by Debbie Harry
Blondie was a real band in the traditional hippie sense. It was an attempt at democracy; everyone shared in the profits, everyone had a position to take, everyone got to say what they thought, and every viewpoint was heard. But it took a while for us to figure out the division of labor. Chris’s job was to make a lot of the decisions, both creative and business. My job was to be the front person and the big mouth, the subject of interviews and the object of photography. The guys had to make their contribution to the music and keep up a strong rock ’n’ roll image. No matter how late they’d been up the night before, they still had to get up onstage and play their asses off. But I was being run ragged. I went out on promo tours by myself for three months at a time while everybody was at home, wondering why we weren’t out on the road playing. For good or bad, the buck stopped at me. We’d tasted freedom during those few months off the road. While the band was often a battle of wills—and we struggled constantly to avoid becoming formulaic—all these different creative possibilities kept arising. So, we decided to explore them. Chris and I wanted to make an album that synthesized black and white music, not just a rock band covering a black song or writing a song that referenced black music but a true collaboration between a black act and a white act. We were serious about it. We thought it would be very interesting socially as well as musically. The racial issue was and still is very heavy in the U.S.
2017 “Fun” video shoot. What were those lyrics?
Pola Esther
The first artists we thought to work with were Bernard Edwards and Nile Rodgers. We had been Chic fans for years. We’d met them briefly at the Power Station when Blondie was recording Eat to the Beat and they were working with Diana Ross. Later we got to know them socially. One time, Chris and I took Nile to a high school in Queens. We walked into the gymnasium where the kids were break-dancing and rapping and the only song they were scratching on was “Good Times.”
Chic had had all these commercial hits with songs like “Le Freak” and “Good Times,” and we’d had all these commercial hits, like “Heart of Glass,” “The Tide Is High,” and “Rapture”; they were in a niche and we were in a niche; we were trying to sound like them sometimes and sometimes they were trying to sound like us; so we thought it would be a good idea to see what happened if we met in the middle. Luckily, they were as interested in us as we were in them. This was before they’d worked with David Bowie on Let’s Dance, and with Madonna on Like a Virgin, so we were the first rock artists they’d decided to work with in that way. The collection was later to be entitled KooKoo.
It was a full-on collaboration. Nile and Bernard wrote four songs, Chris and I wrote four songs, and we wrote two more songs as a foursome. And it was so much fun to record. They would start the sessions by telling a lot of racial jokes. My face would hurt from laughing sometimes. We had Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale of Devo on backing vocals for “Jump Jump” and they were credited as Spud Devo and Pud Devo. I loved that album. I feel that we were on the cusp of creating a style of music that exists today without a second thought but was unprecedented then. I guess we were a few years too soon.
10
Blame It on Vogue
Chris Stein
If you are a woman and you want to feel inadequate and anxious, then get yourself a copy of Vogue and start flipping through it. Works like a charm. It certainly worked that way for me. Not just Vogue, of course, but any of the high-fashion magazines: I couldn’t help myself, I’d keep on reading looking for some kind of Holy Grail, I guess, but getting more and more depressed. But every now and then, a jewel would fall into my lap and save the day, like an article about Frischzellentherapie—fresh cell therapy—which was being offered at this exclusive clinic in Switzerland. I’d gotten to the age where I had abused my body enough to have seen the enemy at the gate. And here was a treatment that claimed to offer an almost miraculous restoration of beauty and health. As the article explained: We are born with trillions of cells that are constantly dying off and being replaced by new ones. However, over time, as we get stressed out or overworked, or don’t get enough sleep, or eat terribly, or drink too much, or do a bunch of heavy drugs, the new cells can’t keep up with the pace of the destruction. And to my understanding, as the body fails to replenish its dead cells, the aging process starts to pick up the pace. For the last seven years, Chris and I had been poster children for how to speed up that cellular destruction. I took note.
Once Blondie became successful, the pressures of the music industry and the continuing demands for more material, more tours, more press, had taken us to pretty much our limit. Throw in the constant bickering between band members and the lack of understanding from our new management, and we were fried. We were always trying to inject new energy into the band and our music, and now here was something that promised to inject new energy into our bodies. I clipped that article from Vogue and carried it around with me for a long time.
We had finished recording KooKoo. It was time to start thinking about the album artwork, which is when Chris thought of H. R. Giger, the great master of fantastic realism. Chris was a big fan of his work. We had met him in 1980, at a party at the Hansen Gallery, where they were exhibiting his work. When we arrived, Hans was standing there with an Oscar statuette in his hand, posing for the press. He had just won the Oscar for his work on the Ridley Scott movie Alien, for which he created the spaceship, the scenery, and that extraordinary creature, the beautiful, horrible mix of biology and machine, the Alien. I loved how he played with these opposites. Seeing fine art of such high quality in a science fiction movie was unusual and exciting.
Since the gallery wasn’t packed out, we went up to say hello to Hans and his wife, Mia, and we invited them back to our apartment. Hans told us that this was only his second time in America. He was from Switzerland and didn’t much like leaving Zurich. But, he told us, no city in the world inspired him like New York. New York was a black-magic city, he said. The horizontal line of the subway and the tall, narrow skyscrapers joined together to make a kind of inverted crucifix. Those paintings he did later about New York City may in part have resulted from this visit.
