Beat Punks

by Victor Bockris

  By the end of 1975 we had got the band together to the point where we could go out to perform. Then Clem went to England for Christmas to visit his girlfriend Diane Harvey at Oxford. While he was there he called us collect from a phone booth in London to the phone booth in CBGB’s and we talked about everything for an hour. Hilly didn’t know anything about the call. Anyway, you can’t do that anymore.

  During the six weeks Clem was away we rehearsed and wrote new songs, hoping he would be back in time for us to do a New Year’s Eve show. Clem didn’t come back in time, so New Year’s Eve 1975–1976 we didn’t do a show. New Year’s Eve was always a total bust for me as a kid. I never had a date, I always stayed home, bored out of my mind, watching the stupid ball on the Time and Life Building drop at midnight. Sometimes I would get drunk alone, or else at someone else’s place babysitting. Traditionally the worst night of the year for me, New Year’s Eve has now put Blondie to work in the oddest places. I felt it was very important to work on New Year’s Eve.

  One of the events that marked the real start of the New York punk social scene was Clem’s arrival back from England with the first Dr. Feelgood album. We threw a welcome-home party for him on the Bowery. If there’s one group that could take credit for giving direction to the New York scene, it must be Dr. Feelgood. Clem had seen them in London, and the fact that a band like the Feelgoods could pack the Hammersmith Odeon and make it onto the British charts gave many New York bands conviction to keep on. Unfortunately Feelgood stayed together barely long enough to catalyze New York’s bands before they broke up.

  What a great party. Several hundred people came, stood around, and got fucked up. That was the first time Nancy Spungeon (who would later die in the aftermath of the Sex Pistols) showed up looking hot. There used to be a lot of great parties in those days where everyone would be in the same place at the same time.

  We lived on the Bowery for a year surrounded by the symbols of our struggle. One time Clem and Chris went out to the store and rushed back in yelling, “Hey! There’s a dead bum outside!” He was frozen in the snow. Somebody had seen him walking around in the snow with no shoes on earlier in the day. His eyes were open, he had a little white beard, and he had turned blue. Everybody ran into the street to look at the frozen bum until an ambulance came to scrape him up.

  One bum we called Lon Chaney was always smiling. He would wear a top hat and pink overalls. Once he had on a pair of white men’s longjohns, except they were all dabbed with paint à la Jackson Pollock or Larry Poons. Or he’d have on a military outfit. There was an abandoned storefront across the street from us, where all the bums would crawl in and sleep. One day another bum came along with a big stick and commenced banging on the front of the place, and screaming for hours. The view out our front window often had the surreal look of a Fellini set, though the rotting decay of the Bowery was eerily peaceful after the local restaurant supply store closed in the evening.

  Meanwhile things were continuing to develop. Danny Fields began a regular column in the Soho Weekly News and started giving some publicity to the downtown rock scene. Famous people started coming to CBGB’s. Jackie Onassis was said to have dropped in one night, and it became very cliquish. The first time Danny wrote about us in his column was when we were in Vain Victory, a play by Jackie Curtis, which was made up of lines from old horror movies. Tony Ingrassia directed it. Blondie did the music and I played Juicy Lucy. This was an important move for us, introducing Blondie to yet another audience.

  On July 4, 1976, we drove back from Boston and arrived in New York at seven-thirty in the morning. We returned our rented station wagon uptown, then travelled downtown on a bus. We were bleary-eyed, stoned out of our brains, and fucked up from doing this big gig the night before, and the bus was full of these bright-eyed chipper old ladies wearing red, white, and blue American pinafores, who’d struggled in from Missouri to see the ships. When we got back to the Bowery we found a three-hundred-pound bum taking a two-hundred-pound shit on the front step. We took it for a genuine Bowery Bicentennial Welcome. Masses of patriotic tourists strolled through town all the day as we watched the boats and walked around. The Bicentennial was reminiscent of Godard’s movie Weekend. There were throngs of people thronging all day long, like a big ant colony.

