Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  “I saw Debbie and Chris about two months later at CBGB’s. I wasn’t singing – I was sewing on Saint Mark’s Place to try to survive and raise my son. Debbie and Chris offered their condolences and said if there was ever anything they could do to help me and Branch they would.”

  Ultimately, it was their new drummer’s drive and enthusiasm that pulled Blondie around. “Clem, whom we barely knew at the time, called up asking, ‘Are you going to do something or not? I think you should at least try’,” explained Debbie. “Chris said, ‘Well, we have to get a bass player, it’s practically like starting over.’ I was still working at [White’s] but we didn’t want to talk about bands for a while. We were fed up and embarrassed with everything.”

  Having reassessed his priorities in the wake of Fred’s decampment and his abortive audition for The Patti Smith Group, Clem resolved to give Blondie his best shot. “We had a common ground in liking The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, The Ronettes, The Shangri-Las,” he declared. “I didn’t have to be educated by anyone as to what the aesthetic of this band was going to be.”

  “Clem was the glue that actually held it all together, even when it came to working in the studio later,” remarks Craig Leon, who would go on to play a significant role in shaping Blondie’s studio sound. “He was also the guy that had the real sense of rock’n’roll fandom. He would be looking at pictures of The Who, figuring out how he should stand in a photo! He was always reading all these Tiger Beat magazines, all of that. He brought a lot of that element into Blondie. But Blondie was very ramshackle in the beginning.”

  “[Clem] was really out to work,” admitted Debbie. “After the thing with Fred happened, he pushed us really hard. He kept it going.” Clem’s first move was to go back to his East 10th Street base and return with roommate and old school friend Gary Valentine to fill the bassist vacancy. “He brought over a bass player, who was known for being a poet in school. They went to high school together; he had never been in a band,” she recalls. “[Clem] got us rehearsing again and began to bring a bunch of his friends from Bayonne around. Gary Valentine was the ringleader of these kids and pretty soon he started playing bass. If Clem was the Keith Moon of Bayonne, Gary had to be the Bob Dylan. He was super handsome and everybody in Bayonne knew Clem and Gary had to be in a rock group.”

  “When Clem first told us that he was playing in a band in the city … I wanted to know more about it and asked the usual questions,” remembered Gary. “‘Well, they’re really campy,’ Clem said. ‘Debbie, the singer, is great. Really sexy, and her voice is terrific. The guitarist’s kind of a nut though. He has really weird ideas about how to play. And Fred the bass player’s good. The music’s sort of like what The Shangri-Las would have been like if they were drag queens.’”

  “When Fred Smith quit Blondie to join Television, Clem suggested I might be able to play bass,” said Valentine. “He took me to a midtown loft on 37th, near Eighth Avenue with all the hookers outside. We jammed on the Stones’ ‘Live With Me’ for about an hour, smoked grass and just kept playing. At the end they said, ‘This is fine.’ I was in.”

  “He wasn’t really a bass player at all,” explained Clem. “He was a poet and could play piano a little. I brought him to meet Chris and Debbie, and he played one of his songs on the piano and was in the band. Then he quickly learned bass.”

  Born Gary Lachman on Christmas Eve, 1955, Valentine (who assumed his stage name on joining Blondie as it “seemed like an appropriate name for a teen idol”) had fled Bayonne after he caused his 16-year-old girlfriend, Zelda, to fall pregnant in 1974. “Her parents had me arrested for statutory rape,” he revealed. “So I left home and moved to Manhattan, which was strictly illegal because it was breaking probation, and that’s when I met Clem again.”

  After moving into the 10th Street storefront opened up by a friend named Crash, Gary began hanging out at CBGB’s and accompanied Clem to his audition for Patti Smith’s band. Valentine would later emphasise his poverty during this period, claiming he was “living on the streets in Manhattan in the middle of 1975”, an assertion Chris Stein later rejected: “Gary never had to starve. He wanted to starve. He wanted to have the image of being a starving artist. He loved that. He was a really good-looking young guy and chicks were lining up to take him home and feed him. He was just intrigued by the idea.”

  Valentine moved into Chris and Debbie’s Thompson Street apartment and began rehearsing with the band, while still reporting to his probation officer in New Jersey on a weekly basis.

