the age of 12, after a childhood spent banging on various objects in rhythmic fashion, the future Marky Ramone began figuring out how to make music himself. He earned money working as a delivery boy and used it to piece together his first drum set.
Upsetting his parents with the endless percussive racket didn’t faze him. Though his mother and father preferred jazz and traditional standards, his ears were drawn toward something louder and more primal.
Rock & roll came calling.
“Everybody has a calling. That was mine,” he says.
Ramone began developing his own drumming style through practice, with some early lessons from a jazz drummer. His influences would eventually stretch across genres, from jazz virtuoso Buddy Rich to rock-drumming godheads like Keith Moon, Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker.
For Ramone, a band’s relationship with its audience is just as important as the music itself. The point is to create an experience people could carry with them long after the show ended.
“To bring enjoyment and entertainment to people, to see them having a good time, that’s really what it’s all about,” Ramone says.
His approach to his performances and the Ramones as a unit was one of service to the pogo-ers, dancers and thrashers in the audience.
“Let’s face it, you know, it’s not a perfect world. But if you can bring enjoyment to somebody for an hour-and-15, hour-and-20 minutes, then you accomplished something,” he explains.
And though this world can’t be perfect, a song can sometimes be. In the spring of 1978, the Ramones went to Media Sound Studios on 57th Street in New York City to record “I Wanna Be Sedated.”
“It took two takes, meaning two tries to get it right, and what you hear is what it is,” Ramone says. An anthem was born, and it still sounds like a fresh rush of adrenaline nearly 50 years later.
It’s hard to believe that a song so pivotal, one among many pivotal moments in Marky Ramone’s career with the leather-jacket clad troublemakers from Queens, all came from an offhand question posed posted during a hang session at CBGB with Dee Dee Ramone. Fresh from a stint playing in Richard Hell’s Voidoids, Marky remembers the events well.
“He asked me if I would join the Ramones. I said, ‘Yeah!’” he recalls. “So we all got together, had a meeting, and then we went to a rehearsal studio, and we started playing a few Ramones songs. And it worked. So at that point, I was christened Marky Ramone.”
The rehearsal worked, and his new name stuck.
Now the living history that is Marky Ramone — one of the last Ramones standing — is making his way to Orlando. He’ll bring decades of experience, stories and the unmistakably rebellious rhythms of the Ramones to a new generation of fans, as well as plenty of people who remember exactly where they were when they first heard Marky Ramone’s punk heartbeat.
8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 3, The Plaza Live, 425 N. Bumby Ave., plazaliveorlando.org, $70.82-$101.87.
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This article appears in Sept. 2-8, 2026.