  Eduardo’s boyfriend Alex was a really sweet guy who was also fucked up on biker imagery. He had long hair, a blond beard, big muscles, and looked like a biker but used to go off five days a week to a normal computer job. He’d come back in the evening, put on biker drag, and sit in the piss-soaked loft smoking huge joints of angel dust after work. Then Eduardo would come home and he’d smoke two big joints of angel dust too. I don’t think they had to do anything else, because we did a little of the angel dust occasionally and it was different than the shit that went around later. It was more psychedelic. Once Chris had ESP and saw Chairman Mao in the cats. One night he took a joint of angel dust to CBGB’s and dosed everybody, pretending it was a regular joint. It only took one or two hits to get you fucked up so you were hallucinating and didn’t know what was going on. Although I must say, we don’t think angel dust is too good. It’s akin to smoking a plastic bag, or Elmer’s glue.

  Eduardo and Alex finally sucked another victim, Steven Sprouse, into their environment. Poor Steven moved all his shit in before he realized there was too much shit already and something was definitely wrong, when Eduardo just kept him up all night. Quite coincidentally, if you believe in coincidence, Steven Sprouse was a young, unemployed designer/painter and he did live on the third floor for a while until he was half frozen.

  Mod clothes were cheap in thrift stores, and Steve loved the ‘op’ clothes of the Sixties, too. Oh for pegged pants, narrow lapels and small collars! None of these items were for sale new in New York when Blondie started, so finding a supply of pointed shoes in mint condition was a major event that could eclipse finding King Tut’s tomb, causing en masse pilgrimages to Hoboken. Everybody in the band got a short haircut around the same time. Gary was first. This was all part of the process of jettisoning the Stilettoes style and dressing Blondie in the mod mood. I had worn a pair of black shorts once and Steven said that this was the right look for me. He gave me a pair of thigh-high black leather boots and black tights to go with the shorts. So as soon as we got back into the black I was right at home, everything clicked.

  © 1998. Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and Victor Bockris.

  This was the first of some fifty interviews I did with Debbie Harry.

  15

  An Interview With Debbie Harry

  New York City 1979

  Debbie Harry and her boyfriend Chris Stein came over to my apartment in West Greenwich Village at 4 pm to show me some photographs he’d taken of her. Chris has been doing photo sessions with Debbie ever since they met in 1974. They had just heard that Call Me, the theme song from American Gigolo, was a top five AM Radio Hit.

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: What’s the story with that song? Giorgio Moroder wrote the music?

  CHRIS STEIN: He wrote the music and Debbie wrote the lyrics, yeah.

  DEBBIE HARRY: They asked me if I wanted to and I said sure I’d love to. We went over to the hotel and he played us the movie on video and I just got my impressions of it and I tried to think of what it would be. Giorgio’s original idea was to call it man machine because the man was just like the sex machine, and he had these lyrics he had written but he definitely wanted me to write something better.

  STEIN: Debbie’s lyrics are much more subtle than what he wrote. His thing was very direct like saying I am a man and I go out and I fuck all the girls. Debbie’s lyrics are a lot more subtle and the movie in a way is not that blatant, it is sort of subtle.

  BOCKRIS: So how do the lyrics come to you?

  HARRY: I was just listening to Giorgio’s music and I had my visual impressions from the film which really helped a lot, it’s really cool …

  STEIN: Yeah in that kind of situation it helped a lot. I was just talking to somebody about doing m
ovie music. It’s so easy to do music for a movie. Like it was so easy to do ‘Union City’ because the mood of the picture was all there and everything and I just had to fit the music to it.

  HARRY: American Gigolo has some things that are really nice about it, it has a very great look. The thing that I was really fascinated by when I saw it was the muted tones and high tech look of it, so that was the first verse about colors. Color me your color baby/color me your car. It was like teasing too because the thing about the movie was that he was always – “Call me! Call me if you want me to come to you.” You know, “Cover me.” And it was like these little commands had this macho quality through being a male hooker, you know that kind of demanding business. So it really fell in easy for me. I got real enthusiastic. The first verse came real fast and then the others were just there.

