Face It

by Debbie Harry

  The Stillettoes had a director, Tony Ingrassia. Bands don’t usually have a theatrical director, but we did. Tony was an under- and aboveground theater director, as well as an actor and playwright. He staged Andy Warhol’s Pork and he wrote and directed the play Fame on Broadway. He was connected to MainMan, David Bowie’s management company, which had a multigenre approach that was way ahead of its time. Tony did a version of a Jackie Curtis play, Vain Victory, in which Elda and I both had parts, and Elda may have been in something else Tony did. Roseanne had gotten me the apartment in her building in Little Italy on Thompson Street and coincidentally, Tony lived on the top floor.

  I think Tony got curious about what we were doing as he and Roseanne were friends and he may have invited himself along to a rehearsal. Next thing we knew, he was our musical director, image coordinator, choreographer, and much more. Tony insisted on full attention and dedication from us. He worked us like we were truant little girls from Catholic high school. A real slave driver; the whip was cracking.

  Tony believed in and was an advocate of Method acting. The Method—used by some of my favorite actors, like Shelley Winters, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Julie Harris, Robert De Niro, Meryl Streep, Kate Winslet, Johnny Depp, and Daniel Day-Lewis, to name just a few—demanded an emotional and intellectual connection from the actor, not just a technical recitation. Our sessions with Tony were excruciating at times, because he forced us to repeat and repeat a song. This was tough on the vocal cords, but it pushed us to deliver the feelings in a lyric, like Brando screaming, “STELLA!!!” That’s what he wanted and we worked hard to give it to him.

  Now, I’m convinced that being trained as a Method singer was the best thing that could have happened to me—and worth all the sore throat muscles. When you sing someone else’s song, the Method gives you the edge over a performance that is strictly technical. Technique, however good, will only take you so far. The Method helps you transcend mere technique. The notorious character that was Tony entertained us endlessly and gave us so much that was important. Tony, a larger-than-life person in every way, died of cardiac arrest at the age of fifty-one. Wherever you are now, Tony, XXX.

  Joan Jett and me. Original girls of the underworld.

  Chris Stein

  Sean Pryor

  We played a bunch of local gigs, downtown bars, all very small-time. We made no money, but it was so much fun. We played a lot of different covers and we had some of our own songs that Elda wrote kitschy lyrics for—“Dracula, What Did You Do to My Mother?” and “Wednesday Panties.” We had the most decrepit equipment and the coolest, most fucked-up crowds. Part of the Holly contingency and all the people Eric Emerson knew, which was everybody on the scene. We played at Club 82, the famous drag bar on East Fourth Street, between Second Avenue and the Bowery. It was run by a lesbian couple, Butch and Tommy, but it still had that underworld glamour it had in the fifties, when it was rumored to be run by the Mafia and all the celebrities went there. There was lots of dark wood and booths and mirrored walls and signed eight-by-ten black-and-white photos of Abbott and Costello and others from the showbiz gallery of rogues. I remember David Bowie coming to one of our shows there with his wife Angie.

  We opened for Television at CBGB’s. Marty Thau, the Dolls’ manager, was there one of those nights and told somebody that he was struck by my looks, but that I seemed kind of quiet onstage. My role in the group was to be the relatively reasonable one and to calm things down, which I guess showed up as “quiet” onstage. This was one of the things I learned to grow out of, as time went on. But, as with most bands, there comes that critical flashpoint of disagreement where it just can’t be resolved. Chris and I quit the band. I still wanted to do what the Dolls were doing but I couldn’t have if it wasn’t for Chris. We formed a respectful, psychic, trusting partnership and a great understanding for each other. We had similar tastes, and where our tastes differed, we usually found a way for those divergencies to mesh in a creative way.

  When we left the Stillettoes, Fred Smith and Billy O’Connor, the bass player and drummer, came with us. A few weeks later we played our first show as Angel and the Snake. The name came from a picture Chris saw in a magazine of a girl with a snake that he thought looked vaguely like me. We opened for the Ramones at CBGB’s. Three weeks later we were back at CBGB’s with the Ramones, playing our second show. It turned out to be Angel and the Snake’s last show. After that we became Blondie and the Banzai Babies.

