by Debbie Harry
My producer was Seth Justman, the keyboard player from the J. Geils Band. I wanted a producer who was also a musician. My best working relationships have been with people who play an instrument. And he was also a writer, so working with him was a no-brainer. Before we recorded, I would visit him in Boston, where we would write songs together and discuss the kind of sounds we wanted. A sound that was commercial, was personal to me, and at the same time related to eighties music, with its drum machines and shiny synthesizers. Our concept was to create music that was “loose but tight.” There must have been more than twenty people on that album, some great musicians, including six backing singers and a horn section. Most were Seth’s guys I think, except for James White, my old friend from the downtown days, who played saxophone. I love what James does because he’s always such a unique quantity. He can be completely abstract and off the hook, and he can also play funk. He fit right into that “loose but tight” concept.
Bob Gruen
Chris and I cowrote three songs for Rockbird: the title track, “Secret Life,” and “In Love with Love,” which is one of my favorite songs. It’s beautiful and it works for me, musically and lyrically. I wrote the lyrics for every song on the album with the exception of one, “French Kissin’ in the USA.” That was a song that somebody had sent to Geffen. As soon as I heard it I thought, Wow, what a great song, how come nobody has done this? I found out later that the woman who had sung the original song had submitted it to Geffen to try to get a record deal. Her version was beautiful but she got screwed when I took the song, because I loved it and didn’t know her side of the story. She was not happy about the situation. I wouldn’t have been happy either. It was Rockbird’s biggest hit.
The album came out in November 1986. On the album sleeve there was a big headshot of me, blond this time. I’d been in a color rotation and my hair had been red, brown, and some other colors in between, and now I was back to blond. I was wearing a camouflage dress against a camouflage background. My friend Stephen Sprouse had the idea for the cover and collaborated on it with Andy Warhol. The camouflage pattern was something that Andy had been working with. Steve designed clothes from it in some of the most hysterically anticamouflage colors. At the photo session for the cover, Linda Mason painstakingly did my entire face with a matching camouflage pattern. I was overjoyed when Geffen agreed to release Rockbird with the title in four different colors of Day-Glo ink, so you could buy the colors you liked best. What an honor it was to have both Andy Warhol and Steven Sprouse collaborate on this cover with me!
When the reviews came out almost everybody called Rockbird a “comeback,” a term that I think is thrown around too often. These days, taking three years off between album releases wouldn’t seem odd. I’ve lost count of how many comebacks I’ve had. This comeback unfortunately did not translate into big sales. Part of the problem was that I was fighting a battle on two fronts. Everybody was always saying, “Can we call it Blondie?” or “Are you Blondie?”
When I started out in Blondie, it was before women in rock became as commercially viable as they are today. I had to fight my way into getting record deals and to be taken seriously. But when the eighties rolled around many of those blocks and conflicts started to evaporate. And that turned out to be a mixed blessing: where once we had had a virtual lock on the attention from labels and the public alike, now the field had become much more crowded . . . And reinventing myself beyond “Blondie” was a challenge. But you must know by now that I do love a challenge.
I didn’t tour with Rockbird, for mixed reasons: not wanting to tour without Chris, not wanting to leave him when he still wasn’t completely well, and not wanting to tour with a stage band. But really, I didn’t feel that there was any mad necessity for me to hit the road. Instead I did a few TV and movie things. I was in an episode of George Romero’s Tales from the Darkside, “The Moth,” where I play a sorceress who is dying and convinced that her soul will come back as a moth. I was in a comedy movie too, Forever, Lulu, a.k.a. Crazy Streets, playing a mysterious woman pursued by a cop played by Alec Baldwin in his movie debut.
I was also on Andy Warhol’s show on MTV. Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes, directed by Don Munroe, was one of MTV’s first non–music video programs. It was a show based on Andy’s famous quote about everybody being famous for fifteen minutes, and an extension of Interview magazine—print gone to video. Andy’s guests covered the spectrum: musicians, artists, actors, singers, drag queens, rich, poor, big stars, struggling artists—the same kind of people Andy cultivated off-camera. Andy was really in his element with this show. TV had always been one of his many obsessions, and on this show he was a real star. He asked Chris to write the music and I had a job as an announcer. Jerry Hall was an announcer too.
I was in the first program in 1985 and so were Stephen Sprouse, Ric Ocasek, Moon and Dweezil Zappa, Sally Kirkland, the novelist Tama Janowitz, Bryan Adams, and some flamboyant drag queens from the Pyramid Club. I was also on the last show in 1987. Andy was filming a new episode when he had to go to the hospital. It was for a routine surgery on his gallbladder. But later it came out that Andy was much sicker than he let on. He had never fully recovered from his bullet wounds after Valerie Solanas shot him in 1968. The last episode of Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes ended with footage from his memorial.