So when it came time to do our album sleeve, Chris and I asked Hans if he would come up with a concept and he agreed immediately. He borrowed a photo that the British photographer Brian Aris had taken of me, with my hair brown and combed back sharply off of my face. Then he painted over it, adding four huge spikes that went in one side of my head and out the other. Giant acupuncture needles, he explained. He had just been for acupuncture treatment, which he called “aku-aku.” Hans had a staggeringly thick Swiss-German accent; his English was limited, and he spoke it in a slow and deliberate way. It sounded funny and sweet, and I loved him all the more for it. The contrast between his art, which to most people was subliminally frightening, extreme, and almost intolerable, and this cuddly German teddy bear struggling to say “acu” was endearing.
Aku-Aku was also the name of Thor Heyerdahl’s book about his exploration of Easter Island in the 1950s. It was fascinating to watch Hans’s mind at work as he combined elements of wizardry and the mystic stone statues, and juxtaposed those gigantic acupuncture needles. A deliberate echo of the punk safety-pin piercings of the day. And somehow Hans’s Germanic “aku-aku” became KooKoo. Hans elaborated that the spikes going through my head were symbols of the four elements. The source of energy was lightning and the rods would channel the current into my brain. Didn’t hurt a bit!
I loved what he did with my face. I had told Hans that I wanted to make this a clear departure from Blondie—not just in the musical style, but in my persona. Hans had never followed Blondie, as he was more of a jazz man apparently. But it worked out perfectly. It was way too goth for my Blondie image but just perfect for my first solo album. Since we were so happy with the album cover, we decided we would make the videos for KooKoo’s two singles, “Now I Know You Know” and “Backfired,” with Hans. Which meant that we would have to go to his atelier in Zurich. So of
f we went to Switzerland.
Hans and Mia lived in Oerlikon, a quiet, bucolic neighborhood. From the outside, the Gigers’ little house and studio fit right in, except for the garden, where the shrubs were left to grow wild, because Hans liked the random shapes they took. But the interior was definitely in keeping with Hans’s fascination with the macabre. The rooms were dark and decorated with goth and fetish art depicting birth, sex, and death. On one table there was a skull; Hans told us that his father had given it to him when he was six years old. Next to his Oscar statuette Hans had placed a shrunken head, the perfect memento mori.
We were there for two or three weeks shooting sixteen-millimeter films that would later be transferred to video. Hans made me an elaborate bodysuit painted with bio-mechanoids—hybrids of humans and machines. They fitted me with a full face mask—which meant two straws stuck up my nose. Ha! I already knew a thing or two about straws up the nose. Then they smeared my face with this fast-setting material used for dental bridges. Yikes! Not so good—I freaked at being closed off like that. So they had to whip the mask off, before it was completely solid. Hans was disappointed with the warped-looking features we were left with, but we topped it with a long black wig and he was able to make it work. Hans was in the video too, wearing a copper, stencil-like mask that was cut out of parts used in making watches. A Swiss-watch stencil mask, so beautiful.
He also made an elaborate Egyptian sarcophagus out of Styrofoam. This time Hans pierced my body with gigantic acupuncture needles, using them like wands to attract the power of the lightning. And KooKoo was brought to life like a latter-day Frankenstein. The sarcophagus was incredible but was too fragile for me to lie down in, so he cut a doorway, in the shape of the sarcophagus, for me to come through. I emerged as the reanimated bio-mechanical woman and started to dance around in my painted bodysuit costume airbrushed through the copper watch stencils. While all this witchery was going on, Chris was there with his Hasselblad shooting stills of the wizard Hans and this creature—me—from one of Hans’s paintings that he’d brought to life with his art. Those shots Chris took of me are some of my favorite photos ever.
At some point during our stay, I found myself jonesing for smack. Drugs were pretty common in New York at that time and I’d been chipping and dipping for a while now. When I mentioned this to Hans, he handed me a round black ball of opium to eat. Hans was not just a meticulous craftsman, an obsessive artist, and a perfectionist, but he was also a generous and charming man and the perfect host.
I had not forgotten that article from Vogue. Since we were already going to be in Switzerland, Chris and I decided to pay a visit to La Prairie, the Frischzellentherapie clinic. It was on Lake Geneva in the little town of Clarens-Montreux in the French part of Switzerland. Clarens originally became famous as the location for Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s wildly popular La Nouvelle Heloise. Stravinsky wrote The Rites of Spring and Pulcinella there, Tchaikovsky composed his violin concerto there, and Nabokov, the author of Lolita, died in the town. And now, here we were . . . Clarens, with its manicured gardens and its picturesque paths, has historically pulled in a lot of tourists. Chris and I rented boats, drove through the scenic Alps, and visited neighboring Montreux, host city for the famous jazz festival. And then we checked into La Prairie.
