Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Information Page

  Contents

  Introduction

  1. An American Girl

  2. Village Heads

  3. Brave New Babylon

  4. East Side Story

  5. New York Rockers

  6. Crossing The Thin Line

  7. Flying Over With Bombs

  8. Wrapped Like Candy

  9. You Always Pay

  10. Walking On Glass

  11. Six Like Dice

  12. No One Can Say We Didn’t Hold Out For 15 Minutes

  13. The Ice Cream Years

  14. Unfinished Business

  15. The Second Act

  16. Much Better For A Girl Like Me

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Selected Discography

  Copyright © 2012 Omnibus Press

  This edition © 2012 Omnibus Press

  (A Division of Music Sales Limited, 14-15 Berners Street, London W1T 3LJ)

  EISBN: 978-0-85712-780-8

  The Author hereby asserts his / her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with Sections 77 to 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Contents

  Information Page

  Introduction

  1. An American Girl

  2. Village Heads

  3. Brave New Babylon

  4. East Side Story

  5. New York Rockers

  6. Crossing The Thin Line

  7. Flying Over With Bombs

  8. Wrapped Like Candy

  9. You Always Pay

  10. Walking On Glass

  11. Six Like Dice

  12. No One Can Say We Didn’t Hold Out For 15 Minutes

  13. The Ice Cream Years

  14. Unfinished Business

  15. The Second Act

  16. Much Better For A Girl Like Me

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Selected Discography

  Introduction

  “Maybe we were a reality TV show before there was reality TV,” Chris Stein remarked during a phone conversation a couple of years ago. Of course, Chris was referring to Blondie, the group he formed with Deborah Harry five decades ago which, from the least promising of beginnings, clawed a path through the ruins of downtown New York to become a global phenomenon.

  Today, Blondie are duly recognised as one of the 20th century’s most influential and innovative groups, fronted by the most imitated (though never equalled) female singer of all time. Ignited by the success of 1978’s ‘Denis’, Blondie fired off a salvo of groundbreaking hits that included ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear’, ‘Hanging On The Telephone’, ‘One Way Or Another’, ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Atomic’, ‘Call Me’, ‘The Tide Is High’ and ‘Rapture’ – the latter being their homage to Chic, which brought New York’s hip hop revolution into the mainstream.

  While Debbie’s striking beauty made it impossible for her to escape becoming a pin-up in the old-fashioned sense, she saw that it happened on her terms. It quickly became apparent that she was a strong-willed, clever, and culturally articulate woman, who would open the door for successive generations of female singers to seize control of their own destinies. By demonstrating that it was possible to be intelligent and beautiful, she lit a path that runs from Madonna to Lady Gaga. Her refusal to be manipulated by any authority but her own established a post-feminist ideal that would inspire women such as Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Gwen Stefani and Pink. Similarly, the fleeting but dynamic riot grrrl movement drew much of its spirit of independence from Debbie.

  As the creative dynamo at the pulsing core of Blondie, Debbie and Chris may have been the most vibrantly idiosyncratic partnership to emerge from New York’s punk era. But they also faced the challenge of maintaining a relationship amid the incessant pressures of leading a number one group, besieged by business nightmares and inter-band ego wars, and exacerbated by drugs. These and other factors combined to run down Blondie’s first phase, with Chris’ debilitating illness as the final nail in its coffin.

  Happily, Blondie returned in 1998, as Debbie, Chris, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri topped the charts again with ‘Maria’. New members joined the fold to extend the group’s legacy and establish them as a popular fixture on the summer festival circuit. Such is the timeless magic of the songs and Debbie’s allure that new generations have embraced them, as old-timers look back with affection.

  Blondie’s story ranks among the most resonant of rock’n’roll tales. On one level, it concerns the love and creativity shared by two unique individuals. However, it is equally about New York, the city that suffused the group with its energy, attitude and excitement. Few other bands are as synonymous with, or evocative of their hometown as Blondie. Even at the peak of their global popularity, Debbie and Chris kept their ears to the New York sidewalk and their feet planted in the disparate scenes flourishing amid the city’s underground art epicentre and throughout the parallel club movements of punk, disco and hip hop. In the case of the latter, they were the first white group to trumpet the revolutionary new style, scoring a huge hit with ‘Rapture’. For four of their five years at the hub of the media spotlight, Chris and Debbie ensured they regularly appeared on Glenn O’Brien’s weekly TV Party on cable television.

  Outside the steady trickle of much-anticipated new material, Blondie’s influence can be found constantly as their songs show up on the soundtracks of TV programmes, movies and ads, and Debbie’s pout is always evoked by the latest tousled blonde singer. As she herself now reflects, “Blondie were part of a chain of events, part of the New York scene where we were feeling it and really living it. Blondie did what we did before anyone knew what was happening, and laid a lot of groundwork for other bands. We were probably too early. I think the music industry caught up with us, but they didn’t like us when we started. We did feel we were like outsiders breaking into the establishment.”