  By the summer of 1975, Television manager Terry Ork had taken charge of booking arrangements at CBGB’s. “Television and Patti Smith’s enthusiastic championing of ‘art’ created a rarefied and slightly stifling atmosphere,” observed Gary. “Ork’s datebook often seemed too crowded to allow space for Patti’s sole serious female competitor. For the first month or so of my tenure, we were personae non gratae at CBGB.”

  Although this marginalisation temporarily excluded Blondie from the epicentre of the new scene, Max’s Kansas City had by then been reopened by new owner Tommy Dean, who, after considering turning the venue into a disco engaged Peter Crowley – formerly responsible for booking acts into a 23rd Street gay bar called Mother’s – to hire bands. It was at Max’s, as well as venues such as Mother’s, Brandy’s and the Performance Studio on East 23rd Street (where The Ramones had debuted in 1974) that Blondie’s new line-up received its initial exposure.

  SoHo Weekly News journalist and later Rock Marketplace editor Alan Betrock was an early champion of Blondie, and would feature the band in the premiere issue of his New York Rocker magazine. Interested in managing the group, he offered to finance the recording of a demo. “Blondie were a real good recording band,” he later declared. “I brought a couple of people to see them and I was really hurt and upset, because they just couldn’t play live – they’d stop in the middle of a song and start over again, the amps would go out, the guitar would go out, strings would break and they wouldn’t have extra ones. I decided that the thing to do for them was just to make a tape and not bring people down to see them.”

  “I was playing about a month when we did those,” said Gary. “He wanted to manage. ‘Let’s make a demo!’ And so he brought us into a studio out on Long Island, someone’s garage, basically. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was great, I hadn’t done anything like that.”

  Beginning on June 13, 1975, the quartet of Chris, Debbie, Clem and Gary laid down demo versions of five tracks, a cover of The Shangri-Las’ ‘Out In The Streets’ and four originals: ‘Thin Line’, ‘Puerto Rico’, ‘Platinum Blonde’ and ‘Once I Had A Love (The Disco Song)’ – the latter being prototype for ‘Heart Of Glass’, cut at Chris’ suggestion toward the end of the sessions. Engineered by Kevin Kelly and produced by Betrock and the band, all songs were recorded in one or two takes. Debbie’s overdubbed three-part harmonies on The Shangri-Las’ song are eerily effective, displaying an early feel for the studio born out of her love of girl-group productions. “We hadn’t recorded anything and we wanted to hear what we sounded like on tape, and have a fairly decent quality demo to play for people,” said Debbie. “I was the only one who had recorded before.”

  “We went to somebody’s basement somewhere in Queens,” recalled Clem. “It was like no one actually knew where they were going. I’m not sure how we got there; it must have been in Debbie’s Camaro. No one really knew what we were gonna do. I remember playing piano on ‘Platinum Blonde’, and we all thought it sounded great.”

  “It was so hot and humid that we couldn’t keep anything in tune,” Deborah remembered. “It was like being under water. Plus there was no sound in the room, no acoustics. I think that if those things were mixed properly they would be a little better. The proportions are a little bit whacked out.”

  Although Betrock thought the demo “sounded fine”, a combination of his other interests and lack of confidence in Blondie’s ability to play their songs live curtailed his involvement with the gr
oup. “They just weren’t that experienced, they weren’t that together, they didn’t have any money and their equipment was always breaking down,” he declared. “[Debbie] was not all that comfortable. And I called her once and said, ‘Well, look: I’m working with you and The Marbles and The Marbles can play live and I can’t do both of you guys, so I’m gonna work with them.’”

  “I don’t think Blondie even had it together to have a manager of any kind,” recalls Craig Leon. “Alan Betrock was running around with the demos that nobody was interested in. Their first demo was very unimpressive.”

  “Alan started out interested in managing us, but he started New York Rocker and dropped interest because we had personnel shifts and a few problems,” explains Debbie. “We had no money and he didn’t want to invest his own beyond a certain point, and that’s what a band needs initially – someone who can invest a couple of thousand dollars and get their equipment straight, make a demo and present them. That has to be done. It didn’t happen for us, and no one had any fucking money so he dropped us and picked up a group called The Marbles … We were always asking Betrock for the [demo] tape, we said we’d buy it. He wasn’t doing anything with it but he didn’t want to let it go, ‘cos he obviously had plans for it.”