  STEIN: She made up the song in the studio.

  HARRY: I loved doing it. It was like being hired to do a jingle or something. You know, you get your assignment. And now everyone’s predicting a top five hit. It’s a stroke, it’s a definite stroke.

  BOCKRIS: How did you write ‘Heart of Glass’?

  HARRY: I don’t know how it happened. Chris wrote this song you know and he was playing it to me de de de de de de and he was sitting there with the guitar. I mean sometimes with the guitar I used to have to fight about me getting space on the bed or the guitar. Because sometimes he was just there with his guitar and nothing else. Like sometimes when he starts playing something over and over again and that just came out and we didn’t really think about it the music was just there.

  BOCKRIS: But how did the words get written?

  HARRY: That’s what I’m talking about.

  BOCKRIS: You mean you came out with the words just sitting there listening to him play?

  HARRY: Yeah. Sometimes notes seem to suggest certain words.

  One evening around nine I went up to Debbie and Chris’s Penthouse apartment just off Central Park and taped a further conversation with Debbie.

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: Do you have any experiences that stand out as your most extreme psychically?

  DEBBIE HARRY: When I was a really little girl I thought that I killed Eleanor Roosevelt. Somebody in my family was just raking apart Eleanor Roosevelt and I was sitting there saying I wish she was dead. And I wished and I wished and I wished and I wished and I wished for days that Eleanor Roosevelt would die and then she died. And I just felt really bad afterwards. But I knew I didn’t kill her.

  BOCKRIS: Also there was that story you told me about when you were in Bangkok.

  HARRY: Oh yeah, Chris was tossing and turning and he was like awake and I was sound asleep and he was just asking himself a question mentally and I sat up while I was sound asleep and I answered his question and then I lay back down. But Thailand is very sensual a lot. The climate is very sensual, the people are real sensual. Everything’s really sensual there.

  BOCKRIS: Is it very different to play Bangkok?

  HARRY: Yeah. It’s very general communication. Communication is just basic human attitudes or human experiences: happy, sad, rational, irrational. That kind of stuff versus intellect.

  BOCKRIS: But does it effect the way you feel performing?

  HARRY: I guess I have to go out of myself more in Bangkok, try to reach out. It’s like the difference between having an audience that’s fifteen to thirty-five and an audience that’s three years old to eighteen years old. Because they’re less involved with intellect. Their existence is more sensory and that’s it.

  BOCKRIS: You do have a large following among little kids.

  HARRY: It’s because I’m old enough to be their mother.

  BOCKRIS: I think it’s because little girls always choose bigger girls to admire and be like. […]

  BOCKRIS: Have you ever wanted to have a child?

  HARRY: Yeah. Sure.

  BOCKRIS: Have you decided not to?

  HARRY: No. I haven’t decided not to. I just haven’t decided to.

  BOCKRIS: It’s one of those things that has always been taken for granted, but it seems like a lot of people are deciding not to.

  HARRY: Well everyone’s being poisoned to death with all these fucking chemicals and nuclear shits going around it’s just a natural instinct not to perpetuate life in a fucked up environment. It’s not natural to pollute one’s environment. I mean nobody pisses in the water you’re going to drink but everybody drinks piss, you know? It’s really true. I was trying to think about what are the basic differences between men and women and I think that that’s probably one of them that women are more involved with just basic physical survival techniques whereas men can play around with all these deviations and have all these little … their existence is much more abstracted.

  BOCKRIS: Do you have any girlfriends? Everytime I come up here the place is full of guys.

  HARRY: They’re all Chris’ friends. I guess I don’t have any girlfriends. I have friends, but I don’t have any constant girlfriends. I mostly just hang out with Chris. I guess you just come here when there aren’t any girls you know. Maybe I don’t have any girlfriends. Uh oh.

  BOCKRIS: Is that a problem.

  HARRY: OH NO! I DON’T HAVE ANY GIRLFRIENDS!

