by Debbie Harry
It’s amazing to go there now because it’s a different planet. The club has become a clothing store owned by John Varvatos and the old CBGB’s awning is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. John has kept the style of the original awning, but it’s black now rather than white. When we were first there, it was mostly derelict stores and flophouses and a pizza parlor across the road. There was an alley at the back of the club full of rubbish, rats, pissed-on garbage, and shards of broken glass. Inside, the club had its own special reek—a pungent compound of stale beer, cigarette smoke, dog shit, and body odor. Hilly’s dog Jonathan had full run of the place and would wander about, relieving itself whenever and wherever. In one corner we jokingly called “the kitchen,” a large pot of chili simmered away at all times—adding its own fragrance to the bar’s heady mix. The bathroom—well, I read somewhere that Chris and I made out in the bathroom; we may have, but not all the way, for good reason. Chris did manage to capture the “mystique” of the CBGB’s bathroom in some great photos.
The club had a bar, a jukebox, a pool table, a phone booth, and a big bookshelf full of books, most of them beat poetry, which Hilly was into. Once you walked past the long bar, there were a few tables and chairs and a small, low stage. The stage was tiered so that the singer was out front at the bottom, the band was in the middle, and the drummer sat perched above on a tiny platform. We played CBGB’s every weekend for seven months straight. We didn’t make money; we got paid in beers. You were lucky if they were charging two dollars at the door. And Hilly was big hearted, always letting people in for free. Later on, when Roberta Bayley ran the door, things did get a little bit more professional.
The crowd was almost all our friends, all the other bands and all the downtown artists and freaks. Like Tomata du Plenty, Gorilla Rose, and Fayette Hauser, and later Arturo Vega appeared. He would always show up wearing a Mexican wrestler’s mask and for months no one knew who he was. Arturo was an artist and his loft was around the corner. Later he became the Ramones’ artistic director, logo designer, T-shirt salesman, and lighting man. Dee Dee and Joey Ramone shared his loft. It was an immediate, smaller, tighter, more private world then. It was a time of felt experience—no special effects, just raw, visceral, uncut living. No voyeuristic secondhand selfies being beamed out on the Internet. No cell-phone junkies trading endless texts instead of direct, face-to-face contact. No insistent press trying to video and photo your every move or misstep . . .
One of my favorite people from that scene was Anya Phillips. She was a fascinating woman, part Chinese, part English, beautiful, and always provocatively dressed. Multitalented and multifaceted, Anya could go from a hard-nosed business meeting to a strip job on Times Square. She took me there once and said, “Just sit over here in the audience,” and I watched as she did her strip. Anya was very outspoken, as you would expect from a dominatrix, and a creative force. She started going out with James Chance—James White—and she managed his band the Contortions. Anya shared an apartment with Sylvia Morales, who at one time was married to Lou Reed. Since there really weren’t many of us girls on the scene, we all knew each other.
Iggy Pop apparently described me once as “Barbarella on speed.” Barbarella was a comic-book character from the future, where people didn’t fuck anymore, a sexual innocent who gets sent on a mission to save the planet and along the way learns the joys of sex. The director of Barbarella, Roger Vadim, was a big fan of comic books, as were we. Our band shared its name with a cartoon character, after all. And I was playing at being a cartoon fantasy onstage. But the mother of that character was really Marilyn Monroe. From the first time I set eyes on Marilyn, I thought she was just wonderful. On the silver screen, her lovely skin and platinum hair were luminescent and fantastic. I loved the fantasy of it. In the fifties, when I grew up, Marilyn was an enormous star, but there was such a double standard. The fact that she was such a hot number meant that many middle-class women looked down on her as a slut. And since the publicity machine behind her sold her as a sex idol, she wasn’t valued as a comedic actor or given credit for her talent. I never felt that way about her, obviously. I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act. My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.
The “Blondie” character I created was sort of androgynous. More and more lately, I’ve been thinking that I was probably portraying some kind of transsexual creature. Even when I was singing songs that were written from a man’s point of view—“Maria” for example, a Catholic schoolboy lusting after this unattainable virgin girl—I had to be kind of gender-neutral, so it seemed that I wanted Maria. A lot of my drag queen friends have said to me, “Oh, you were definitely a drag queen.” They didn’t have problems seeing it. It was the same thing with Marilyn really. She was a woman playing a man’s idea of a woman.
Rock, like I said, was a very masculine business in the midseventies. Patti dressed more masculine. Though deep down I guess we came from a similar place, my approach was different. In many ways, you might say that what I did was more challenging. To be an artistic, assertive woman in girl drag, not boy drag, was then an act of transgression. I was playing up the idea of being a very feminine woman while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game. I was saying things in the songs that female singers really didn’t say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious.
At first, I can’t remember there being a lot of competitiveness at CBGB’s but there were different camps: the “art/intellectual people” and the “pop/rock people.” We definitely had more of a pop sensibility in that we loved melodies and songs. But the subject matter of our songs was somewhat subversive. We felt that we were bohemians and performance artists, avant-garde. And when you add to the mix this very New York DIY street-rock attitude that we had, you got punk. Nobody was called punk yet. There was no one at CBGB’s wearing T-shirts that said “punk.” But I was a punk. I still am.
