by Debbie Harry
I think that I had a certain amount of innocence about it all. I would be onstage and there’d be five thousand people pulsing their desire at me. You could feel the heat of it. The raw, animal physicality. Feel them transmitting this strong sexuality. Picking up on it, then working to turn them on even more. And the frenzied feedback cycle would keep building and building . . . This was real. Very real.
But looking back, I think my ego had run amok. Really, it was just business as usual. I was just part of the game, a cog in the machine. I mean, you can pretty much sell anything when the corporate structure gets behind it and turns art into commerce. I laid this theory on one of the many labels I’ve been signed to and they were gagging. For a punk, this confrontation was a revelation.
I was even a punk as a pinup. There was a magazine most of America bought called TV Guide. One of the ads in the back was for a company specializing in posters of American pinups like Farrah Fawcett, Suzanne Somers, and “Blondie,” as they called the poster they sold of me. I liked that I was on the fans’ bedroom walls, helping them to entertain themselves. You can’t control other people’s fantasies or the illusion they’re buying or selling. You could say that I was selling an illusion of myself. But the biggest seller is always sex. Sex is what makes everything happen. Sex is why people dress nice, comb their hair, brush their teeth, and take showers. In the entertainment field, sex appeal, looks, and talent are the primary factors.
There are hazards to that, though. There were many times when people would review how I looked instead of how our music sounded. I didn’t do Blondie to become famous for my looks. When I started out, rock music didn’t want girls to be anything but window dressing, something to stand there and look pretty and sing “Ooh, ooh, ooh” or “La, la, la.” That wasn’t me. I tried it for a short time in the Wind in the Willows and knew for sure that it wasn’t me. Like most girls of my generation, I’d been programmed since childhood to look for a strong man to carry me off and look after me. I bought into those fantasies as a kid at least to some degree, but by the time I was in my midtwenties I was done with that. I was wanting to have control, and as Dad always said, I was too damn independent for my own good. I looked for adventure and new experiences instead of settling down. I needed to keep learning more and more. I felt like I was a woman with a man’s brain and initiative and strength—and being cute does not make you an idiot. One thing I did learn in this crazy world was how desperately important it is for me to keep a sense of humor.
We had finished our UK tour with a number one album and now, just weeks later, we were about to release the biggest-selling single of our career. It all started with a phone call from Giorgio Moroder. Giorgio was the godfather of disco, the producer and songwriter and hit maker behind those great Donna Summer singles. He also wrote electronic music for movies and he was working on the theme song to a new Paul Schrader film, American Gigolo, starring Richard Gere as a stud for hire. Giorgio wanted Blondie to perform the song. He’d written the music. For the lyrics, Stevie Nicks’s name was mentioned, but he’d ended up writing them himself. He gave us a cassette tape with a demo of the song he’d called “Man Machine.”
Giorgio is a real ladies’ man, with real Italian machismo, and always had beautiful girlfriends and women around him. I couldn’t sing Giorgio’s lyrics because they came from the perspective of a man with huge sexual power. So, I took the job of writing new lyrics. We asked to see the film. Paul Schrader invited us up to his room at the Pierre Hotel, where we all watched the rough cut on video. The visuals were what fascinated me about the movie. Such subtle, evocative colors, which I later learned were pulled from the palette of Giorgio Armani, and that stunning image of a beautiful car driving down the coast highway. I walked back to our apartment with the visuals fresh in my mind and the music in my head and the first lines came to me instantly. “Color me your color baby. Color me your car.” Once I was home I wrote them down right away. The rest of the song, as they say, just wrote itself. It had to be “Call Me,” because that’s what Richard Gere’s character said to all the women. We went into the studio with Giorgio for just one afternoon and recorded. It was released as the first single from the soundtrack album and shot straight to number one in the U.S., UK, and Canada, and number two in the dance charts. It would turn out to be the biggest-selling single in America that year.
I performed that song on The Muppet Show. Surprisingly, it was a “moment” for me. I was never a Muppets fan—it was way too goody-goody for me—but after I saw Dizzy Gillespie on the show I thought, If he did it, I want to do it. So, I flew to Elstree Studios in England and had such a fabulous time. Jim Henson, the Muppets’ creator, was, I think, a big pervert, in the best possible way. He had a cleverly twisted sense of humor and he was giving smart motives and observations to his characters. He and Frank Oz, who performed Miss Piggy and Animal and Fozzie Bear, were like these strange old hippies, sweet but subversive. They dressed me as a Frog Scout and I talked to the scouts about earning their badges. I also taught them how to pogo. I sang “One Way or Another”—I’m not sure if they realized that it was about a stalker—and I did a duet with Kermit on “Rainbow Connection.” I sang with the Muppet Band and I became the pinup of the Pond 4 troop. What could be better?
Moving on . . . I’ve been thinking about Andy Warhol and what an impact he had on my life. Andy was the master of blurring the line between art and commerce. His art played with the conventions of commerce—marketing, mass production, branding, popular culture, advertising, celebrity. He also blurred the line between serious and playful. He was very serious about his work, but he approached it with a sense of humor. His work ethic was incredible. He would wake up early every day and go to his studio and paint, break for lunch, and work all afternoon—often spending hours on the phone—then at night he would always go out and socialize. He went everywhere. In fact, I first met him—and his dazzling entourage—when I was waiting tables at Max’s. I admired Andy so much. Like Andy, I felt the influence of Marcel Duchamp and a kinship to Dada and Popism, which became foundational to what I was creating.
