Introduction

“Maybe we were a reality TV show before there was reality TV,” Chris Stein remarked during a phone conversation a couple of years ago. Of course, Chris was referring to Blondie, the group he formed with Deborah Harry five decades ago which, from the least promising of beginnings, clawed a path through the ruins of downtown New York to become a global phenomenon.

Today, Blondie are duly recognised as one of the 20th century’s most influential and innovative groups, fronted by the most imitated (though never equalled) female singer of all time. Ignited by the success of 1978’s ‘Denis’, Blondie fired off a salvo of groundbreaking hits that included ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence Dear’, ‘Hanging On The Telephone’, ‘One Way Or Another’, ‘Sunday Girl’, ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Atomic’, ‘Call Me’, ‘The Tide Is High’ and ‘Rapture’ – the latter being their homage to Chic, which brought New York’s hip hop revolution into the mainstream.

While Debbie’s striking beauty made it impossible for her to escape becoming a pin-up in the old-fashioned sense, she saw that it happened on her terms. It quickly became apparent that she was a strong-willed, clever, and culturally articulate woman, who would open the door for successive generations of female singers to seize control of their own destinies. By demonstrating that it was possible to be intelligent and beautiful, she lit a path that runs from Madonna to Lady Gaga. Her refusal to be manipulated by any authority but her own established a post-feminist ideal that would inspire women such as Garbage’s Shirley Manson, Gwen Stefani and Pink. Similarly, the fleeting but dynamic riot grrrl movement drew much of its spirit of independence from Debbie.

As the creative dynamo at the pulsing core of Blondie, Debbie and Chris may have been the most vibrantly idiosyncratic partnership to emerge from New York’s punk era. But they also faced the challenge of maintaining a relationship amid the incessant pressures of leading a number one group, besieged by business nightmares and inter-band ego wars, and exacerbated by drugs. These and other factors combined to run down Blondie’s first phase, with Chris’ debilitating illness as the final nail in its coffin.

Happily, Blondie returned in 1998, as Debbie, Chris, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri topped the charts again with ‘Maria’. New members joined the fold to extend the group’s legacy and establish them as a popular fixture on the summer festival circuit. Such is the timeless magic of the songs and Debbie’s allure that new generations have embraced them, as old-timers look back with affection.

Blondie’s story ranks among the most resonant of rock’n’roll tales. On one level, it concerns the love and creativity shared by two unique individuals. However, it is equally about New York, the city that suffused the group with its energy, attitude and excitement. Few other bands are as synonymous with, or evocative of their hometown as Blondie. Even at the peak of their global popularity, Debbie and Chris kept their ears to the New York sidewalk and their feet planted in the disparate scenes flourishing amid the city’s underground art epicentre and throughout the parallel club movements of punk, disco and hip hop. In the case of the latter, they were the first white group to trumpet the revolutionary new style, scoring a huge hit with ‘Rapture’. For four of their five years at the hub of the media spotlight, Chris and Debbie ensured they regularly appeared on Glenn O’Brien’s weekly TV Party on cable television.

Outside the steady trickle of much-anticipated new material, Blondie’s influence can be found constantly as their songs show up on the soundtracks of TV programmes, movies and ads, and Debbie’s pout is always evoked by the latest tousled blonde singer. As she herself now reflects, “Blondie were part of a chain of events, part of the New York scene where we were feeling it and really living it. Blondie did what we did before anyone knew what was happening, and laid a lot of groundwork for other bands. We were probably too early. I think the music industry caught up with us, but they didn’t like us when we started. We did feel we were like outsiders breaking into the establishment.”

This book is the second of the authors’ ‘New York Stories’ trilogy– our first, Trash!, being a ‘before, during and after’ history of The New York Dolls, whose infamous exploits dovetail with Debbie’s life in the early part of this book’s narrative.

There is also a personal connection between Blondie, the quintessential New York band, and co-author Kris, who championed them early on when he was editor of Zigzag magazine. As Kris tells it:

The feeling was mutual. Debbie and Chris’s fiercely independent natures have ensured Blondie’s enduring legacy. This book tells how it happened.

KRIS NEEDS
DICK PORTER
2012

Chapter One

An American Girl

In June 1979, Blondie achieved what was then considered a key signifier that a band had made it in the USA: appearing on the cover of Rolling Stone. Journalist Jamie James – subsequently described by Debbie Harry as “a strutting little pompous git” – caught the group on one of the off-days that sometimes occurred during this period, as Blondie’s fame exponentially grew while the press seemed regularly reluctant to take them seriously.