The clinic has reimagined itself since then, but back when we were there it was more like a hospital. There were doctors and nurses and a battery of blood tests and X-rays. Then came a series of injections with embryonic cells from a black sheep—why it had to be a black sheep I’ll never know. At that time, stem cell therapy was a new science and people weren’t talking about it like they do today. One of the creators of this therapy and a member of La Prairie’s advisory board was Christiaan Barnard, the surgeon who did the first open heart surgery, which led to the development of heart transplants. He was a forward-thinking scientist, so initially that made me sit up and take note. The shots they gave us were huge and the injections were painful, which is something else that’s changed over the years. After the treatment, we rested up in the clinic-hospital while they monitored us. Chris felt that little black sheep had definitely reenergized him for a while, and it had a positive effect on me too.
When our record company heard KooKoo, they were forced to deal with my potential as a solo artist. And after they weighed their options, it was clear that their hearts weren’t really into it. “What do we do with this?” they wondered. And they never did step up to the challenge. They had not been expecting such a departure from cute, hot little Blondie. They were not enthusiastic at all about my dark hair; they thought it would confuse the fans. They wanted Debbie Harry, not Dirty Harry. They didn’t much like the artwork with my skewered head either, but to be fair they weren’t alone. A number of American record stores refused to stock it, and when our record company in the UK put up posters of the sleeve photo in the London Underground, they were banned—deemed “too disturbing.”
What the record company wanted was for me to keep on making Blondie records. They had developed a market for Blondie—they figured—and that’s where the money was. At that time, it was uncommon for an artist in the music business to make these kinds of departures. For example, when I was offered a part in the movie Blade Runner, which I really wanted to do, the label blocked it. This was ridiculous as far as I was concerned because I was sure it would only have helped sell records. In this day and age, they would figure out how to combine the elements and make the album correspond with the release of the picture, but that wasn’t how it worked then. Of course, it might have helped if Shep had gone in and renegotiated our Blondie deal for the better. But as far as I know, he didn’t. Basically, communication between us and the label was rotten. Apparently, there were problems within the record company as well, with the partners at loggerheads, although we didn’t know that at the time.
KooKoo was never part of a master plan to launch a solo career. It was just Chris and I having the idea of making an album that was equally black and white. Interestingly, just after KooKoo came out, Paul McCartney did “Ebony and Ivory” with Stevie Wonder and as huge A-list artists, they got this gigantic push. You can sell anything if you’ve got enough push. I guess if we were smarter we would have called it Black and White or Oreo or something . . . But KooKoo didn’t do too badly. It made the top ten in the UK charts, earning a silver album, and in America it went gold. And in the meantime Chrysalis released an album of old Blondie hits: The Best of Blondie.
I’ve been trying to think what the best of Blondie was for me. I’ve come to the conclusion that it was the early days of the band when we were struggling artists, scuttling around the Lower East Side just trying to get something going, walking home from work before dawn through the dark, dusty, sweet-dirt smell of the city. Everybody got by on no money. Nobody talked about mainstream success. Who wanted to be mainstream? What we were doing was so much better than that. We felt like pioneers. We were cutting new paths instead of taking the tried and tested roads. Personally, I was also on this desperate mission to discover who I was—and I was obsessed with being an artist. To my mind, desperation and obsession are good things. Ultimately for me, it’s the overwhelming need to have my entire life be an imaginative out-of-body experience. I fed my obsession by making an album with musicians like Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards, or by working with an artist like Hans Giger.
After the flood . . . Blondie, 1981.
Jody Morlock
Brian Aris
Success, when it finally came, quickly started to feel almost anticlimactic, compared with the exhilarating years leading up to it. The public exposure that came with success had a high cost in lost freedoms. The very same freedoms I had gained while clawing my way up the ladder. Success was a paradox with no easy solution. When your face becomes that well-known, you just have to get away from it somehow. You need to get away from it, to stay alive, or at least I needed periods of anonymity. The combination of being famous and being forced and formed into this commerci
al product makes the whole thing so cookie-cutter.
During my year away from being “Blondie,” I don’t think I missed her a bit. Chris and I had been so busy, involved in all sorts of new ventures. We wrote the title song for the John Waters movie Polyester. We cohosted an episode of Saturday Night Live. Chris was busy putting together his own record label, Animal, and producing other artists. The rest of Blondie were doing their own things too. Clem was producing a couple of New York bands and he’d spent some time working in England. Jimmy recorded a solo album. The whole system of the music industry was designed to keep you on the hamster wheel, album-tour-album-tour-album-tour, chasing your tail, never moving forward, or even sideways, or so it felt, but we’d managed to break the rules for a short while. But now they were looking at us to make a new Blondie album.
The Hunter was Blondie’s sixth album. I don’t remember much about that record other than I just didn’t feel comfortable. I always like recording and making albums, but I was in a weird frame of mind, and I think the main reason for that had to do with getting back with the band. Not because things had been so creative and fun during the break. It’s just that there was so much tension in the band. When you’re in any kind of band, there’s always going to be some friction. All these different people with their different ideas and issues, simmering away under pressure, year after year. But now it felt like a major clash of personalities.