Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  Hailing from Brooklyn, The Crystals were the first group Spector signed to Philles, the label he started with Sill in 1961 (later grasping sole ownership after his partner backed down). Spector set about developing the panoramic ‘wall of sound’ he applied to the new girl groups, leading the way with The Crystals after their 1961 debut hit, ‘There’s No Other (Like My Baby)’, merely bruised the Top 20.

  Vivacious blonde singer-songwriter/producer Ellie Greenwich was another key component in the girl-group phenomenon. Together with husband Jeff Barry, Broadway’s pop queen wrote some of the biggest hits for the girl groups, including Spector’s Ronettes, The Crystals and several for The Shangri-Las. (In addition to penning several of the hits that fired Debbie’s musical passions, more than a decade later Ellie would provide backing vocals for Blondie on ‘In The Flesh’.)

  Although hailing from Brooklyn, Ellie Greenwich grew up in the affluent Long Island suburb of Levittown, teaching herself piano and composing songs by her early teens. She attended Queens College aged 17 and, in 1958, released her first solo single, ‘Silly Isn’t It’, for RCA under the name Ellie Gaye. She became a Brill Building regular after her piano skills caught the attention of Jerry Leiber while she was waiting for an appointment. Leiber and Stoller allowed her to use their facilities so long as they had first pick of the songs she came up with. Ellie and Jeff Barry married in October 1962, as their songwriting partnership blossomed into a hugely successful exclusive arrangement with Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music.

  When Leiber, Stoller and veteran third partner George Goldner started Red Bird Records in 1964, Barry/Greenwich were installed as staff writers and producers, scoring an immediate number one with the Dixie Cups’ Spector-produced ‘Chapel Of Love’. Ellie’s success pricked the ears of her old childhood friend George Morton, who visited her at the Brill Building to the chagrin of husband Jeff, who maliciously asked Morton what he did for a living. Not wanting to lose face, George replied that he wrote hit singles. Barry challenged him to bring one in. Energised by the pressure, the songless Morton took a gamble, booked time at a local studio and invited four girls who had already impressed him at local events: The Shangri-Las (who took their name from a local Chinese restaurant). The Shangri-Las had been formed from friendships between the Weiss and Ganser families who lived in the tough Cambria Heights neighbourhood of South-East Queens. Mary and Liz ‘Betty’ Weiss and twin sisters Marguerite ‘Marge’ and Mary Ann Ganser attended the local Andrew Jackson High School. Sharing a mutual love of music, between 1963 and 1964 the four would practise their harmonies, routines and stage presence around the pop songs of the day, soon graduating to playing local teen hops and school dances.

  While driving to the demo studio in his Buick, Morton pulled up by a Long Island beach and poured out ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’. The seven-minute demo impressed Leiber to the extent that he signed The Shangri-Las to Red Bird for five years in April 1964. After they recorded a more compact version ‘Remember’ became a summer hit, complemented by the group’s bad girl image. This was a new strain of teenage rock’n’roll, delivered from a feminine perspective. Morton’s innovative production heightened the song’s melodrama via his trademark sound effects, in the form of crashing waves and seagull calls.

  Morton was suddenly a studio hotshot, signing to Red Bird as staff producer. He was nicknamed ‘Shadow’ by George Goldner – after the mysterious pulp magazine character because his whereabouts could never be established. Working more like a movie director, Morton guided The Shangri-Las through two years of worldwide hits and mini-symphonies including ‘Leader Of The Pack’, ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’, ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’, ‘Give Us Your Blessings’ and the sepulchral B-side confessional ‘Dressed In Black’ – a blueprint for future punk generations that could have been written for Debbie Harry.

  Red Bird folded in 1966 after Leiber and Stoller had already bowed out, unsettled by Goldner running up significant gambling debts and the dissolution of the Greenwich/Barry marriage two years earlier. The Shangri-Las signed to Mercury, releasing two more singles, ‘Sweet Sounds Of Summer’ and ‘Take The Time’, neither of which troubled the charts. The group split, typically ending their run almost penniless and subject to lawsuits that prevented them recording. Mary travelled, and then worked as a secretary in Manhattan while taking college classes. She later went into the architectural industry, then furniture, subsequently running a commercial interiors dealership in the eighties.