Andy and the Amiga 2000 in 1985.
Allan Tannenbaum
To my amazement, we actually became acquainted. Chris and I found ourselves on Andy’s invitation list. He would ask us to dinner sometimes. He didn’t eat much; he’d often cover up his plate with a napkin and take it with him and leave it on a ledge somewhere for a hungry street person. Later on, he invited us to his parties at the Factory on Union Square. Andy would invite all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds, uptown, downtown, artists, socialites, eccentrics, you name it. Andy, in his way, was very sociable and hung around with any-and everybody. One of his great skills was that he was a very, very good listener. He would sit there and suck all of it in. His curiosity was endless. He was also extremely supportive of new artists. Chris and I adored Andy—and to find out that he was a fan of ours was heavenly.
Andy put me on the cover of Interview magazine and he threw a party for us at Studio 54 when “Heart of Glass” went to number one in America. Now that we weren’t on the road, we had gotten to know him a little, and the idea of Andy’s doing my portrait came up; somewhere, at some point, Andy had remarked that if he could have anyone else’s face, it would be mine.
How it worked was that first Andy took some photos of you. He used one of those unique Big Shot Polaroid cameras that looked like a shoebox with a lens on it. The Big Shot was designed for portrait use only—and the quality of the shots was often striking. Perfect for Andy. After taking the Polaroids, he would show them to us and ask quietly—Andy was very soft-spoken—“Well, which one would you like?” I saw a couple that I thought were good but I said, “That’s really up to you.” He’s the artist; it seemed to be the safest thing to have him choose. I’ve lived with that Andy Warhol portrait for a long time now, so I’m much more used to it, but seeing all these portraits of yourself for the first time, by an artist who was so important to you, was startl
ing. I guess I was just stunned. And humbled. Over the years, Chris and I came across a lot of those cameras from the early seventies and we would always buy them for Andy. We’d find them in junk stores at around twenty-five cents a pop. He’d always be very grateful. The portrait itself has taken on a life of its own—reproduced countless times and exhibited in numerous galleries worldwide. I still have that original Warhol. I can’t imagine parting with it. Well, I will be parting with it briefly next year, when I loan it to the Whitney for a retrospective show of Andy’s work.
Later, Andy called and asked me to model for a portrait he was going to create live, at Lincoln Center, as a promotion for the Commodore Amiga computer. It was a pretty amazing event. They had a full orchestra and a large board set up with a bunch of technicians in lab coats. The techs programmed away with all the Warhol colors, as Andy designed and painted my portrait. I hammed it up some for the cameras, turning toward Andy, running my hand through my hair, and asking in a suggestive Marilyn voice, “Are you ready to paint me?” Andy was pretty hilarious in his usual flat-affect way, as he sparred with the Commodore host.
I think there are only two copies of this computer-generated Warhol in existence and I have one of them. Commodore also gave me a free computer, which I passed on to Chris. Chris loves equipment. Our apartment was starting to look like the cockpit of a 747 with all the computers and synthesizers and electronics and wiring. Chris wanted very much at the time to have his own twenty-four-track studio. This way he could set up his own label and work with other bands. But that would cost a bunch of money. Well, it just so happened I’d been offered a whole bunch of money to endorse a line of designer jeans.
Look how cute we are, Freddie!
Bobby Grossman
Gloria Vanderbilt, the designer for Murjani, and I met just once, very, very briefly, just a hello. She fascinated me. She had led the most extraordinary life: a socialite and an heiress who became an actress, artist, writer, model, and fashion designer. She was what really interested me about doing those ads. That and the Popist idea. I wanted to make the ads as relevant to my life as they were to selling jeans, more like art rock videos. We invited our friends the Lounge Lizards, James Chance, and Anya Phillips to be in the commercial. But what I remember most about this little escapade in art and commerce was how tight those pink jeans were. Ridiculously tight. In fact, I needed several good-looking men to help me get them off.
Memory is subjective. A lot of it depends on the angles you see things from. Having conversations about politics or money—or who’s taking what drugs when and how—is like Rashomon revisited. Everyone likes to take credit for discovering us, for making me a star, for taming those savage little maniacs running wild in the studio. That last one seems to be Mike Chapman’s memory, though that was never my recollection. But we loved Mike and without him would never have made such great records. Loved him enough that we agreed to spend two months in Los Angeles to make our new album with him. We had always made him come to New York, which he did not like. So it was only fair and appropriate to go to the city of cars, where you had to drive to get anywhere, to make the album entitled Autoamerican.
