Face It

by Debbie Harry

  Clem, in his Hall of Fame speech, thanked CBGB’s and Hilly Kristal, saying that they deserved to be inducted. It turned out that the awning over CBGB’s front door and the phone box inside would soon be in the Hall of Fame museum. CBGB’s closed in October 2006. The writing was on the wall for a long time. Hilly’s lease had expired. The landlords, like all the other landlords in NYC, hiked up the rent and Hilly started to run into money problems. To make matters worse, Hilly was very sick at the time. There were benefit shows and all sorts of efforts to raise money for the rent and to raise awareness of the club as a cultural landmark, the epicenter and incubator of an underground scene that had become a worldwide influence. But the final eviction notice came. CBGB’s made its farewell with a last weekend of shows.

  An infamous Hall of Fame induction.

  Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic, Inc via Getty Images

  Patti Smith played the Sunday show. Blondie and the Dictators played the final Saturday night. The place was sinuously writhing and grinding like some giant wild animal. CBGB’s held around three hundred people, but there must have been five hundred of us packed into the space, with a whole shitload of emotion. I was overwhelmed myself; after all, it was the end of an era and a final goodbye to another massive piece of my past. Like a death in the family. We were time travelers who’d flicked the switch and landed back where it had all begun. Here is where we had worked on our image, developed our style, and grown as a band. So many memories poured through me: the rivalries, the love affairs, the fights, the manic shows, the wild energy, the experimentation, the sense that anything could happen and did. The raw punkness, the intensity of it all . . . Ha! Yeah!!

  The year after his club closed, Hilly died from lung cancer. He had been talking about resurrecting CBGB’s in Las Vegas. I was sad he was gone. And so grateful that we were lucky enough to have had that haven when NYC was broke, we were broke, and DIY culture was a necessity, not a style that would be copied by the worlds of fashion, music, design, movies, and art. Punk has gone on to become a commodity. CBGB’s is a different commodity now, a high-end men’s clothing store, and walking past 315 Bowery is like walking on a different planet.

  The closing of CBGB’s.

  Bob Gruen

  That same year I was on a promotional trip in Las Vegas and I saw Cirque du Soleil’s new show Love. It was based on Beatles songs, and Paul and Ringo were there, along with Yoko Ono, and they all seemed to have gotten over their differences. Time really does heal, or it can if you let it. Blondie may not have lost anyone permanently—you know, death—just mentally. I saw Sheila E while I was there and she told me she was going to be playing with Ringo at the Garden State Arts Center. I had seen her play with Prince and she is a great, terrific drummer and singer, so I got tickets and went with my sister, Martha, to see Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band.

  Ringo had a lot of different artists play with him and I especially enjoyed Edgar Winter. He was eccentric, but not trying too hard to be so, and a great musician. I hadn’t paid much attention to his music back in the early seventies because it was too good-ol’-boy sounding for me. The only way I knew anything about Edgar was by hanging out with one of his ex-wives, maybe his only ex-wife for all I know, Barbara Winter. As I sat there listening to Edgar and the All-Starrs, stories from the past came rushing through my mind. Those days had a physicality that made it seem as if the molecular structure of my senses had more space. I flashed back to when I worked at Max’s Kansas City in the late sixties and had that brief fling with Eric Emerson one night in the phone booth upstairs.

  Eric ended up living at Chris’s apartment for a while. Eric had so many girlfriends and some children, but finally he met Barbara Winter, whom I remember as being very sexy, with large breasts and lush black hair, a real rock ’n’ roll babe. I remembered Elda telling us a story about Barbara standing in the front window of Eric’s old apartment on Park Avenue and Twenty-Seventh Street, while she swung this giant black dildo around. It was early in the morning and all the office workers from the New York Life building and other businesses were dragging themselves to work, and there stood big-boobed Barbara waving her dildo. I almost wish I had been on my way to work that morning. That vision would have made my day and possibly much more.

