by Dick Porter
Chrysalis’ refusal to release the version of the album Chris and Debbie had envisioned caused a rift that would end their long association with the label. The following year, Harry and Stein issued the awkwardly titled Debravation (8½): Producer’s (Director’s) Cut, which restored the album to its original state and was sold at concerts.
“It just seems very odd to me. I can go anywhere in the world to perform and draw a great audience. I’m a really good singer and, I think, a really good performer. I can also make records and write songs. Yet people in the corporate world look at me as not being a safe bet. It’s just a bizarre position to be in,” Deborah observed. “I’m not really worried about it – I play the hand I’m dealt – that’s what’s pulled me through in life. But don’t you think there’s something wrong with that picture? I do.”
Despite Chrysalis’ evisceration of the album, Debravation still has its moments. Featuring ambiguously dystopian lyrics by SF author William Gibson, ‘Dog Star Girl’ is fittingly futuristic. “We melded two of his poems together,” explained Debbie. “I think it has to do with Sirius – you know, the star – and there’s a tribe in Africa that says that they’re from that star system. But with Gibson you never know. Musically it has this throbbing thing going on, this tension, and that worked for me.”
The Ramone-free version of ‘Standing In My Way’ is another highlight, blasting out a nineties take on Blondie’s signature sound adorned by organ licks that are very much in the Jimmy Destri style, while Toni Colandreo and Debbie’s ‘Lip Service’ demonstrates great conceptual breadth by welding a Chicago house-influenced groove to lyrics that reference Edgar Allan Poe.
With Debbie and Chris’ relationship with Chrysalis at an all-time low, it was unsurprising that the label scarcely put any promotional muscle behind Debravation. Despite European and American tours the album failed to sell, reaching number 24 in the UK but scarcely registering elsewhere. The upbeat ‘I Can See Clearly Now’ also made the UK Top 30, and its Arthur Baker sequencing combined with Deborah’s breathless vocal to ensure the song became a US dance-club hit.
Debbie’s final release on Chrysalis was the second single from Debravation, ‘Strike Me Pink’. This emotive keyboard and sax-infused ballad was promoted by a video depicting Deborah watching a man struggling in a tank of water. With echoes of David Lynch’s cinematic style, it was too edgy for the many television channels that refused to air it. “It was based on Houdini’s water tank trick,” Debbie explains. “I was dating a magician at the time, so there was obviously something going on in the back of my mind.”
Since separating from Chris, Debbie had eschewed commitment to a serious relationship. Her personal status proved a constant theme during interviews of the period, with many journalists marvelling at the fact that one of the great beauties of the 20th century remained single. Generally, their enquiries revealed nothing more than that she sporadically dated and was happy to do just that. So the journalistic emphasis often switched to quizzing Deborah as to why she and Chris had never married and raised a family.
“I never really thought marriage was for me. I always thought that relationships were important to me, but the idea of marriage in the traditional sense was almost like some sort of bondage to me – and if you’re gonna have bondage, you might as well have a little bit of S&M with it,” she giggled. “I thought the marriage vows at that time were very inappropriate for me. I think I was probably ahead of my time, because nowadays people just write their own marriage vows anyway. My thinking was more about today. Many of the things that I was the right age for doing seemed totally inappropriate for me.”
Similarly, the hectic nature of Debbie and Chris’ co-existence had precluded a stable environment in which they might raise a child. “When I was with Chris, I was too unsettled. I didn’t really have very much time to have children. I was working all the time. I think I was very selfish and very career-orientated and I knew I didn’t want to hurt a child with my ambition,” she explained. “Life was just too insane to contemplate starting a family … I wouldn’t put a child through that lifestyle. That would be kind of almost abusive.”
