Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  Although Deborah was delighted to be in a group where she had some say about both image and sound, her parents were less enthusiastic. “They didn’t understand it at all and they really tried to convince me that I was wandering off into the world of God knows what. They were kind of right, because I was taking a gamble with my life. But I don’t think they really had a clue. They weren’t musicians or artists in any way and I don’t think they understood that certain part of me, because they didn’t have it in them.”

  Irrespective of parental disapproval, Debbie knew exactly what sort of group she wanted The Stillettoes to be. “I wanted a combination of the aggressive Shangri-Las rock and the round, solid vocals of an R&B girl group, and the overall idea was to be both entertaining and danceable.”

  Named by Elda, The Stillettoes were backed by guitarists Tommy and Jimmy Wynbrandt – who would later join cult New York power-pop band The Miamis. “Musicians were hard to come by as they all wanted to be in boy bands and wear make-up and platform shoes like the Dolls,” Elda recounts. “But Tommy and Jimmy said they would help, Timothy Jackson took on the drumming and my old friend Alter Ego, who started Pure Garbage, played bass. Debbie had called me, eager to move forward. There are a lot of aspects to a do-it-yourself project and it was my project so I didn’t mind making all the necessary investments into it. For Debbie and Rosie it was a turnkey operation – they just had to show up, be happy and perform. Easier said than done.”

  Underground theatre/film director Tony Ingrassia was signed up to choreograph the group. “He worked on the songs with us, concentrating on a mood, projecting a mood through a song, [and devising] stage tricks to give us a cohesive look. He and Elda used to fight about the image. It was her concept,” Deborah explained. “We used to work our butts off, and sing for hours until our throats were raw. It was incredible; it was just like going to school. He was real intense about it. I still have to respect him for that. I would get mad at him, but it was stimulating to get that mad.”

  “Ingrassia promised that if I let him stage The Stillettoes, he would get us on the [Bowie/Spiders From Mars guitarist] Mick Ronson tour,” says Elda. “He also was a good acting teacher and I thought it would help Debbie and Rosie with their stage presence – I had already gone through it. Method acting techniques open people up and Tony made Debbie and Rosie cry a lot.”

  “Elda wanted to make us a campy, kitsch materialisation of the True Confessions heart-throb garbage girl who’s fucked and abandoned, widowed or unmarried; Rosie was into rhythm and blues soul music,” Deborah remembered. “Rock dancing was non-existent. Disco was just starting to get a real hold on people.”

  By the time that The Stillettoes made their live debut in October 1973, Rosie Ross had quit the group after Ingrassia stopped directing them and had been replaced by Amanda Jones, who was recruited by Elda. “We played at the Boburn Tavern on 28th Street; it was just a shitty little dive where they took the legs off the pool table to use it as a stage,” recalled Debbie.” We didn’t think we’d get much of a crowd, but the place was jammed; by the next week, David and Angie Bowie were pulling up in their limousine. We had New York by the balls! There was nothing going on in those days.”

  “Elda and Holly Woodlawn had the loft upstairs, so they asked the owner if they could perform in the pool room at the back,” Chris explained. “It was an anonymous little bar but in those days people were always inventing places to play.”

  “Holly did the lighting, holding a spotlight with a red gel while standing on the bar,” recalls Elda. “We had a great turnout. Being related to Eric Emerson meant that everyone in Downtown New York would know about the gig. It seemed like The Stillettoes were off to a great start.”

  “I loved The Stillettoes,” enthused Leee Black Childers. “They were very influenced by those underground plays and musicals that we did. The people who wrote the plays weren’t songwriters, so they did old tunes and put new words to them. The words were often outrageously dirty – ‘Thalidomide Baby’ and stuff like that. The Stillettoes played a mixture of old tunes and show tunes, but with an outrageous twist. They would go from dirty songs to pop songs. The band was a good training ground for Debbie Harry. Debbie was very nervous about being able to sing. She also didn’t think she was pretty.”

