by Debbie Harry
Parallel Lines was released in September 1978, our second album that same year. As we toured around Europe once again, it made its way up the charts in several European countries and in Australia. Our single “Hanging on the Telephone” was top five in the UK charts but it went absolutely nowhere in the U.S., not even the bottom hundred. Happy as we were to see that all our hard work was paying off, it was definitely disappointing not to have a hit at home. At the beginning of 1979, while we were on the American tour, we saw that “Heart of Glass” had entered the American charts. And slowly but surely it kept on climbing. We were in Milan, where we’d flown mid-tour to do a TV show, staying at one of those old-fashioned Italian places full of dark wood and velvet, when we got a phone call. It was Chapman. “I’m in the bar,” he said. “Come on down.” So we went downstairs to the lush bar-lounge, wondering what he was doing in Italy, and he greeted us with a bottle of champagne. That’s when we found out that “Heart of Glass” was number one.
Mike put it nicely in a Rolling Stone interview about Parallel Lines: “If you’re going to be in the music business, you gotta make hit records. If you can’t make hit records, you should fuck off and go chop meat somewhere.” Right on, Mike. No meatpacking for us . . .
We were so happy and excited but I’m not sure we had time to let it fully sink in, as we flew straight back to the U.S. to do The Midnight Special, American Bandstand, and The Mike Douglas Show, and finish our U.S. tour. By the time that tour ended, Parallel Lines was in the U.S. top ten and headed for platinum. I can’t complain about that, can I? The hard work did pay off after all.
8
Mother Cabrini and the Electric Firestorm
Chris Stein
Rob Roth
Since we were either on the road or in the studio, you might think we didn’t need an apartment. But of course we did. I found us one uptown: 200 West Fifty-Eighth Street at Seventh Avenue. Actually, it was Stephen Sprouse who discovered the building. After he moved out of the top floor of the old Bowery place, he found an apartment in one of those prewar buildings with high ceilings and rent control.
Sometimes, I would go visit Stephen and we would talk about ideas for my new look. He was a sweet, generous person. When we were on the Bowery, he gave me my much-photographed pair of thigh-high black leather boots from I. Miller, which at that time I could have never afforded. Stephen probably got them from a show, because he was still working for Halston at the time. I had an old black sateen trench coat that was more like an evening coat. When I wore the coat with those boots and a black beret, I looked like Patty Hearst from the SLA crossed with Faye Dunaway in Bonnie and Clyde. Stephen liked that look. He also put me in a Halston black silk, matte jersey dress that I just adored. I wore that dress to death. I wore it to the point where you couldn’t be in the same room with me because it smelled so bad. I still have that stinky old rag, even if it might take a few minutes for me to find it right now. I can always just follow my nose . . .
Shortly after that, he gave me a sort of synthetic fabric sheath dress. Yellow stitched with red. Slits up the side. A boatneck, three-quarter-length sleeves, and a little beaded belt made by his mother, Joanne. Then, as our touring became a little bit more organized, he would send me out with drawings of how to put different pieces together in different ways. I still have those too.
From the first time I set foot in this West Side building, I started making friends with the superintendent. I would knock on his door and chat him up and give him a little money and say, “I really want to live here.” It took some time, but eventually, in October 1978, he gave me a heads-up on a very special apartment and we moved in. It was on the top floor with terraces on three sides. The paint was peeling, the roof leaked around the skylight, and it was drafty. It had originally been the apartment’s old laundry room, I was told. We also had a tar beach over our heads. Lillian Roth, the silent-movie star, had lived there once. I loved it. We had that apartment for a nice long time, three or four years, which was a big change from moving every year. Even when we stopped living there, we held on to it and Chris’s mother, Stel, took it over.
Chris moved his life-sized statue of Mother Cabrini—which, of course, being holy, survived the electric firestorm in our apartment—into a corner of the kitchen. We had a big living room with the usual furniture and a smaller room with a wall of closets. It was amazing to have actual closets and the room could be used as our office. The double-wide terrace at the back of the building was where Chris grew his pot. Chris was a pothead. His was an endless quest for the ultimate high. This often included hash as well, and those pungent aromas were soaked into the fabric of our lives—and into the fabric of our couch and bed. For a short while, we even sold pot as a way to pay the rent. It was a good thing that our rent was so low, because most of our hoped-for profits went up in smoke.