  Betty had a child and later started her own cosmetics business on Long Island, while Mary died in March 1970, aged 22, after suffering from seizures for some time. The remaining Shangri-Las reunited in 1976, when ‘Leader Of The Pack’ made the UK Top 10 on reissue. Sadly, Marge would succumb to breast cancer in July 1996, aged 48.

  Young Debbie Harry was particularly drawn to the doomed tragic-teen aura of The Shangri-Las (in 1977, Phil Spector would remark that she reminded him of one of the group). They had quickly became one of the greatest, most influential groups of all – thanks largely to the cinematic production of ‘Shadow’ Morton, whose teenage mini-operas compressed whole storylines into the grooves of a seven-inch single. Spector’s monumental creations had been breathtaking, but The Shangri-Las dared to venture where female singers had rarely been before – exploring themes of forbidden love, alienation, teenage loneliness, tragic death (even going so far as to recount the death of an archetypal ‘mom’ on ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’) and simmering paranoia caused by some ambiguous trauma, on the pseudo-classical ‘Past, Present And Future’.

  The girl group’s black-clad, streetwise image and attitudinal pouts predated punk, captivating Debbie to the extent that a version of the poignant ‘Out In The Streets’, Mary Weiss’s favourite Shangri-Las song, would be tackled at Blondie’s first recording session in 1975. The group’s epic melodramas, peppered with bad boys in leather jackets who were ‘good/bad but not evil’, also influenced other seventies New York acts – including Jayne County, The Ramones and, just before them, The New York Dolls, who lifted the “When I say I’m in love” opening line of ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ for their 1973 urban melodrama ‘Looking For A Kiss’, while Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders would cover the song on his first solo album. (Over in the UK, The Damned used the “Is she really going out with him?” intro from ‘Leader Of The Pack’ to kick off their debut single, ‘New Rose’.)

  The girl groups had also consolidated Debbie Harry’s growing fixation with nearby New York City, twinkling over the Hudson River. By 1965 it was entering into a cultural revolution, off the back of the ‘British invasion’ that had taken place the previous year.

  Chapter Two

  Village Heads

  “The drug experience was edifying and illuminating, but the other side is that it was habitual and destroys brain cells. Did I have a drug of choice? Well, I chose a lot of drugs.”

  Debbie Harry

  Without Chris Stein, the Blondie phenomenon would never have ignited on such a global scale or have been so diversely fascinating. He is the one who became Debbie’s rock, keeping her positive, offering challenge and excitement, and providing sanctuary. He would be her intensely knowledgeable creative foil as the pair juggled pop culture with underground art and street music, while the world went Blondie-crazy.

  Responsible for Blondie hits that include ‘Rip Her To Shreds’, ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Rapture’ and ‘Dreaming’, the Harry/Stein songwriting partnership can be rated alongside Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards or Strummer/Jones. It also followed the classic Broadway hit factory tradition of personal intimacy providing a springboard for dynamic creativity – Barry/Greenwich being one obvious example.

  Witnessing the couple together during Blondie’s rise and fall between 1977 and 1982 was often touching as they cohabited in their own binary orbit, immune to the external hassles of press criticism, clamouring media and rabid fans. Chris would laugh at Debbie’s expeditions from hotels to nearby shops, her f
amous face disguised behind wigs and shades. In fact they would laugh a lot, whether at the antics of old mutual friends or at the absurdity of it all. Through the first half of Blondie’s first phase they would also find solace in each other’s company, as they bitterly protested about their management.

  Stein was always into comic books, grindhouse movies, extreme pop culture, arcane or obscure musical forms, and the heritage of his home city. He relished the fact that he could now rub shoulders with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol as a fellow artist who, for a time, was more successful or well-known than either of them. Underneath the thick-framed glasses and amiably stoned professorial demeanour lurked a dry humourist, a foraging and sometimes fearless musician, and an outstanding photographer. Stein was loyal to those who showed him support, too – even at the peak of Blondie-mania he would take the time to keep in touch, via regular phone calls and letters, with one of this book’s co-authors.