  “It was such fun,” beamed Debbie. “The Stillettoes were only ever watched by drunks and low-lifes in sleazy bars and we made no money, but it was fun. That whole early seventies period was fun. Sometimes I miss those times. The New York Dolls were fabulous fun. That whole period, I don’t know, there were just a bunch of nice bands then, elegant glitter bands with big platform shoes and big everything. It was great … We were campy. We used to have a song called ‘Narcissisma’ … We did ‘Goldfinger’, too … And then we had a song called ‘Rouge’ which was written by Alice Ghostley who was a very odd comedienne – she was on Bewitched and she was always the fucked-up, crazy witch aunt.”

  “The best song was called ‘Dracula, What Did You Do To My Mother?’” asserted Elda. “We wore green crosses and skull eyeglasses that we bought on 42nd Street. It was great.”

  “Everybody was there in bell-bottom pants,” added Deborah. “We did a couple of shows. Then the girls were there in tight pants and minis. They had scoured the second-hand stores.”

  Regardless of whatever qualities were on display, The Stillettoes’ second gig at the Boburn Tavern would be significant in enabling Chris and Debbie to finally meet. “Elda would invite people while she was out socialising and that’s actually how I heard about it,” remembered Chris. “At the time I was dating this girl called Elvira, who used to be the girlfriend of Billy Murcia – the drummer from the Dolls. We went out for about nine months – she had a little daughter I really liked. Anyway, Elda had invited her to the show, so I went too.”

  “He came there with Eric Emerson and Elda. She used to go with Eric. He was sitting in the shadows yet I could feel his piercing gaze upon me throughout the whole show,” explained Deborah. “I really couldn’t see his face clearly because he was sitting in such a way that his head was [facing] backwards … All I could see was this sort of glow, and I don’t know if it was [fate] or it was just sort of apparent that we were supposed to connect up. I know that sounds kind of ridiculous, but I delivered the whole show to him. I couldn’t look anywhere else.”

  Debbie later spoke of feeling an immediate “psychic connection” with Chris, while her future partner admitted, “I was flabbergasted. I was impressed and knocked out by her.” Unsurprisingly, the two hit it off. “He was very magnetic to me. He has such beautiful eyes. And I love dark hair on men,” purred Deborah. “It’s very easy to be friends with Chris, because he’s really a lovely guy. He’s a weird combination of a very sophisticated mind and very childlike behaviour. It’s totally endearing. I was always smitten by those elements of his personality.”

  “I probably saw in her what a lot of people saw later on, but I got there first,” surmised Chris.

  Their personal relationship would soon blossom, but first Debbie asked Chris to join the group. “I discovered he was a musician, and one of the other Stillettoes knew him, and we asked him to join our backing band. That was Chris. We fitted from the start.”

  Chapter Four

  East Side Story

  “The Bowery was a drab, ugly and unsavoury place, but it was good enough for rock’n’rollers. The people who frequented CBGB’s didn’t seem to mind staggering drunks and stepping over a few bodies.”

  Hilly Kristal

  Although Chris and Debbie felt an immediate attraction to each other, their personal relationship developed at a slower rate than their creative alliance. With their prime focus set upon reconfiguring The Stillettoes, the couple would regularly stroll between their respective apartments, plotting the band’s next move and hatching song ideas.

  In addition to drawing them closer together, al fresco brainstorming amid New York’s concrete canyons infused their songs with the essence of the ci
ty. “I’ve always felt the environment one lives in has an effect on what one does, and this was certainly proved true in the initial stages of my collaboration with Chris,” observed Deborah. “I was walking to his house one day when I started working up a song called ‘Platinum Blonde’. By the time I got there I had the lyrics and melody so we started fooling around with it right away. Movement, like walking, driving or listening to the bump, spin, hiss of the laundromat or motors has always been an inspiration for lyrics.”

  The nascent Stein-Harry relationship developed at a natural, unpressured pace. “Chris and I hadn’t become lovers yet, but through working together we’d become friends,” Debbie explained. “He knew I was nervous that my past would catch up with me. The all-night phone calls continued, so he said I could stay at his apartment if I would feel safer. However, after a while the Jersey car salesman came to his senses. I think he felt bad about what he’d done.”