  These plans reached fruition four years later, when Betrock released the demos as a limited edition EP on coloured vinyl. “I made him swear he’d never release ‘The Disco Song’, but it got out and he’s responsible,” Chris reveals.

  “He spent about $500 doing these five songs so we offered him the money plus a couple of hundred for his effort and devotion, and helping us out and getting it done. He said, ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do anything with it, it’s for me.’ Then he went and did a mix. Believe me, it’s much different,” adds Debbie. “One thing we’ve learned is we can hardly trust anybody,” Chris concludes. “It’s very disillusioning.”

  Any feelings of disappointment at being unable to secure financial backing were tempered by a thawing of the freeze on Blondie appearing at CBGB’s. The streamlined quartet debuted at the Bowery bar on July 4, 1975, supporting The Ramones. Shortly afterwards, courtesy of an artist-cum-magician named Eduardo Benton, Debbie and Chris found themselves a new home that would function as band headquarters, situated just three blocks from Hilly Kristal’s club. The liquor store below was also the nexus of local wino activity.

  “One time Clem and Chris went out to the store and rushed back in yelling, ‘Hey! There’s a dead bum outside!’ He was frozen in the snow,” remembered Debbie. “Somebody had seen him walking around with no shoes on earlier in the day. His eyes were open, he had a little white beard, and he had turned blue. Everybody ran into the street to look at the frozen bum until an ambulance came to scrape him up.”

  “We had the first floor, Eduardo lived on the second and, for the first few months the third floor was empty,” elaborated Deborah. “The Bowery was unheated funk, but the space was heaven. There was enough room for me and Chris to live, rehearse and run the complex business of booking Blondie.”

  “A famous philosopher’s girlfriend, who was a very nice lady in great shape, with the Lauren Bacall look, had originally let Eduardo have this great space, and she asked us to move in when she moved out,” Debbie explained. “But about a month or so after we moved in he started a downhill slide. He would go into a false biker number, which involved not washing for days and sleeping in a piss-soaked bag with his boyfriend, Alex. He worshipped piss and would piss into beer bottles, leaving half-full ones all over his floor.

  “The cats, who moved from Thompson Street to the Bowery with us, were the first to suss out Eduardo’s number. They just ran up to his floor and pissed and shit all over his drawings and paintings … He was gone, but he was definitely an inspiration. He evidently inspired the cats too, but in their case only to greater heights of shitting and pissing. His floor of the house was basically a toilet.”

  The loft was also apparently haunted. “There was an entrance that came up from street level, a narrow long staircase that was very dark, and at the top of the staircase there was a flat wall with a doorway in it and Chris decided to paint this wall black … there was a loud knocking and he saw a little boy,” Deborah insisted. “[I] flashed on a little kid,” confirmed Chris. “It was more like a feeling than actually seeing. It was more a presence.”

  Despite such unexplained occurrences, Chris and Debbie found practical matters more onerous “We all almost got killed one night,” Chris declared. “The whole place cost us $350 a month ‘cos there was no heat at night and there was only one bathroom. I used to have to go down about eight in the morning to get the boiler going, then it would start up and go the whole day until they would close the liquor store at six, then there would be no heat until the next morning. Well, one night the flame in the boiler went out and all the gas just got pumped up through the radiators, and when Debbie and I woke up we had black soot around our nostrils.”

  “Electricity, fire and water gave us the most trouble,” added Deborah. “The pipes were always bursting, the fuses were always blowing in the middle of rehearsals, the place was dirty and it smelt terrible, so environmentally speaking we had it covered.”

  Regardless of the absence of any mod cons, the Bowery loft was capacious enough to provide Blondie with a rehearsal space, office and crash pad. “We did all the rehearsing in our loft, so everybody sort of hung out there a lot, but we – Chris and I – were really the only ones that lived there,” Debbie explained. “Everyone had sort of committed at this stage and we put all our time into the band. We had a verbal agreement that we were doing this and we tried very hard to take all the elements of each member of the band and represent those elements musically. It wasn’t just Chris’ ideas of what music should be and what we were influenced by; it was clearly a composite of all of us.”

