by Dick Porter
By 1990, the changes to New York were manifest – hip hop became dominated by pantomime gangstas and Avenue A was now negotiable without too much street hassle. Most tragically, the gay community that had driven the city’s subterranean currents was decimated by AIDS. Disco was no longer merely a celebratory soundtrack but the music of the doomed, its symbolic death knell marked by the closing of The Paradise Garage in September 1987.
By 1993, the city’s conservative mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, had adopted policies aimed at reducing minor crime. While the actual impact of his licensing restrictions, denial of protest rights and crackdown on graffiti artists or subway turnstile jumpers remains hotly debated, his concept of ‘zero tolerance’ became a rallying call for the Right and served to sanitise New York. Every subsequent return visit to Manhattan was notable for the sprucing up of previously bleak streets and, although it was now possible to venture deep into the East Village without risking a gun in the back, the funk seemed to be draining out of the place. That intangible buzz was no longer coursing under the sidewalk.
Most artists lamented the erosion of the downtown sense of community. While CBGB’s traded on past glories by presenting unknown out-of-towners, underground clubs still managed to exist. The cheaper rents, meanwhile, were now to be found over the bridge in Brooklyn. This systematic clean-up of the New York streets and the subsequent influx of outsiders, accompanied by skyrocketing rents and artistic flight, crushed the spirit that spawned so many cultural movements. The rotting Bowery lofts which had housed and nurtured Blondie now sold for upward of a million dollars. This would continue as New York turned into just another city.
“It certainly doesn’t have the funk appeal it once had, and I miss that,” reflected Debbie. “It’s all very tidy since Giuliani went down on his knees with a little toothbrush and cleaned it all up. The entertainment is too ‘general public’. Now that all the strip clubs like Billy’s Topless are closed, these places on 42nd Street that kinda had the girls doing their thing are illegal. So you get all these strippers in mainstream Broadway shows … it’s not even under the radar, it’s just not sexy. It’s lascivious, but it’s not real horny, y’know? People pretend it’s funny like they’re going along with a joke, but they won’t admit they’re getting turned on. It’s fake-wholesome, like the movie Chicago.“
“I hate the fucking clean-up,” asserted Chris. “It’s not good for the arts, what’s going on there. Young kids can’t afford to live there. When I lived there, I had a fuckin’ $100 apartment. You can’t expect to have to make a $1,000 a week to survive and still have a band, it just doesn’t work like that. I think urban areas are supposed to be dirty and dangerous, I don’t think it’s supposed to be fuckin’ Disneyland. So on one level it’s really grotesque what’s going on there now and the police are uptight and a lot of it is very surface what’s happening, too. It’s just all done for the tourist trade and shit.”
Although Debbie continued to live downtown, Chris would leave the city in 2002. “I had a really nice loft on Greenwich Street, but we were right in the fucking thing when the Trade Center blew up. We were right in the front lines there. I had like a 4,000 square-foot loft with a street entrance. It was like a thousand bucks for 10 years, and then it went up to 5,000 bucks. It was like ridiculous. That was the end of it.”
Reflecting upon the 2001 World Trade Center atrocity that changed the city’s landscape and impacted profoundly on the lives of many New York residents, Debbie found herself missing the innocence of the early CBGB’s era. “When the Trade Center went down it hit me hard and I wished it was 1975 again. That was an exciting time to be starting off. The attacks made me realise what an important time that was for me … I’m always amazed that outsiders think New York is an unfriendly place. I think people were very supportive of one another after it happened.”
At that time, Blondie had almost completed recording a follow-up to No Exit at a studio close to the Trade Center. “We had the stuff stockpiled and were working in a studio in Manhattan,” explains Craig Leon. “At that point there were business problems with their management/record company going bankrupt. Allen Kovac’s record company compounded my situation because they owed me royalties on No Exit. It also compounded making the record difficult because they weren’t paying the studio. During one of the periods I went back to the UK to mix a classical project we had recorded in New York for Decca. I would have to be there for three weeks or something. I had copies of the files and the studio had copies, so we’d have them in two different places. I was in the UK, then 9/11 happened, which made it very difficult to transport back and forth. In between all of that, everything kind of went into limbo because they couldn’t get the tapes out of the studio to work on them, because they hadn’t paid the bill.”
While plans for the new album were being reformulated, Blondie set out on a 30-date summer tour, following it up with a shorter ‘Greatest Hits’ tour in November 2002 – before crossing the Atlantic for a string of arena dates in the UK and Ireland the following month. Although the very nature of a tour based around the group’s greatest hits compelled them to emphasise their older material, many songs were given a makeover. “It’s refreshing for us,” enthused Debbie, “we’ve done all the other material for so many years. Most of the songs, we’ve taken and tried to revamp them, and make them interesting for ourselves, as well as to make them more contemporary. So when we bring in something new and start to play it, it’s really exciting for us. Also, I noticed in the last three shows, the audiences were really listening to the new material and really paying attention, it was great.”
