by Dick Porter
Charlesworth thus became the first – but certainly not the last – British music writer to be enchanted by Deborah Harry. “She just shimmered,” he continues. “Her eyes sparkled and when she smiled I just melted. She was cool, committed and she knew her pop too. I was certainly intimidated by her but I tried not to show it and somehow managed to talk to her about this and that while Bob took some more pictures.”
At this stage Deborah was working in a New Jersey beauty parlour. “She told me she wanted to be a singer but she had a daytime job,” says Charlesworth. “She said she hoped some day to get into the music business full-time. I told her I’d stay in touch and she gave me the phone number of the beauty parlour. Bob took some more pictures, and I went away and in a week or two included my little interview with her in a generic piece I wrote for MM about several New York bands like The Stillettoes, Television, The Harlots Of 42nd Street and a few more. I’d sent over Bob’s pictures and, naturally enough since she was a vision of loveliness, the subs’ desk in London chose to illustrate the feature with one of Bob’s big pictures of The Stillettoes’ lead singer, taken on the night of my interview.”
A week later Charlesworth called Debbie at the beauty parlour where she worked and told her that her picture was in Melody Maker. “She was very excited about this. It was evidently the first time she’d ever had her picture in a magazine, or so she told me, and she seemed desperate to get her hands on a copy. A night or two later she drove up to my apartment on East 78th Street in an old green banger with bench seats and I gave her three copies of the magazine and we went out and had a Japanese meal together on the West Side. I don’t think she’d ever been to a Japanese restaurant before so I introduced her to sushi and tempura and sake, which she loved. She told me that The Stillettoes were breaking up and she was forming a new band with her boyfriend, Chris Stein, their guitarist. I took note of this and mentioned it in my next New York news column. When she dropped me off at my place after midnight I pulled her towards me across the bench seat, kissed her on the lips and invited her inside, but I was too late – she’d already met another Chris.”
Charlesworth stayed in touch with Debbie and, on June 14, 1974, took her to see The Who at Madison Square Garden, the final night of a four-night run. “We had a great view, close by the stage but looking down on John’s side,” he recalls. “Funnily enough, I don’t think she was that impressed. They smashed up lots of gear at the end and maybe she was thinking what a waste it all was.”
After the show he brought Debbie backstage to meet the group. “In the dressing room Roger Daltrey tried to put the make on her. He said something like, ‘Fuckin’ ’ ell, Chris, that bird looks just like fuckin’ Marilyn Monroe!’ and Keith Moon was showing an interest too. She didn’t respond to either of their advances – which didn’t please Roger, whose strike rate in this department was always very high. She spent the rest of the evening with me, taking in an after-show party at a roller-dome where we danced a lot and Bob Gruen, ever on my trail, took more photographs, including several of us together. I still have them.”
A few weeks later, Debbie called Chris Charlesworth and asked him to meet her and Chris Stein at Max’s Kansas City. “Upstairs in the bar they told me more about their plans for the new band, and asked me whether I’d be interested in managing them. I was astounded, incredibly flattered, but I declined. I knew very little about management in those days and didn’t think I was up to the job. In any case, I was having far too much fun being Melody Maker’s man in America. I think they thought it would be cool to have a British music writer as their manager and they were probably right, but I wasn’t the right one. I did recommend some managers I knew but, as far as I am aware, none of them took them up on it, fools that they were.”
At the time of The Stillettoes’ initial mention in Melody Maker, gender-bending Jayne County – who had appeared in Warhol’s stage show Pork and subsequently been hired by Bowie manager Tony DeFries’ Mainman organisation – was fronting outrageous groups such as Queen Elizabeth And The Backstreet Boys (then as Wayne County). S/he was one of the select few who caught The Stillettoes at Club 82 and considers the venue to be “the predecessor of CBGB’s”.
