by Debbie Harry
So off we went to Europe on a regular working-musician jazz tour. This kind of tour also had its own routine: get on the train, get off in one European city or another, and schlep your instruments and suitcases to tiny little jazz clubs. No roadies, not much equipment; we used the house PA, so less hassle and less stress, and I liked that extra freedom and sense of adventure, and the spontaneity of chance encounters and the up-close-and-personal nature of the shows. It was an intimacy that reminded me of the early club and CBGB’s days. Speaking of up-close-and-personal, I remember a gig in Germany where the stage was so low that someone in the audience knocked me over as they got up from their table. I fell back onto Roy’s little soprano sax and bent it out of shape. But I guess I must have done okay because on their next album, Individually Twisted they had me sing all of the songs.
It was so much fun, that tour, and such a nice experience just being a singer. It was also an exciting musical experience. After a while I noticed how each musician had a capability in a certain style and how they would “go off,” as the jazz guys say, into some emotional transformation, and then come back into the basic framework. In rock ’n’ roll, that’s not such a big part of the stage show, and especially not in my generation, the punk generation, which rebelled against all those boring, gratuitous, ego-trip, awful half-hour solos. The Ramones were the absolute champions of that concept, with their two-minute songs and their strict, stripped-down format. Even today in Blondie we have few solos in the traditional sense, although Clem is always ad-libbing his fills at the beginning or end of a song.
At that time, I was still doing movies. One of them, Drop Dead Rock, came out the same year as Individually Twisted, 1996. There’s a picture of me and Adam Ant on the poster but I honestly don’t remember one thing about it. It’s the same with most of the parts that I had. Usually they were cameos or mechanical kinds of roles, nothing pivotal, that were shot in one or two days. Parachuting into a picture for a quickie is actually more difficult than you might think. The other actors have been at it together for a while. They understand each other, they have a feel for the cameraman, and they’ve built a rapport with the director. So breaking into this established dynamic for just a day can feel kind of uncomfortable. But there were some times on those single days when I would feel good about the performance, or something special would happen between me and the camera, which is always very exciting.
I can count on one hand the parts that I think were real parts. There was Jonas Åkerlund’s Spun; John Waters’s Hairspray; David Cronenberg’s Videodrome; two movies that Isabel Croixet directed, My Life Without Me and Elegy; and James Mangold’s 1995 movie Heavy. Heavy was a good film and a challenge. It had great actors, like Shelley Winters and Liv Tyler, and a very low budget. My role, as a world-weary, slutty waitress in a small-town café, felt like a real part and a real character that I could develop and understand. We were shooting the film near Lake Mohawk up in High Point, New Jersey. Lake Mohawk was where forty years earlier Shelley Winters had shot the big Hollywood movie A Place in the Sun. Shelley played a factory worker in that movie who got pregnant by Montgomery Clift, then demanded he marry her. But Montgomery Clift had fallen in love with a socialite, Elizabeth Taylor, so he drowned Shelley in the lake. And here she was in the same location but in an indie movie this time, playing the owner of a roadside diner. I played the waitress who had worked for her for fifteen years.
Shelley, with her two Academy Awards for best actress and two nominations, was a force to be reckoned with. She had this contained intensity that was immensely powerful. She challenged everyone to step up and deliver. I could see that was how she worked, putting everybody on their toes. When she first arrived, she called me into her trailer and said, “We should get to know each other a little bit, because we’re sort of adverse characters.” My character supposedly had an affair with her character’s husband and there was this simmering tension between us. So I sat listening to her going on and on and at the end of the monologue/conversation, as I was leaving—with one foot down the trailer steps—she said, “I’ve worked with singers before. I’ve worked with Frank Sinatra. None of them can act.” I knew exactly what she was up to. She’s a Method actor, so she was trying to antagonize me just as her character antagonizes my character in the movie. But it wasn’t hard for me to play a waitress in a small town. In the late sixties, back when I hit a wall and left the city to stay with a friend upstate in Phoenicia for a few months, I worked at a little coffee shop on the main street, one of maybe five or six stores at best. The owner, Irene, had been running the place forever, and I filled in for her, two days a week. Mostly it was just delivery guys who stopped by, and they would always ask, “Where’s Irene?”