As with the gigs that followed No Exit‘s release, these shows were celebratory affairs. There appeared to be little dissent between Blondie’s principal quartet, an indication of the way maturity had mellowed that often fraught dynamic. “Our last tour was the most fun I ever had on the road,” enthused Debbie. “When we did it all first time around, there were always so many tensions and insecurities. Now we feel we can relax. Because we’re more comfortable with each other and what we’re doing, I think the band sounds better than it ever has.”
However, despite the fact that Debbie, Chris, Clem and Jimmy were hardly in their dotage, she was aware that, as the years rolled by, the physical demands of playing live would become increasingly difficult to endure: “It’s important to tour now, as we’ll have less energy in 10 years. One day, I won’t feel like going on the road. But we love what we’re doing – so why stop?”
Blondie duly flew south for the summer festival season, playing dates in Australia, New Zealand and Japan. However, Chris had to rush home during the Australian leg of the tour on account of the birth of his daughter, Akira. In 1999, a decade after he and Debbie broke up as a couple, Chris had married actress Barbara Sicuranza – with whom he would also have a second daughter, Valentina, two years later.
“The pregnancy was a tense time for me, as well as for my wife, because of all the drugs I’ve done over the years,” he explained. “You can’t help but wonder what effect that might have. Blessedly, though, our baby is absolutely fine, and very alert and bright. To have a first child at my age is like a gift from above. Suddenly, you find yourself looking forwards rather than back. It’s given me a whole new lease of life. And that we should have a little girl is just the icing on the cake. The world needs all the female energy it can get.”
Given the enduring nature of his relationship with Deborah, Chris was aware that there were possibilities for feelings of awkwardness and jealousy on all sides. “We’ve been a hard act to follow. It’s always been tough for the women I’ve been involved with after Debbie, but Barbara and I have worked all of that out. My wife’s a great woman, really talented and smart, and I enjoy her company immensely. I think we’re very good for each other.”
“I think early on in my relationship, I was intimidated and less secure and sort of wondering about this woman, his partner, and they are so close,” recalled Barbara. “They have love and it was ha
rd for me a little. But I have a different relationship with him and have a different relationship with her. I respect what they have because why would I want to deny people that I love, love for one another?”
Deborah, who would be godmother to both Akira and Valentina, admitted that it took her and Barbara “a little while to build up any kind of relationship … we had to figure out where we stood with each other and where each of us stood with Chris. We definitely worked at it. But my relationship with Chris was the longest I’ve ever had and also very important. I think he’s a terrific person and I guess he thinks I’m OK, too, as we’re still very good friends.”
“It’s 30 years now since we first met, and we’ve been closer than close ever since,” asserted Chris. “I honestly don’t know how to explain our connection. It’s so deep that I sometimes think we must have been linked in a former life. And despite all that we’ve been through, separately and together, it continues to go from strength to strength. It’s almost like we’re telepathic. We know what each other is thinking, even without asking. It’s quicker for me to read Debbie’s body language, and she mine, than it is for us to speak.”
“We may not be a couple any more, but Chris hasn’t stopped being the dearest person in the world to me. He’s still the person who best understands how to control my paranoia,” revealed Debbie, who continued Blondie’s Antipodean tour alongside Clem, Jimmy, Leigh and Paul.
Sadly, while the group were in Australia Deborah received the news that her adoptive father, Richard, had died at home. “Dad had been pretty sick for a while, which was very hard to watch. I imagine I had the same mixed feelings anyone experiences in such circumstances. You hate to lose someone you love, but it’s awful to see them suffer. Although we didn’t always have a meeting of minds, we’d achieved a real closeness in recent years.”
“Both of Debbie’s parents have passed away now, and my mother is currently in a pretty bad way,” added Chris. “But then, this is the stuff that happens to everyone as they get older. It’s the path that all of us are going to have to tread at some time.”
Recorded once more with Craig Leon, Blondie’s eighth studio album was pieced together from elements of the initial recordings complemented by material laid down by individual band members working alone. “Things have changed quite a lot, because on this record people brought in work they had done in their home studios, but there’s still some of the same aspects to recording,” explained Clem.
It was prefaced by the September 2003 release of ‘Good Boys’, a hi-energy hands-in-the-air chunk of sequenced pop, topped by an ethereal vocal. The single, which was not issued in the US, made number 12 in Britain and cracked the Australian Top 40. Written by Debbie and musician/producer Kevin Griffin, ‘Good Boys’ also cited Queen guitarist Brian May among the writing credits on account of a lyric section that referenced Queen’s 1977 hit, ‘We Will Rock You’.
One month later, the album appeared under the semi-ironic title The Curse Of Blondie. “The ‘Curse of Blondie’ has been an ongoing refrain for us and when anything bad happened or untoward or surprising, you say ‘ah, the curse of Blondie’. I always think of it as being funny and melodramatic and sort of tongue in cheek,” explained Debbie.
“I might be the curse of Blondie to Chris, and Chris might be the curse of Blondie to me,” laughed Clem. “Part of the curse is being in the band, right? There’s the camaraderie and the love, and there’s also the backbiting.”