In the late summer of 1974 Club 82 would stop booking live bands, leaving the ailing Max’s Kansas City and the recently opened CBGB’s as the most accessible venues for New York’s glitter underground. Situated at 315 Bowery, opposite the dead end of Bleecker Street, the latter premises had been taken over in 1969 by Hilly Kristal, who previously managed the Village Vanguard Jazz Club on Seventh Avenue, before opening a country music bar on 13th Street. The initials stood for ‘Country, Bluegrass and Blues’, with the appended ‘OMFUG’ as an acronym for ‘Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers’. Kristal initially decided to convert the space from a biker bar to a steel-guitar-and-checked-shirt establishment, but there was not enough country in town. He would also discover that finding gormandisers to uplift was similarly difficult. “But what happened was, first of all there weren’t really enough people to make it work,” Kristal explained, “enough things to keep it going day after day here on the Bowery, which was a little bit different to how it is now; it was a mess.”
The bar’s tawdry location added to its chaotic sense of excitement. In 1974 the Bowery/Lower East Side was still considered dangerous, to the point of being a no-go area for the more timid. The club was dark, narrow and illuminated inside by neon beer signs. Next door was the Palace Hotel, one of the city’s flophouses and a major haven for the then-ubiquitous Bowery bums. The club’s entrance reeked of vagrant’s piss, a fragrance that tended to follow you inside.
For years the Bowery had been the quintessential Skid Row populated by derelicts, as immortalised by Lionel Rogosin’s 1956 film On The Bowery – a fly-at-the-bottom-of-the-glass view of what, for the first half of the 20th century, had been the happening drag for vaudeville and burlesque entertainment. The film’s bleak picture of bums, alcoholics and hustling ne’er-do-wells was brutally raw and still accurate by the time CBGB’s opened for business. Before this there had been the Bowery Boys B-movies, which ran for 15 years from the mid-forties and set their streetwise Lower East Side heroes against authority figures, cops and mobsters. But for most of the sixties, with much of the cultural action going on in Greenwich Village and further East, around St Mark’s Place and the Lower East Side, the Bowery had been left to rot along with its itinerant inhabitants.
Eric Emerson had been friendly with the local Hells Angels chapter whose clubhouse opened in 1969, opposite the local men’s shelter on East Third Street. He was on his way home with drummer Sesu Coleman when they stopped off at 315 Bowery; although Kristal had his country bar on West 13th Street, he lived at this address. Within a two-block radius of Hilly’s on the bowery were six flophouses holding about 2,000 alcoholics, junkies, social rejects, discarded Vietnam veterans and former inmates of prisons or mental institutions. Traversing the Bowery involved stepping over unconscious bodies, who were easy prey for muggers (‘jack rollers’, as they were known) when comatose. Hilly was looking to promote live music, so Emerson and Coleman offered to play as they had at the Mercer. The Magic Tramps helped build the stage and performed at the venue’s grand opening on October 19, 1972.
In December 1973 Hilly renamed the bar CBGB’s. Wayne County and Queen Elizabeth were the first band to play the new club. “I played CBGB’s four whole months before Television,” asserts Wayne/Jayne. “It was for a crowd of Hells Angels. They used to hang out there a lot before it became cool and The Ramones and Patti Smith started playing there. In fact, I’m the one who told Dee Dee Ramone about CBGB’s. He was complaining about there being so few places to play in New York City …”
“In April, Tom [Verlaine] and I were walking down from his house … and we passed this place, which the owner, Hilly Kristal, was outside fixing up,” Television guitarist Richard Lloyd recalled. “We asked if maybe we could play there and he told us he was going to call the place Country Blu
e Grass and Blues. So we said, ‘Yes, we play stuff like that …’ He gave us a gig, so we got a whole bunch of friends down and convinced him to give us every Sunday for a month.”
“There were all these kids and they had no place to play their own rock music,” observed Kristal. “They weren’t interested in sixties rock, they weren’t interested in folk or anything. They were interested in their thing, what they had to say.” Hilly Kristal provided a crucial outlet at a time when new, different, or just plain bad groups had nowhere else to go in the city. “They played in their lofts and basements, there were a couple of places they could play once or twice a week, but nobody would let them play their own music most of the time,” he added. “So, when I saw this, I just kinda let them play, and then because there were so many of them I said, ‘There’s a change in the policy; the only way to play here is you have to do your own music.’ And that started people coming around, I mean not customers too much but the musicians … Everybody wanted to do their own music. Some of it was terrible, and others worse than terrible, but it was interesting.”