  When Eric and Barbara moved into an apartment in a brand-new high-rise way down on Greenwich Street, just north of Chambers Street, Chris and I would go visit them. It had a spectacular view across the Hudson and out into the harbor, including the Verrazano Bridge. Wild. Truth be told, living in NYC is all about having one of those views. These were some of the first of the new wave of ultramodern high-rises to be erected in the city. A whole section of the city, long held by the import-export spice merchants, was having an extreme makeover and the heady, rich aroma of all those spices and coffees was disappearing. That smell was heavenly. If I could, I would have made it into incense or something.

  One time when we walked over to Eric and Barbara’s, I was in a foul mood. I mean, foul. “Unreasonable” would be the most diplomatic description of my temperament. I was being a shit. The building complex wasn’t finished. The empty lot next door, wrapped partially by a chain-link fence, housed the construction company’s trailer office and equipment and a roving bitch guard dog . . . Well, this bitch wasn’t about to roll with my shit, and she bared her fangs and lunged and bit me in the ass. Calmed me right down. Frankly, I don’t understand how Chris managed to tolerate my awful mood swings, but he was so sweet and funny about my ravings and he could joke me out of almost anything. And sometimes he too would lunge and bite me in the ass.

  So these were the reveries running through my mind.

  Thanks, Edgar. I had no idea I would love seeing you perform as much as I did. And thank you for transporting me back to those special times with Chris, when we had no money and walked everywhere, be it hot and steaming or red-nose freezing.

  When the Blondie tour was over, and all of a sudden I had time on my hands, I felt the urge to write some songs on my own. Often, when I was working on band material, I’d be mindful that the lyrics could end up being sung by either a man or a woman. It was always important to me that Blondie songs be androgynous. But these songs I was writing were much more personal. My work with the Jazz Passengers was a major influence. Roy Nathanson wrote a beautiful song on the gruesome subject of a suicide bomber for me, entitled “Paradise.” Chris and I wrote two songs together and I collaborated with Barb Morrison and Charles Nieland, who were working as Super Buddha. That’s how my first solo album in fourteen years came to be. Necessary Evil was released in September 2007 and I went back out on the road.

  I never had a Barbie doll when I was a little girl. She didn’t exist then. I think the Barbie doll came into existence long after I’d stopped playing with dolls. So when the Barbie people asked to meet with me, I was kind of curious and I said, “Sure.” What intrigued me most about this meeting was that they never talked about Barbie as a doll. Every one of them had this unshakeable and complete understanding of Barbie as a real person. When they talked about Barbie they would say, “Oh, Barbie isn’t like that,” or “Barbie would never do that!” In their minds, Barbie was a real being with a real presence and her own sense of style. I found this fascinating. It reminded me of the puppeteers when I did The Muppet Show, in particular Frank Oz. Frank warned me that Miss Piggy would never do the show with me because it would be too much of a conflict to have me around, flirting with Kermit.

  When they asked how I felt about a Debbie Harry Barbie, at first I thought, Why in the world would I want that? Except that at that point it was kind of like a fetish, and I have no problem with fetishes. Also there were people I thought highly of who had Barbies, like Cher and Marilyn Monroe. And much of Barbie’s success can be tied to whom the company had chosen to fetishize. So I said, “Let’s do it.” And now I have a Barbie doll. Several actually, somewhere in the closet, all of them wearing the pink dress with the laces that I made back in the seventies. The Barbie people li
ked that pink dress. I think I would have almost preferred the zebra dress. But maybe animal print is one of the things that Barbie doesn’t do.

  When we started on a new Blondie album in 2009, many of the great seventies and eighties recording studios in NYC had closed down, victims of the shift to digital. The studios that were left charged heaven and earth and then some. So we looked around for a cheaper option and found a great place in Woodstock, near where Chris, Barbara, and the girls lived. Chris came up with the album title: Panic of Girls, a collective noun he made up—like “murder” of crows—for girls running wild. Since we were once again without a record company, Blondie’s ninth studio album came out on an independent label and made the top twenty in the UK indie charts.

