by Debbie Harry
“We were both swooning like teenage girls when he sang and afterwards, backstage, we met him. He politely took both our phone numbers down with a stub of a pencil in a little notebook but then I looked the other way and Debbie just disappeared with him. I think that was the beginning of her dalliance with him, but I’m still waiting for the details on that one! Anyway, he was courteous and the next day there was a message from him on my answer machine inviting me over to his hotel to ‘take tea’ with him, ‘maybe with some milk in it.’ Ha ha! I still have the taped recording. So Debbie got to shag him and I got the invite to tea. That’s what happens when you play with Dirty Harry: she gets the man and you get the tea!”
Harry Dean and I made out a few times. As I said, he was a charmer. But he was living in L.A. and I lived in New York. But I’m happy he thought that the song was about him. “I Want That Man” was Def, Dumb and Blonde’s first single and its one big hit. The song I wrote in London with Alannah and Tom, “Kiss It Better,” was the second single. Of the fifteen songs on that album, more than half I wrote with Chris. We weren’t a couple anymore, but he was still my closest friend and musical partner and the dearest person in the world to me. One of those songs we wrote, “Brite Side,” I sang on Wiseguy, a TV series where I played an aging rock star. Ha! Ian Astbury of the Cult came in to sing vocals with me on Chris’s song “Lovelight.” Gary Valentine was a guest vocalist on the album too. Alannah didn’t sing with me, but I was on the Thompson Twins’ 1989 album Big Trash, singing my part over the phone from New York to London.
Red Hot + Blue—Red, Hot, and Byrne.
Bob Gruen
Def, Dumb and Blonde was released that same year. The name on the front sleeve was “Deborah Harry.” I had started to feel pretty strongly about differentiating between Blondie and the solo projects, and that was one simple way of doing it. Plus, I had come to the point where I thought that Deborah was a prettier-sounding name than Debbie. The album did well in the UK, Europe, and Australia and did nothing in the U.S. I loved that album and I put a band together to go on the road. Chris was the first person I turned to; then our bassist Leigh Foxx, who had played with Yoko Ono and Iggy Pop; and another guitarist, Carla Olla. You might think that it would feel strange, with Chris and I going to different hotel rooms at the end of the night. But it had been a while since we split up and both of us were seeing other people.
2006—Starliners tour.
Bob Gruen
The four years between Def, Dumb and Blonde and my fourth album, Debravation, were very busy. I did a lot of TV and movies: New York Stories; the Tales from the Darkside movie; Dead Beat; Intimate Stranger, about a poor aspiring rock singer who makes her living as a phone-sex girl; Body Bags, where I played a nurse; and Mother Goose Rock ’n’ Rhyme, where I was the Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe. No one can say I’m typecast. I was on an episode of the TV drama series Tribeca with Dizzy Gillespie. I sang Cole Porter’s “Well, Did You Evah” with Iggy Pop on Red Hot + Blue, an AIDS benefit album. In 1993 I made my debut at the fabulous outdoor drag festival Wigstock, and I played my first show at my friend Michael Schmidt’s new club Squeezebox. That place was always jumping and stuffed with people. One night we did a crazy show there with me and Joan Jett headlining, plus the Toilet Boys, Lunachicks, Psychotica, and some drag performers. At one point Joey Ramone got up onstage with us. The whole show went out live on the Internet, which was still rare in those days.
I first met Michael Schmidt in the seventies. Blondie had played a show in Kansas City and we were going up to the hotel room when this gorgeous kid came over. He was just a teenager and his parents had bought him tickets for his birthday. He was so good-looking and well-spoken, with an enigmatic energy, that he made an impression on me. Years later, I saw him again in the oddest circumstances. He was wearing my camouflage dress and blond wig while acting as my stand-in for the photographers as they did their lighting tests for the Rockbird album cover. Later, Michael was shocked that I remembered him from all those years ago in Kansas City. Michael designed jewelry and clothes in his loft on West Fourteenth Street. At that time, a lot of artists in New York were being thrown out of their lofts due to gentrification, with landlords raising rent. I heard from my friend Guy, the singer with the Toilet Boys, that Michael had been evicted. My apartment in Chelsea was large and had an empty bedroom, so I invited Michael to move in, and he lived there for a while in the early nineties.