Not many attended Television’s first show; half of them were friends who got in free (admission was a dollar) and no one had money to buy drinks. Josh Feigenbaum wrote a review in SoHo Weekly News about one of these early gigs, in which he describes the group as “loud, out of tune and pretentious as hell”. Patti Smith and her guitarist Lenny Kaye attended minimalist prog-rockers Television’s third week, with Kaye recognising that a new ‘other’ scene was gestating. “The first few times Television played I didn’t like what they were doing,” recalled Kristal. “I let them play because some of these bands were just interesting. Their music didn’t quite make sense at the beginning, but soon after, when they got it together, they did.”
In addition to initiating the ripped-and-spiked look that served as the sartorial template for UK punk 18 months later, Television bassist Richard Hell was going out with Elda. “She said, ‘I heard this bunch of guys and they dress like old men and they’re very funny and they play in this weird bar downtown,’” Chris explained. “And we asked them where they were playing and they said, ‘CBGB’s.’”
Hell told Debbie and Chris about the bar’s new policy of allowing unknown local bands to perform on specific nights. On May 12, 1974, the penultimate night of Television’s residency, The Stillettoes made their CBGB’s debut as the support act. Aside from Elda’s personal connection to the headliners, Chris also had some history with vocalist/lead guitarist Tom Verlaine, having previously been asked to join a germinal version of the group: “[Verlaine] called me up and asked me for a bass player. Actually my friend and I used to make fun of him because when he first came to New York he had shoulder-length hair and he had all these hippy love songs, which he used to play acoustically, and we used to take the piss out of him basically. He called me up looking for a bass player, but by that time I was already doing something with Debbie.”
“When I decided to try and put a band together,” Verlaine countered, “one of the guitar players turned out to be Chris Stein and he came and heard a few songs and played guitar and said, ‘This stuff’s too fast, I don’t like this stuff. It’s not commercial enough.’ He could play it though.”
The Stillettoes supported Television at two subsequent May CBGB’s gigs, and although these events – viewed through the prism of almost 40 years – are now seen as significant, the less than salubrious environs of Hilly’s Bowery bar scarcely encouraged any sense of history in the making. “CB’s was just like going into somebody’s crummy basement,” remembered Chris. “There were big stuffed easy chairs and Hilly had these dogs that would crap all around. It was all very funky.”
“CBGB’s braved the world of music, and we braved the smell of urine to go there,” cracked Leee Black Childers. “There was a pipe that came out of the wall, out came a rat, and it ran right across the floor. There were stories based on those kind of places, that when you were sitting on the toilet, the rats would also swim up. If you chose the rock’n’roll lifestyle, that’s part of it.”
“It was real disgusting. Every night you just had to watch where you walked. Dead dogs, vomit, urgh,” insisted Debbie. “It was so small and intimate. Unimportant, basically. Maybe that is kind of important about that – that it wasn’t important. There was no value to it. We all had our private fantasies and obsessions, and we just did it for the sake of doing it, with no agenda … I mean, everybody wanted to make a living and make money and be superstars, it was all within our own little brains, because there was no evidence of any of that ever happening.”
In the months before the music press latched onto CBGB’s, it was difficult to imagine that the bar would develop any kind of cachet. “We would play for whoever was in the bar – which was just a handful of bums and bikers at the start – and Hilly’s wife would tell everyone to turn it down,” recounts Deborah. “You’d get a couple of beers and then we’d owe them money. I’m serious. There was no money involved. The CBGB’s guys were just happy to have somebody in there making some noise.”
“It was sort of like going to music college in a way,” she mused. “Not only did we get to play, but we got to play in front of an audience – even if they were completely drunk or stoned, it didn’t matter.”
“[CBGB’s] was the kind of place where you felt you could do anything you wanted, because it was so trashed to begin with,” enthused Elda. “Here was a sense of freedom in that venue. Hilly … was like a fatherly figure. And he was very nurturing.”