Given that the media so often deals in archetypes, it is unsurprising that so many interviewers asked Deborah whether she harboured any regrets – as if attempting to portray her as some kind of post-modern Garbo, ‘wanting to be alone’ as her memories of former triumphs faded alongside her youth. Given that Debbie has regularly asserted just how little time she has for nostalgia and that her world view looks unerringly forward, it was never going to ring true. As a woman approaching her 50th birthday, Debbie was able to go out and perform new material before large, enthusiastic audiences, record new albums and maintain a viable acting career. There was just too much life in Deborah for her to quietly fade away among her own memorabilia.
One of the key elements that both Debbie and Chris had brought to Blondie was their enthusiasm for a wide range of popular culture. In addition to art, literature, theatre, films and television, their interest in whatever was happening in both the mainstream and the counterculture ensured that there were always new creative avenues to explore. Such questing enthusiasm led Debbie to Max’s, CBGB’s, Studio 54 and now directed her to the East Village for the 1993 Wigstock Festival.
Established in 1985, the world’s first outdoor drag festival was held every Labor Day and attracted an exotic cast drawn from the cream of New York’s club scene. By the time Deborah made her festival debut, airing the elegiac ‘Communion’ for the first time, crowds in excess of 25,000 had gathered for an event that marked the end of summer among the city’s thriving gay scene. The following year, when Debbie took part in a staged fight with drag duo The Duelling Bankheads (who slurred their way through a suitably camp rendition of ‘Heart Of Glass’), there were another 10,000 present.
Already a gay icon, Debbie’s appearances at Wigstock helped cement her continuing popularity among a scene she actively supported through her appearances at AIDS benefits and Gay Pride concerts. “I think that the gay following that we’ve developed has a lot to do with that icon thing and the imagery,” she observed. “I think what it boils down to is an understanding and a compassion but also, getting down to basics, the people I hung around with and had a lot of fun with and really hit it off with, a lot of them were and are gay men. You know, I still go to what I think are gay clubs, but it’s hard to know whether they’re strictly gay any more. I suppose there are only a couple of exclusively gay clubs these days … One of my favourite places to go in New York is Mr Black … You’ll find naked men just wandering around in there.”
Although Debbie had always presented an apolitical front to the media, her activism was inspired by the US Government’s de-prioritising of AIDS research and the way in which reactionary elements had used the disease as a means of marginalising homosexuals. “It’s infuriating. They put billions of dollars into the arms race, then put a thousandth of that into medical research for AIDS,” she declared. “It’s not just limited to homosexuals, it’s a heterosexual disease. So everyone has to realise that. Personal attitudes and tastes don’t concern me.”
By 1994, the creative wanderlust that consistently drove Debbie to seek out new sounds and styles now urged her toward jazz. There had been hints of this on Autoamerican and the more recent Debravation – both ‘Strike Me Pink’ and ‘Mood Ring’ contained jazzy elements. However, when she was invited to sing a song entitled ‘Dog In Sand’ for New York ensemble The Jazz Passengers’ sixth album, In Love, Debbie initiated a process that would further extend her musical scope. Jazz Passengers saxophonist Roy Nathanson had previously been a member of The Lounge Lizards and had hung around the CBGB’s scene during the seventies. Although he was remotely acquainted with Deborah, it was only when producer and former Saturday Night Live music supervisor Hal Willner suggested she would be perfect for the song that Nathanson considered her voice in the context of jazz. “I had written this song called ‘Dog In Sand’ and she sang it great,”
he recalled. “After that, I thought, ‘Well, maybe she wants to work with us,’ so I just asked her.”
Debbie duly agreed, and joined the group live for the first time at The Knitting Factory in New York on November 19. By June 1995, she had joined the group as a full-time vocalist and took part in their European tour, the highlight of which was an appearance at London’s annual Meltdown Festival where they were joined on stage by that year’s event curator, Elvis Costello.
“It’s much more about real singing, which is definitely what I’m more adept at,” Debbie observed. “I work very hard to be a good singer and I study, and I’ve kept working. In my performance I consciously hold back from dancing too much because I know that it’s going to affect my singing. I really work to be a musician, and I contribute to the arrangements as much as I’m capable of doing. And that’s what I love. I get joy from that.”