  BOCKRIS: What makes you really mad?

  HARRY: Sometimes I really fly off the handle. I just scream and yell. Stamp my feet.

  BOCKRIS: Do you throw things?

  HARRY: Yeah. Sometimes. We used to have really great fist fights. We used to punch each other me and Chris, we used to punch it out. But we don’t do that anymore. I guess we just got over it.

  BOCKRIS: But I know you like sex in the supermarket best. Could you tell us just one story about sex in the supermarket?

  HARRY: One time I came in and there was this woman – you know how they always have these men or women doing demonstrations. You know like sometimes they have a man with the mop and glow or the bissel rug cleaner or they have the lady with the hors d’oeuvres, the kind of pate you can make out of cornflakes. So well one time I went into this 24-hour supermarket on route 17 in Ramsay New Jersey and there was a lady there with a huge van of cherry jello. I guess that was probably the ultimate sex experience I had.

  BOCKRIS: What happened?

  HARRY: Nothing.

  BOCKRIS: Just seeing the cherry jello?

  HARRY: This huge vat of cherry jello. I mean it’s not really sex in the supermarket, there’s no body contact, it’s very …

  BOCKRIS: Actually the 24-hour supermarkets are the ones that are exciting. There’s something about anonymity which is very sexual, when people walk around anonymously by the cucumbers.

  HARRY: Yeah I guess the heaviest sex if you really want to talk about physical sex in the supermarket usually it only happens in the parking lots. It never happens in the store.

  BOCKRIS: What, when the guy comes over and says can I talk to you?

  HARRY: Well, you know, it’s like you’re trying to get into your car and somebody comes up and tries to steal your purse or something, pushes you down into the car and just tries to rape you. Or one of the checkers carries your bags out to the trunk and brushes up against you, but that’s just about it. At least it is for me. Maybe some ladies hang out with the butchers and stuff.

  BOCKRIS: Are you surprised by the number of girls you know who’ve been raped?

  HARRY: No.

  BOCKRIS: You don’t find it particularly high?

  HARRY: I guess it’s high, but I mean that’s just the story of being a cunt. It’s either you get it or you give it, right. Girls always get it. Do you know any guys that have complained of being raped?

  BOCKRIS: No.

  HARRY: Well, there you have it.

  BOCKRIS: I know guys that have been raped by guys, but they don’t complain about it.

  HARRY: No? Well the thing is, I don’t know, when guys get raped by guys I think it’s different than when a girl gets raped by a guy. Because a guy who rapes a guy there’s going to be a certain … well no, I guess not. G
uys that get raped are really in trouble. What are they going to say when they go to the police. “I’ve been raped”? The police are just going to laugh the guy right out of the station house. Kick him in the ass a few times.

  BOCKRIS: But the way rape is handled in this country is such a big joke.

  HARRY: It is awful.

  BOCKRIS: It’s pretty bad. It’s nothing like this in England, for example.

  HARRY: I know. Girls don’t have so much problem going out and stuff like that. I mean it really isn’t like this anywhere else in the world.

  BOCKRIS: In the last year I’ve discovered that almost every girl I know has been raped at least once.

  HARRY: I don’t know what to say. I don’t know. That’s why they should legalize prostitution, they should legalize that. I mean let’s just get sophisticated here, really! I mean every other country in the world probably except Australia and Canada has legalized prostitution. Every other country, right? I don’t know about Japan, but they’ve always been very sexually liberated. They’ve always been open for lesbianism and homosexuals really they always have the Japanese. The Chinese are real rigid. I heard there is no pre-marital sex. It’s not encouraged. All kinds of sexual contact is really discouraged.

  BOCKRIS: If you could invent sex all over again, what would you change?

  HARRY: What would I change? I would make it have more flamboyant ritual. Torches, silk robes, so that it would really dig into your libido.

  BOCKRIS: Do girls ever attack you because they’re jealous?

  HARRY: Yeah. But only if they take downs.

  BOCKRIS: You’re the sort of person that draws attention.