A few years after Heavy came out, I heard that James Mangold was going to do a new movie set in Jersey, Cop Land, and I really wanted to be in it. I begged him, “Please, you’ve got to put me in your next film.” I don’t think he was that wild about me. But he put me in one shot as a bartender, no dialogue or anything, just mopping the bar and giving someone a beer. However, when he edited the movie, I ended up on the cutting room floor.
YOU MUST BE MAD.” THAT’S WHAT I SAID WHEN CHRIS CALLED TO SAY, “Let’s get Blondie back together.” I honestly thought that he had lost his mind. We’d had this phenomenal, massive, worldwide success with Blondie, hit after hit and tour after tour, and then went through such a terrible experience with the illness, the drugs, the financial ruin. And neither of us was dead. Yet. I felt for sure that somebody was going to die this time around, especially when so many of the people we had come up with were already gone. On the same morning that Chris called me, I had spent the first hour of the day with my head in a photo book called Warhol’s World that my friend Romy, one of the “Goody” girls, gave me. I saw a lot of faces that I knew and so many of them were dead. Having survived all of that craziness, to be thinking about doing the whole thing again? God, no. I still had so many bad, bad memories from what had gone on before, with not just the band but the business. Working with the Jazz Passengers had felt like such a relief and a privilege and an education, so the last thing I had on my mind was a Blondie reunion. But as usual, Chris talked me into it.
Chris was almost a million dollars in tax debt, thanks to our former financial adviser, Bert Padell. He’d seen an ad in the Village Voice from a collector who was looking to buy rock ’n’ roll memorabilia, so he called up and said that he had some gold and platinum discs to sell. The man that posted the ad, Ed Kosinski, turned up at Chris’s loft and was pleasantly surprised to see that the seller was actually Chris Stein. So the two of them became friendly. Ed was married to Jackie LeFrak from the famous New York real estate family. LeFrak City is that forty-acre stretch of apartment buildings you see when you’re driving through Queens to JFK. He invited Chris and me to their apartment for dinner. We found out that Jackie LeFrak’s sister Denise was the subject of the Randy and the Rainbows song “Denise,” which we had turned into “Denis.” The synchronicity of it was eerie. Ed told us that he had a friend in the music business that he wanted us to meet, Harry Sandler. It was Harry who really pushed Chris to put Blondie back together. He was blunt with Chris: “If you don’t do it now, it will never happen.” That really sank in for Chris.
Harry at that point was working with a manager named Allen Kovac, who’d had considerable experience in working with older bands that had broken up and were getting back together. He was very persuasive, so we agreed to a meeting. Allen was a smart guy and a good talker. His presentation on how he could help with a Blondie reunion was forthright and compelling. He was also willing to work through the morass of bad business deals and band-member conflicts that made a reunion sound like such a horror show to me. We’d suffered from managers that were either disinterested and uncaring or actively enjoyed our being off balance, because it put them in the catbird seat. Allen had a really clear overview of what happens to people in this situation: the pressures and disappointments and how everyone g
ets fractured by it. Allen was none of those people and he was an extremely good salesman.
So, Chris set about contacting these people that we hadn’t seen in years. He called Jimmy Destri—he and Jimmy always got along—and then he had Clem fly in from L.A. As Clem recalls, “The funny thing was that everyone looked strange and out of sorts, missing teeth, kind of overweight, and disheveled. A bit apprehensive.” Hmm. Chris also called Gary Valentine, who lived in London, where he worked as an arts correspondent for the Guardian. Chris flew him to NYC and Jimmy met him at the airport and took him to Chris’s loft. Here’s how Gary remembers it: “Chris’s mausoleum, his cavern in TriBeCa, was like Turner’s place in the movie Performance, only worse. I flew over expecting to hit the ground running, but everything was not as ready to go as Chris had told me. Chris himself did not look well. For a few weeks I was more or less keeping him company, trying to get his spirits up. I liked Chris. He even saved my life once, when I was nearly electrocuted at the Bowery loft. It was only after a while that I realized that Debbie wasn’t quite as excited about having me around.”