  My favorite song on that album was “Mother.” I think it has some of my best lyrics. Many people have thought it’s about my mother, or even my birth mother, although I’m not sure either of them was into patent leather thigh-high boots! It’s actually about the club in the Meatpacking District called Mother that I loved to go to in the mid to late nineties. It was an underground club, literally below street level, very dark, very naughty, and a lot of fun. Mother was a big part of my social life. It was where my friends were. Every week on a Tuesday night they would have a different theme and everybody would come dressed in different drag, such as Pablo Picasso night, or robot night, or Klingon women night—everything you can think of. I love dressing up, and I have since I was a child, and that was one of the reasons that I enjoyed going there so much. Wearing a costume is liberating. It’s why people love Halloween, because they get to play a part for a few hours. One night at Mother I dressed up as an Edvard Munch painting. I had a bowler hat so I took advantage of it, and I dressed in a painted-up sandwich board. The costume was absurd and impossible to maneuver in a crowded nightclub, but there was no better place for a good time.

  Johnny Dynell and Chi Chi Valenti gave life to the performance club Jackie 60, which later became Mother, and both clubs were exceptional for having a good time. My friend Rob Roth, artistic director for us on many projects, was one of the in-house artists. He’d make short video loops related to the theme of the party and they’d play on multiple screens throughout the club all night long. Some of the regulars were queens who were also professional stylists and they would show up in the most incredible outfits and creations. Like works of art. Really, walking, talking works of art. I am a voyeur; I love to watch. You would get an eyeful and be an eyeful and you could drink and dance all night. Mother was such an important part of my life that when it closed, I felt such a sense of loss that I wondered, What am I going to do on Tuesday nights without Mother?

  Jackie 60—Tuesdays would never be the same.

  Tina Paul

  Jody Morlock

  After the Panic of Girls tour we made Ghosts of Download. On Ghosts, we jumped in full with programming. Chris and I had always been drawn to new developments in science and technology, curious about the “new thing,” whatever it might be. The new was mysterious and fascinating and we were eager to experiment. Like Chris, I have never been afraid of change.

  I wrote a song on Ghosts with my friend Miss Guy called “Rave,” and I did a song written by Matt Katz-Bohen that included a duet with Beth Ditto entitled “A Rose by Any Other Name”: “If you’re a boy or if you’re a girl I’ll love you just the same.” We had been part of a community that valued androgyny and wasn’t burdened by anxieties about sexuality. Outside of that world, though, it took significant courage to be transsexual or have a sexuality that was not the “norm” . . . Modern science is finally recognizing that we are all complex, individual balances of male and female, because every single person is some kind of gender combination, whether you want to accept it or not. For me, it’s always been this way. Half man, half woman. Not a transsexual; not a cross-dresser; not bi; not the expression of a frustrated or repressed sexual self. Just both sexes. A double identity.

  In the end we released a double album, Blondie 4(0)Ever. One disc was Ghosts of Download and the other was an album of new recordings we had made of Blondie’s greatest hits. Regaining control of our material was complicated and contentious. When contracts run out, there’s a clause in the record deal that says your ownership of the material will revert to you after a certain number of years. The labels fight this tooth and nail. It can be a nightmare winning back those rights. So, one work-around is to rerecord the originals. In addition, we wanted to showcase our classic songs in a modern idiom, with the new band. And this was an important time for us. It was Blondie’s fortieth anniversary. We released Blondie 4(0)Ever in May 2014 with Andy Warhol’s portrait of me on the cover.

  Chris marked our anniversary with his book Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk. It was a mix of text and his photography, with photos of me and the band, plus other artists, filmmakers, musicians, and friends. He manages to document a special time in New York, with the wild beauty of the decayed and dirty city in the seventies. The garbage strewn everywhere, where you found fabulous things that people threw out and you deconstructed them and you put the pieces together with creativity and irony as the glue. The punk aesthetic.