In his Rolling Stone piece, James was put on the defensive from the start: “I can tell the moment Debbie lays eyes on me that she hates my guts.” The fact that it had taken ‘Heart Of Glass’ hitting number one in the US charts to arouse the magazine’s ardour irked Debbie, who asked him why they had shown no interest three years earlier. The hapless writer tried to splice reportage of in-band sniping to his evident lack of empathy with Blondie’s music or the scene from which it emerged, bookending his piece with an interview with a woman who likes to be called ‘Cag’ – Catherine Harry, Debbie’s adopted mother.

Until that point, accounts of Debbie’s pre-New York past had been restricted to her adoption, her New Jersey school days and vague allusions to mostly unspecified forms of teenage rebellion. James kicked off with Cag’s anecdote about Debbie’s singing debut – her sixth-grade class had once staged a ‘Tom Thumb wedding’, featuring one kid as the groom, another as the bride and a third cast in the role of bridesmaid. She also recalled Debbie soloing on the 1912 chart-topping parlour standard and wedding perennial ‘I Love You Truly’ for the grand finale.

Cag explained what a tight-knit family the Harrys were. “The only Christmas she wasn’t here was the time she was on tour in Australia [1977]. She was so depressed, and I was so depressed. She said, ‘I’ll never be away for Christmas again.’ Debbie’s a wonderful daughter.”

Had Debbie been much of a hit with the boys? “Are you kidding?” Cag erupted, going on to relate the story of how her adopted daughter was approached to enter the high school beauty pageant. “She didn’t particularly want to go in; they called her in … She was always beautiful. When she was a baby, my friends used to tell me I should send her picture in to [baby food manufacturer] Gerber’s, because she would be picked as one of the Gerber Babies. But I didn’t send it in. I didn’t believe in her being exploited.”

“My mother was offered a contract for me to become a Gerber Baby, but my mother told me there was no way. She wouldn’t be a showbiz momma. So maybe that’s why it took me so long to get my music together,” confirmed Debbie, touching upon the trait that led to her becoming a creative late bloomer.

“She is shy,” continued Cag. “When she’s not performing – and you must know this – she’s quiet, with a very pixie sense of humour. She’s not real outgoing or loud. She’s sort of retiring … very family-oriented … She’s the one that got homesick at camp.”

Deborah Ann Harry was born Angela Tremble in Miami, Florida on July 1, 1945. She was adopted at the age of three months by Catherine and her husband Richard, who worked as a salesman of woven clothing labels in Manhattan’s fashion district. (“He was very casual about it,” Debbie would remember. “He always said that if people want something they’re going to buy it.”) The family lived in the quintessential small town of Hawthorne, New Jersey, described by Debbie as “a typical suburban commuter kind of town”.

Debbie appears to have been an insecure, solitary child, unhappy with the way she was dressed down by a mother who “didn’t contemplate a future for me other than marriage”. To a degree, this emphasis on conformity sprang from the teachings of the Episcopalian faith, to which the family subscribed. Although this ascetic strain of Protestant Christianity was subsequently abandoned by Debbie (who dismissed it as simply comprising “no incense, no confession” and “good hymns”), she also recognised that it laid the foundation of a broader interest in spirituality. “It teaches you to be real pragmatic. Then you start to wonder about God. Then you just leave the church. A lot of Protestants don’t go to church. But it’s very social, very community supportive. But I think that G-O-D is like the answer to a formula for creating life. Or some kind of energy or anti-gravity. It’s like the answer to an equation and it’s become mythical over the years. But at one time we all knew what it was. I don’t know when it was exactly, but that was the ancient knowledge. It’s become diffused as it was handed down and turned into myth.”

While Debbie’s insecurities may have stemmed from her adoption, the Harry household (which also included a younger sister, Martha, and a cousin, Bill, who lived with the family) was evidently warm and loving. Although Catherine and Richard were strict, they imposed boundaries on their children in a caring manner.

When Debbie was four years old, her parents broached the idea that she was adopted in the gentlest way possible. “They framed it in a bedtime story about [a child] being chosen,” she later revealed. “And then said, ‘And that’s how we got you.’”

Kids are highly adaptive creatures, and this was certainly true of Debbie. “To me they were just my mum and dad and I was very happy that way.” Looking back, she clearly appreciates the pivotal roles that Catherine and Richard played in her development. “The turning point in my life was being adopted and moving to New Jersey. If not I might have stayed in Florida and who knows what could have happened. Maybe I would have worked at Disneyland.”