They put us up at the Oakwood Apartments, which we hadn’t realized were on the other side of the hill in Burbank. They were full of transients and drug dealers; we were often swarmed by unmarked cars that would suddenly appear and surround a cab or truck and arrest some guy, just like the good old days in New York. Except that it wasn’t New York, it was Burbank. The thought of spending two months waking up there every morning and driving to United Western Studios in Hollywood wasn’t a happy one. Then one day, we heard a huge racket from police choppers over our heads, like something out of Vietnam. Someone had been shot in the parking lot. That gave us an excuse to get out of Dodge and hightail it over the hill. So, we moved into the Chateau Marmont, into one of those great old bungalows they have down below the hotel, near the pool. This little bungalow was much more to our taste. Sadly, the bungalows may have become more famous after John Belushi died in one of them years later.
Autoamerican was a very different album to make than Eat to the Beat. We very much wanted to create a work that went beyond the “valley of the dolls” and beyond what Blondie was known for. Popular music had become so compartmentalized. All these little camps for people to join, making them an easier target for the industry to sell things to. We wanted to make music that would cross over these boundaries, bring people together. Autoamerican’s theme was diversity—musical, cultural, and racial. There were all sorts of different musical styles: rap, reggae, rock, pop, Broadway, disco, jazz.
Is there a hairdresser in the house?
Bobby Grossman
When the record company heard it, they were nonplussed. But by this point we were used to their saying, “Where are the hits?” Because we had hits, we ignored them. Just like we learned to ignore the critics who turned on Blondie because of our hits and accused us of selling out. Ah, these little armchair heroes, battling on the front lines for the purity of pop and rock. No blurring of the line between art and commerce for them! In a particularly idiotic one-star review, Rolling Stone accused us of “proclaiming the death of pop culture” with this album.
By the eighties, new wave had already been co-opted by the mainstream, just as punk had been and the hippies before that. You couldn’t move for glossy, major-label new wave bands. It was all too safe for our liking. We wanted to do something radical. We didn’t call ourselves new wave—maybe it was the critics who labeled us that—and we were doing what punks do, which is break down walls. I had really had enough of doing what other people wanted or expected me to do.
On Autoamerican we did a subversive disco song about Satan, “Do the Dark.” We did a score to an imaginary film, “Europa.” We did a torch song by Lerner and Loewe from Camelot, “Follow Me.” We’d gone to see the movie, and afterward Chris couldn’t get the song out of his head. I suspect that the rest of the band thought he’d lost his mind. On “T-Birds” we had the Turtles’ Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan sing backup. They were these sweet, funny guys who would come to our L.A. gigs and say, “Write us a hit song so we’ll be able to work for another ten years.” They’d had a couple of big singles in the sixties and really knew how to work it. Then they packed it in, joined Frank Zappa’s band, and became Flo and Eddie.
We also recorded “The Tide Is High,” a rocksteady/reggae song by the Paragons that we first heard on a compilation album in London. Chris and I fell in love with it. We asked the Specials if they would play on it, but they couldn’t or wouldn’t, I don’t remember which, so we brought in session musicians. Until then, we’d never had so many outside musicians on one of our albums. They included four percussionists, jazz horns, a thirty-piece orchestra, and a mariachi band. “The Tide Is High” was our first single from this “album with no hits.” It went to number one in the U.S., the UK, and several other places.
Our second single, “Rapture,” was a rap song but with a downtown rock sort of twist. We loved rap. It was still very underground at that point, but “Rapture” went to the top of the charts. I’m told it was the first rap song to make number one and it was the first with its own original music. All the rap songs up to that point were done using rhythm tracks and licks from existing songs. We shot the video for it in New York and asked our hip-hop and street art friends to be in it. There were Lee Quiñones; Jean-Michel Basquiat playing a DJ; and Fab 5 Freddy, who had taken Chris and me to our first rap show in the Bronx. I name-checked Freddy in the song and also Grandmaster Flash, another pioneer. We asked him to be in the video too, but he didn’t make it. The voodoo man in the white suit and top hat was played by a break-dancer, William Barnes. He helped us find some genuine voodoo dancers and brought along three Haitian girls. During the shoot, one of the girls started behaving like she really was possessed and fell into a trance. We had to stop while William tried to bring her out of it.
The “Rapture” video was rolling out with its premi
ere on the TV program Solid Gold. It was also the first rap video on MTV. When I hosted the TV show Saturday Night Live in 1981 we brought a hip-hop band with us, Funky 4 + 1. I tried to get the TV crew to set up a table with two turntables, so that they could do their scratching and dance performance during the show. But the execs were too nervous and only allowed them to perform during the credit roll at the end. Once they saw what it was about, I think they regretted not having them in the show, because it was so great. It’s funny how the entertainment industry was so scared of hip-hop. Chris and I were so turned on by it. Chris was so buzzed that he talked to some people in the music industry about all these great bands. Every one of them told him that rap was a fad and it would soon go away.
Studio 54.
Allan Tannenbaum
Autoamerican was released in November 1980. It went into the top ten but didn’t reach number one. We had decided not to tour with it. Or Chris and I had decided. Chris thought that being on the road all the time was a waste of time. He felt that his best efforts were better spent being creative than dogging around doing physical labor. Chris is not a road warrior like Clem is. He’s Mensa material with an IQ of God knows what and he found it objectionable to be dragged around, more and more exhausted, unable to do all the other things that interested him.