Despite the relatively small number of customers coming in off the Bowery, CBGB’s enabled The Stillettoes to develop a reputation. “The whole act became more gaudy and tacky and the press started coming around,” Debbie recalled. “I had a black Morticia dress, a gold Day-Glo cross, gold lamé dresses, stupid wigs, a goldfish bowl with a goldfish in it called ‘Mr Jaws’. I was developing the Blondie character. She wasn’t quite there yet, but she was on her way.”
Aside from the odd original such as ‘Platinum Blonde’, the bulk of The Stillettoes’ set was campy covers of songs such as Labelle’s ‘Lady Marmalade’, Jean Knight’s ‘Mr Big Stuff’ and The Shangri-Las’ ‘Out In The Streets’ – which Blondie would revisit almost a quarter of a century later, on their No Exit album. “I like everything up to 1971, practically,” Chris asserts. “I really like all the girl groups from the early sixties. From the late sixties, I like R&B, black music, lots of different things, too numerous to mention. The obvious things on the surface are The Shangri-Las and The Crystals, Supremes, Lou Reed.”
Gentle murmurs of interest about the group travelled as far as the ears of Marty Thau – at that time managing The New York Dolls, who were just about to release Too Much Too Soon, the second and final album recorded by the quintet’s classic line-up. He was particularly struck by Debbie: “When I first saw her, I was amazed at how beautiful she was. But she was very quiet, and later on I learned from her that that was during the period of time when she was very frightened and paranoid about a lot of things. Like she phrased it, at one point she was just there but she couldn’t speak to anybody, she was too fragile. Later, word got back to me that she was a singer in The Stillettoes, and they were very good. I never saw them perform, but I did get a lot of feedback from people who said, ‘Hey, Debbie has this group and can sing and she’s really beautiful. This group should really be caught to see if there’s anything that could be done with them.’ But I was involved full time with the Dolls.”
“When I first signed the Dolls, I invited The Stillettoes up to my house out in the country, just to spend a nice social day together,” Marty recalls. “They all poured into Debbie’s beat-up old Camaro, drove up there and we spent that day at my house … They left, and then about an hour later I get a phone call from them that they were waylaid because the battery went out on the car. So I had to shoot down there with my car and fire up their battery. They somehow ended up at a pool hall, shooting pool with a bunch of rednecks. That’s when I first
met Debbie.”
Although the gigs supporting Television in May and June allowed The Stillettoes to get noticed, their future direction would cause the band to split after the June 12 show at Club 82. “There was too much catfighting going on,” said Chris. “It didn’t seem the right kind of thing.” The crux of the dispute was Deborah’s desire to have the band develop musically whereas Elda wanted a more theatrical direction. As Jimmy Wyndbrandt observed, there were, “pretty much irreconcilable differences between Debbie and Elda. They were getting kinda successful even though they hadn’t played very much – a three-girl thing hadn’t happened in a long time. They broke up, I believe, because of rivalries; everybody had different ideas of where it was going. Chris and Debbie were already thinking about what they wanted to do musically and Elda’s very into theatrics.”
“I was running out of funds. No one was contributing and Tony [Ingrassia] thought as a single mother I should get a job to carry the project,” Elda recalls. “Instead of going in the direction of original material I was told that Debbie and Rosie can now choose their cover songs. We were turning into a disco band! So we had a meeting at Tony’s house. Not one of them supported my point of view – forget the tour and forget Tony. Debbie and Chris just sat there in silence. So I quit my own band.”
“Three girls trying to get along together is hard enough without worrying about whose ego is going to be on top,” asserted Debbie. “Elda wanted a certain person to manage us, and I didn’t like the idea of someone saying, ‘This is your manager, sign this.’ I said I wanted to do my own thing again and I left.”
Naturally enough, given Debbie’s focus on the musical aspects and her relationship with Chris, the musicians followed her through the exit. “When I split from The Stillettoes and decided that I wanted to do less shtick and more music, I dropped a lot of the more obvious theatrical things,” she recounted. “We really didn’t have any exact ideas about what we were going to do. But we got to a point in The Stillettoes where we were getting some notoriety, and some following and some press, and then we started not getting along on business and artistic points after a while and we broke off on our own.”