1996. Hi, Joey.
Tina Paul
Then came a magazine called Punk that began in 1975. John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil. They pulled this brilliant PR stunt, putting up these flyers that just said, “Punk is coming.” They papered them all over. Everyone was saying, “What is this? What’s punk and what’s coming?” Buzz creation, before buzz creation was called that. And then the magazine appeared, which was just fabulous—nasty and irreverent and sick. We loved it. They took the word and branded it and developed the brand around this small scene. There wasn’t really a particular sound you could define as punk until much later on—because at first there were many different styles. But I think the universal thread was that we were pointing out the inconsistencies in a hypocritical society and the foibles of human nature and what a joke it all was. A kind of big Dadaist up-yours. Most everybody was writing songs that satirized something.
The New York punk scene didn’t have one particular look either. When Blondie started, the guys all had long hair. Chris had very long, black hair and wore black eye makeup. Clem had long, black, wavy locks and he wore a black leather jacket, jeans, and high-tops. When we got to know Clem better, we found out he was a “Deadhead.” He was obsessed with rock. His house in Bayonne, New Jersey, had rooms filled right to the ceiling with music magazines like NME, Crawdaddy, Creem, Teen Beat, Rave, Let It Rock, Rock Scene, Rolling Stone, Jamming, One Two Testing, Dark Star, Bucketfull of Brains, and Zigzag. It’s a wonder the place didn’t burn down. As for my “punk bombshell” look, old movie stars were the influence, but it developed from buying clothes at secondhand stores or finding things people threw out on the street—then trying it all, mixing it up, and seeing what worked. The famous zebra-striped minidress that Chris to
ok a photo of me wearing and sent to Creem magazine? That was a pillowcase that our landlord Benton found in the trash and I made into a dress.
In the early to midseventies, the thrift stores still had all those great pre-hippie sixties clothes. You could walk in, and for almost nothing, you could come out with a mod suit or a spangled minidress and straight-legged pants. No bell-bottoms. I was done with bell-bottoms. We were all fashion conscious, of course. Everyone in Blondie favored the mod look and it was easily available. And we all loved to shop. I think it might have been Gary who was the first in the band to cut his hair, but then they all did. Everything sort of gelled. I really think there was a certain amount of serendipity to the whole business. None of it was thought out other than a synchronistic sense of style and preference. People today who want to make a living at rock ’n’ roll seem a lot saner about things. It’s a subject taught in school—a totally different frame of reference. We were just in this isolated bubble of economic depression in New York that was artistically so strong. We had to be artistically strong and we didn’t think about making long-range plans, only surviving.
There was a garbage strike in the summer of ’75. New York City was about to go bankrupt. Tons of trash rotted in the sun and the city stank. Kids would set piles of trash on fire, then open the hydrants so that all the flotsam ran down the streets. Blondie was playing that whole summer, doing shows with Television, the Miamis, the Marbles, and the Ramones. The Ramones were a great band and seriously funny. Sometimes, in the early days, they would stop and have a fight with each other about something in the middle of a song, even though the songs were so short. Hilly’s wife, Karen, would often walk by the stage at CBGB’s holding her ears when they played and scream at them to turn it down. We became close friends with the Ramones right up to a terribly sad end.
Sean Pryor
Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection
We left our apartment after we were broken into for the third time. Little Italy really was full-on Italian then, very Mean Streets, and one day I saw these big guys beating up a black kid who was running down the street. I made a real scene about it and Chris thought they were going to murder us. That was when the trouble began. We were invited by Benton Quinn to move into his loft, at 266 Bowery, just down the street from CBGB’s. It’s still there and still pretty beat-up. Benton was a flamboyant character much like the androgynous Turner character played by Mick Jagger in the movie Performance. He had an elegant, ethereal, otherworldly feel about him, like someone out of a Pre-Raphaelite painting. Originally from Tennessee, Benton carried himself with an aristocratic Southern grace.
Early Blondie, CBGB’s.
Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection
We had use of the first floor. There was a shared bathroom and kitchen on our floor, Benton lived on the second floor, and the top floor was uninsulated and semi-derelict. Stephen Sprouse moved into that space later with a hot plate. Stephen was a designer and a child prodigy. He had been discovered by Norman Norell, who designed for Gloria Swanson, the silent-movie star. After Stephen won a competition for new designers sponsored by Norell, his father had to bring him into New York because Stephen was only fourteen years old. When Stephen moved into the Bowery building, he was working for Halston and was already considered an up-and-comer. At the same time, he was doing his own designs. I was always cutting up clothes and putting things together, and to be honest, I think he only started working with me because he was disgusted with the way I looked! He just said, “Do this, do this, do this,” and it was so good.
