Marky Ramone will take the stage at The Plaza Live in Orlando this Thursday at 8 p.m., bringing decades of punk-rock road stories to a venue that has watched Orlando's live music scene evolve for more than six decades. The drummer, born Marc Steven Bell in Brooklyn, became the Ramones' longest-tenured percussionist across 15 years and is one of only three surviving official members of the band today. Tickets for the September 3 show run between $70.82 and $101.87.
Before he was Marky Ramone, Bell was a delivery boy in Brooklyn, saving his earnings to assemble his first drum set, according to Orlando Weekly. He started making music around age 12, receiving early lessons from a jazz drummer, and drew inspiration from a wide swath of rock and jazz percussionists, including Buddy Rich, Ginger Baker, Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Moon. Watching the Beatles perform on The Ed Sullivan Show as a child left a lasting impression on him, too — not just for their sound but for how unified they looked as a group, a lesson he later said shaped how he thought about being in a band.
From CBGB Spectator to Voidoid to Ramone
Long before he ever picked up drumsticks for the Ramones, Marky watched the band perform live at CBGB in 1975, a formative encounter with the New York punk scene taking shape around him. He went on to play with Richard Hell's Voidoids before Dee Dee Ramone asked him to join the Ramones, a personal invitation that put him behind the kit for one of punk's defining acts. Once he was in, the band rehearsed together until the new lineup clicked — and it was only after that rehearsal succeeded that he received the name Marky Ramone, per the same Orlando Weekly account.
His first live show with the band came in June 1978 at The Chance in Poughkeepsie, New York — the very gig where the iconic back-cover photo for the album Road to Ruin was shot, according to Chronogram Magazine. That lineup shift came after Tommy Ramone stepped away from the drum throne to focus on record production full-time. Marky's tenure wasn't uninterrupted, though: he was dismissed from the band in early 1983 amid severe alcoholism, later achieved sobriety, and rejoined in August 1987 following Richie Ramone's departure and a brief two-show stint by Blondie drummer Clem Burke performing under the alias Elvis Ramone, as detailed by the Observer.
Two Takes and a Sedative Anthem
Among the songs likely to echo through The Plaza Live is *I Wanna Be Sedated*, which the Ramones recorded in 1978 at Media Sound Studios on 57th Street in New York City. The track reportedly took just two takes to nail down, a detail Orlando Weekly's profile highlights as evidence of how tight the band had become by that point. Marky has said that a good performance can give an audience roughly an hour and 15 to an hour and 20 minutes of enjoyment, and that delivering that enjoyment is, in his view, the entire point of performing.
He's also spoken about why the Ramones' visual identity mattered as much as their sound: looking like a unified unit, he's said, was important to how the band presented itself to audiences — an echo of the same lesson he took from watching the Beatles on television decades earlier.
A Legacy Now Etched Into Rock's Institutions
The Ramones were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame on March 18, 2002, in their first year of eligibility, with Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder delivering the induction speech for a lineup that included Marky alongside founding members Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee, and Tommy Ramone. Nearly a decade later, the Recording Academy handed the band its first Grammy honor, a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 53rd Annual Grammy Awards in February 2011, which surviving members Tommy and Marky accepted in person in Los Angeles.
With all four founding members now gone — they died sequentially between 2001 and 2014 — Marky remains one of just three surviving official members of the band, alongside later-era players Richie Ramone and C.J. Ramone. Before punk, he had already logged studio time as a co-founder of the Brooklyn proto-metal trio Dust, which released two heavy rock albums on Kama Sutra Records in 1971 and 1972. He later chronicled the band's inner turmoil and relentless touring in his 2015 autobiography, Punk Rock Blitzkrieg: My Life as a Ramone, co-written with Rich Herschlag and published by Atria Books.
The Ramones' 50th anniversary has drawn tributes well beyond Orlando this year. John Travolta hosted a benefit tribute at Hollywood Forever Cemetery in August featuring C.J. Ramone alongside members of Green Day, Rancid, and Blink-182. That nationwide wave of commemorations underscores how a band once dismissed as underground noise has been fully absorbed into rock's canon.
A Historic Orlando Stage Gets Its Moment
The Plaza Live itself carries its own local history. The building opened in 1963 as Orlando's first two-screen movie theater, nicknamed the Rocking Chair Theatre, before converting into a live performance venue in the early 1990s. The Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra Foundation purchased the building in 2013 and leased it to the City of Orlando in 2019.
A $10 million renovation, funded through Orange County Tourist Development Tax revenue and state grants, restored the venue's Googie-style rotating rooftop spire and modernized its main hall, which now holds up to 1,330 standing or 991 seated patrons, according to Orlando Weekly's coverage of the project. The venue sits at 425 N. Bumby Ave. in Orlando, giving punk fans a restored architectural landmark as the backdrop for Thursday's show.
Orlando Weekly, which has served as a free, independent voice of Orlando since 1990, published the original profile without a paywall; readers who want to support that kind of coverage can join as a supporter for as little as $5 per month. For longtime fans and newcomers alike, Marky Ramone's stop at The Plaza Live offers a rare chance to hear firsthand stories from one of the last people who lived the Ramones' story from the inside.