Contrary to his paranoia, I do like Gary. He’s a sensitive, multitalented man and his broad-ranging, inquiring intellect has given him a strong worldview. Gary stayed at my apartment for a while and we’d walk my dog together. We talked about his writing, and how the mystery writer Cornell Woolrich used to live in the same apartment building as I did and supposedly wrote Rear Window there. It wouldn’t surprise me because you really could look into people’s windows. In the gardens, the center part of the building, the apartments had a lot of turnover. It was a kind of transient gay ghetto and people didn’t seem at all shy about having sex in front of the uncurtained windows.
While Gary was with us we played a handful of shows. One of them was a tribute to William Burroughs held in Lawrence, Kansas, where Bill spent his final years. Being on that show with Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, and Patti Smith, people I greatly admire, was meaningful for me. Chris and I had come to know Bill Burroughs a little, socially. One time we went to dinner with Bill at the Bunker—that’s what they called the place—and I took my little dog Chi Chi with me. That dog was tiny. She only weighed about five pounds. But she would fight like a demon whenever she felt trapped. I gave her the name Chi Chan because it supposedly meant “ferocious blood.” Chi Chi was her street name. I thought a creature that small and frail could use a strong name. Bill grabbed my little dog and held her tight all through dinner—and Chi Chi chewed away at Bill’s bony hands all night, nonstop. Bill liked to numb himself up with “certain substances,” or maybe he liked being bitten, so I guess her incessant chomping didn’t bother him too much. Chris and Bill got along like gangbusters. They shared a lot of interests, including weaponry, and they were of equal genius, so I think they understood each other. Hal Willner was working on another of his unique projects, recording Bill reciting the Lord’s Prayer. He had Chris add music to the track and it came out on Bill’s album Dead City Radio.
The Blondie reunion was moving ahead, but in fits and starts. We were trying to get the best balance of players from the past and kept checking to see if anyone was interested. Christ talked with Gary Valentine and he was willing to come over from London where he was living, to give it a try. Gary has proved himself to be a credible writer and had several books published on his favorite topic, mostly philosophy focused. He hadn’t really been playing that much and our vision for the new Blondie was a bit different than the original. I felt that in the nineties a more evolved sound would be expected; that we couldn’t get away with our original downtown sound. This was too bad because Gary had that great energy, good looks, and a style that came naturally to him.
I had told Chris and Allen from the start that there was no way I would be in an oldies band—I was adamant about that—so we started writing new songs. At first we worked with Mike Chapman, but the circumstances were not ideal. We were all tentative, having been apart for so long, and not having ended on the best of terms. We needed to mend some fences. We were at the stage of feeling each other out and figuring out if we could work together—if there would be a future for Blondie and how it would play out.
This was the fragile, dysfunctional, multilayered, complex situation that Mike came into. Mike really loved Blondie, and I have to give him credit for coming to our rescue. It could hardly have been comfortable for him to hang in there as the fifth wheel while this entity from the dark past tried to pull itself back together—but Mike has a formidable inner strength to go along with his exceptional creativity. He had been responsible in many ways for creating the sound of Blondie as a radio band, and though Mike did not end up producing our reunion album, unfortunately, that was more to do with management and the record label.
