Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  Although by the mid-sixties The Beatles had arrived to change the face of American popular music, back in the Village shockwaves were still reverberating after Bob Dylan had used the neighbourhood as a launch pad to fame and fortune. Of course, there was already a thriving folk scene there before he showed up, which he tapped into with his talent to reinterpret and bare-faced cheek. Until Dylan’s arrival the Village had been a more insular community, dominated throughout the fifties by venerable overseer Pete Seeger who, after meeting Woody Guthrie in March 1940 at an event in aid of displaced migrant workers, formed the system-lambasting Almanac Singers. By the sixties, clubs and coffeehouses were swelling with troubadours such as Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs and Peter, Paul and Mary (the folk-pop trio handled by Dylan’s manager, Albert Grossman), establishing the Village as a music industry boom town.

  At the other end of the aural spectrum, The Velvet Underground’s assimilation of noise and avant-garde elements embellished Lou Reed’s street vignettes. They were a major influence on Chris, who – along with many other aspiring downtown musicians – enjoyed elements of gutter-level danger and narcotics with his rock’n’roll. At a time when many bands were simply ‘going psychedelic’ with a string of beads and some phasing, The Velvet Underground cleaved an audaciously innovative path. Formed around Reed and John Cale in the latter’s Ludlow Street loft, the group resolutely kicked against the zeitgeist; sliding out of New York’s sleazy underbelly, they malevolently belched extreme noise terror at a time when flower power was blossoming.

  New York City put out totally contrasting signals that, when carried by their emissaries to the West Coast, were almost a declaration of war. It created an East/West schism that would presage the hip hop beefs of the eighties.

  After the long-delayed release of The Velvet Underground And Nico in March 1967, erstwhile manager Andy Warhol was keen to open a new club to replace the band’s previous regular venue, The Dom. He happened on a new space at 420 East 71st Street called The Gymnasium – actually the gym of Sokol Hall, an activity centre serving the Czech and Slovak community. On March 24, the now Nico-less Velvet Underground began a residency at what was promoted as a ‘new happening discotheque’, continuing each weekend for a month under the banner ‘Work Out At The Gymnasium’. The venture closed soon after, mainly on account of sparse attendance levels.

  Among those who did show up were Chris’s new band, First Crow To The Moon, which also featured Summers and Goldman from The Morticians plus singer Jim Savage, saxophonist Sonny Boy and guitarist Alan Avick (who Stein recalled was “an incredible guitarist but he died young – of leukaemia”). The quintet scored the gig supporting the Velvets through Joey Freeman, a friend of Chris who worked for Warhol. “It was his job to go wake Andy up at his house and stuff,” explained Stein. “So one day he said to my band in Brooklyn – it didn’t have a name, it was just a blues band – ‘Do you want to play with the Velvets?’

  “It was pretty late at night by the time we got out of the subway in Manhattan and headed toward The Gymnasium. Walking down the block with our guitars we actually saw some people coming down the street and they said, ‘Oh, are you guys the band, because we’ve been waiting there all night and we couldn’t take it any more, we left because they never showed up.’ So we said, ‘Yeah, we’re the band.’ We went inside and there was hardly anyone there. Somebody said Andy was supposed to be there, but he was off in the shadows with his entourage, we never saw him. We hung around for a little while and they played records, then we headed up for the stage. It was a big echoey place, we had absolutely no conception of playing a place like this whatsoever, but [Velvets drummer] Maureen Tucker said we could use their equipment. So we plugged into their amps and the amps were all cranked up superloud … The only song I remember doing was ‘You Can’t Judge A Book By Its Cover’.”

  “We must have done a few more,” Chris later recalled, “but I remember sitting down after a while because the whole thing had gotten me pretty discouraged. Then somebody came over and said, ‘Oh Andy likes you, he thinks you’re great.’ We must have played five or six songs then we just gave up. By that time the rest of the Velvets had arrived. After a while, they started to play and they were like awesomely powerful. I had never expected to experience anything like that before … I was really disappointed that they didn’t have Nico, because we thought she was the lead singer, but I distinctly remember the violin and their doing ‘Venus In Furs’ because a couple of people in dark outfits got up and started doing a slow dance with a chain in between them … There were maybe 30 people there. It was very late, but it was a memorable experience.”

