Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  “We decided we needed a piano player. Through a band called The Fast and a girl called Donna, we got Jimmy Destri,” Chris explained. “We wanted a piano, and he had this junky old organ. We didn’t know about an organ, especially a Hammond, but he brought it and we ended up using it. It’s funny how that was a big turnabout. That became a distinctive part of our sound, because we worked with what we had.”

  “Jimmy had played with Milk ‘N’ Cookies for about two weeks right before they went to England to make their album for Island,” added Debbie. “But after he had learned all the material, just before they left for London, [vocalist] Justin [Strauss] said, ‘You can’t come.’ Jimmy got a full-time job and went back to school and that’s where we found him.”

  “I remember Jimmy Destri coming to me before he joined Blondie and asking me who should he join, because Talking Heads were interested in him too,” Thau reveals. “I said, ‘No man, they’re not your type of people. Your people really are with Blondie.’ I thought Talking Heads were maybe more sophisticated or more elitist. He was just some kid from Brooklyn, so I don’t think it would have been a good match up. I thought it was some good advice telling him to go with Blondie.”

  Born James Mollica on April 15, 1954, Brooklyn boy Destri attended the local John Jay and New Utrecht high schools and got into music through his uncle. “My mother’s youngest brother was the drummer for a late fifties/early sixties rock band called Joey Dee And The Starliters who had a hit record in America. They were on The Dick Clark Show and I saw my Uncle Joe on TV and said, ‘That’s what I want to do!’ He was a one-hit wonder, had one song then went into construction and every time I said I wanted to go into music he said, ‘Don’t do it!’ But I disobeyed.”

  Raised on Beatles and Stones records, Jimmy’s first venture into rock’n’roll was the Anglopop-infused Knickers, which boasted the guitar stylings of future Trouser Press editor Ira Robbins alongside the magazine’s singles reviewer, Jim Green, on bass, but managed only two gigs during its yearlong existence. “Before I joined Blondie, I was just in Brooklyn with my Revox,” he explained. “I went to art school for two years after high school, just like every other musician on earth … I was looking for a gig, any kind of gig, and I began hanging around CBGB’s, Max’s, and the other clubs in the area. I became friends with Debbie and Chris … They were just starting to form Blondie, not knowing where to go, or who to play with. We had a vibe going as friends; I never even mentioned I could play anything. I think my sister told Debbie, ‘You know, he plays piano.’ And I said, ‘But I don’t have one. I have this natty old organ and I can fill in on bass if you need that.’ There were no auditions; we just got in a studio and it clicked. They asked me if I had any tunes. I had two tunes, Gary Valentine had two, and they had six, so we had an album’s worth of material.”

  Jimmy made his Blondie debut at Mother’s in November 1975. “Everybody was out of tune but we had fun playing together; it just clicked,” said Deborah. “We were still a mess, but we were getting more and more excited about playing together.”

  Soon after Jimmy joined, Blondie were banned from CBGB’s for a couple of months after Hilly Kristal overbooked one of their nights. “Hilly had booked a couple of extra bands that he was putting on ahead of us,” explained bassist Gary. “I told him what I thought of that, very loudly. I don’t remember now if we played that night or not, but I was angry enough at Hilly to piss him off and he told us that he wouldn’t book us again.” Instead, they started playing venues such as Monty Python’s, situated just over the street from Hudson’s Army & Navy Store on the corner of the red-light area at 13th Street and Third Avenue.

  Early the following month, Clem departed for England to visit a girlfriend studying at Oxford and check out what was happening on the London music scene. At the time that equated with ‘pub rock’, as the following year’s punk explosion was still a distant rumble. He was particularly struck by the sharp image and barely restrained aggression of scene heavyweights Dr Feelgood. “If there’s one group that must take credit for giving direction to the New York scene, it must be the Feelgoods,” he declared. “I’d originally seen them in London and brought their album back with me, and the fact that a band like the Feelgoods could pack Hammersmith Odeon, make it onto record and then into the charts gave many New York bands faith in what they were doing.”