  I don’t remember which of us came up with “Banzai Babies”: Chris and I were both into Japanese pop culture. “Blondie”—well, I had been bleaching my hair again and when I walked down the street the construction guys and truck drivers would yell, “Hey, Blondie!” There was a famous comic strip character from the thirties named Blondie, a flapper—the dumb blonde who turns out to be smarter than the rest of them. Okay, I could play with that role onstage, it was a good start. But really there was no grand scheme behind anything. We just did what we liked to do and everything was just inching forward.

  In the beginning we had backup singers, Julie and Jackie, all three of us blondes until Jackie dyed her hair brown. That didn’t work out, so we brought in Tish and Snooky Bellomo, a duo I saw perform at the Amato Opera House across from CBGB’s. They were one of the acts in this wacky vaudeville show called the Palm Casino Review, with drag queens and theatrical misfits. Gorilla Rose and Tomata du Plenty of the Screamers, who opened for us on occasion, introduced us. I asked the girls if they wanted to come to our rehearsal and sing with us. Because they were sisters their harmonies were terrific and I loved their hair and clothes, so I thought we could join forces.

  Tish and Snooky had a storefront on St. Mark’s Place between Second and Third that would later be known as Manic Panic. They’d buy old dresses from the forties and fifties that were tied up in enormous rag bundles of clothing, get them delivered, and throw them on the floor, these big piles of clothes, and people would come in and search through. None of us had any money so we only bought clothes secondhand, the sexiest and most outrageous possible. I remember one time Tish and Snooky came in with three pairs of jodhpurs, these riding pants they found in a thrift shop in the Bronx, so we all wore those onstage. Other times we might be very glam with long dresses, stilettos, and fur stoles. There were all sorts of costume changes and props.

  We did noisy girl-group rock with three-part harmonies like the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets.” We covered the Beach Boys’ “Fun Fun Fun,” with the girls in prom dresses that we tore off at the end of the song, to reveal the vintage bathing suits we were wearing underneath. We did our own kind of rock take on disco songs, like Labelle’s “Lady Marmalade.” My idea was to bring dancing back to rock. That was important to me, just moving to music, and when it first began, rock ’n’ roll was all about dancing. We had great dances in the little town that I grew up in and I really loved going to them. If you grew up on AM radio, they played music to dance to, but then FM came along and it wasn’t cool to dance to rock anymore, at least not in New York City. And hardly anyone in the midseventies was doing that kind of retro thing we were doing. We put our own downtown spin on it that made it a kind of crossover between glitter-glam and punk. Chris and I wrote some songs, “Platinum Blonde,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” “Little Girl Lies,” “Giant Bats from Space.” Later, the bats turned into giant ants.

  We played all over—CBGB’s and the Performance Studio, Max’s, and White’s, where I was working as a barmaid. A lot of straight businessmen would go to White’s to drink after work, and one time in the middle of a song we got a conga line going and all the suits joined it. We played a place uptown called Brandi’s and got the Ramones to open for us. But the guys who ran the place hated the Ramones. When they started singing “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue” they told them to leave and never come back. They liked us because we were cute girls—harmless. Ha!

  We just kept on playing and experimenting. After a while, we just called ourselves Blondie.

 
5

  Born to Be Punk

  Jody Morlock

  Childhood and family photos, courtesy of the Harry family

  Memory, what did you do to the fun times? Really, the first seven years of Blondie felt insane. Total madness. But I keep thinking there must have been some good times. Feels like I’m always remembering the hard times. I can’t for the life of me think of any funny experiences. Have I always been so fucking serious? When we used to go out, I know we laughed a lot. What were we laughing at? What were the funny times? Maybe I’m just demented and the horror stories are more entertaining for me. I have plenty more horror stories to tell—and I will tell them—but I’m going to try real hard to dig out some funny stuff. Early Blondie was such a storm of crossfire emotions that it’s hard for me to find the fun. Maybe it’s like the King of Comedy said, you just take all the terribly serious and dreadful stories and make them funny.

