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What’s Marky Ramone Doing at Our Whole Foods?

Marky Ramone, selling his Brooklyn's Own pasta sauce
Marky Ramone, selling his Brooklyn’s Own pasta sauce

There are a lot of things one expects to find while browsing in Whole Foods: desperate young professionals cruising the produce aisle for a date, free samples of Kombucha and soy-stuffed gyoza, security guards dressed like federales, and even a white dude rapping in the parking lot from time to time. But Marky Ramone? That’s one scruffian we certainly never expected to find at Whole Foods until we stumbled upon the last lone Ramone himself this past Saturday at the Venice store, clutching a bottle of self-branded spaghetti sauce.

Marky Ramone, selling his Brooklyn’s Own pasta sauce

Marky, who replaced original drummer Tommy Ramone in 1978 following a stint with Richard Hell and The Voidoids, is now selling a brand of tomato sauce called Marky Ramone’s Brooklyn’s Own Pasta Sauce. The sauce had been touring the east coast for a little while before finally making appearances out west at the start of summer. In a video, Ramone says, with trade-mark enthusiasm, that it’s “all-natural and it tastes great.”

We’re pretty sure that Marky, like the rest of the dearly departed group, isn’t Italian (hey, was Paul Newman?), though he does indeed hail from King’s County. Regardless of what’s in the bottle, the product carries a cartoon of the drummer himself on a label recalling the group’s logo. Like it or not, in our current age of Misfits onesies, you just have to accept that this is a cool move for the rocker, who’d probably still prefer shattering eardrums live to supplying your kitchen. And unlike the Toby Keith restaurant or any product Kiss puts out, we’re game to try anything from the surviving Ramone, especially one who may potentially attend to a sauce as steadily as he kept an assaultive beat all those years.

A case of the pasta sauce, which includes twelve bottles, goes for $88 through Marky’s website, with 10% going to fight autism. Or you can buy it, one bottle at a time, at Whole Foods.

What’s Marky Ramone Doing at Our Whole Foods?