by Debbie Harry
When it came out in June 1976, “X Offender” wasn’t a hit, but I think the single surprised a lot of people who didn’t know what to expect from us. It really sounded good. One day, we walked into CBGB’s and it was playing on the jukebox. That was a big moment for us. There was enough of a buzz for an album, but it seemed we needed Frankie Valli’s approval. Frankie Valli was apparently a co-owner of Private Stock or its biggest shareholder. One night a limo pulled up outside CBGB’s and Frankie Valli got out. The limo sat waiting for him among the bums and the winos while he watched us play. We didn’t get to meet him, so I don’t know what he thought of us, but now we were signed to Instant Records and Private Stock.
With Seymour Stein’s wife, Linda, David Bowie, and Danny Fields.
Bob Gruen
The recording studio, Plaza Sound, where we made our first album was a fantastic place—enormous compared to the little closet-sized spaces that most studios are—and very grand. It was in the same deco building as Radio City Music Hall, where I went as a kid to see the Easter and Christmas shows featuring the Rockettes. The Rockettes, in fact, could rehearse in another room while we were recording. The studio, on the whole upper floor, had been specially built for the NBC Symphony Orchestra and its conductor, Toscanini. It was hung from iron girders like a suspension bridge. The dance floors floated on rubber springs, which helped insulate the sound of the orchestra or the dancing girls from the music hall. In the 1930s, when it was built, it must have been a real feat of engineering.
Another remarkable invention was a massive old pipe organ that had sound effects like a synthesizer—but being pre-electronic, it was all mechanical. At the back of the organ, there was an entire room filled with all these amazing little mechanized artifacts that made the effects they used in shows and silent movies: wooden mallets, door knockers and bells, drums and whistles . . . Sometimes we would take the elevator down to the theater and hang out behind the screen when they were showing movies—or ride it up to the roof, where Chris took some more great photos. We were in the studio every day from noon to one or two in the morning and we had the run of the building. Forty years later, when we did the David Bowie tribute there, it was insane getting into the building because of the updated security.
We knew all the songs we were recording inside out by then, since we had played them onstage for so long. One day our producer Richard Gottehrer brought Ellie Greenwich into the studio. They knew each other from when they both worked at the Brill Building. We were all big fans of Ellie because of the songs she’d written for the Shangri-Las, “Leader of the Pack” and another song Blondie always did, “Out in the Streets.” Richard asked her if she would sing backup on a couple of songs. Ellie came with the two women who were part of her trio. I sat in the control room, watching as they sang. They were flawless. Their harmonies were just ridiculously tight and good. As it turned out, one of the songs they sang on—“In the Flesh”—became our first international hit. It went to number one in Australia after it was played on their most popular TV music program, Molly Meldrum’s Countdown. Molly always claimed that he played it by accident, wink, wink; we wondered . . .
To promote the album in the U.S., Private Stock made a poster they plastered all over Times Square. Not a poster of Blondie but of me, on my own, in a see-through blouse, full frontal. We had insisted that the whole band be on the poster—and the record company nodded and said sure, no problem. The way it went down, this very cool Japanese photographer, Shig Ikeda, had done a series of head shots for each of us—along with the customary group shots for the album cover and for general PR. Shig had done this extra one of me in that see-through shirt, which management swore they would crop to just the head. Chris told me later that more than one person he spoke to thought it was an ad for a massage parlor.
I was furious. Not because my little nipples were on display to the world, which didn’t bother me that much. There had been photos of me in Punk and Creem that were more revealing. But those were fun and ironic, playing up the whole idea of a pinup in an underground rock magazine, and quite different from some record company suit exploiting your sexuality. Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that, but on my terms, not some executive’s. I stormed into Private Stock and confronted the executive—who shall remain nameless—and said, “Well, how would you like it if it was your balls that were exposed.” He said, “That’s disgusting!” And I thought, Now, there’s a double standard, and I wondered about his balls too.
Chris and I now lived in an apartment in a brownstone on Seventeenth Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Gary was no longer living with us—the charges against him had been dropped and he didn’t have to hide anymore. Our new place was a cross between a loft and an attic. The ceilings sloped and were lower in the back than in the front, which was a seldom-used living room.
On set with Joan in 2017.
Veronica Ibarra
Sean Pryor
Chris took a lot of photos in that apartment. He set up a darkroom with an enlarger and when the photos were printed he would hang them on a line underneath the skylight in our big kitchen. Maybe one of the best-known photos from that time is the one where I’m holding out a flaming frying pan and wearing a dress that Marilyn Monroe had supposedly worn in The Seven Year Itch. Our downstairs neighbor, Maria Duval, an aspiring actor, had bought the dress at an auction and loaned it to me. There is a story to that photo.
About a year after we moved in, while we were out on tour, Chris’s mother called us. “Don’t be alarmed,” Stel said, “but your house just burned down.” Although we never found out how the fire started, I had a hunch about it that made me sick to my stomach. Before going on the road, we had arranged for Jimmy’s younger sister Donna Destri to stay in our apartment and look after the cats. Trying to make it more comfortable for her, I had put a little TV on a box by her bed. I had plugged it into an electric outlet by the kitchen wall that I had never used before. I had a horrible feeling that it might have shorted out and set fire to the mattress. The only good news was that Donna wasn’t hurt. The cats survived too, by hiding in a closet.