In common with many adoptees, the notion of her biological mother as a mystery figure inspired imaginative childhood speculation. “Not knowing where I came from is a great stimulant to the imagination, and it has always meant I don’t take anything for granted,” Debbie observed. “One afternoon while we sat in the kitchen drinking coffee my Aunt Helen said I looked like a movie star, which thrilled me and fuelled another secret fantasy about Marilyn Monroe possibly being my natural mother. I always thought I was Marilyn Monroe’s kid. I felt physically related and akin to her long before I knew she had been adopted herself … Why Marilyn and not Lana Turner, Carole Lombard, Jayne Mansfield? Maybe it was Marilyn’s need for immense doses of demonstrative love that is the common denominator between us. Although that doesn’t fit me, because I got loads of love. My parents had to put up with some stupid shit from me like I’ve always had this sense of destiny, and when I felt I wasn’t being appreciated, I’d tell them. ‘You’ll be sorry you talked to me like this when I’m rich and famous.’ They would laugh. At least I kept them entertained.”

Rather than becoming mired in feelings of abandonment, Debbie’s stable home life and mental agility enabled her to draw positive elements from being adopted. “Having a big question mark about your identity, especially when you’re a kid, because you’re always trying to figure out who you are anyway, led to this double portion of ambiguity – the great unknown. One of the things I’ve always felt about not being identified, not knowing exactly what I was supposed to look like or what I was supposed to do, was that I could be whoever I wanted to be. And I really, really wasn’t like anybody. I think that’s helped me, but it was also difficult at times.”

Debbie would subsequently find her biological father, although her birth mother refused any contact when her whereabouts were unearthed in the late eighties. “I found out some personal history. I went to the agency that I was adopted through and I spoke with the representative. She took out all my files, and the files from that period were very, very in-depth – I was adopted right after the war, and people kept good records because there were so many lost loves and so much confusion going on – so many children.”

Recounting the circumstances of her birth, Debbie explained, “I think on my father’s side, I have seven or eight half brothers and sisters. My father was already married and my mother was not married. She got pregnant and then found out he was married and had all these children. She was heartbroken and she went away, had me and put me up for adoption.” To this day, Debbie has no intention of making contact with any paternal siblings from her biological family. “I don’t see what purpose it would serve,” she asserts. “How would I relate to them?”

In later years, Deborah employed therapy as a means of exploring the emotional impact of being adopted at such an early age. “I think it gave me some fear and some anger, and I didn’t know how to separate the two, because I think they are very closely related … It was a core issue for me and must have happened at a time when I was unable to put it into language, but it was something that I had experienced as an infant. A trauma. So eventually I was able to identify that, and to say, ‘Oh, that’s what happened,’ and to take that by the hand.”

Aside from Cag’s conventional aspirations for her daughter, economic necessity played a key role in how Debbie dressed. “I was always wearing second-hand clothes. We were really broke then. And my mother wasn’t really into pop culture at the time, so it wasn’t really driven home to me what the fifties were like.

“I hated the way I looked growing up. I had this blonde hair, pale-blue eyes and these jutting cheekbones. I didn’t look like any other kids I grew up with and I felt very uncomfortable about my face. I hated looking in mirrors and I definitely didn’t think I was pretty,” Debbie later insisted. “When I was a baby I was real pretty, but in between I was a real mess. I was very ugly. I just grew up weird … My mother always made me get these weird haircuts and I always had to wear clunky shoes and shit. I never thought I was pretty.

“My mother and I never got along in terms of clothing at all. She wanted me to look like I was a preppy WASP from Connecticut – that was good fashion to her, and I sort of loathed it … I always wanted to wear black and I wanted to wear things that were tough looking. There was a phase where I wanted to wear big flannel shirts and tight pants, and I always wanted to wear my sweaters backwards. I had clear ideas about what I wanted and it really had nothing to do with the times. So my mother and I never agreed.”

Looking back on the sartorial conflict that parents and their offspring habitually engage in, Debbie now admits to a greater understanding of her mother’s perspective: “I appreciate some of the things she said now; she had some good fundamental rules that she followed. I wanted radical, I wanted sex, I wanted movie stars. But she had very classic ideas and she was right in many respects – that some things would ultimately look better on me; like a tailored line, a simple line, would look better on me than something frilly. I mean, they didn’t have any money, she didn’t have a great wardrobe or anything; a few pieces.

“When I was a teenager, my father started doing a little bit better, things got a bit easier,” reveals Debbie. “When you don’t have a lot of dough it gives you a sense of humility and value. But a lot of people come up that way; I’m certainly not bragging about it. Plus my mother and father have very old-fashioned values about loyalty and stayed married for 60 years through thick and thin. It wasn’t always great – they had their ups and downs.”