  Mixing original material with cover versions and sometimes going by the alternate name of The Bootleggers, First Crow To The Moon played venues such as The Crazy Horse on Bleecker Street and Flatbush Terrace in Brooklyn. In addition the group held jam sessions at The Nite Owl on West Third Street, when it closed in the afternoons.

  First Crow To The Moon drifted apart; Chris spent 1967’s summer of love tripping in San Francisco but, as the lysergic heat subsided, he felt the pull of his hometown, returning to New York before the year was out.

  In comparison with the vibrant chaos of New York, mid-sixties New Jersey was a different world; its open spaces, shopping malls and small-town fastidiousness provided just the kind of environment to stoke a desire to escape among disaffected teenagers. Debbie’s trips to Manhattan became increasingly frequent as the lure of glamour and excitement exerted an irresistible pull upon her. “I came from a very provincial atmosphere. Suburbia, New Jersey. Grew up in a small town, in a family that was very small town, and I wanted the world. I really wanted to taste everything,” she recalled. “It was always my dream to live the bohemian life in New York …”

  Deborah set about finding herself work to support the relocation; her initial stint at a Gift Mart was followed by a job at the BBC’s New York office, where she operated the telex machine and learned how to edit tapes for radio broadcasts. To an extent this provided her with the inspiration to begin experimenting with sound. “I hung out with jazz musicians. I met Bob Evans, the piano player. I met a lot of weird people like Tiger Morse, Tally Brown … They did jazz all the time. It was free, abstract, non-music music. Whenever it became music, it was music. Most of the time, it was noise – percussion, screeching, shit like that. I chatted and yelled and banged stuff and carried on.”

  Moving into an apartment on St Mark’s Place in the East Village, Debbie began to realise her bohemian ambitions by becoming an artist. “I didn’t know what else to do,” she admitted. “I had no idea how to take care of myself.”

  “I was curious,” she remembered, “I wanted adventure, and to feel and absorb things, and see what was going on. I was on the shy side, but determined to discover who I was. Desperate to, actually. Desperation and obsession are good things. I don’t know if I was that intelligent about it. I got myself into uncomfortable situations, but managed to come out the other side. I was shy, but fascinated with the underground, beatniks, strange, fringe people, and I got to meet them, and to study human nature.

  “I was really excited to be on my own and to see all the stuff that was going on in New York at the time. I thought it was rather sexy. The early days of rock’n’roll was all counter-culture. It was forbidden – all rather clandestine. Churches forbade it and schools set dress codes.”

  Ideally placed to explore the full range of cultural developments detonating around her as the sixties climbed towards a creative zenith, Debbie immersed herself in the burgeoning hippie zeitgeist. “I went to the Be-Ins in Central Park. They were great – a lot of crazy people tripped out of their minds, dressed great. That was one thing I liked about hippy nation; everyone was always dressed up. In a way, the sixties in New York were a larger version of what went on at CBGB in the early seventies. You had Sun Ra playing in the park. The Fugs were around town, The Velvet Underground were playing at The Balloon Farm.”

  Despite Debbie’s observati
on that, “I don’t know if it did anything special for me,” some of the musical elements of the peace and love scene made an indelible impression. “I’ll never forget seeing Janis Joplin with Big Brother And The Holding Company at the Anderson Theatre in 1967, when she grabbed a bottle of Southern Comfort off the top of the upright piano, took a belt, and went straight into ‘Ball And Chain’ begging, ‘Take my heart.’

  “When I saw Janis, I thought, ‘Wow, what courage!’ She communicated who she was, what she was singing about. It wasn’t just a technical experience for her, making notes come out and waving her arms around. She was doing with her body what she felt in those songs.”