Being on tour meant that it would be two or three weeks before we could get back home. When we finally did get back, it was hugely upsetting. The place was strewn with debris from the fire. And because people were able to just walk into our apartment and take things, they did. Although the only items they stole that really mattered to me were some little pieces of jewelry I’d gotten from my mother. Fortunately, Chris had his guitar and camera with him. So he set up a photo session in the burned-out kitchen. The walls were caked in soot and the range was covered in ash. I put on Marilyn’s dress, which had been badly singed in the fire, and our latest close call (which wasn’t all that close) became a work of art.
Curtain Up
Brian Aris, 1979.
NOT ALL THE PIECES OF FAN ART IN THIS BOOK ARE PORTRAITS OF ME. Some are works created by fans that they simply wanted to give me. I like to think that while they were drawing and printing, they were listening to me singing our songs. My old friend Steven Sprouse, who designed many of my famous looks, used to always listen to music while he sketched. Without fail the music was blasting away while he worked—which is how a lot of the artists I know do their work. This may sound like the bragging of an outsized ego, but it’s not always my music they listen to. And the influence of any music on artwork is kind of a romantic notion. Still, as I look at all these interpretations of me, my face, my characters through the years, I am touched by it. Many of these images are taken directly from famous photographers’ shots of me, like Chris Stein, Mick Rock, Robert Mapplethorpe, Brian Aris, Lynn Goldsmith, and Annie Liebowitz—yet the works have something noticeably their own. Something in the eye of the beholder as they say. The feelings of the artist are present whether from an accomplished illustrator or drawings from the hand of a younger, less experienced scribbler and that’s the icing on it for me.
Rob’s additions and overview
of the fan art concept are exceptional, like all his work, and he’s also come up with the idea of starting a website where fan art works like this can be posted; an interactive book. I LOVE IT!
At the Guggenheim the other night I met up with a producer friend of mine, Charlie Nieland, who worked on my solo album Necessary Evil. We had come to see the Hilma af Klint collection on loan from the Swedish Museum of Art. Hilma started drawing when she was a young girl, then dedicated her life to drawing and painting and studying art. Who knows if any of my Fan Art artists carried on into the future with their interests in portraiture or other schools of art. Most likely I’ll never know. Very likely I’d be glad if they did.
Every musician, actor, artist I’ve ever met always says, “It’s the fans that make it happen for us.” So again it’s a chain reaction, interaction, and the proof is here in my book. For me it’s a way of saying thank you . . .
7
Liftoff, Payoff
Sean Pryor
Courtesy of Debbie Harry’s personal collection
I don’t like to dwell in the past. You do something, if you’re lucky you learn from it, and you move on. What was I learning? How to express myself, how to get better at what I was doing, where I fit into the picture, how to be in control of my own life. How to better express myself? Yes, that happened. How to improve my performance and better position myself? Yes, that too. But the control part? Not so much. Some kind of control you’ve got, when you’ve signed your life away on so many dotted lines and they’ve strapped you to the head of a rocket. The lesson was really the same as it ever was: survive and find a way to create while you’re hurtling through space.
Strapped to a rocket and ready to be launched or, as Chris said, “chasing the carrot”? This was that time when we really took off. I mean, took off. It was a riotous, breathless, rest-less, crazy period, much of it a blur now, from the speed with which it all unfolded. After the release of our first album, we played a bunch of shows in New York and then in February ’77 we hit the road, for the first time. And we stayed on the road. And stayed . . . First we went to L.A., where we were put up at the Bel Air Sands. Our manager had made a deal with the owner: free rooms in return for some free shows. The shows were supposed to take place on a cruise ship. When it came down to it, however, the ship was declared unseaworthy and the permit for a concert was denied. In the meantime, each night we drove in our rented van from the Bel Air to the Whisky a Go Go on Sunset.
But before the shows, we first had to sign a contract. Peter Leeds, the Wind in the Willows’ old manager, had come back into our lives, offering to manage Blondie. He wasn’t the first to make that offer. Before him, our neophyte managers were these cute little potheads from the Bronx. Oh God, they were so adorable and funny, and crazy about Blondie. They came down to CBGB’s, these two munchkin guys dressed like 1970s disco boys with wide-lapeled shirts and long collars and flared pants. But somehow, we were still flattered that they were paying attention to us. Then they said, “We want to manage you.” God knows why. There was no contract or anything. They just started preparing different things, posters or buttons or T-shirts, and I think they tried to book us somewhere. Leeds’s bolder strategy was to tell us that he’d booked us these gigs in L.A. Unfortunately, his strategy worked.
At that time, the whole L.A. scene was wide open. The Whisky a Go Go had been famous in the sixties as a platform for so many great rock bands but was apparently feeling the competition from the new, fancier clubs that were opening up. The Whisky was looking for something fresh and new to restore it to its former glory. It was the right place at the right time to make an impact and we really wanted to do these shows. Wanted to do them so much that we signed a five-year management contract with Leeds.