  Chris may now have found a new partner and devoted the last few years to fatherhood, but the bond between him and Debbie provides the spark which holds Blondie together even today. He is also among the short but illustrious list of godfathers of what is oft identified as ‘New York City’s musical melting pot’, rising above any ‘Disco Sucks’ prejudice early on to work with Chic and being one of the first downtown musicians to pick up on the burgeoning hip hop movement emanating from the South Bronx. The disparate roster of the Animal label he ran between 1982 and 1984 established him as one of the few from NY’s class of ‘76 to put his money where his mouth was, projecting a panoply of pioneers and misfits to wider public attention via the reflected glare of Blondie’s spotlight.

  Christopher Stein was born in Brooklyn on January 5, 1950. His mother, Estelle, was a painter and window designer, while Ben, his dad, was a salesman and frustrated writer who had been a labour organiser and wrote for the radical press in the thirties and forties. “I remember the FBI coming to our house when I was a kid,” explained Chris. “And I used to listen to my parents’ Leadbelly records, and they had black friends, which was a little unusual at that time.”

  “Both of them were ‘reds’,” added Stein. “They had met in the party so my Jewishness was limited. They were more atheistic in their views, and I didn’t have a barmitzvah, although of course I had plenty of relatives who were practising. In retrospect, I wish I knew a little more Hebrew. My father used to speak Yiddish with my grandfather quite fluently. I love listening to Lenny Bruce – I admire his ability to make Yiddish sound cool.”

  Visits from The Man notwithstanding, the Steins ran a typical non-practising Jewish liberal artistic household. His parents chose a gentile name for their son, specifically so that he would not be subjected to antisemitism. “Yeah, that was really bizarre,” he reflected. “There are a lot of ‘Chris Steins’ now if you look it up, but not then. I remember guys saying when I was growing up: ‘Oh, that’s a weird name for a Jewish boy!’”

  Estelle and Ben’s relationship was sometimes uncommunicative – Chris has described his mother as “neurotic” and “somewhat controlling”, while his father gradually eased himself out of the relationship and eventually moved in with a younger woman. “I remember that we’d go to the Catskills and my mother would basically lock herself in a cabin and paint the whole time. Not that my father was the easiest person to get along with – he had a very sarcastic, Yiddish sense of humour, one that I’ve inherited. One that is very New York.”

  An only child, Chris drew his initial musical inspiration directly from his parents; his earliest musical memories are of his mother singing songs from films such as Federico Fellini’s 1954 drama La Strada. “When I was a kid most of my heroes were 60-year-old black men. All those great blues guys like Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker.” Later, his passion for folk music would intertwine with a liking for newer groups like The Beatles and Stones. “My head paralleled the rise of all these groups when they first came about. I feel really lucky that I was born in 1950 and could see all that stuff.”

  “I always liked Dylan, the Stones, The Beatles, the usual shit,” Chris recounts. “I liked [the Stones] up until ‘It’s Only Rock ‘N’ Roll’. I liked Henry Mancini a lot too. And soundtracks. Dr No was one of my favourites. And ‘Peter Gunn’.”

  Initially, Chris enjoyed drawing (particularly spacemen) before setting his sights on becoming an Egyptologist. But everything changed after he got his first guitar from his parents when he was 11 years old. “I didn’t know you were supposed to press the strings down onto the frets to get different notes. I thought there was one fixed note and that was it,” said Chris. His unorthodox approach to the instrument was furthered by early exposure to bluegrass legend Lester Flatt. “When I saw Flatt playing slide I didn’t know what it was. I thought he was playing with his thumb so I started playing a lot with my thumb and it took me a year or two to gradually get my fingers round the other side of the neck.”

  Easily bored, Chris spent countless hours sitting in his room playing guitar and developing an understanding of folk music and the civil rights movement. He was also technically adept and developed a penchant for pulling speakers from discarded televisions and hooking them up to his beat-up record player. These were duly festooned around his room, which was painted a suitably bohemian black. A constant stream of friends dropping by to smoke pot and groove to sounds played at ear-splitting volume caused his mother to brand her son’s bedroom ‘a den of inequity’. This nascent nonconformity would ensure he fitted in perfectly once he started hitting the West Village.