  “Debbie had some so-called ex-boyfriend who was harassing her,” confirms Elda. “So there were times she would call and cancel at the last minute. It was freaking us all out, especially Chris. So Tony and Rosie found an apartment for her in their building on the West Side. Chris and the band packed her up in the dead of night and moved her. The ex-boyfriend would call threatening me if I didn’t tell him where Debbie was. He was one scary guy.”

  Chris’ laid-back nature, and his understanding of the psychological impact of possessive ex-boyfriends and overenthusiastic chemical consumption, enabled the couple to gradually grow together. “When he saw Debbie, he had the hots for her, like, unbelievably,” asserts Elda. “I was even a little surprised that she went for it. Let’s just say that he was very, very smart the way he handled her. I knew he wanted her body, soul and spirit, but he played it very cool to get her. He nurtured all her insecurities. See, everybody loved Debbie because she had this Marilyn-Monroe-in-the-gutter quality, but she was very insecure, and a little bit paranoid.”

  “I think it was about three months before we were actually intimate,” Chris recalled. “I think we just had a meeting of the minds,” added Deborah. “Maybe it’s because we’ve both got such accepting natures and we have a lot of room for a lot of different kinds of people and different dispositions and things like that. We both have a temper, though.”

  “I’m an independent person, and I’ve survived quite well being independent,” asserted Debbie. “I don’t need a man for support in that way. I need a partner, I need someone who wants to share the kinds of things that I enjoy doing, and that is willing to have a woman who’s strong. A lot of men don’t want to have a strong woman – but a lot do. It probably has to do with intelligence. I like somebody with a good sense of humour.”

  Chris’ openness, his sense of humour and respect for Debbie gradually chipped away at her reluctance to become involved. The couple opted to cohabit at Thompson Street, with Chris subletting his apartment to Tommy Erdelyi – who would shortly become known as Tommy Ramone, The Ramones’ drum titan.

  Irrespective of being closer to the West Side, Chris found there was no escaping the harsh realities of the New York streets. “It was totally fucking Mean Streets there,” he recounts. “It was exactly what’s in the film with all the fucking social clubs and stuff like that. Eventually we were sort of blacklisted in the neighbourhood because we were just too weird. What happened was I was waiting for Debbie to come home one day and I was downstairs and I had super-long hair and used to wear fucking make-up and all this shit, so everybody thought we were completely weird but we still got along with the super of the building and all the people and stuff. I was waiting for Debbie to come home, and across the street is a bunch of the neighbourhood guys kicking the shit out of this black guy – just for the hell of it … And I’m just observing this and I hear a voice going, ‘No, no! Stop! Call the police!’ And it’s fucking Debbie who has just arrived on the scene from visiting her parents, and after that we were ostracised.”

  Despite Deborah’s connection to Chris, it was actually Elda that asked him to join The Stillettoes. Setting aside his loose arrangement with The Magic Tramps, he agreed to play full-time partly on account of his attraction to Debbie. Chris took over on guitar, with Elda recruiting Fred Smith as bassist and a friend from the Boburn tavern, Billy O’Connor, as the band’s latest drummer. “I met Chris when he was a bass player for Eric Emerson. He would go down on his knees and everything; he was really different as a bass player than he is as a guitarist,” observed Debbie. “I thought he was marvellous. But I think it fits him better intellectually to play a guitar than bass.”

  “We didn’t really know what we were doing when we started,” Deborah later explained. “We did some Tina Turner songs and a few Rolling Stones songs. We weren’t that good. We were just learning. All we wanted to do was songs that had a hook in them, that were danceable, because up to that point everybody was watching these long guitar solos and good old boys singing about ‘the road’ and it didn’t relate to our urban experience at all. It was just Middle America music and we were sick of it.”

  The band’s musical inexperience was matched by the poverty of their urban experience. “We had absolutely no equipment when we started out. We were terrible,” Debbie asserted. “Chris had a little tiny amp thing that was terribly noisy. The police radio never stopped coming through. Everyone was responsible for their own mix so it was all, ‘Your amp is on 10 so mine’s going on 10, too, dammit! Let’s watch the singer bleed; I’m putting my amp on 11! See the singer bleed through the nose!’ But, oh God, seriously, those were fun days at the beginning, before we got famous and all that shit. We were just disreputable and funky and sleazy and smelly in every way. We were jerks. We were the underdogs.”