Schmitty made some remarkable clothes for me too. The most famous dress Michael made for me was a floor-length gown made from thousands of double-edged razor blades. It took him months to make. Michael blunted each of those blades himself, but you could still get caught on them; these double-edged blades were made to last through multiple shaves and they weren’t easy to dull. It was definitely a dress I had to put on carefully. But once it was on, it felt sensual and snakelike. Dirty Harry meets Slash Harry. That gown was a kind of daredevil, exciting piece. It was showcased at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute. I’m not sure where it is now; maybe it’s still there.
For my fourth album, Debravation, I’d wanted to try something more avant-garde and experimental. I’ve never wanted to repeat a hit song by copying it for a new song. I’ve never had much interest in doing something I did in the past, which is why I would often end up in some catch-22 situations with the labels. We had around thirty people on that album and eight different producers—Chris of course, and Anne Dudley of Art of Noise, and on “My Last Date with You,” R.E.M. We did an instrumental: Nino Rota’s theme for the Fellini movie 8½. I love Rota’s music. I had sung “La Dolce Vita” on Hal Willner’s Nino Rota tribute album. We also did our own version of Led Zeppelin’s “Black Dog.” When we presented the finished album to the record label, they rejected it. So we made some changes and they released that version of the album in 1993. A year later, we released the original album ourselves as Debravation: 8½: The Producer’s Cut, on an indie label. That was the end of my relationship with Sire. But I had always felt that Madonna was the only one that really mattered to Sire. When Debravation came out, Madonna went on her Blonde Ambition tour. John Waters said, “Debbie blinked for two minutes while she was looking after Chris and Madonna stole her career.”
Bunny . . . you taught me everything I know.
Tina Paul
Sean Pryor
The double-edge razor blade dress.
Bob Gruen
Debravation made number twenty-four in the UK charts and the first single, “I Can See Clearly,” did pretty well in the clubs. The video for the second single, “Strike Me Pink,” turned out to be controversial. The theme was the Houdini water tank trick, in which an escape artist has to break from his bindings before he drowns. The video was not supposed to imply any kind of fatality, and it was never really completed. For some reason, we were not allowed to finish it the way we had envisaged it. I should never have let that video be shot, because it had nothing to do with the song. It isn’t an angry song, it’s a sexy song with a sort of bluesy, positive lyric. “Strike me pink.” Not “Strike him dead.” “Baby your touch is magic . . . Maybe you’ll bring me a lucky streak / Well strike me pink.”
The original plan was that I would come in wearing a fantastic pink dress, looking very feminine and lovely, and then I would wave a magic wand and the guy would escape. There’s something powerful about the color pink. It’s something that dates from the cradle, a system created to distinguish male and female sexuality, hence there are some adult males who get the instinctive drive to do that “man” thing for a girl in pink. Because the pink one is usually smaller and weaker and needing protection, and there go the testosterone levels. Pink was a smart move for the singer Pink. Just or almost as smart as “Blondie.” I have always thought the contrast between innocence and lusty sexuality, like that between good and evil, is irresistible.
The problem was that the woman who was supposed to send this wonderful pink dress didn’t send it. At the last minute I tore arou
nd looking for another fabulously exotic pink dress, but I couldn’t find one. So for some reason the only other costume at the shoot was a man’s suit and tie, a completely opposite signal to a feminine pink dress. And there was no magic wand and the man drowned.
I was dating a magician and illusionist at the time, Penn Jillette, so that must have been why the Houdini water tank trick was going through my mind. Penn is a very interesting man, six feet six inches tall, a big man, big personality, big everything. He is well-known as a magician—Penn of Penn & Teller—but he also had a secret rock life that not many people knew about. He played drums and bass and recorded under the name Captain Howdy. I guested on one of his two albums, Tattoo of Blood, in 1994.