We had a couple of interesting connections back then. There was a Greek gentleman whose name was, shall we say, Ulysses; he’s still around I think, and I don’t want to blow his cover. He was a good-looking middle-aged guy who dealt in some serious weight. We occasionally bought keys from him and sold them in small amounts to an intimate circle of friends. Ulysses was a colorful character and we visited him often. He had a “loft” on Fourteenth Street, which was actually a basement apartment. Since it was an entire floor, he felt entitled to call it a loft, I guess. The place was always full of smiling, cute teenage boys. This made our business efforts, which were pathetic for moneymaking, mostly social.
A more refined source of weed was a sculptor who lived on the fringe of Chinatown. He had a whole building he claimed to have bought from the city for a dollar. He was a good hustler, so I believed him. He was also an artist who understood the layers of dust and debris, the rubble that made up the fabric of our incredible city. “Ray” was very particular about his product and his pot was ultra-strong sensi from Northern California. The pale greenish pollen was sticky and the buds were fat and had very few seeds. It wasn’t cheap, but it was worth every penny. You’d think by the way I’m describing this stuff that I was as big a pothead as Chris—but you’d be wrong. I couldn’t handle it at all. I’d find myself either floating above my body in a state of blank catatonia or in complete paranoia. I marveled at how anyone could even talk after smoking a joint of “Ray’s Famous.” But all the boys loved it.
We also had a connection for this gorgeous Hawaiian Purple. Chris started saving the seeds—a traditional pothead habit—and then he started planting on our terrace, which made for a pretty good garden, with a wall to ensure privacy. We had a friend tend the farm while we were on the road. But when we returned, Chris was crushed to discover that his plants had been pollinated. They were doomed to be less than chibo chibo. They’d lost their purity. Somehow that hit me as a biblical reference. You know, the Garden of Eden and the female polluting the male.
One night in our apartment, while Chris and Glenn O’Brien were watching public access programs on cable TV channel C and chain-smoking giant-sized joints, they cooked up the idea of TV Party. We knew Glenn from CBGB’s. He had a band called Konelrad and he was well-known at Warhol’s Factory. When Andy launched Interview magazine, Glenn was the first editor and he wrote a regular column called “Glenn O’Brien’s Beat.” Public access TV was wild. It was open to any lunatic, joker, or proselytizer who had some message or obsession they wanted to share with the community. Just pony up your $40 or $50 and you’d get an hour of studio time. Glenn’s idea was to do a weekly talk show—a subversive, art underground version of the classic American late-night shows—and he and Chris would cohost. So, that’s what they did. TV Party started in 1978 and ran every week for four years on cable TV, channels D and J. At that time cable was only available from Twenty-Third Street up, which meant that if you were downtown you were out of luck. On the other hand, if you were downtown you were much more likely to be on the show.
All those Tuesdays on Twenty-Third Street. First we would meet in the Blarney Stone, the Irish sh
ot bar across the street from ETC/Metro Access Studios, where the show was broadcast. All these talented oddballs gathered together, Glenn and Chris casually figuring out the theme for the TV Party show that night—perhaps a Fellini bacchanal or maybe a Middle Eastern harem nocturne. Like the beginnings of deconstructed fashion, this was a deconstruction of television. As Glenn put it: “We had a good run, fucking up television. Cursing, getting high, advocating subversion, being party desperados . . .”
TV Party!