  Like Debbie, Chris loathed school – after attending elementary school PS 199 in Midwood (where he played a leaf in a fourth-grade play: “It was pathetic. I had brown crepe paper all over me”), he moved onto Andries Hudde Junior High, before completing his compulsory education at Midwood High School where he was “traumatised by having to eat in the high school lunchroom”, wore steel-rimmed spectacles and generally ignored the teachers. “It was a school for fuck-ups who couldn’t fit into the system,” observed Chris. “I was always a little off-centre … and when my father died in 1965, I began to become more withdrawn and sullen.”

  That same year, Chris became the first kid to get thrown out of the school he described as “the last great greaser hangout in Brooklyn” for having long hair. (At the time, there was a test case going on where an excluded pupil sued his school for a similar dismissal; the school nervously invited him back; he refused.) Similarly, his luxurious locks failed to meet with the approval of the local hoods. “We would pass by the pool hall and these gangster types would beat up anyone with long hair,” he recounted. “I remember this pair, the Sirico brothers, would call us ‘faggots’ and try to do us damage.”

  By the time he was 15, Chris had spent sufficient time practising in his bedroom to unveil his guitar chops before a wider audience. “I floated in and out of a great number of Brooklyn groups, including The Morticians, who rehearsed a great deal but only played one gig … a promotional thing for a local barber – in his shop,” he recalled. “I was in a lot of bands. One called Fananganang … The Morticians, which became The Left Banke. I was in The Millard Fillmore Memorial Lamp Band – we used to play in Washington Square all the time.”

  The Morticians lined up as Stein on guitar and vocals, Simon Summers (guitar, bass, vocals), Barry Goldman (guitar, bass, vocals) and drummer George Cameron, who left to join he Left Banke and enjoyed a massive hit with ‘Walk Away Renee’ in September 1966. When the band dissolved that same year, Chris set out in search of new musical kicks. “I spent a lot of those folk-rock days just hanging out in Greenwich Village, playing my guitar in Washington Square and catching glimpses of the big local groups: The [Lovin’] Spoonful, The Magicians … even saw Jimi Hendrix a couple of times.”

  “During these years he learned from a cross-section of guitarists from John Fahey and [bluegrass pioneer] Lester Flatt, to the Lovin’ Spoonful and Bob Dylan,” explained Deborah. “He was going to a private school called
Quintano’s, but he was still a goof-off.”

  The Leonard Quintano School For Young Professionals was a Fame-style establishment that groomed students for careers in the performing arts and could count the likes of The Shangri-Las’ Mary Weiss, future New York Dolls Syl Sylvain and Billy Murcia and Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler among its alumni. Tyler subsequently described Quintano’s as a “school for fuck-ups like myself where you just had to show up to graduate.”

  Understandably, the trauma of his father’s sudden death had a massive impact on Chris. “He was only in his fifties, but he was a very sensitive man and his inability to release his creativity had put a great strain on him,” Debbie later explained. Recalling his dad’s gentle nature, Chris observed, “He just generally believed in freedom and peace, that was it really. He died ‘cause he was frustrated, being locked into his day-to-day existence, his job … he was frustrated into an early grave.”

  Although rock’n’roll provided him with an outlet, Chris would struggle to cope with his bereavement. “My father dying made me a little crazy. I wasn’t able to deal with it.” The full extent of this would not become apparent for almost four years. In the meantime, Chris continued his informal musical education by hanging out in Greenwich Village.

  Despite being airbrushed by the anodyne gentrification blighting much of New York City, Greenwich Village looks structurally much the same as it did in the last century. No buildings rise above mid-storey height, as its streets disregard the 19th-century numbered grid system between Sixth and Ninth Avenues and Houston to 14th. The neighbourhood started out as a wealthy rural hamlet, growing into a proper village within the ever-expanding city, attracting artists, activists, theatre groups and defiant homosexuals early in the 20th century. Speakeasies thrived during Prohibition, before booming jazz and blues clubs moved in. After World War II, ‘the Village’ attracted artists with its cheap rent and creativity seemed to coruscate through the bars and clubs. The main gathering spot was Washington Square Park, a short walk from Broadway at the foot of Fifth Avenue, its late 19th-century marble arch known as ‘the Gateway to the Village’. From the end of World War II, the Sunday afternoon hootenannies where singers exchanged songs were attended by devotees and those who could not get into the clubs, for reasons ranging from age to colour. The Park was the folk scene’s open-air epicentre.