Penn is also an intellectual, well-spoken, well mannered, and smartly reserved, so I will just tell this one story, because Penn has told it himself. We were in Florida, watching the space shuttle launch, and when it was over I went out to the hotel hot tub. Penn said that I came back to our room complaining loudly that the men who designed Jacuzzis put the jets in a very inconvenient place to get a woman off, which caught me in an embarrassing position when this young, red-faced boy walked by . . . Penn asked where the jets ought to be. In the seat, I said. “So when I was building my house and they were putting in the Jacuzzi,” Penn later recalled, “I asked him to do it so that the jet would hit the clitoris. The designer said, ‘So you want that halfway back and straight up?’ I said, ‘No, I was thinking toward the front and at a forty-five-degree angle.’ It worked! I kept expecting that man’s wife to send me at least flowers.” Penn patented the orgasmatron tub and called it the “Jill-Jet”—the first syllable of his last name and the female equivalent of jack-ing off. It’s described in the patent as a “hydro-therapeutic stimulator.”
I’ve always liked sex toys. Who doesn’t . . . They are a lot of fun. The last time I saw Alannah, we went to Sotheby’s in London, where they had an exhibition of erotica that was up for auction. It was a good exhibition with all kinds of paintings, furniture, and sculptures. There was a jade dildo that was a thousand years old and I was surprised and delighted to find that Pamela Anderson was there too. I had met Pamela at a MAC’s Viva Glam photo session. The cosmetics company held an annual event where they would choose a diva and design a new lipstick, giving all the proceeds from sales to AIDS charities. I was a Viva Glam diva one year and so was Pamela. But that day at Sotheby’s she was giving a talk about the importance of sex in a relationship. Alannah went off and looked at furniture, since she was now designing and making furniture herself. I have a couple of her wing chairs in my house and they’re wonderful. She made them to personify two Victorian whores. They’re tattooed on the legs and dressed in layers of silk, velvet, and leather.
As for Penn and me, we saw each other for a few years in the late eighties, early nineties. Then Penn moved everything to Vegas. And I went on the road with Blondie.
13
Routines
Bobby Grossman
Could my routines reveal some further insight into what makes me tick? After all, what’s a memoir for, if not to pull back the curtain and check out the lady who is pushing the buttons? And when you’ve been on the planet for as long as I have, those routines have made their marks . . . There have to be some telltale indications of my predilections and preferences, right? “Routines” come in all shapes and sizes, of course, and being a showbiz type, I immediately jump to “song and dance.” But I think there’s a lot even in the most apparently humdrum of routines. And further, where do we draw the line between routine and ritual?
I guess we could start with anything. Okay, morning coffee. I would prefer to have my morning coffee in hand before letting out the dogs—but piss rules. I know exactly how much that first morning piss means, so I get those dogs out there pretty damn quick. Then the coffee: French press, French roast and espresso combo, half decaf, half regular. Why cut it with decaf? I am not a slammer. I want the buzz—but slow-release, if you don’t mind. Nothing too jagged to start the day. Then back to bed with the coffee, the dogs, and a book. The first hour of the day I spend with my nose in a book . . . I’ve loved reading since I was a little girl. And the love affair continues to this day. So, this first hour is supremely precious to me—it lights me up—and I’ll do what it takes to protect that time and make it happen.
The routine for the rest of the day depends on appointments and errands. Gigging or touring sets the clock ahead and I try to sleep till ten thirty. Then I’ll follow pretty much the same coffee/piss/reading routine, except minus the dogs, when I’m on the road, with some occasional moments of panic, trying to hunt down a civilized cup of coffee in the middle of nowhere. Oh, and I do miss my doggies when I am on the road.