Despite initially lacking confidence, Debbie first revealed her voice in the church choir. “There I was, a fat, cherubic soprano getting it on with the Christian Soldiers,” she would recount. “I loved singing so much I won the choir’s perfect attendance award, a silver cross, truly earned by my parents for getting me to practise every week.” She would later make an enthusiastic if limited cheerleader. “I wasn’t very good at twirling, actually,” she confessed. “I’d get very nervous and I would always drop it. But I think that’s why they chose me. They had me there twirling and dropping the baton for the bending over aspect. I was there for the pervert fathers. Looking at my underpants!”

Although Debbie reacted against any kind of preordained suburban destiny, she was never an outright rebel at the high school where she was later described by classmates as “friendly” and “popular”. “I feared and hated school passionately,” she reflected. “School was like treading water to me. Art classes were my favourites, but painting/drawing wasn’t considered important. Having shaken off the fat years I made baton twirler and was voted the prettiest girl in my senior class. Apart from that I didn’t have much going for me in high school. I felt everybody was trying to limit what I was before I’d tried anything.

“I was always nervous at school. I liked being in the classroom, learning things. But I couldn’t take the tension, having to pass a test. I was terrible at math, although I was quite good at geometry: ratios, envisioning the relationships of lines in space. English and art were my best subjects, but I had no idea of being a writer, or a songwriter, at that point.”

As a means of escaping the cloying suburbia of Hawthorne, Deborah would travel to Manhattan to soak up the atmosphere and excitement absent from the quiet streets of her hometown. “I was 12 or 13 years old and on a Saturday morning for 80 cents, I could get a round trip ticket to New York City. So I would get on a train and I would go into the city and I would walk around the West Village, which was old timey New York with the little streets and I would look in all the theatres and the clubs and the coffee shops, I would look at all the posters and see who was playing – it was very exciting for me.”

In common with many teenagers from limited income households, Deborah also took part-time work as a means of raising some spending money. These early forays into the world of employment quickly established the idea that working in the straight world may not be for her. “I had two jobs that I really didn’t like. I used to clean this woman’s house but that was when I was really young, and then later on when I was in high school I got a job in a redemption centre for S&H green stamps, and that was completely humiliating. The people who came in there and wanted their merchandise were really demanding about it. Maybe they thought they were getting something for nothing and they had to be aggressive about it, but it just seemed that everybody was so mean.”

As her worldview expanded, Debbie – who acquired her first serious boyfriend when she was 14 – gravitated toward the social and creative fringes, “I was an outsider in high school,” she explained. “I always used to wear black, and I had my hair striped out and I always bleached it different pastel colours. Every time I got in with some people I got disenchanted and I got kicked out or quit, and I had to worry because my mother was always worried about my reputation, and my best friend was a fag. It was raunchy, but it was fun.”

“All I remember about high school was how boring it was,” recalled Debbie. “I made average and good grades at Hawthorne High School. I was never in any trouble. I was just steady. I was just there … I don’t think that anything that I did in school was representative of me. You have to fit into the regime and you get through it.” Despite continual pressure to conform, the teenage Debbie had little inclination to toe the line. “I got into a sorority. I had to run around and act a certain way, supply certain things upon command, like gum if they wanted gum. I was offensive to them, so I got canned. But the reason I got kicked out was because of this friend of mine who was really great, really nutty, but they thought he was too horrible. Mostly because he was gay. They said, ‘You can’t hang around with him.’ So I got the axe. The girl that brought up the charges later on married him.

“I must have had 10 or 12 different colours of hair. At first I would use a mix of peroxide and ammonia, stuff that was easy to get. I started with streaks, and then it gradually turned orange. That’s when my mother would start to notice. All of a sudden at dinner, she’d say, ‘Your hair is different. What did you do?’ And I’d just say, ‘Oh, I lightened it a little.’ My father would go, ‘Well, I don’t know if I like this, hmmm …’ But he liked it on my mother; so it was semi-acceptable. Later, it was turning up platinum.”

Her experimental approach to cosmetics also led to Debbie’s first experience of life as a self-invented outsider. “I used to come into school covered in beauty marks,” she explained. “I looked like I was splattered in mud so the other girls thought I was a little bit weird. And I used to come home for lunch and if my mother wasn’t home, I’d whip into her room and start applying stuff all over me. But I was really young.