Initially, Debbie’s new direction confused her established fanbase. “I knew with Debbie involved we’d get bigger audiences, but I didn’t really know what that meant,” recounted Nathanson. “A ton of people would come to the gigs – like fanatic fans – and they weren’t really there to listen to The Jazz Passengers at all. So that was difficult, but she was so great with us and she was so cool, we kept doing it.”
“I think the Jazz Passengers thing was really good for Debbie,” asserted Glenn O’Brien. “It enabled her to make music and even improve her skills while taking the spotlight off her and just being one of the boys in the band. That was a situation she was never in before. And I think she’s more one of the boys in Blondie now than she was in the beginning. She’s not playing up the glamour part so much as just being a great entertainer.”
“It was a relief to be part of this thing – to be visible and invisible at the same time,” Deborah explained. “I think being an icon is like being stuck in a character role. Some actors in films are stuck in hero roles and it’s very hard to get out of them. It takes a lot of age and endurance for Al Pacino to go from being a young lead to other great roles.”
Debbie continued to gig with The Jazz Passengers throughout the next two years, recording an album with the group, Individually Twisted, in 1996. Credited to ‘The Jazz Passengers featuring Deborah Harry’, the 13-track disc included a reworking of ‘The Tide Is High’ and a duet with Elvis Costello, ‘Doncha Go ‘Way Mad’. She also appeared on the group’s 1998 Live In Spain album, recorded at the Hotel Cancilla Ayala in the Basque province of Álava. Although Debbie downplayed her contributions as “fake jazz”, Craig Leon felt that moving into a new medium had been highly beneficial to her: “In a weird way Debbie has become a lot better than she was … She has gone off into a completely different area and done very well creatively in it. She’s become really good at it, to the point where it lights bulbs in my head as to doing a real Debbie Harry jazz album.”
While Deborah’s collaborations had moved her into a new creative realm, her Blondie persona remained sufficiently marketable to ensure a steady flow of compilation and remix albums were released throughout the nineties. After scoring a gold record with The Complete Picture retrospective in 1991, Chrysalis (which also put out the Once More Into The Bleach collection three years earlier) evidently believed there was plenty of milk left in the Blondie cash cow, issuing the 47-track Platinum Collection in 1994, followed up the next year by Beautiful – The Remix Album and Remixed Remade Remodeled – The Remix Project, both released within a month of one another.
Although these anthologies and the rolling programme of CD rereleases of Blondie’s six studio albums helped to dig Chris and Debbie out of debt, the sense that their legacy was being strip-mined by a label they were no longer signed with rankled. “That shit is based on the fact that record companies realised they could have more than one hit with the same record,” blasts Chris. “That shit is appalling, we had such a shitty deal with Chrysalis that they could do that to our songs. Remixes have nothing to do with someone wanting to do something better – or at least not in our case. It has to do with record companies wanting to make more money. It’s not creative, but at the same time there is an audience for it. I like house and rap music, and we did reach a younger club audience, so there might be some good coming from it. But we could have done the remixes ourselves, taken a different approach. My problem with it is that someone can take a vocal off an existing track, put any rhythm they like underneath it and call it Blondie.”
During her tenure with The Jazz Passengers Debbie maintained her acting career, appearing in the sixties thriller Dead Beat before scoring the more substantial role of Delores, a down-at-heel waitress, in Heavy – the directorial debut of James Mangold, who subsequently helmed the 2005 Johnny Cash biopic Walk The Line. The movie cast Deborah alongside Hollywood heavyweight Shelley Winters, as well as Liv Tyler – the daughter of Aerosmith frontman Steven – and model-turned-singer Bebe Buell. “I got involved through Bebe Buell, Liv’s mother and an old friend of mine from the CBGB’s days,” explained Debbie. “Liv and Bebe were excited about it because it was a sensitive – not commercial – thing. Liv’s very serious about acting and doesn’t want to be another flip of the page.”
