In live performances, the Heartbreakers, but not the Ramones, also sometimes substituted sexual references for some of the mentions of "Chinese rocks".
"The reason I wrote that song was out of spite for Richard Hell, because he told me he was going to write a song better than Lou Reed's "Heroin", so I went home and wrote 'Chinese Rocks'," Dee Dee is quoted in Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.
"The line 'My girlfriend's crying in the shower stall' was about Connie, and the shower was at Arturo Vega's loft", where Dee Dee, his girlfriend Connie and Joey Ramone all lived at one point.
But he brought me the song; he didn't even know Johnny and Jerry, but we were friends and he thought the band was great.
credit the songwriters as Thunders, Heartbreakers' drummer Jerry Nolan as well as Ramone and Hell.
"Johnny Thunders ranked on me for fourteen years, trying to make out like he wrote the song.
In the Heartbreakers' live performances of the song, Thunders would often change the lyrics to more explicit ones.
It appears on later editions of End of the Century (vinyl repressings and CD releases) credited to the Ramones as a whole, with no mention of Hell.
Vega was a long-time friend of the band and the designer of the Ramones' "presidential seal" logo.
Dee Dee Ramone stated in interviews that he felt proud of the song, it being one of his best-known tracks, but that the song became a "pain in the ass" for him as he repeatedly tried to get clean and was mistakenly regarded by many fans as a "heroin guru" promoting drug usage rather than just documenting it.