“I practised putting on makeup a lot. I used to study it carefully and practise everything. I used to sit in front of a mirror and try to make myself look Oriental. I made a lot of mistakes; sometimes I’d walk out of the house looking like a ghoul and not really know it. One time in eighth grade my mother wasn’t home; so I went upstairs and started fooling around. When I went back to school after lunch, no one would talk to me. Everybody went to one side of the lounge, and I was all by myself, practically in tears.”

Despite these early setbacks, the realisation that Debbie was not quite the ugly duckling she had imagined herself to be dawned upon her, then puberty hit early. “I first became aware of my sexuality when I was about 10 or 11. I think that everybody does, it’s surely not extraordinary to me. I had an interesting experience when I was 11: We were on holiday in Cape Cod, and I used to go out with my cousin … walking the holiday streets at night. When we left the house we used to put on lipstick, without our mothers knowing. Well, we picked up these guys, who were much older than us. They followed us back to where we lived and they said, ‘OK, we’ll pick you up later and we’ll go out for a drink.’ At 11 p.m. that night our mothers had put us in pyjamas and told us to go to bed, when these two guys came knocking at the door. We went down and opened it and you should have seen the faces of these two guys when they saw these two little kids there, without lipstick. It turned out that they were both very famous musicians. They gave us both autographed pictures and stuff. But my parents were really shocked.”

Deborah’s precocious looks also had the disquieting effect of attracting local weirdos. “I happen to have a sensual nature. And I suppose it comes out in pictures. I’ve always had that kind of response as a female. I know, because I’ve always been followed by perverts. Always the sick kind. In public places, flashers. I remember once when I was a child. It was at the zoo, and I was with my mother. This man came over and whipped open his coat. Disgusting.”

But as her personal sexuality flourished with hormonal gusto, young Deborah began visiting a pickup drag, known in the local vernacular as ‘Cunt Mile’, in search of sexual kicks. “I liked to experiment, I think I really enjoyed the darker side – the underside of things,” she recounted. “I didn’t do a great deal of it, but it was very meaningful for me. I wanted to see a real cross-section, I wasn’t content to be a white middle class girl growing up and doing what was expected of her. But it certainly was pretty nice.”

Looking to expand her developing horizons, Debbie took to driving with enthusiasm. “It sort of saved me,” she asserted. “It’s how I got through high school. When things would get too intense I would just get in a car.” Now independently mobile, Deborah found that she was drawn to the nearby town of Paterson. “Both my grandmothers lived in Paterson. A lot of people don’t believe that there is such a place. In the London Times in 1965, there was a piece about William Carlos Williams’ poem ‘Paterson’. They said that, ‘Paterson is an imaginary town in New Jersey which Williams created as his symbol of America.’ Thirteen miles outside Newark, and those limey intellectuals thought it was a myth.”

Although Deborah had ambitions of travelling around Europe, in 1963 she was enrolled at Centenary College in Hackettstown, New Jersey. “My parents didn’t think going to Europe was the right thing to do. I didn’t really want to go to school, but I did because I was very submissive. I didn’t know what else to do. I really had no idea how to take care of myself. I had been programmed for marriage and a certain degree of higher education. I don’t think my parents contemplated a future for me other than marriage. I was marketed for that, I was produced for that. This two years was to finish me off, to perhaps meet someone.”

This ‘finishing school’ (described by Debbie as “a reform school for debutantes”) was founded in 1867 by the Newark Conference of the United Methodist Church, becoming a girls’ preparatory school in 1910, then a junior college for women in 1940. Debbie’s graduation with a Bachelor of Association of Arts degree in 1965 was seen as the last educational step before her stipulated future as a fully domesticated housewife.

While there were several early factors that would prove crucial to the emergence of Debbie’s Blondie persona, being one of the biggest stars on the planet would only have been a wild fantasy at this point. As a teenager, her ambitions stretched no further than becoming a beatnik: “It was always my dream to live the bohemian life in New York and have my own apartment and do things. I didn’t like suburbia. I always had my own secret, private ideas … I always knew I would be involved in entertainment somehow.”

Debbie had enlivened her New Jersey childhood by creating a fantasy world populated by untouchable movie icons. By the time she reached Centenary College, she had developed a fascination with the anti-establishment archetype exemplified by James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Naturally enough, her concept of glamour at the time was provided by the then-ubiquitous Marilyn Monroe. “She was the most controversial female while I was growing up, so she cast a large aura and I was very interested in that – her charisma. I never really had that thing of dying to be another person; I was in awe of everybody, really. I knew I wanted to be a performer of some sort. I was kinda vague about it but I was good at music.”