Initially uncertain about casting Deborah, Mangold was sufficiently impressed by her down-to-earth nature and took the plunge. “If Debbie was going to be in the movie, I knew people were going to be looking at her with an extra set of ammo, thinking, ‘Oh, it’s just stunt casting,’” remembered the director. “My feeling was she had to do something so human, so reserved, so tender that she shut them up for good. And she did. Her upstate roots show. In fact, part of her connection to the project is that she once actually worked as a short order waitress in an upstate New York diner. I think she’s brilliant in Heavy.” With many reviews noting the strength of Debbie’s performance, it seemed the critics agreed with Mangold, who would recast her in the same role for his big-budget feature Copland two years later.
Less significantly, Deborah also starred alongside former singing highwayman Adam Ant in the 1996 music business parody Drop Dead Rock. Cast in the role of bizarrely named record company executive Thor Sturmundrang, Debbie imbued the character with generous helpings of evil and mendacity. Asked if she based her portrayal on anybody she may have encountered at Chrysalis, Deborah replied, “No … Just on everybody I’ve ever met in the entire industry.”
While Debbie was digging into her rock’n’roll past for Drop Dead Rock, Chris had decided to part with a small portion of his Blondie heritage by selling unwanted memorabilia. Placing an advertisement in The Village Voice, he set in motion a sequence of events that led to a wholly unexpected conclusion. One of those who responded to the advert introduced Chris to veteran tour manager Harry Sandler, who suggested that Blondie reform to record a new album.
“Somebody was talking to Chris about it – not for the first time – and said to him, ‘Look, if you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it,’” explained Debbie. “So he called me up and said, ‘What do you think about putting Blondie back together?’ And I laughed! Then he went on and called everybody.”
Sandler had been working with promoter and manager Allen Kovac, who shared his belief that a reformation was viable. “He had confidence,” said Debbie. “He said he felt he could do it and thought highly of our history and our sales record. Initially, I think he was just going to help us renegotiate our old deal because our old catalogue was still selling.”
“Debbie was intrigued that there was the chance that a band could reunite – get the people to heal and really sort out their issues and come back together,” recalled Kovac.
But, despite being interested in the possibilities of a Blondie reunion, Debbie remained unconvinced. “I didn’t want to get back together. As usual Chris talked me into it. It involves people that basically I feel are vultures picking my bones. That’s a very uncomfortable feeling and by then I was doing something that was more meaningful and I preferred to be left alone to do that,” she stated. “It was Chris’ idea. He
felt that if he didn’t do it at a time when everybody in the band was still alive, he’d regret it. And he was getting a lot of emails from fans, suggesting the idea. Personally, I would never have thought of it.”
After persuading Debbie, Chris contacted Clem who, having long felt that the band should have never split to begin with, readily agreed. Next came Jimmy: “I was in London and my wife called and said, ‘Chris Stein called.’ And I said, ‘Chris never calls. What’s it about?’ So I called him from London and he was like, ‘Let’s do it again.’ Click. You know, ‘click’ right after that, so it left me a lot of time to reflect and that’s how Chris is. My initial reaction was bewilderment, but happiness too.”
Now living in England, Gary Valentine was equally surprised to receive a message from Chris asking him to get in touch. “I hadn’t seen or spoken to Chris in 10 years – I call him, and he’s ecstatic, ‘I want you to come to New York, because I wanna put the band back together.’”
Gary duly flew back in November 1996 to begin rehearsals with Debbie, Chris, Clem and Jimmy. After appearing with Debbie and Chris at a tribute show for William Burroughs in Lawrence, Kansas, the group booked into The Hit Factory to record some demo material. With Debbie committed to touring with The Jazz Passengers in support of their newly released Individually Twisted disc in February and March 1997, Valentine – who had been crashing at Chris’, then Debbie’s apartment before renting a Brooklyn loft with his wife, Ruth – returned to London to prepare songs for the new album.