  By late spring 1974, the retooled Stillettoes were confident enough to set their mixture of high camp and late glam before small sections of the public. “Chris calls [The Stillettoes] the last of the glitter groups. It was a sort of campy Shangri-Las/Supremes-type of girl trio,” recounts Debbie. “We had a lot of fun but we weren’t too musical. The record companies at that time were not interested.”

  At a time when pretentious progressive opuses such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon were selling by the truckload, the fading glam scene still came closest to any form of rock’n’roll dynamism. “It was all glitter bands,” declared ex-Stillettoes bassist Fred Smith. “That’s what was happening. It was a lot of fun. It was exciting. There were all these groups forming on the Lower East Side. There was CBGB’s and Club 82 opening. There was something happening. It was more fun than music. The Stillettoes, like most of the other groups, were probably more into presentation than music, but the girls wrote a few good songs.”

  Situated on Fourth Street and Second Avenue, Club 82 had been one of Manhattan’s most glamorous drag venues between the forties and late sixties, playing host to successive waves of female impersonators. Latterly, 82 had lost some of its transgressive allure once such establishments could operate openly, but still employed a team of lesbians to maintain order at the door. “It was run by this lesbian woman – called Tommy – who was gorgeous and ran it like a brick shithouse,” recalls New York Dolls guitarist Syl Sylvain who, with the rest of the ‘Lipstick Killers’ (as the Dolls were sometimes known to the glitter cognoscenti), had opened the venue for live rock’n’roll in full drag. “It looked all tropical. The Copacabana goes gay, if you will. The centre of it was the actual stage, like a square. Completely around the stage was the bar. We would hang down there. The prostitutes were on 10th Street and after their work hours they would go down to Club 82 and drink down there. They would have like drag shows and do performances.”

  For a short time, the club filled the countercultural void left by the collapse of the Mercer Arts Center and provided The Stillettoes with a venue for a handful of their early gigs, one of which was attended by Who drummer, Keith Moon. Also at this June 1974 show was a representative from Albert Grossman’s Bearsville Records who offered the girls, but not the bo
ys, a recording deal. They demurred.

  The same gig also afforded The Stillettoes their first mention in the UK press, as Melody Maker‘s Chris Charlesworth reviewed the show, observing that “some of the songs were well worth putting on vinyl”, while an accompanying image depicted “a cuddly platinum blonde named Debbi”. Charlesworth, who was the inky paper’s New York correspondent, was tipped off about The Stillettoes by photographer Bob Gruen. “He knew I was interested in checking out some rock’n’roll action amongst unsigned acts downtown and there was a band that he thought I might like. ‘There’s this singer, a blonde girl, looks just like Marilyn Monroe,’ he said on the phone. ‘Check her out, man, you won’t believe it.’”

  Charlesworth headed down to Club 82. “It was an old-style dyke bar with mirrors everywhere,” he recalls. “I think it was famous in its day as an all-female gay hangout but now fallen on hard times, and the girls who worked it, all of them of a certain age with short crops and dressed in dark men’s suits with buttoned-up shirts and ties, figured that a bit of rock’n’roll might keep the creditors at bay. For a while it was a sort of sister club to CBGB’s, never as well known but fun all the same, brighter too with more of a party atmosphere. So on this night I paid my $3 on the door and went inside, bought a beer and found Bob by the stage, camera at the ready.

  “The Stillettoes turned out to be a trio, backed by a four-piece, who took their cue from the girl groups of the pre-Beatles sixties. There was a black girl, a redhead and a blonde who was the leader, and Bob was right: she wore a clingy, low-cut, full-length satin fifties ball gown in gold that flattered her figure and she was a dead ringer for Marilyn, with platinum hair, a lovely smile and strawberry lips. Their set was under-rehearsed and short – everybody’s was down there – and afterwards Bob took me backstage to meet her.”