In terms of adopting such subversive role models in her suburban life, Debbie was inclined to be pragmatic. “It wouldn’t get me anywhere to be a rebel, except I’d always be punished and locked in the house. But I always stated what I thought. [My parents] were liberal intellectually and politically. They themselves and how they were weren’t liberal. They tried to get me to understand it and I did, but they were firmly entrenched in their way of life. I was just waiting for the time I could do what I wanted to do.”

Exposure to jazz and European cinema laid the ground for much of Debbie’s aesthetic sensibility. “Some of my biggest influences were Paul Desmond, Dave Brubeck, Cal Tjader, all those freaked-out jazz musicians, I really got into that,” she’d recall. Indeed, the first album that Deborah Harry fell in love with was the 1955 compilation I Like Jazz, which featured contributions from artists such as Duke Ellington and Dave Brubeck. “I didn’t have a lot of money to buy records … so I’d listen to a lot of radio … a little radio where I could have my ear right next to the speaker. In those days DJs could be freaky – the late-late-night DJs were the ones. Funky, soulful stuff, maybe a little bit of rock. What could be better? I was always a radio head.”

Deborah Harry’s expanding palate of influences was also shaped by the magnetic pull of nearby New York. “When I was a little kid my mother and father used to take me to do the traditional kid things. Radio City shows, the tree at Rockefeller Plaza. New York was always the big fascination and the big Mecca for entertainment, anything that was exotic. My father worked here for more than 25 years. I guess I sort of started taking bus trips to the city when I was in the eighth grade. I would come in to the Village and check out what was going on.”

Once she was ensconced at Centenary College, Debbie enrolled in creative writing classes. “I seriously started to write in 1964 … poems. They weren’t very good. I used to write little stories.” However, being just old enough to remember a time before rock’n’roll, it was this still new music (rather than literature) that ignited her rebellious instincts. “One of the greatest things about it was that it was forbidden,” she recalled. “That forced young people to have an identity. You could sort through everybody by who they liked, or whether they liked rock’n’roll at all.

“1959-1965 was a great time to be a rock’n’roll teenager,” she reminisced. “Radio was at its peak. Every show was in heavy competition to discover the newest, wildest sound on plastic … The first rock stuff I got into was Frankie Lymon doo-wop during the fifties. Later, my dancing friends and I did the Strand, the Hully Gully, the Swim, the Jump, the Bop, the Watusi and the Twist – kicked off by the Mashed Potato which, when seen for the first time, caused some kind of scandal at school: ‘You’re dancing like a nigger, girl … You can’t do that!’ Until that time expressing how the music made you feel hadn’t been done.”

Like many American teenagers of the era, Debbie could hardly fail to notice The Beatles’ impact on the US pop landscape as the band touched down to invade in February 1964. However, rather than being swept away by the prevailing currents of Beatlemania, her artistic sensibility took heed of the dynamics behind the group’s rampant popularity. “I learned a lot of things from The Beatles about sassiness. I always thought they were sassy; that was my label for them. Attitude is very important. And I always felt that sex is a cool thing to sell. It’s a sure thing.”

While John, Paul, George and Ringo enraptured the masses, Debbie fell under the brief supernova spell of New York’s girl groups. These provided some living, breathing rebels to identify with and to model her early individuality upon.

The 10-storey Brill Building, which got its name from the tailor occupying the ground floor, had dominated New York’s entertainment industry in the late fifties. By 1960, however, while it still housed hotshot songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, most on-the-button contemporary music was emanating from the cheaper, funkier Music Building at 1650 Broadway – a maze of cubicles furnished with desks, phones and an upright piano that played host to the hordes of publishers, promoters and songwriters who descended on the city. As the sixties began to swing, those little cubicles began churning out Top 10 hits at a relentless rate – often from those run by Aldon Music, the company started by music biz veteran Al Nevins and hotshot young entrepreneur Don Kirshner, who made the first of many killings in the white teenage market opened up by Dion & The Belmonts with their young singer/songwriter Neil Sedaka. Happening new writing partnerships of the time included Gerry Goffin and Carole King, Barry Mann and lyricist Cynthia Weil (who broke the Brooklyn stranglehold by hailing from a rich Upper West Side Jewish background), Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry.

Goffin and King owned the distinction of writing the first number one single for a black all-female group, the wistfully infectious ‘Will You Love Me Tomorrow?’ by New Jersey’s Shirelles, in 1960. This opened the floodgates for the earliest form of girl power.