  This book is the second of the authors’ ‘New York Stories’ trilogy– our first, Trash!, being a ‘before, during and after’ history of The New York Dolls, whose infamous exploits dovetail with Debbie’s life in the early part of this book’s narrative.

  There is also a personal connection between Blondie, the quintessential New York band, and co-author Kris, who championed them early on when he was editor of Zigzag magazine. As Kris tells it:

  In recent years, whenever I was called up to write features about life in the eye of the Blondie hurricane or appear in documentaries, the question of a book started being asked again. Working on these projects had already brought me back in touch with Chris and Debbie, who I hadn’t spoken to for over 20 years. The conversations with Chris were always a delight, his lazy drawl meandering from Blondie’s early days to his Animal Records label – plus, without fail, the inexorably changing face of his beloved New York City. We talked about the n
eed for a book chronicling the New York music scene, even a Blondie biopic, but never a ‘Blondie book’ – although, when this project was finally underway, Chris just said, “Anything you need”.

  He had already supplied the best reference I could wish for after I asked him for an intro for a Blondie magazine piece I was writing a couple of years ago:

  “I was really fond of Needs in a period where we were regularly savaged by British rock journalists who would appeal to our good graces and come on all friendly like. Kris proved to be a staunch supporter whose moral code was not at odds with his face value. In retrospect, I look back with a degree of fondness at the battles that went on in the press but, at the time, I was glad to have Zigzag provide me with the occasional platform to shoot back from. Kris accompanied us on various forays into the hinterlands of Britain as we lived out our fantasies of Beatle-mania, so I was quite pleased to hear from him again after all this time.”

  The feeling was mutual. Debbie and Chris’s fiercely independent natures have ensured Blondie’s enduring legacy. This book tells how it happened.

  KRIS NEEDS

  DICK PORTER

  2012

  Chapter One

  An American Girl

  “The only thing I wanted to be as a teenager was a beatnik. I loved that whole ideal of artists, musicians, writers. It was a choice, a life choice, and it hasn’t always been easy.”

  Debbie Harry

  In June 1979, Blondie achieved what was then considered a key signifier that a band had made it in the USA: appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone. Journalist Jamie James – subsequently described by Debbie Harry as “a strutting little pompous git” – caught the group on one of the off-days that sometimes occurred during this period, as Blondie’s fame exponentially grew while the press seemed regularly reluctant to take them seriously.

  In his Rolling Stone piece, James was put on the defensive from the start: “I can tell the moment Debbie lays eyes on me that she hates my guts.” The fact that it had taken ‘Heart Of Glass’ hitting number one in the US charts to arouse the magazine’s ardour irked Debbie, who asked him why they had shown no interest three years earlier. The hapless writer tried to splice reportage of in-band sniping to his evident lack of empathy with Blondie’s music or the scene from which it emerged, bookending his piece with an interview with a woman who likes to be called ‘Cag’ – Catherine Harry, Debbie’s adopted mother.

  Until that point, accounts of Debbie’s pre-New York past had been restricted to her adoption, her New Jersey school days and vague allusions to mostly unspecified forms of teenage rebellion. James kicked off with Cag’s anecdote about Debbie’s singing debut – her sixth-grade class had once staged a ‘Tom Thumb wedding’, featuring one kid as the groom, another as the bride and a third cast in the role of bridesmaid. She also recalled Debbie soloing on the 1912 chart-topping parlour standard and wedding perennial ‘I Love You Truly’ for the grand finale.

  Cag explained what a tight-knit family the Harrys were. “The only Christmas she wasn’t here was the time she was on tour in Australia [1977]. She was so depressed, and I was so depressed. She said, ‘I’ll never be away for Christmas again.’ Debbie’s a wonderful daughter.”

  Had Debbie been much of a hit with the boys? “Are you kidding?” Cag erupted, going on to relate the story of how her adopted daughter was approached to enter the high school beauty pageant. “She didn’t particularly want to go in; they called her in … She was always beautiful. When she was a baby, my friends used to tell me I should send her picture in to [baby food manufacturer] Gerber’s, because she would be picked as one of the Gerber Babies. But I didn’t send it in. I didn’t believe in her being exploited.”

  “My mother was offered a contract for me to become a Gerber Baby, but my mother told me there was no way. She wouldn’t be a showbiz momma. So maybe that’s why it took me so long to get my music together,” confirmed Debbie, touching upon the trait that led to her becoming a creative late bloomer.

  “She is shy,” continued Cag. “When she’s not performing – and you must know this – she’s quiet, with a very pixie sense of humour. She’s not real outgoing or loud. She’s sort of retiring … very family-oriented … She’s the one that got homesick at camp.”