There was a liquor store on the ground floor of the building. It was the liquor store for the Bowery, so there was always a lot of traffic. The customers would use our doorway as a bathroom and the smell of piss wafted up into our loft. One day we found a dead wino on the sidewalk down the street. There was always something dead out there, rats or winos. But on the upside, it was great having all that raw open space where we could play.
Next to the fireplace was a life-sized statue of Mother Cabrini that Chris had bought in a junk store. She had glass eyes that someone had painted over and Chris had scraped off the paint, which made her even creepier. Dee Dee Ramone was spooked by that statue. He stabbed it a couple of times so there were a couple of holes in it. Our building used to be a doll factory employing child labor supposedly. I’m psychic and I definitely felt there were presences there—but we all felt things were a little wonky. There were poltergeists. Pipes kept breaking, things would fall down, shit kept happening all the time. Three of us, me, Chris, and Howie, were trying to light the fire one night. It was full of paper and wood and should have gone right up, but it just wouldn’t light. Eventually, we gave up trying. We stood back and then suddenly the fireplace burst into flame. We all were shocked into silence.
One time, Gary, who was staying with us, almost got fried. He said almost doesn’t count but I disagree. Chris walked in on Gary as he was clutching this lamp in a kind of electrical spastic paralysis. Chris knocked it out of his hand, just in time. Saved him. And on another night, over the weekend, we all nearly died. Down in the basement of the liquor store there was the oil burner. The water pump was broken, so you had to fill it with water by hand or else the flame would go out and the boiler would just pump fumes and smoke through the system. On this night, the guy in the store forgot to put water in and the boiler’s flame did go out. Toxic smoke and fumes flooded our apartment. We were asleep. It was the cats that woke us up, pawing at our faces. We reeled around in a stupor, our noses plugged with black soot. We couldn’t talk properly because our throats felt like sandpaper. We threw open the windows to clear out all the gunk. We froze our asses off, but better that than dead. Those cats saved our lives. Service animals didn’t exist then, but these three kitties were our heroes and qualified for medals of recognition.
That summer was when we made our first-ever recording, a demo. There was another new magazine on the scene, the New York Rocker, whose editor Alan Betrock was an early champion of Blondie. He put us in the magazine and said he wanted to help us out. Somehow or other we wound up in Queens, recording a demo in the basement of a house belonging to the parents of a friend of Alan’s. Alan said he was going to give it to Ellie Greenwich, whom he had some kind of connection with. Ellie Greenwich was one of the great Brill Building songwriters. She’d written hits for the Ronettes, the Crystals, and the Shangri-Las. I loved them all, especially the Shangri-Las. It wasn’t just us; the Ramones and Johnny Thunders loved them too. They were a real touchstone. One of the songs we’d always done live was the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets.” Now we were recording it in this humid, steaming basement, on a little four-track. The humidity was so high we couldn’t keep the guitars in tune.
We also recorded our own songs, “Thin Line,” “Puerto Rico,” “The Disco Song” (which was an early version of “Heart of Glass”), and “Platinum Blonde,” which was the first song I ever wrote. Alan took the tape around to some record companies and journalists, but nothing came of it. We were always asking Alan for the tape because he wasn’t doing anything with it. And as soon as we got some money we said we would buy it from him. He didn’t want to part with it though and said he wasn’t planning to release it. Four years later he put it out on an independent label and we were surprised he released these early versions without telling us, but it was cool.
In the fall of ’75 we had a new band member, Jimmy Destri. We had been talking about maybe getting a keyboard player, and a young photographer/musician friend of ours, Paul Zone, introduced us to Jimmy—who worked at the time in the ER at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn. More important, he knew who we were, he’d seen us play, and he owned a Farfisa organ. He had been playing with the band Milk ’n’ Cookies before they had gone to England to make an album and left him behind. After Jimmy joined Blondie, one of the first things we did together was a Jackie Curtis play, Vain Victory. Tony Ingrassia was the director. It was the first time we’d worked wi
th Tony since the Stillettoes, so it was a reunion. It was a fun thing to do; it ran for a few weekends and we got some good audiences. I had the role of Juicy Lucy, a chorus girl on a cruise ship, and the band played the music. Playing a part made me feel comfortable and with the band more solid at last, I was realizing that the part I liked most was the one I played with Blondie. Then, over time, little by little, it started to become more personal.
Sean Pryor
6
Close Calls
Bob Gruen
Jody Morlock
Driving—and my car—played quite a role for me in the early days of New York. My mom had given me a blue ’67 Camaro, a stick shift that she couldn’t drive anymore, because she was in very bad pain from osteoporosis. I loved having a car in the city, though to keep it on the street was a nerve-wracking pain in the ass. For a while, we found a construction site down on Greenwich Street in what’s now TriBeCa that didn’t have No Parking signs and we would just leave the car down there. But that couldn’t last forever, so I’d be back up at the crack of dawn on street-cleaning days, to switch sides when the cleaning truck came. But the Camaro was a perfect refuge, a great place to get away from everyone—to have some peace and quiet. On my own in the car, I would think of lyrics as I watched for the street cleaner in the rearview mirror.