“Part of the curse is we finally have achieved some kind of success in the record business, which is going through a drastic transformation now,” said Chris. “I think this era of charts and rigidity is going to be over because of the internet. And part of our appeal is that our approach to making music is naturalistic. We do stuff on our own terms.”
The 14 tracks that make up The Curse Of Blondie contemporise Blondie’s signature sound while expanding it into new areas. Numbers such as ‘Golden Rod’ (part of the band’s live set since the 2002 UK tour), the glamtronic bump’n’grind of ‘End To End’, and Jimmy’s urgent ‘Last One In The World’ are all indicative of the group in ‘modern rock’ mode. The pop aspects of Blondie’s sonic heritage are represented by the perky but hard-edged ‘Undone’ and ‘Shakedown’ – which, after a surprisingly visceral opening featuring Debbie’s most savage rap to date, takes us on a lyrical journey down the New Jersey Turnpike, before unfurling a cloying R&B chorus.
“There was always this great debate within the band,” recalls Leon. “Chris in his writing is very loop-oriented and, like, late seventies/early eighties primitive electronic-oriented in what he does, whereas Jimmy and Clem and just about everybody else were saying that they wanted to do things that were more live.
“Jimmy was kind of locked out on material for it. There was definitely an acrimonious situation between Jimmy and the rest of the group. They were having problems with him. Chris was actually vetoing a lot of things that were Jimmy’s. You’ve got material that lends itself more towards Debbie’s solo work that Chris was involved in, rather than an actual Blondie record. It’s kind of a Chris and Debbie record. And again, looking for material, there’s a lot of filler, written by the bass player and things like that, but it was sounding pretty decent and we were doing it.
“Jimmy was really angry because he didn’t have a lot of material on the album. Arguably, he did write or co-wrote quite a lot of their hits. He very much brought in street pop, New York pop and classic pop. The classic pop elements were him and Clem more than anything else – not that Chris and Debbie didn’t know them and like them, [but] they were always more into the leftfield influences. You’ve got to remember they were the people who were into hip hop when it was really underground and all of that. They’d be listening to Cuban salsa music or something.”
Ultimately, Craig Leon was prevented from completing his work on The Curse Of Blondie. “Like a lot of Blondie events, it ended up with a manager yelling at people and them yelling at each other and yelling at me,” he explains. “Quite honestly, I didn’t have time to bother with it because of all the other things I was doing, so I was actually quite relieved when Allen Kovac gave me this big long speech where he just kind of sacked me from the record, which I think was unbeknownst to the band as well. I also think he had this viewpoint where he wanted to make them more contemporary, meaning disco 1981 as opposed to classic rock’n’roll 1967 or 1977. I don’t even know who finished off those songs. They certainly weren’t people I recognised. It’s sad because, even though it isn’t a classic Blondie album or anything, the original way it was heading would have been much better.”
Alongside the big guitars and insistent rhythms that underpin many of The Curse‘s songs, the album also includes several more restrained moments that are largely Jimmy’s work. Described by Destri as “the greatest love story I’ve ever written”, ‘Rules For Living’ is a wistful ballad that floats atop layers of processed rhythms and synthesized melody. Debbie supplies a reserved vocal that reaches an expertly controlled higher pitch during the chorus, delivering the lyric evocatively as instruments drop out of the mix. Co-written by Jimmy and Debbie, ‘Background Melody (The Only One)’ is a crystalline shard of sweet pop that drops Latin horn breaks, backwards guitar and sparse trip-hop rhythms into a song that pitches the vocal somewhere in the fragile range. A further Harry/Destri collaboration, ‘Diamond Bridge,’ begins in a laconically understated manner before developing force and momentum and then returning to the start of its sonic cycle.
In terms of unpredictability, it’s difficult to top the band inexorably linked with the sounds and attitude of New York City covering a traditional Japanese folk song. ‘Magic (Asadoya Yunta)’ originated in Okinawa and recounts the tale of a woman named Asadoya nu Kuyama, who was brave enough to reject a wedding proposal from a government official. Blondie’s rendition features understated electronics and guitar supporting multi-tracked choral vocals. A similar world music vibe suffuses ‘Hello Joe’, a track written in memory of
Joey Ramone, who died of lymphoma in April 2001.
“It’s a tribute, about witnessing Joey down the years, and saying his memory will never die,” Debbie stated. “He’ll always be alive for me. I always loved that band and thought Joey was a nice person.” ‘Hello Joe’ emerges as a Latin shuffle that includes the referential lyric, “Hey, hola Joe,” and something that sounds remarkably like a processed accordion in the bridge section.
But The Curse Of Blondie‘s most radically exciting inclusion is the remarkable ‘Desire Brings Me Back’. Written by saxophonist Gretchen Langheld and guitarist Carla Olla, the song begins with a maelstrom of discordant jazz, before lurching into Birthday Party mode to assail the listener with a primal, sultry sex beat, topped by such conflicted lyrics as, “How can I feel so free when I’m so bound to you?”
“This record is one of our most eclectic,” declared Jimmy. “The interesting thing about the band is that the influences that come from within the band are all over the place and they all kind of come together and assimilate into making what Blondie sounds like.”