  I was happy when we were stepping out around the Lower East Side, so innocent in a way, just trying to put things together. It was always a trip to play at CBGB’s. At last call, all the musicians would pack up their instruments and head outside into the sweetness of the city changing from night back into day. That Manhattan breeze would begin to pick up, a breath of fresh air. One night, Chris and I blew into a bodega for milk and cookies. After the bodega, we strolled the two blocks back to the rent-controlled apartment that Chris had on First and First.

  As we reached the front door that night, a dude—normally I never use this word, but in this case it fits so perfectly—came up from behind us with a knife. He looked a lot like Jimi Hendrix, very stylish and cool, dressed in a full-length leather coat. His pinned, hard eyes looked very serious. He wanted money; what else? Of course, we were broke after the milk and cookies. Chris did have his guitar, a Fender, which he had carved into a sort of horned demon shape. It was very pretty, honey colored and curvaceous. Fred Smith’s guitar, a dark black-red Gibson SG that Chris had borrowed, was inside the apartment also. “Jimi” wanted more than what we had on us and insisted on coming in with us. He asked us for drugs and Chris said there was some acid in the freezer. But this “Jimi” was no acid freak and ignored that particular offer. Chris’s friend Walter was passed out in the loft bed and our guest even tried to shake something out of him, but it was useless. Walter just mumbled a few words and rolled over.

  “Jimi” used a pair of old pantyhose to tie Chris to the post that held up the loft bed—and used a scarf to tie my wrists behind my back. Told me to lie down on the mattress. He didn’t bother with snoring Walter . . . Then he poked around searching for anything worth anything. He piled up the guitars and Chris’s camera and then he untied my hands and told me to take off my pants. He fucked me. And then he said, “Go clean yourself,” and left. “‘Jimi’ has left the building.”

  And we were feeling so good after our show that night. A delicious feeling of satisfaction mixed with flirtation. Then whack! An adrenaline rush with a knife at the end of it. I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. I’m very glad this happened pre-AIDS or I might have freaked. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape. I mean, we had no equipment. Chris had this tiny little amp that picked up the police radio signal and a bunch of white noise. Then other bands kept stealing our musicians too. Looking back, it seems absurd that we ever made it to be famous.

  The scene was starting to change. Patti Smith and the Ramones both had record deals and there was more than one label sniffing around Television. Blondie had become a recognizable name in some small way but nobody in the music business was looking at us. Chris was on welfare, I was a bikini bartender in the financial district, and we occasionally sold some pot to make a few bucks. At this point Blondie was an underdog, way down at the bottom of the heap. There were times I felt, What’s the point, it’s just too hopeless. But we had a patron saint for a while named Mark Pines, a man-about-downtown who had a loft on East Eleventh Street, where our drummer Billy O’Connor rented a room. Mike would let us play in the loft, which had a few amps and other assorted equipment. That made our life a lot easier.

  Billy O’Connor had been our drummer since Tot, the drummer with the eye of Horus makeup, quit the Stillettoes. Billy was a nice guy from Pittsburgh, very likeable and easygoing, and he came with his own set of drums. His family wanted him to stay in med school. Like so many teenagers, he wanted to taste freedom, break out, and bang hard for a bigger life. Naturally, he was under a lot of pressure to continue his education. He was conflicted, and the drinking and the pill-popping overcame him. Sometimes he would be semiconscious. He finally passed out backstage right before a gig. That night Jerry Nolan from the Dolls sat in and saved us. And after that Billy left to go back to college. It was too bad really, he was so sweet natured. As with myself, you usually quit drugs—or you don’t quit drugs and you burn your last bridge. Years later we reunited and we would see him every time we played Pittsburgh.

  But we really had to find a replacement. So, we put an ad in the Village Voice, “Freak energy rock drummer wanted.” We got a bigger response than we expected: fifty drummers. We auditioned them all one Saturday in the rehearsal space we shared with the Marbles, another band that we sometimes played with. As with many commercial spaces, after the workday, the heat was turned down. It was way up on the fifteenth floor of an industrial building in the Garment District, mostly occupied by furriers and companies that made leather goods. All these drummers were coming in and out of the elevator, a big confusion of players and imposters. Well, finally we got to drummer number fifty: Clem Burke. No shit, he was our last tryout, and he was the one. He looked good and he could play. Our favorite part-time postal worker became Blondie’s new drummer and the rest is history.