Andy’s death hit me hard. A terrible shock. His death was an enormous loss that changed my life as it changed the art world and the social life of New York City. Because Andy had always been a part of everything that went on—going out practically every night to openings, films, concerts. Andy was always curious and open to everything and interested in what everyone was doing. He was a big supporter of me and Chris. After Andy’s death I went into mourning. I didn’t realize this until some time later, but I was actually in mourning for Andy for about two years. It was doubly emotional for me for another reason. Earlier, on the same day that Andy died, Chris and I had split up. I came home that afternoon, not having heard the news about Andy. When Chris told me, the bottom fell even further out of my world. Thirteen years of deep intimacy and creativity with Chris was changing to a different dynamic. And now the sudden death of a revered idol. These were losses beyond tears. I felt myself suspended and spun by a force that left me dazed and miserable.
Bobby Grossman
We never really talked about our breakup to the press. Some interviewers made their own assumptions. Not long ago, when Blondie was on our 2017 UK tour, Chris and I went on Johnnie Walker’s BBC Radio show. Johnnie Walker started going into the whole thing about Chris’s falling ill and he said, “And then you walked out on him.” I was completely taken aback. I looked at Chris and he said nothing, so I let it go. And then he said it again, to Chris this time, ‘When Debbie walked out on you.” I couldn’t believe that he was actually saying that, and he said it twice; I don’t know if he was looking for a fight. I think that somebody must have walked out on him. A lot of times with a man, if they’re having a problem with a girlfriend or a wife, they transpose everything onto you. This has happened to me many times with managers and record company execs, so I shouldn’t have been so shocked. As you well know, though, I have never stopped loving Chris, or working with him, or caring about him, and I never will.
Chris had been saying that he wanted a studio and a loft. I had started exercising with Kerry, who had mentioned in conversation that she owned a loft building in TriBeCa and two floors that were empty, so I said, “Oh, you should let me rent them.” Kerry said that they were in disgustingly bad shape and we should see them first. They were in fact worse than bad; they were horrific. Somehow we got some money and cleaned up and renovated the basement and the first floor, and Chris moved in there alone. I found an apartment down the block from where Chris and I had lived on Twenty-First Street. We continued to see each other every day.
12
The Perfect Taste
Jody Morlock
Brian Aris
How do we edit our life into a de
cent story? That’s the rub with an autobiography or memoir. What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay, and what to ignore? How much of the inner and how much of the outer? What’s going to compel and what might bore? What tone, what voice, what edge, what rhythms, what colors to paint when patching together the memories into a sequence that has some magic to it?
Recently, I was reading Gabriel García Márquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale. I found it so intricate—and had to keep rereading passages so I could keep all the names of the people in his immense family straight. Márquez paints his life story with the same brilliant imagery and beautiful turns of phrase he employs in his novels: the heat, the jungle, the immense physicality. It’s almost frightening to experience, as he transports us back into an alien culture and environment. I remember reading a review of Living to Tell the Tale that was unenthusiastic at best. Do I even stand a chance? My jungle isn’t nearly as exotic as Colombian banana plantations in the 1930s. Well, some might say that the jungle of CBGB’s in the 1970s could come close. But I don’t have nearly as many relatives as Gabriel García Márquez, though I have a surprise coming up in that department.
Even more daunting, though, is the thought of having another person involved in the “edit” of my memories. Losing control of my own art, of my voice—it’s an old fear from a long battle to be who I want to be and create what I want to create. Glenn O’Brien was the editor who took my virginity as a writer. He’d put together a new magazine called Bald Eagle, a collection of stories and poems. Glenn asked me to submit a piece for the first issue. The issue’s theme was 9/11, and I wrote a poem about souls passing. The very idea of having someone molest my sad little poem with their “clammy” hands made me anxious. I mean, I’d been corrected in school of course, but that was a long time ago. It felt so invasive. Having someone reshape my poem was startling and threw me off a little. Glenn knew exactly how I felt by my reaction on the phone. “Oh yeah, this is your first time being edited, isn’t it?” So yes, Glenn O’Brien broke my editing cherry, as it were . . . I’d sometimes imagined having sex with Glenn but not exactly this kind of sex. But now we’ve reached chapter 12 without a body count, and there is no turning back.
Writing my story still feels like unexplored territory. Since I’m too old, too claustrophobic, and too bad at math to travel into outer space, I’ve been forced to go into inner space. Not so physically confined a feeling but maybe even more scary. Looking at what we have so far, it’s good to see that I’ve accomplished more in my life than was ever expected of me. Last year in London, a journalist asked me what I had done that I was most proud of. My answer: Even trying to do it, that was a major step. And sticking with it through everything, because there certainly have been some ups and downs.
This reminds me of when I went to the cigar store.
See, I smoke. Took it up in my sixties. It was never an intention as such, but somehow at some point there I was, drawing and puffing away. Go figure. As a teenager and at various times through the years I had tried and failed to be a smoker. Cigarettes mostly. Pot in the sixties too, but I’m such a lightweight I had to give it up. I marvel at potheads who smoke herb every day, all day, year after year. I just wonder how they do it . . . Anyway, back to my nasty habit, which I have finally been able to maintain.
I’ve admitted my vice, my lack of control, my weakness, but I do try to keep it down to just a few a day. And when I’m working, I definitely cut back to only two or three a day. The one smoke I always enjoy very much is the after-show ritual with a glass of wine—so satisfying, meditative, and calming.