The girl-group phenomenon spread like wildfire, prodded full-force by another new arrival called Phil Spector – a diminutive record producer who cast a skyscraper shadow over the early sixties New York music scene. Although born in the Bronx in 1939, he had been taken to California by his mother in 1953 after his father committed suicide, learning his studio craft from Gold Star producer Stan Ross and scoring his first hit record in late 1958 with The Teddy Bears’ ‘To Know Him Is To Love Him’ (titled after the inscription on his father’s tombstone). Leiber and Stoller’s mentor, Lester Sill, then arranged for Spector to come to New York and work with the duo, resulting in the lustrously intoxicating ‘Spanish Harlem’, a huge hit for Ben E. King in late 1960.

Hailing from Brooklyn, The Crystals were the first group Spector signed to Philles, the label he started with Sill in 1961 (later grasping sole ownership after his partner backed down). Spector set about developing the panoramic ‘wall of sound’ he applied to the new girl groups, leading the way with The Crystals after their 1961 debut hit, ‘There’s No Other (Like My Baby)’, merely bruised the Top 20.

Vivacious blonde singer-songwriter/producer Ellie Greenwich was another key component in the girl-group phenomenon. Together with husband Jeff Barry, Broadway’s pop queen wrote some of the biggest hits for the girl groups, including Spector’s Ronettes, The Crystals and several for The Shangri-Las. (In addition to penning several of the hits that fired Debbie’s musical passions, more than a decade later Ellie would provide backing vocals for Blondie on ‘In The Flesh’.)

Although hailing from Brooklyn, Ellie Greenwich grew up in the affluent Long Island suburb of Levittown, teaching herself piano and composing songs by her early teens. She attended Queens College aged 17 and, in 1958, released her first solo single, ‘Silly Isn’t It’, for RCA under the name Ellie Gaye. She became a Brill Building regular after her piano skills caught the attention of Jerry Leiber while she was waiting for an appointment. Leiber and Stoller allowed her to use their facilities so long as they had first pick of the songs she came up with. Ellie and Jeff Barry married in October 1962, as their songwriting partnership blossomed into a hugely successful exclusive arrangement with Leiber and Stoller’s Trio Music.

When Leiber, Stoller and veteran third partner George Goldner started Red Bird Records in 1964, Barry/Greenwich were installed as staff writers and producers, scoring an immediate number one with the Dixie Cups’ Spector-produced ‘Chapel Of Love’. Ellie’s success pricked the ears of her old childhood friend George Morton, who visited her at the Brill Building to the chagrin of husband Jeff, who maliciously asked Morton what he did for a living. Not wanting to lose face, George replied that he wrote hit singles. Barry challenged him to bring one in. Energised by the pressure, the songless Morton took a gamble, booked time at a local studio and invited four girls who had already impressed him at local events: The Shangri-Las (who took their name from a local Chinese restaurant). The Shangri-Las had been formed from friendships between the Weiss and Ganser families who lived in the tough Cambria Heights neighbourhood of South-East Queens. Mary and Liz ‘Betty’ Weiss and twin sisters Marguerite ‘Marge’ and Mary Ann Ganser attended the local Andrew Jackson High School. Sharing a mutual love of music, between 1963 and 1964 the four would practise their harmonies, routines and stage presence around the pop songs of the day, soon graduating to playing local teen hops and school dances.

While driving to the demo studio in his Buick, Morton pulled up by a Long Island beach and poured out ‘Remember (Walking In The Sand)’. The seven-minute demo impressed Leiber to the extent that he signed The Shangri-Las to Red Bird for five years in April 1964. After they recorded a more compact version ‘Remember’ became a summer hit, complemented by the group’s bad girl image. This was a new strain of teenage rock’n’roll, delivered from a feminine perspective. Morton’s innovative production heightened the song’s melodrama via his trademark sound effects, in the form of crashing waves and seagull calls.

Morton was suddenly a studio hotshot, signing to Red Bird as staff producer. He was nicknamed ‘Shadow’ by George Goldner – after the mysterious pulp magazine character because his whereabouts could never be established. Working more like a movie director, Morton guided The Shangri-Las through two years of worldwide hits and mini-symphonies including ‘Leader Of The Pack’, ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’, ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’, ‘Give Us Your Blessings’ and the sepulchral B-side confessional ‘Dressed In Black’ – a blueprint for future punk generations that could have been written for Debbie Harry.