  One strange thing that day was Patti Smith’s showing up. She sauntered into the room with one of her band and proceeded to audition Clem. She was very aggressive. After Clem played, she declared that he was too wild, too loud, generally just too too, and then she left. What nerve, showing up at our auditions like that. I guess she was just too curious to know what we were up to. You know, the competition. Not that we were very much of a threat at the time—or ever for that matter.

  One night, after business hours, when we were allowed to make noise, we went back to our room with Clem to rehearse. But we couldn’t get the elevator to work. It was stuck on the ninth floor. We needed to get to the fifteenth. We shouted up the stairwell but there was no answer, so eventually we had to start climbing. Stairs in New York City are not one-floor affairs. I’ve been climbing tenement staircases of six or seven stories in downtown lofts and apartment buildings for all the years I’ve lived here. Old, dried-out, creaking steps worn smooth by generations of immigrants trudging to work in the sweatshops. Inhaling a century’s worth of dust-filled sediment in unventilated, mostly windowless shafts. This stairwell was equally airless and dark and thick with dust—but we kept going. Clem is a big guy with lots of energy, but he hates any physical labor other than playing drums. “This blows!” was his usual expletive when he had to set up his own drum kit or move instruments into a club or rehearsal. “This blows!” “This blows!” “This blows!” rang out loudly, floor by floor, in the echo chamber of the giant stairwell. Clem.

  At the eighth or ninth floor we started hearing voices and shouted out for them to finish up so that we could use the elevator. There was no response, so we kept climbing, getting madder than ever. By this time, there were a lot more sounds coming from below—like they were moving stuff—and we started yelling into the stairwell, cursing them out for holding the elevator. A mean, tough-guy voice cursed back at us—something out of central casting. He seemed more than serious. Sufficiently intimidated, we went back to pulling ourselves up those stairs on the railings, our lungs and tempers burning. Well, the next day we’d find out that they were serious. They were professional fur thieves, filling the elevator with furs and leather coats, doing their job while we were trying to do ours.

  Caught in the airles
s vacuum of a time tunnel, I suddenly remembered that I had also met Chris in a different dusty stairwell. Clem’s first show with Blondie was also Fred Smith’s last gig with us. We were at CBGB’s playing with the Marbles; Tom Verlaine and everybody were in the audience. And then in between sets, Fred announced that he was leaving us to join Television. We were struck dumb. It was so disheartening. I might have thrown it in then if it weren’t for Clem. He was so enthusiastic, a real cheerleader. He would keep calling us up and asking when we were going to rehearse. He pushed us really hard and kept us going. One day he brought some friends from New Jersey to the rehearsal. There was a poet called Ronnie Toast, who got his name after he set fire to his dad’s suit because he was pissed at him—and the whole house went up in flames. Ronnie had been sent to the nuthouse for a while. Clem also brought along a young, very good-looking kid named Gary Lachman. Gary was one of those people who looked like he ought to be in a rock band. So, we brought him in on bass, though he had never played bass before—although he had played a guitar. His first show with us was another show at CBGB’s. “Lachman” became “Valentine.”

  Taking off in Glastonbury, 2014.

  Chris Stein

  Sean Pryor

  CBGB’s, at 315 Bowery, has become a legend, but in those days it was a dive bar on the ground floor of one of the many flophouses that lined the avenue. The Hells Angels lived on Third Street, so it became a biker bar. In 1973 Hilly Kristal, who ran the place, named it CBGB/OMFUG, which stood for “Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers.” Hilly was a big, slow-talking hippie. Apparently, he had grown up on a chicken farm and he thought that country music was going to be huge. He often wore a plaid shirt and had a thick beard and this big mop of untamed hair. Then Hilly decided to give the local “street bands,” as he called them, a try. He would say things like, “These kids have something to say and we should listen.” CBGB’s was still a pit, but it was our pit.