Los Angeles was all we could have hoped for. It was a big turnaround for Blondie. Rodney Bingenheimer, a local, influential DJ with an uncanny knack for finding new music who had his own radio show on KROQ, flipped out over us, played us all the time, and had us on his show. In spite of its being “commercial,” KROQ was more like a college station and Rodney had complete control of his playlist. He was known for playing music from the hip new kids—and helping those bands to break out. There was even an L.A. Blondie fan club that was presided over by Jeffrey Lee Pierce, a sweet kid who later would have a great band called the Gun Club, which Chris would end up producing. Jeffrey had dyed his hair blond to look like mine. The first time we played in L.A., people were still dressing like hippies—and here we were, dressed in black, or in our little mod outfits. But the audiences really responded to us. When we went back to the Whisky to do more shows later that year, it looked like everyone in the audience had been raiding the secondhand stores—and the girls were wearing cute mod miniskirts instead of those floor-length floral things.
Tom Petty opened for us the first week. The second week we played with the Ramones, which was when things got crazier. There were just a few very small dressing rooms upstairs at the Whisky, which we all shared. Both bands, girlfriends, guests, and various hangers-on all crammed into these little rooms. Joan Jett was a regular visitor, Ray Manzarek of the Doors was there, and so was Malcolm McLaren, who was in town trying to get the Sex Pistols a U.S. deal. One night Malcolm got into some kind of argument with Johnny Ramone and Johnny chased him out of the dressing room, swinging a guitar at his head. Another night, a man came upstairs dressed entirely in black, including his hair, his beard, and his moustache. He wore a cape, aviator shades, a huge cross on a chain, and an “In the Flesh” button on his lapel. Phil Spector. He was flanked by Dan and David Kessel, two tall, good-looking, impeccably dressed twins who were his entourage that night. They ushered the Ramones and everyone out of the room, except us. While the glamorous twins stood by the door, keeping everyone out—or maybe keeping us in—Phil kept up a long monologue into the early hours of the morning.
Buried somewhere within the endless ramble was an invitation to his mansion. I really didn’t want to go because I didn’t want to tire myself out. The legend of Phil Spector, of course, always fascinated me, so I was torn about the invite. I’d heard a lot about him, loved his music, and was attracted to his madness, but I was singing every night, two sets a night, with no time off. I didn’t want to have to talk, I wanted to rest so I could do the next show. But Peter decided we needed to go. Phil’s walled mansion was really quite close to the Strip. I remember the icy AC and how very “Phil Spector” he was. Chris remembers Phil greeting us with a Colt .45 in one hand and a bottle of Manischewitz in the other.
There were a few other guests that night, including Rodney Bingenheimer and Leeds, who might have been hoping we’d work with Phil on a record. Everyone had to sit down; Phil didn’t want anyone walking around. He was entertaining everyone with his W. C. Fields imitation. At one point Phil sent out for pizza. Then he sat at his piano and started playing. He wanted me to sit on the bench next to him and sing “Be My Baby” and some Ronettes songs with him. He kept making me sing and sing. I really didn’t want to, because I had so many shows, but Phil was in his zone and was not to be denied. Then a little later, when we were sitting together on the couch, Phil took out his gun, stuck it into the top of my thigh-high leather boot, and said, “Bang, bang!”
Dennis McGuire
High tea.
top row: Siouxsie Sioux, Viv Albertine, me
bottom row: Pauline Black, Poly Styrene, Chrissie Hynde
Chris Stein
Phil was working with Leonard Cohen at that time and he took us into the music room, wanting to play us something, but he played it at top volume so it just sounded distorted. All I really wanted to do was go back to the hotel and get some sleep. You never really get enough sleep on tour, and with two shows a night you have to take it where you can. I do think it would have been great to work on a record with Phil and perhaps we could have pursued it. Peter Leeds may have butted heads with Phil, which held us back. He did end up working with the Ramones. Going by what Joey and Johnny said, it wasn�
��t easy. He wanted total control. He was a genius, he had a gun, and his paranoia was enormous—and that doesn’t always end well. I do find it sad he’s in prison—sadder still for the poor woman that he lured to his mansion and then shot and killed. It’s awful: it is madness that such a brilliant mind, such an influential talent, as Phil Spector—the man who created the Wall of Sound, this seminal contribution to rock ’n’ roll—now sits behind bars, in poor health, rotting away in a prison hospital.
After our last Whisky show we went to San Francisco and played at the Mabuhay Gardens. It was a small Filipino club that had gone punk with a vengeance. For his promotional efforts, its owner and emcee, Dirk Dirksen, became known as the “Pope of Punk.” This was a real city like New York or Chicago, with a diversity of occupations and frustrations. The girls were stylish and pretty, so the boys in the band had some appropriately wild times. I had a few wild times of my own fighting off some very aggressive women; some were after me and some were after Chris. And there was a wild party in an art gallery that the guys broke into—literally broke into, a brick or a cinder block through the front door. We were high on the energy of those few weeks in L.A.; everyone was walking in the footsteps of rock history—and we had a reputation to build!