  As with Chris, a yearning to seek out what was fresh and ‘happening’ in New York drew Debbie to the gravity well of artistic expression generated by Warhol and the Velvets. “The first time I saw them was one of the best shows I have ever seen. I didn’t have a clue who they were. I used to go to this place – a big room called The Balloon Farm … which was like a former Ukrainian nursing home, and it was The Velvet Underground playing live with Nico. The stage set and colours were designed by Andy Warhol who was also doing the lights. It was beautiful. Mo Tucker on drums was fucking great. And you could just wander in and watch them.”

  Such close exposure to the Velvets furnished Deborah with radical new ideas about how female musicians and vocalists could present themselves. “You couldn’t help feeling a different sense of time because they created an overpowering fresh environment,” she asserts. “Nico could be very quiet. She would stand there, so cool. She would wear this chartreuse jacket, with her long, very blonde hair, standing completely still – ‘I’ll be your mirror.’ She would just do that, with the rest of the Velvets behind her, so dark and menacing. Blondie once did a big festival in Barcelona, one of our earliest shows in front of a large audience, and we shared a little caravan with Nico. She was in there shooting up; ‘Wow, Nico shooting up! Cool!’ Then she went out and played her songs on the harmonium. She was still gorgeous.”

  “I was just a baby growing up in the middle of this incredible scene,” observed Debbie. “I was on the fringes of that whole Factory thing. I was this shy person who didn’t talk very much, just hung out and looked cute and watched everybody. They were all so eccentric and beautiful and flamboyant then. It’s funny because – except in certain quarters – people have become so conservative and uniform. It’s like cookie-cutters; people are just stamped out. It’s so refreshing when someone like you comes along who’s exotic or eccentric, whatever you wanna call it.”

  By 1966, Deborah took her initial steps into performance by joining her first groups. “After I’d moved to New York I was in and out of the Uni Trio, which was a St Mark’s area jazz group, and the Tri-Angels, but nothing came of either of them,” she explained. “I was painting then, but beginning to feel music more, so I started painting sound. But sound had to be painted on walls, not canvas, so I decided to move into music, stopped painting, and spent more time in clubs with live music.”

  In addition to hooking up with these short-lived bands, Debbie also briefly cast her sights toward musical theatre. “I used to buy Backstage, which listed open calls for Broadway shows like the one for Hair, when thousands of kids showed up and stood on an endless line. I didn’t know about agents, and I went to a few of these auditions on full-size stages in Broadway theatres, but I never got further than singing, ‘Oh, la-da-da,’ before a voice would boom, ‘Thank you very much,’ out of the dark, and I would trot off, having waited in line a whole day being sweaty and nervous, along with all these showbiz hopefuls. Looking back that scene makes me think of a convention of bag women.”

  As the year approached its end, Deborah took another step forward by joining her first professional group – the exotically named First National Unaphrenic Church and Bank, where she sang and banged percussion. More of a collective than a band, FNUC&B cloaked abrasive art-school modern jazz in hippie idealism, splitting after their involvement in recording the 1967 album The Psychedelic Saxophone Of Charlie Nothing, released on John Fahey’s Takoma label after Debbie had left the group. In addition to saxophonist Nothing (otherwise known as Charles Martin Simon), The Unaphrenics included drummer Tox Strohaw, Fuci (who played the triangle and contributed ‘screams’ and ‘yells’) and percussionist Sujan Souri. “The First National Unaphrenic Church and Bank had marginally more stability, except that Tox was an escaped convict,” Debbie explained. “He was living on an Indian reservation in the Smokie Mountains and we had to smuggle him back to New York with a beard and an assumed name – they were strange days.”