  Another of Chris and Debbie’s new neighbours was aspiring fashion designer Stephen Sprouse, who would become one of the couple’s closest friends and play a significant role in shaping Debbie’s visual image. “He was living on the third or fourth floor,” she recounted. “I don’t know how he lived up there – there was no heat.”

  “I had all these stray cats that’d come up onto my floor,” said Sprouse. “I’d wake up in the morning and there I’d see Deb, a few feet away from me, giving cat food to these strays. And that’s essentially how we met.”

  “There were backyards that made a courtyard, and all these alley cats were interbreeding,” added Deborah. “Hundreds and hundreds. I don’t know if they ate rats or whatever, but they were tough, all scarred, one eye hanging out. One ear. We’d see these raging battles.”

  With Blondie on a budget described by Debbie as “half a shoestring”, Sprouse became a vital element in creating a cohesive image. “Steve had some stuff because he had worked for Halston and he knew all these models and elegant women,” she explained. “He’d been dressing them, and he had a few pieces left over from that. He liked the idea that we dressed sixties, which was basically out of necessity.”

  Although constant rehearsals at their Bowery loft knitted Blondie into a far tighter unit, the group were still perceived as the poor relations of a scene beginning to attract interest from record labels and the music press. As A&R representatives circled Television, Patti Smith and The Ramones, there was no evidence of anyone wanting to sign Blondie.

  The press seemed less than excited by the band and one particular roundup of the New York scene, from New Musical Express stalwart Charles Shaar Murray, dismissed Debbie as, “This cute little bundle of platinum hair with a voice like a squeaky bath toy and quite the cruddiest garage-type garage band I’ve seen since the last band I was in (and that band was a fuzz-box pretentioso blues band. This one is just cruddy).

  “She has what could politely be described as a somewhat suspect sense of pitch, but her charm lies in the fact that she’s a kid who’s pretending desperately hard to be a star and who’s aware of it. Which is why it works at a
ll (apart from on account of she’s so gosh-darned cute, gol-ding it); because her act has that home-made-ish quality.

  “Sadly, Blondie will never be a star simply because she ain’t good enough, but for the time being I hope she’s having fun. Whatever her actual age, though, she’s spiritually a part of the Great American Nymphet Tradition.”

  Such criticisms were particularly hard on Deborah, still struggling with her confidence and searching for a viable stage persona. “We were not well-prepared musically,” she admitted. “We were experimenting, and our shows were confusing. There were times when I felt, ‘Oh, what’s the point? It’s just too scary.’ Everyone else was getting record deals and great press, and Blondie was at the bottom of the heap. But I had a great friend in Chris, who just went, ‘Ah, come on, just keep going. Something’s gotta give.’ We didn’t have a clue what we were doing. The whole thing was a crap-shoot. But CBGB’s was fine. We played there for seven months, every weekend. It was our vaudeville, where we got it together.”

  “No-one took them seriously, myself included, because musically they were very, very ramshackle,” Craig Leon remembers. “They were one of two bands who had great song ideas. It could have been either one that I ended up working with at the time. The other one was The Miamis; they were great songwriters but, again, the playing was so all over the shop. Nobody wanted to know Blondie, mainly because they weren’t that great live. That’s the bottom line. Quite honestly, if I was in a band, I don’t know if I would have picked them as my opening act either, back in those days.”

  But Chris’ positivity in the face of this lack of interest proved well-founded. The final piece in the Blondie jigsaw was put in place shortly after Murray’s caustic comments saw print on November 8, 1975, as the band expanded to a quintet with the addition of keyboard player Jimmy Destri. “We did a lot of shows as a four-piece where Chris and Clem and I would back up Debbie, in little dives, where you’d set up a guitar amp and a mike on the floor in the bar and play,” Gary Valentine recalled. “If we each came out with $5 at the end of the night, that was fine. That meant a cheese sandwich, some potato crisps and breakfast tomorrow, but it was clear that the sound wasn’t strong enough.”