On tour, after that first hour, my routines become a whole lot less private. I’m meshing with a group schedule that can feel almost factory-like in its regularity, or like military troop movements. Wherever we are, the show usually starts at nine P.M. During the day there may be some promotions to do, interviews or a visit to a radio station, and then it’s off to the tour bus: luggage at three o’clock, lobby call three thirty, departure three forty-five, sound check four o’clock; there is an order to sound checking too. Then dinner at five, a break from six until seven thirty, then a meet-and-greet for fans and contest winners or business-related meetings with promoters and media. After that, I get dressed and made up. Then a vocal warm-up. Then thirty-minute, ten-minute, and five-minute calls for the show. And at nine o’clock, walk almost single-file to stage; guitars on, house lights off, show starts. Offstage at eleven o’clock, approximately, and back to the dressing room to change for the after-show meet-and-greet for friends and guests. Then back on the bus around midnight. Drive through the night to the next city on the tour. The length of the drive will determine whether we check into a hotel for some more sleep or just stay on the bus until the next sound check.
Back in the day, gigs and touring were a barely controlled chaos. We didn’t have a lot of discernible routine. Now it’s mostly a well-oiled machine, which makes for less stress but sometimes also for less opportunity for the unexpected to happen. Punch in, punch out, punch in, punch out . . . Routines can be a double-edged sword that way. And of course, the craziness can be a whole lot more fun in memory than when it was happening for real.
But before we can even hit the road, there is the rehearsal routine. We usually try to block-book a studio. That way we can set up the back line and monitor system for an undisturbed week or more, depending on how much material we have to learn or how long it’s been since we’ve played. We try to start late morning, ten thirty or eleven thirty A.M., and work until six or seven P.M. Sometimes we’ll go later, but five or six hours of concentrated playing, and then I’m done.
Rehearsing. It’s not my favorite thing. You might say, “Wow, a five-hour workday, that’s pretty good,” but before we get to play those five hours together there’s that time you spend alone, learning and listening to the music you’re going to perform in the show. I’ve never tried to figure these hours out. I just have the music playing at home or in the car, letting it run endlessly through my brain.
I toured for a year with my album Debravation. Then I started touring with the Jazz Passengers—a smart, avant-garde New York jazz band. The Jazz Passengers, according to Roy Nathanson, were the punks of the New York jazz scene. They had the same kind of irony as the rock punks did and their roots were in the same downtown scene that we came from. A poet and actor, Roy was also part of a Lower East Side theater group and played in the New York City Big Apple Circus Band with Curtis Fowlkes. Roy and Curtis had first met when they were in John Lurie’s Lounge Lizards.
How I came to work with them was through Hal Willner. Hal has an eclectic musical knowledge and is a highly creative music producer; I first met him when he was working for Saturday Night Live and I was asked to host the show. After the show, Hal and some of the other SNL guys would come over to our apartment and watch public access T
V with Chris. When Hal was working on his Nino Rota album, he called me into the studio to sing “La Dolce Vita.” Later he was working on a Jazz Passengers album entitled Jazz Passengers in Love. Roy had asked him to bring in some singers and Hal brought in Little Jimmy Scott, Mavis Staples, Jeff Buckley, and me. He wanted me to sing a sweet, clever song named “Dog in Sand” that Roy had written about an old man and his dog. Roy was doubtful. He wasn’t sure that I could do it. He didn’t really know my music. But I went in and nailed it, if I say so myself. After that, Roy asked me to sing with them at the Knitting Factory, and by the summer of 1995 I was playing regularly with them.
Then Roy asked me to go on the road with them. Well, that was a big bite. It meant a lot of songs—and some of them were really obscure, with odd time signatures. All those years in a rock band I had been counting to four, and now I was expected to count to six or seven! I worked hard at trying to figure those songs out, and there were times when I massacred a song, but the band was cool about it—jazz cool. That’s one of the things about jazz musicians that you don’t always get in rock: they pride themselves on keeping their cool. For instance, at the start of the tour we’d have audiences calling out for “The Tide Is High.” So, the Passengers worked out a version of the song, with all those harmonies that were on the original by the Paragons.