  Deborah Ann Harry was born Angela Tremble in Miami, Florida on July 1, 1945. She was adopted at the age of three months by Catherine and her husband Richard, who worked as a salesman of woven clothing labels in Manhattan’s fashion district. (“He was very casual about it,” Debbie would remember. “He always said that if people want something they’re going to buy it.”) The family lived in the quintessential small town of Hawthorne, New Jersey, described by Debbie as “a typical suburban commuter kind of town”.

  Debbie appears to have been an insecure, solitary child, unhappy with the way she was dressed down by a mother who “didn’t contemplate a future for me other than marriage”. To a degree, this emphasis on conformity sprang from the teachings of the Episcopalian faith, to which the family subscribed. Although this ascetic strain of Protestant Christianity was subsequently abandoned by Debbie (who dismissed it as simply comprising “no incense, no confession” and “good hymns”), she also recognised that it laid the foundation of a broader interest in spirituality. “It teaches you to be real pragmatic. Then you start to wonder about God. Then you just leave the church. A lot of Protestants don’t go to church. But it’s very social, very community supportive. But I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life. Or some kind of energy or anti-gravity. It’s like the answer to an equation and it’s become mythical over the years. But at one time we all knew what it was. I don’t know when it was exactly, but that was the ancient knowledge. It’s become diffused as it was handed down and turned into myth.”

  While Debbie’s insecurities may have stemmed from her adoption, the Harry household (which also included a younger sister, Martha, and a cousin, Bill, who lived with the family) was evidently warm and loving. Although Catherine and Richard were strict, they imposed boundaries on their children in a caring manner.

  When Debbie was four years old, her parents broached the idea that she was adopted in the gentlest way possible. “They framed it in a bedtime story about [a child] being chosen,” she later revealed. “And then said, ‘And that’s how we got you.’”

  Kids are highly adaptive creatures, and this was certainly true of Debbie. “To me they were just my mum and dad and I was very happy that way.” Looking back, she clearly appreciates the pivotal roles that Catherine and Richard played in her development. “The turning point in my life was being adopted and moving to New Jersey. If not I might have stayed in Florida and who knows what could have happened. Maybe I would have worked at Disneyland.”

  In common with many adoptees, the notion of her biological mother as a mystery figure inspired imaginative childhood speculation. “Not knowing where I came from is a great stimulant to the imagination, and it has always meant I don’t take anything for granted,” Debbie observed. “One afternoon while we sat in the kitchen drinking coffee my Aunt Helen said I looked like a movie star, which thrilled me and fuelled another secret fantasy about Marilyn Monroe possibly being my natural mother. I always thought I was Marilyn Monroe’s kid. I felt physically related and akin to her long before I knew she had been adopted herself … Why Marilyn and not Lana Turner, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield? Maybe it was Marilyn’s need for immense doses of demonstrative love that is the common denominator between us. Although that doesn’t fit me, because I got loads of love. My parents had to put up with some stupid shit from me like I’ve always had this sense of destiny, and when I felt I wasn’t being appreciated, I’d tell them. ‘You’ll be sorry you talked to me like this when I’m rich and famous.’ They would laugh. At least I kept them entertained.”

  Rather than becoming mired in feelings of abandonment, Debbie’s stable home life and mental agility enabled her to draw positive elements from being adopted. “Having a
big question mark about your identity, especially when you’re a kid, because you’re always trying to figure out who you are anyway, led to this double portion of ambiguity – the great unknown. One of the things I’ve always felt about not being identified, not knowing exactly what I was supposed to look like or what I was supposed to do, was that I could be whoever I wanted to be. And I really, really wasn’t like anybody. I think that’s helped me, but it was also difficult at times.”

  Debbie would subsequently find her biological father, although her birth mother refused any contact when her whereabouts were unearthed in the late eighties. “I found out some personal history. I went to the agency that I was adopted through and I spoke with the representative. She took out all my files, and the files from that period were very, very in-depth – I was adopted right after the war, and people kept good records because there were so many lost loves and so much confusion going on – so many children.”

  Recounting the circumstances of her birth, Debbie explained, “I think on my father’s side, I have seven or eight half brothers and sisters. My father was already married and my mother was not married. She got pregnant and then found out he was married and had all these children. She was heartbroken and she went away, had me and put me up for adoption.” To this day, Debbie has no intention of making contact with any paternal siblings from her biological family. “I don’t see what purpose it would serve,” she asserts. “How would I relate to them?”

  In later years, Deborah employed therapy as a means of exploring the emotional impact of being adopted at such an early age. “I think it gave me some fear and some anger, and I didn’t know how to separate the two, because I think they are very closely related … It was a core issue for me and must have happened at a time when I was unable to put it into language, but it was something that I had experienced as an infant. A trauma. So eventually I was able to identify that, and to say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened,’ and to take that by the hand.”