  In Clem’s absence, the remaining quartet hunkered down in the loft and honed their musical chops. “During the six weeks he was away we rehearsed and wrote new songs, hoping he would be back in time for us to do a New Year’s show,” said Debbie. Clem did not return until January, however, so the band continued to practise with the intention of making a return to CBGB’s that following month.

  With Clem, Jimmy and Gary now all fully integrated into the group, Blondie were at last underpinned by a solid line-up and constant practice. However, the incestuous CBGB’s scene was becoming increasingly bitchy and their emphasis on the poppier end of the musical spectrum ensured they were regarded as little more than lightweight froth.

  “There were a lot of little cliques in those days,” asserted Craig Leon. “These were all people running around thinking they were French Symbolists, and here comes Blondie, who are really like true punks and actually much more the mass-media future band than any of the others. In a way, some of those CBGB’s bands might have been the dead end of progressive rock’n’roll. Not a lot of people really see that.”

  “Patti Smith was down on me because she was very competitive, that was her nature,” observed Debbie. “She has a very masculine and intellectual approach to music and performing. I don’t want to do that. I played a chorus girl, Juicy Lucy, in Jackie Curtis’ Vain Victory and I found that I liked music better because it’s not as intellectual as acting. Rock’n’roll is a real masculine business and I think it’s time girls did something in it. I don’t want to sound like a libber, but I want to do something to make people change the way they think and act towards girls. Janis Joplin did that, but she had to sacrifice herself. Every time she went out on stage, she had to bleed for the audience. I don’t feel like I have to sacrifice myself.”

  Although Deborah always denied that she held any animosity toward Patti Smith, her largesse was not reciprocated. “Patti wouldn’t even want Debbie on the same bill,” insisted Jimmy.

  “The truth is that CBGB’s was like any other gig,” Deborah asserted. “Some nights were good. Some were not so good. The room is difficult to play. It’s long, and the stage is small. But its ambience and reputation, the way people liked to go there – those are the things that made it happen. It wasn’t a venue. It was a feeling. The real value of CBGB’s was that you were left alone. Hilly Kristal left you free to play, to do what you wanted. CBGB’s was a place for freedom and creativity, experiment and experience. You did your own thing and brought your own audience.”

  “I guess you could say it was like our version of the Cavern Club,” mused Clem. “The thing about CBs was that we were allowed to develop in public. We weren’t particularly good when we first started, but we were writing and performing and we were able to do it in front of people, which I think might be a better way to learn how to do it. I’m not really big on people staying in their houses and practising all the time and never feeling as though they’re really good enough to play out. I think it’s really counter-productive if you want to be a professional musician. There’s a lot more to it than how proficient you are as a musician – it has a lot to do with presentation, not being nervous in front of audiences and all that. I think people get more worried about being junior [jazz virtuoso] Dave Weckl, instead of really getting out there and just doing it.”

  “New York punk was the exact opposite of its image,” contends Victor Bockris, on the other hand. “Everybody loved each other and welcomed you into the fold because, like the volunteers at the Alamo, there were so few of them and they were outnumbered. The secret about New York is that it always had an extraordinarily nurturing art communi
ty. If you stood up and did something noticeable they would make a point of letting you know how much they liked it and you. And Debbie, perhaps as much as or more than anybody in that scene, was wrapped up in the arms of New York.

  “The other secret is the humour that glued together the disparate elements of the New York underground. Chris was a very funny man. I found myself constantly on the verge of exploding into big fat laughter every time I saw him. He used to goof on the ongoing comedy that surrounded us on the Bowery.”

  “People tend to look back and say great bands were playing there,” summarised photographer Bob Gruen. “No, the bands that were playing there got great later on. Having had the place to be bad, they got good.”

  It can be argued that Blondie ‘got good’ on Valentine’s Day, 1976, as their first widely recognised line-up made its maiden appearance in front of the hard-to-impress hipsters and curious thrill-seekers. “I think that was clearly the starting point for us,” recalled Debbie. “The show was fun, we got a great response and I felt good about all the work we had done. It was clearly a great departure and next step up for us. We were moving into a bigger world.”

  Chapter Six

  Crossing The Thin Line

  “Debbie was an American ponytail girl as seen through the lens of Roger Vadim; Barbarella on speed, or something like that.”