  In early 1967 Debbie hooked up with Paul Klein, the husband of her high-school friend Wendy Simon, who had noticed her “little nasally voice” and formed a group along with bassist Steve De Philips. Keyboardist Wayne Kirby and woodwind multi-instrumentalist Ida Andrews were recruited fresh from the Julliard performing arts school, before the expanding line-up was rounded out by Peter Britain (lead guitar/vocals) plus percussionists Gil Fields and Anton Karasforth. “So then we had a group of people, who together could play 20 different instruments on stage and create a lot of effects,” recounted Klein. “That was the birth of the Willows.”

  Named after Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 classic children’s novel, Wind In The Willows were fairly typical of the hippie era’s fixation with naivety and nature. “It was pretty awful,” Debbie asserted. “That was baroque folk rock. I didn’t have anything to do with the music then. I was just a back-up singer.” A feature in underground newspaper World Countdown News noted, “Debby [sic] Harry, 22, is the second girl in the group. Debby sings lead on several numbers and provides harmony on most of the rest. She plays tamboura, plus kazoo and tambourine.”

  Although she may have had reservations about the band’s sound and image, ‘Debby’ was very much on message when talking to the paper: “I think that everybody should go beyond the lyrics and whatever we or any group is saying directly, and tune into the overtones of the music. An audience should relax and identify with the overall picture we are trying to paint instead of trying to get inside of our material and interpret our meanings. Instead of concentrating on our music and specific parts of it, people should first sit back and react freely to all of it.”

  The tragically unnecessary death of Wendy Simon’s sister, Beth Ann, alleged to have starved while attempting a macrobiotic diet, indirectly led to Wind In The Willows scoring a manager and record deal. Future Village Voice heavyweight Robert Christgau reported on Beth Ann’s death and subsequently stuck up a friendship with Klein, who lived on the same Seventh Street block. At Klein’s suggestion, Christgau began hanging out with the group with a view to composing a feature about the struggles of a young band in New York. He then brought the group to the attention of another friend, press agent Dominic Sicilia, who in turn introduced them to manager Peter Leeds.

  Leeds, who would go on to play a significant part in Debbie and Chris’s future, secured the group an album deal with Capitol Records. “It was a sort of folk-rock album. A sweet, saccharine kind of thing. I wasn’t really a writer on that,” Deborah insisted. “That record is very childlike to me. I didn’t have a great deal of input. I was a back-up singer, doing high harmonies with the lead singer. It was his trip. He envisioned himself as this big-daddy folk guy with a teddy bear aspect.”

  Capitol duly sent its new investment on the road, the group travelling cross-country for gigs in Boston, Los Angeles and San Francisco, giving Debbie her first taste of life on the road: “I remember one concert before 3,000 people and it was a great rush. I loved it, it was a thrill.”

  However, neither Wind In The Willows (the debut album) nor the band’s live excursions set the world aflame and, despite recording a second album, Debbie’s dissatisfaction with the group she later described as “a temporary association of convenience” quickly surfaced. “I wasn’t turned on by the music any more. I thought we should make certain changes, but Paul [Klein, lead singer] didn’t agree, so I
told them I was leaving,” she explained. “We did a second album that was a little more tasteful – for me, anyway – but it never came out. I have no idea what happened to it.”

  Although she had enjoyed her experiences of recording and performing, the folk scene hardly evoked the wild outsider spirit that initially excited Deborah’s musical creativity. “I was a chirpy, cheery soprano in that group singing back-up and going, ‘Oooooooo.’ Actually, I loved doing the music, because all I wanted to do was sing, to paint music, you know, but I was just really a sideman in that group and I found it very frustrating and I just lost interest,” she observed. “I decided I wanted to do something harder, faster, and more exciting.”

  Debbie’s departure from Wind In The Willows marked the beginning of a half-decade estrangement from performance, during which she enthusiastically embraced the smorgasbord of drugs ubiquitous to the art and music scenes. “I know that the first time I was exposed to pot was in 1964,” she confirmed. “All those drugs – LSD, heroin – became a part of my social life. I didn’t shut myself off from anything. I really wanted to embrace it all. So I did.”