I buy cigarettes in either a small convenience store that sells lottery tickets or a real cigar store. When I spent more time in NYC I used to go to the Sweet Banana Candy Store, mostly because of its name, but that place is gone now, gentrified right out of existence. There is one cigar store I particularly like, with lots of boxes of cigars, all shapes and sizes and prices, with a small lounging area as you enter the store. This is not fancy or exclusive but there are of course “regulars” who hang there.
The cashier, who might also be the owner, is a friendly guy who knows me from around and through music. We always chat a little bit when I purchase my habitual two packs of cigs, which will last me two weeks, sometimes more. So, I’m not in there all that much but enough for us to know each other. There are always men sitting around, waving and puffing their fat cigars, and the air is full of the lingering bluish haze of cigar smoke, with that unmistakable smell. They say that secondhand smoke is just as bad for you as puffing away directly and I’d have to agree that when I step into the cigar store, I may as well have smoked one of those big fat cigars myself.
When making one of my recent biweekly purchases, as usual I took my little dog who always wants a ride in the car. We did a few errands and then ended up at the smoke shop in this little strip mall across from the supermarket. Most often this little strip has a full parking lot and I have to pull in much further down, but that day I found an opening right in front. The doggie climbed up on the center console and watched me carefully as I entered the smoky haze of maleness.
I said hello and walked over to the cashier, bought my two packs, and exchanged a few chatty words with him, then said bye and left the store. When I looked into the car as I was leaving I saw that little big-eyed fur ball staring at me from inside the car. I realized she had never seen the inside of the store but had probably smelled me as I reentered the car after buying cigs. I thought that this was a perfect time to introduce her to the place, so I picked her up and walked right back into the cigar store. Well, all the guys were surprised when I said that she wanted a cigar and fell madly for that furry white cuteness with the big brown eyes and had a little laugh. Then we left and climbed back into the car.
I was just about to pull out when one of the men—a tall, biggish guy—stepped up to my window and told me something so insightful and generous I just had to write about it. He leaned down and told me, “Everyone has talent, but to persevere and to achieve success is what separates the real talent from the wannabes. I want you to know this.” And he went on, “You’ve done what so few have ever carried out. You didn’t just think or dream about it, you hung in there and weathered the rough road to success.” He didn’t look like he was going to say this. I really had no idea he was about to pay me such a compliment. In fact, I had been surprised when I’d watched him walk up. What the fuck? I would never have guessed his insight or thinking would be so generous and acute. This moment has stayed with me—imprinted itself—and even if I quit smoking, I might just go into the cigar store to say hello.
At the Cafe Carlyle 2015.
Jody Morlock
Guy Furrow
So, onward with the tale . . . The second half of the eighties had been pretty awful and sometimes downright diabolical. But then John Waters asked me if I would be in his next movie, Hairspray. Working with John was one of my best experiences ever. In fact, Hairspray and Videodrome are two of the things that I am most proud of, in addition to working with Marcus Reichert in Union City and the Catalonian director Isabel Croixet in her movies Elegy and My Life Without Me.
Before I ever met John Waters, I met Divine. Divine was a larger-than-life actor and drag queen. (“Drag queen” is no longer a PC term, of course, in these days of rapidly shifting gender identifications. But then, in many ways, Divine defied classification.) Brought up in a conservative middle-class Baltimore family, Mr. Harris Milstead’s first job—to the horror of his parents—had been as a women’s hairdresser. He specialized in beehives, while developing his taste for drag. One day I would like to do a study on how many hairdressers were sent to a psychiatrist by their parents—as Divine had been. John Waters comes from Baltimore, so of course they met. John, like Andy, was drawn to people who were what is considered out of the ordinary. It was John who gave Harris the name “Divine”—inspired by the character from Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers. He joined John’s ex
perimental acting group and had roles in all of his movies, including the notorious Pink Flamingoes, in which he famously scooped fresh dog shit off the sidewalk and ate it. In the seventies, Divine was living in New York and became a notorious local fixture. When Chris and I were on West Fifty-Eighth Street, we lived one street away from him, and we would bump into him all the time, walking down the street in colorful, flowing kaftans—just as colorful as he himself. Seeing Divi was always the highlight of the day.
The downtown scene was very small and we all took it for granted that we all knew each other to a certain degree, even if we didn’t actually hang out. Our bass player Gary Valentine had a girlfriend, Lisa Persky, who had a part in the 1976 production at the Truck and Warehouse Theater of Women Behind Bars—a parody of all those exploitation movies about women’s prisons. Divine played the cruel, evil bitch of the Women’s House of Detention. Later that year, the Women Behind Bars cast played a show with us, along with Talking Heads, Richard Hell, Jackie Curtis, and Holly Woodlawn. We were fund-raising for Wayne/Jayne County, who had been arrested after a fight with Handsome Dick Manitoba of the Dictators. Dick had been drinking and was shouting homophobic insults and then jumped onstage. Jayne hit him with a mic stand and assault charges followed. They made up eventually and later recorded together.