Jody Morlock
Bobby Grossman
Amos Poe, the underground filmmaker, was director of photography. Sometimes Amos would get bored and start punching knobs at random, pixelating the screen or inserting sudden jump cuts and shots of people’s shoes. A burst of toxic visuals to mimic the “noise” on set. Behind the camera was Fab 5 Freddy, the visual artist and hip-hop pioneer. Jean-Michel Basquiat would sit there playing with the character generator, writing stuff on the screen like he was graffiti-ing on TV instead of on walls. He wanted to write on the studio wall, but they stopped him after he wrote “mock penis envy” on a blank wall. Jean-Michel took his role as street artist and graffiti philosopher seriously. Andy Warhol loved him. We all did. His graffiti tag “SAMO” was everywhere, the writing on the wall.
TV Party, like a mainstream talk show, had a studio band. The bandleader was Walter “Doc” Steding, musician, painter, director, actor, and general wild man. We first met Walter when he was a one-man band playing violin with electronic accompaniment and would open up for people at CBGB’s. Each of the programs had special guests—Klaus Nomi, David Bowie, Nile Rodgers, David Byrne, Mick Jones of the Clash, Kraftwerk, George Clinton, and the Brides of Funkenstein. There was a phone-in section, where they took unscreened calls to answer questions or just get nutty comments. Sometimes, it seemed like a sex chat line. Chris would always do the show if Blondie wasn’t on the road—and when we were on the road he might send Glenn a video from wherever. I didn’t do it every week, but I would be a guest now and then. I did one show right after we returned from the UK, to give a lesson in how to pogo using a pogo stick.
Glenn was the perfect host with his deadpan, anarchic humor. Chris was pretty good too, with his wry smile and funny asides. Everyone on TV Party was in a band or in the movies, or was an artist, a writer, a photographer, a fashion designer, or all of the above, or just hanging out. One thing fed off of the next, a very DIY sensibility. It never occurred to you at that time to limit yourself to just one thing. You found a niche and you claimed it and you tried to leave your mark like the graffiti artists did. In 2005, Danny Vinik made a film, TV Party the Documentary. I was at the premiere. I sat between Jerry Stiller, the comedian and actor, and Ronnie Cutrone, the artist and one of Andy Warhol’s Factory denizens, and we were all quite riveted by the madness on the screen. It was full of old friends, many long gone. All the original footage had been sewn together in film format and seeing it like that, all in one big gulp on a big screen all those years later, made it super-real. The past became more than just my personal memories. I sat there, soaking in those emotional, intellectual experiences from a previous lifetime, as they were stacked together now into the longest Tuesday night in history.
A few weeks before, I had gone to see another documentary, this one about Paris in the twenties and that great era of American authors who changed the face of modern literature. Paris was the city where they could be free of restrictions and storm ahead with new ideas. There were many obvious parallels between that twenties confluence of writers, artists, actors, and musicians and the punk/underground scene in seventies New York. We had, in some smaller way, transformed post-hippie happenings into a creative eruption of new art forms that presaged the advent of computerization and digital communications. It wasn’t easy. But at the same time, there was a curious simplicity to the way it unfolded.
It’s all about time. Time is what matters. Time had brought me—brought us all—inexorably from the netherworld of the counterculture into the mainstream of today’s culture. Such a very different world. I was harshly criticized in 1978 for showing a slash of red panties onstage at the Palladium; today everything is revealed, nothing is hidden. Boundaries have melted away in favor of an often-boring openness. One silver lining, I guess, is that at least the consciousness has changed for the better around our sexuality: it’s easier to be open about your gender identity and preferences, with less fear of reprisal. There is the concept of a time being “ripe” but now time has sped up. No sooner ripe than rotten. Today it’s all about being famous. But in those days, it was about making something happen. And over time, we did make some things happen.
GLENN DECIDED TO MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT THE DOWNTOWN SCENE. The director was Edo Bertoglio, a Swiss photographer who was part of the TV Party gang and who took photos for Interview magazine and Italian Elle. Edo and his wife, Maripol, a photographer, stylist, and designer, found some financial backers in Italy and work started in late 1980 on New York Beat Movie. It was a snapshot of downtown New York before Mayor Giuliani got on his knees with a toothbrush and a bottle of bleach and cleaned it all up. But it was also a fantasy, an urban fairy tale that starred Jean-Michel Basquiat as a penniless artist wandering around the Lower East Side looking for women to take him in, while he tried to sell his paintings. Those last two things were true. Jean-Michel was homeless at the time.