  Iggy Pop

  Although he had passed on the opportunity to manage Blondie, Alan Betrock’s enthusiasm was sufficient for him to feature them in the first issue of his bimonthly New York Rocker, which hit the streets in February 1976. Betrock felt the CBGB’s scene deserved its own press to focus, publicise and even unify the broad spectrum of artists operating around the Bowery bar. In addition to a Blondie interview embellished with a photograph of Debbie sprawling across the four boys, the broadsheet paper ran Television on its cover and features on The Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Milk ‘N’ Cookies and Wayne County, plus a piece on The Heartbreakers by their soon-to-be ex-bassist Richard Hell, under his ‘Theresa Stern’ pseudonym, and a hand-drawn map of the ‘stars” homes.

  The interview, by Jimmy and Tommy Wynbrandt, took place at “Blondie’s new communal headquarters on the Bowery”, described as their “fortress of solitude … a military outpost … geared for war; an all-out assault on New York City.” The feature details their Valentine’s Day CBGB’s set list; opening with ‘Man Overboard’ before continuing with ‘Die Young, Stay Pretty’, ‘Little Girl Lies’ and ‘He Sure Works Hard (At Loving Me)’. “[Debbie’s] voice coddles, teases, provokes. The audience is hooked now. The band hits a seventh and goes into the finale, ‘I Wanna Be A Platinum Blonde’, Debbie’s tribute to Clairol. ‘Ooh, I hope I get laid,’ she sings, pleading with the fates. Men are weeping. The show ends.”

  This overwrought report notes for the first time the effect that Debbie’s emergent Blondie persona had on male sections of the audience. “I remember going to see Debbie at CBs at this time,” said Elda Gentile. “I think she’d discovered that Blondie identity and was able to run with her.” Indeed, just as Betrock’s paper first recognised her as the most strikingly photogenic face of the new scene, so the vocalist’s hitherto shaky confidence began to solidify. “I was quite nervous about doing shows back then. I think as a person I do have a confident nature and an optimistic nature. As for going on stage I always felt that anything could happen, technical problems whatever, that used to weigh on me,” she recalled. “I used to over-sing just so I could hear myself.”

  Debbie found that being pushed to the front of the stage as a lone lead carried far greater pressure than simply being one third of a vocal trio. “On my own I had to put out more than ever,” she observed. “Every time we go on stage, I try to do something different. It’s like a process of elimination; something works and we keep it, it doesn’t work and we throw it out.”

  “At the beginning, I tried to incorporate a lot of different girls I knew as well as my own experiences into Blondie. I tried to make her a resilient creature who could bounce back and had a never-say-die, what-the-hell attitude. She was sparkling and adventurous, she liked having fun, liked having sex and was tender and sensitive at the same time. I tried to envisage her like a cartoon character because all the members of the band saw Blondie that way.”

  As significant as Betrock’s more orthodox music journalism, the launch of the resolutely lowbrow Punk fanzine in January 1976 also provided CBGB’s with coverage that reached as far as Europe. It also established a collective noun for a scene whose participants often had very little musical common ground. “Punk had a boorish wit a few notches below that of its mentor, Mad,” asserted Gary. “It was also highly selective. Where New York Rocker covered all the music coming out of CBGB’s and Max’s, Punk specialised in a fanatically narrow canon of hard core punk bands; The Ramones, Richard Hell, The Dead Boys and The Dictators. These last two were latecomers to the scene. Like [editor John] Holmstrom and [writer Legs] McNeil, both flirted with a nasty brand of right-wing sensibility. Also like Holmstrom and McNeil, they were into getting very fucked up and acting stupid.”

  Via its deliberately dumb contents, Punk enabled Chris to promote Debbie’s public persona by supplying photographs of her – wearing just a guitar and a pout in some, or her soon-to-become-iconic ripped Vultures T-shirt and little else. Before punk rock had even got off the ground, the movement had its ‘Punkmate of the Month’ – not only guaranteeing Patti Smith’s feminist ire but boosting both Deborah’s impact and her self-esteem.