  Chris shot his pictures in clubs and studios, in our apartment, in the street, and—as Blondie started to take off—on the road, which gave his work a worldwide perspective. Besides many that had never been published previously, Negative includes some of his famous photos of me, like the one where I’m standing in our burned-out kitchen, wearing Marilyn Monroe’s dress, holding a flaming frying pan. I didn’t keep a journal. I sort of regret that now because this book would have been much easier and maybe better if I had. But Chris documented those times with his camera. His mother, when we first met, told me that Chris had always been an observer, even as a baby. And I became so used to being observed by him that I learned to be comfortable with having my photo taken, which was something I used to hate. I am convinced that this was how I got the confidence to get in front of all those other cameras. But I still think that Chris’s photos of me are the most real and the most revealing.

  In Marilyn’s dress.

  Chris Stein

  IN MARCH 2015 I WAS OFFERED A SOLO GIG AT AN UPPER EAST SIDE cabaret supper club, Café Carlyle. I’m not a chanteuse or a torch singer so I was surprised. But the idea of performing in an intimate venue was okay. I’d never done anything exactly like this before, though I had sort of touched on it with the Jazz Passengers, except this time I wouldn’t have a band at the Carlyle, just one accompanist, Matt Katz-Bohen from Blondie. I was curious also about what it would be like to talk to the audience, commenting on the songs. Roy Nathanson had done all the talking in the Jazz Passengers shows and with Blondie the audiences were too big to connect with on an intimate level. I’ve been in audiences at festivals myself and I know how speech without music becomes muddied if you say more than three words.

  As I was picking material, I started discovering things about the songs that I could share with the audience. “I Cover the Waterfront,” for example, is a beautiful, moody, evocative song that I always associated with NYC, but when I looked into it, I discovered it’s about San Diego and Chinese laborers and smuggling. The songs I chose covered a lot of territory, as I did a different show every night. My guest artists were people whom I had worked or written with, including Chris, Roy, Barb Morrison, Tommy Kessler, and Guy Furrow, and they all chose the songs they wanted to do, which added even more flavors to the pot. It felt luxurious to do material like “Imitation of a Kiss,” “Strike Me Pink,” and “In Love with Love,” the songs I didn’t do with Blondie but that worked perfectly with just me and Matt. And from there, I could switch to something like “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Show. Playing two shows a night for ten nights was hard work. I hadn’t done that since the early days. But it was a treat to tie all of these different pieces together into a coherent, compelling package. I’ve said yes so many times when I should have said no, so it’s special when the yes has such a g
ratifying outcome.

  Meanwhile Chris had come up with a curation concept for the next Blondie album. We would write our own songs but also solicit outside songwriters, preferably contemporary artists, who would send us their favorite pieces. Around thirty songs came in and Chris, John Congleton, and myself made some difficult decisions on what to keep. But we would never have done a song without everyone in the band in agreement on what to include. There were songs by people like Charli XCX, Dev Hynes, Dave Sitek, Johnny Marr, and Sia. We specifically asked for Sia to submit something because we were all such big fans. By chance she had been working with Nick Valensi from the Strokes, and that made it even better, even more New York.

  Since our last album had been heavily computer based, with everyone doing their parts separately, we all agreed that this time we would do it as a band album, all of us in a room recording together like the early days. We wanted to record it in New York, so we booked the Magic Shop on Crosby Street in Soho, one of the oldest studios in the city and one of the most historic. Behind the graffiti-covered, gray metal front door were walls that were plastered ceiling to floor with album sleeves from the artists who had recorded there, like Lou Reed and the Ramones. They even had my favorite soundtrack album, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which has nothing to do with rock but it’s just wonderful. The Magic Shop was where David Bowie made his last two albums, The Next Day and Blackstar.