Chris and I bought the first painting Jean-Michel ever sold, Self Portrait with Suzanne. Suzanne was his girlfriend. Jean-Michel had said something to Chris about needing some money and asked if we wanted to buy a painting. Chris said, “How much?” Jean-Michel said, “Three hundred dollars.” So, we bought a huge Basquiat painting for $300, a ridiculously small amount of money, but Jean-Michel came away saying, “I really took them for a ride!” so we were all happy.
I played the role of a bag lady in New York Beat Movie and there’s a scene in which I ask Jean-Michel to kiss me. When he does, I turn into a fairy godmother and give him a suitcase full of money. That’s the thing I remember most about doing that movie, how much I enjoyed kissing Jean-Michel. He was very soft-spoken and kind of shy and sexy and magnetic, and I had a strong attraction to him. It was a very good kiss.
Just about everybody was in that movie: Blondie; Tish and Snooky; Roberta Bayley; James Chance, a.k.a. James White; Kid Creole; Tav Falco; Vincent Gallo; Amos Poe; Walter Steding; Marty Thau; Fab 5 Freddy; and Lee Quiñones—another member of the Fab 5. The Fab 5 were this graffiti crew from the outer boroughs of New York City that painted subway cars and made the transition from trains to art galleries. These were wonderful undertakings but were belittled by most of the press and the MTA. Some people found it hard to draw a distinction between the kids who would just scrawl away and the real painters who created elaborate moving murals that were genuine works of art. One time, for example, Freddy graffitied cartoons of Campbell’s soup cans in tribute to Andy Warhol. These trains would come into the station to spontaneous applause, people on the platform cheering, “Hell yeah!”
Freddy was also a rapper. I remember him showing up at CBGB’s when we played and just sort of standing there, but he was very noticeable because very few black kids came in. Then in 1977, he took us to our first rap gig. It was at a Police Athletic League event in the Bronx, just a neighborhood thing. All the guys getting up and shouting about their sexuality and their sense of their own power or protesting about their state of living. It was very tribal. The sound system was really bad, but it was live and it was fresh and it was very punk. It was another punk scene running parallel to ours and we loved it.
Meanwhile, New York Beat Movie ran into some kind of money problem and everything stopped. The film sat on a shelf somewhere gathering dust for nearly twenty years. Eventually Glenn and Maripol managed to track it down and get the rights to it, but by that time the audio of the dialogue had vanished. They still had the live music audio, but the dialogue had to be overdubbed and that was kind of complicated. We had to lip-sync what was being sa
id and try to match the mouth movements, and since there was no script nobody really knew what had been said. They had to hire an actor, Saul Williams, to speak Jean-Michel’s part, because Jean-Michel was gone by then. We had always stayed in touch with him—and when his drug problem became too serious he went into a methadone program, but it didn’t last. Jean-Michel died from a heroin overdose in 1988. He was twenty-seven years old.
I’m never taking this outfit off.
Dennis McGuire
The movie, retitled Downtown ’81, finally came out in 2000, along with a soundtrack album of the same name. Nineteen eighty-one was the same year Blondie released our rap song, “Rapture.” Jean-Michel was in our video playing the role of a DJ. He tried to graffiti the blank wall behind him on the set, but the studio boss said no, just like they did at the cable access studio where we shot TV Party. Amazing, isn’t it?
THE ALL-SEEING EYE. THESE DAYS IT’S INESCAPABLE. NO ONE NOW thinks twice about being photographed, or they think about it so much that when they’re not being photographed, they photograph themselves. Chris was a sharp-eyed chronicler and observer, always there with his camera, always taking photos of me and others. I got used to seeing myself through the way he saw me, which I guess makes me also an observer, or an observer once removed. That is one of the interesting by-products of being a subject—being able to look at yourself through someone else’s eyes. On our 1979 album Eat to the Beat there was a song that Jimmy wrote called “Living in the Real World.” It went:
Hey I’m living in a magazine