We also tried working with Duran Duran. Allen was managing them and thought we might be a good fit. So we went into the studio. But Duran Duran had this crazy, crazy guy in the band who seemed to be whacked out of his head. It was almost funny. We would be trying to record and he’d be ripping off his clothes, complaining that he was getting overheated, which was amusing. He had a good body and he knew it, but he also reeked of this acrid drug sweat and he seemed to be speeding his tits off. Quite a distraction. But we did record two or three songs with them, including Gary’s song “Amor Fati.” However, things were still not quite right. We were still playing with the combinations, waiting for everything to click into place. And then Clem suggested that we try working with Craig Leon. Craig had produced Blondie’s first album. He was forward-thinking when it came to new technology, and Chris was nuts for this new digital system called Radar that Craig was using. So they spent hours in Chris’s basement, which morphed eventually into the seventh Blondie album, No Exit.
Clem came up with the title, so over to Clem to explain: “Jean-Paul Sartre’s play No Exit had the famous line ‘Hell is other people,’ which pretty well nails the many stereotypical rock band scenarios. But there is also the sign you see everywhere that says No Exit, meaning that there is no escape from Blondie. Because whatever you do, you are always going to be ‘so-and-so from Blondie.’ And Debbie is always going to be ‘Blondie.’”
Well, it’s true that when Gary Kurfirst was managing me as a solo artist, he was very frustrated by the fact that he couldn’t call me “Blondie” despite the extent to which I was identified that way publicly. But it was written in our contract that “Blondie” is certain members and I wasn’t entitled to use that name without those other people’s being involved. One of them was Chris. I would never, ever have done anything called “Blondie” without Chris’s being involved, because Chris was the other half of the origin of Blondie. He and I were partners and had built the whole thing up together from zero. But some of the people along the way who played in the band also felt they had earned entitlement to the name.
After we decided not to ask Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison to join the reunion, they took a lawsuit out against us. Even though they weren’t going to be working with the band, they took us to court to sue us for potential future income. But the state of New York found in our favor. And the reconstituted Blondie got back to work with Leigh Foxx and Paul Carbonara joining myself, Chris, Clem, and Jimmy.
We made the decision that we would go to the UK and Europe to play some shows before releasing the album. Tommy Hilfiger designed all the clothes for the band to wear on tour. He did a great job. The boys looked very sharp and my leather skirts were gorgeous. We were going to England to test the waters. Seventeen years had gone by since the last Blondie album, so we weren’t sure how we would be received. But we were met by a wave of affection and approval. It was a wonderful feeling, seeing that Blondie had actually meant something to people. I think our fans appreciated the fact that we were alive, but also that we were making new music that was relevant to our lives in the present, not just the past.
The tour routine followed the same old pattern, though it felt a lot saner this time. There was contention, of course, but we
had a good manager at last who had an understanding of human nature and would step in and take care of any arguments. And we were older. Perhaps we weren’t all that much wiser, but I think we realized that we had something that was important to us, in our special chemistry and unique sound. It was time to stop acting like babies and start working our butts off to become the best band we could be. A month before the album came out we released our first single, “Maria.” It shot straight to number one in the UK and topped the charts in thirteen other countries. All this meant that people would be looking forward to the album. We released No Exit on our manager’s independent record label, Beyond Records, in February 1999 and it went to number three in the UK. It even went top twenty in the U.S. Chart ratings aren’t everything but it was exciting!
At the end of the tour there was a wedding. Chris married his actress girlfriend Barbara Sicuranza. We were in Las Vegas and they snuck off to one of those wedding chapels. I guess they didn’t want to make it into a big deal. They wanted to keep it private and quietly romantic. I was pretty disappointed, I admit. I thought at least one of us, me in particular, would be invited. But maybe it was a little bit awkward for Barbara, having me as the omnipresent ex. Had I been in her position, I might have done the same thing. They have been married almost twenty years now, but in the beginning it must have been difficult for her, knowing how close Chris and I were. We never sat down and talked about it in terms of, “He’s my husband,” “He’s my ex.” I think we did it in a sweeter, more natural way, by learning about each other and growing to like each other as people, in spite of possible fears and anxieties. Chris is a loving person. I don’t think he would do anything to make Barbara feel uncomfortable, or me for that matter. He’s a sweet-natured, generous guy. I can’t say enough good things about him, obviously.