  Two weeks after Jimmy Destri’s live debut at CBGB’s, the new Blondie line-up made their first appearance at Max’s Kansas City. Although the gig itself was unremarkable, Clem and Gary barely made it, having been busted by a zealous off-duty cop who spotted them smoking pot on the street two nights earlier. Along with their eccentric landlord Eduardo Benton, the band’s rhythm section spent an uncomfortable chilly night in the Tombs on Centre Street. “We slept on wooden benches,” recalled Valentine. “You couldn’t lay in one position for more than 10 minutes. If you wanted a pillow you had to take off your coat. If you took off your coat, you froze.” Fortunately, when their case was finally heard only hours before the band were due to go on stage at Max’s, the cop admitted he had failed to identify himself as a policeman and the trio were duly released.

  The band’s next appearance at Max’s was far less fraught. Blondie became the surprise hit of the venue’s Easter Festival, held across the weekend of April 17-18, also featuring Wayne County, Pere Ubu, Suicide, The Heartbreakers and The Ramones – the latter having played with Blondie at Phase V in New Jersey nine days earlier. New York Rocker’s Lisa Persky declared that Blondie – who included her bass-playing boyfriend – had “finally hatched”, adding, “Another band’s incubation period has ended, and the award for the loveliest Easter Egg goes to Blondie … all of Blondie did much to convince us that they are now deserving of more concrete recognition than they have so far received.”

  Also among those impressed was producer Craig Leon, who previously worked for Sire Records and had been following events in the New York microcosm with growing interest. “Television were starting to become a big deal with Terry Ork,” he recalls. “They were actually the big thing, if there was a big thing. They were the one that 50 or 60 people talked about rather than three or four. I first saw Blondie at CBGB’s or one of those other clubs. I’d seen them around and heard them. I’d loved Debbie’s presence and her voice always captured me. Fred was out of the band and Gary Valentine was in before they actually started sounding reasonable. I paid attention to them because they had elements of all the sixties stuff that I really loved too, the Phil Spector stuff and The Shangri-Las.”

  Craig was put in direct contact with Blondie by Hilly Kristal. “One day at the bar at CBGB’s, he said, ‘Do you want to produce an album for me of everyone that’s playing live in the club? We’re gonna have a festival, I’ll get an engineer with a truck and you and the engineer can produce this record, and
go through all the material.’”

  Along with engineer Kim King – who previously played guitar with Theremin-infused psychedelic group Lothar And The Hand People – Leon sat in a truck outside Hilly’s bar and recorded the festival, which also featured John Cale, Patti Smith, Television and The Ramones. “This is the legendary lost album. This really does exist,” asserts Craig. “It’s a true story; everybody was recorded during this time. I think it was over a whole month almost, a couple of weeks certainly; five or six bands a night at least. The tape was rolling on all of it. This was the documentation of that scene right at the time when it creatively peaked. In the end, this became the Live At CBGB’s album. Hilly never got any paper and they were all getting signed.

  “New York was very vicious then. Everybody was cut-throat. Everybody’s going, ‘I don’t want to be lumped in with them,’ regardless of what they say now. Talking Heads would say, ‘Well, I don’t want to be seen as being in the same scene as Blondie.’ Patti Smith and Debbie didn’t want to be in the same room together; just all this kind of infighting crap. The whole idea of a Live At CBGB’s album was kind of anathema to all these bands who were seeing themselves becoming the new thing, like The Ramones thought they were the new Bay City Rollers. Television thought they were the new Grateful Dead. They were like, ‘We don’t know anything about this underground community; we’re us.’ They all tried to not have their stuff released on the Live At CBGB’s album. They consciously said no – they were all signing to different labels. So the only ones that actually got released on the little album that Hilly put up himself were those other bands. It was crap, because all the good bands were not released. Hilly kind of shrugged his shoulders and was bitter. He was never really bitter about anything, but he’d given these bands their break and now they didn’t want to be associated with his club because of all the other bands that were there. The story was that Hilly supposedly ‘lost’ the tapes, which isn’t true because we actually took the tapes out of CBGB’s and mixed them in studios around New York. I remember doing Talking Heads at Plaza or Electric Ladyland. Those tapes have never been found.