Red Bird folded in 1966 after Leiber and Stoller had already bowed out, unsettled by Goldner running up significant gambling debts and the dissolution of the Greenwich/Barry marriage two years earlier. The Shangri-Las signed to Mercury, releasing two more singles, ‘Sweet Sounds Of Summer’ and ‘Take The Time’, neither of which troubled the charts. The group split, typically ending their run almost penniless and subject to lawsuits that prevented them recording. Mary travelled, and then worked as a secretary in Manhattan while taking college classes. She later went into the architectural industry, then furniture, subsequently running a commercial interiors dealership in the eighties.

Betty had a child and later started her own cosmetics business on Long Island, while Mary died in March 1970, aged 22, after suffering from seizures for some time. The remaining Shangri-Las reunited in 1976, when ‘Leader Of The Pack’ made the UK Top 10 on reissue. Sadly, Marge would succumb to breast cancer in July 1996, aged 48.

Young Debbie Harry was particularly drawn to the doomed tragic-teen aura of The Shangri-Las (in 1977, Phil Spector would remark that she reminded him of one of the group). They had quickly became one of the greatest, most influential groups of all – thanks largely to the cinematic production of ‘Shadow’ Morton, whose teenage mini-operas compressed whole storylines into the grooves of a seven-inch single. Spector’s monumental creations had been breathtaking, but The Shangri-Las dared to venture where female singers had rarely been before – exploring themes of forbidden love, alienation, teenage loneliness, tragic death (even going so far as to recount the death of an archetypal ‘mom’ on ‘I Can Never Go Home Anymore’) and simmering paranoia caused by some ambiguous trauma, on the pseudo-classical ‘Past, Present And Future’.

The girl group’s black-clad, streetwise image and attitudinal pouts predated punk, captivating Debbie to the extent that a version of the poignant ‘Out In The Streets’, Mary Weiss’s favourite Shangri-Las song, would be tackled at Blondie’s first recording session in 1975. The group’s epic melodramas, peppered with bad boys in leather jackets who were ‘good/bad but not evil’, also influenced other seventies New York acts – including Jayne County, The Ramones and, just before them, The New York Dolls, who lifted the “When I say I’m in love” opening line of ‘Give Him A Great Big Kiss’ for their 1973 urban melodrama ‘Looking For A Kiss’, while Dolls guitarist Johnny Thunders would cover the song on his first solo album. (Over in the UK, The Damned used the “Is she really going out with him?” intro from ‘Leader Of The Pack’ to kick off their debut single, ‘New Rose’.)

The girl groups had also consolidated Debbie Harry’s growing fixation with nearby New York City, twinkling over the Hudson River. By 1965 it was entering into a cultural revolution, off the back of the ‘British invasion’ that had taken place the previous year.

Chapter Two

Village Heads

Without Chris Stein, the Blondie phenomenon would never have ignited on such a global scale or have been so diversely fascinating. He is the one who became Debbie’s rock, keeping her positive, offering challenge and excitement, and providing sanctuary. He would be her intensely knowledgeable creative foil as the pair juggled pop culture with underground art and street music, while the world went Blondie-crazy.

Responsible for Blondie hits that include ‘Rip Her To Shreds’, ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Rapture’ and ‘Dreaming’, the Harry/Stein songwriting partnership can be rated alongside Lennon/McCartney, Jagger/Richards or Strummer/Jones. It also followed the classic Broadway hit factory tradition of personal intimacy providing a springboard for dynamic creativity – Barry/Greenwich being one obvious example.

Witnessing the couple together during Blondie’s rise and fall between 1977 and 1982 was often touching as they cohabited in their own binary orbit, immune to the external hassles of press criticism, clamouring media and rabid fans. Chris would laugh at Debbie’s expeditions from hotels to nearby shops, her famous face disguised behind wigs and shades. In fact they would laugh a lot, whether at the antics of old mutual friends or at the absurdity of it all. Through the first half of Blondie’s first phase they would also find solace in each other’s company, as they bitterly protested about their management.

Stein was always into comic books, grindhouse movies, extreme pop culture, arcane or obscure musical forms, and the heritage of his home city. He relished the fact that he could now rub shoulders with the likes of William S. Burroughs and Andy Warhol as a fellow artist who, for a time, was more successful or well-known than either of them. Underneath the thick-framed glasses and amiably stoned professorial demeanour lurked a dry humourist, a foraging and sometimes fearless musician, and an outstanding photographer. Stein was loyal to those who showed him support, too – even at the peak of Blondie-mania he would take the time to keep in touch, via regular phone calls and letters, with one of this book’s co-authors.

Chris may now have found a new partner and devoted the last few years to fatherhood, but the bond between him and Debbie provides the spark which holds Blondie together even today. He is also among the short but illustrious list of godfathers of what is oft identified as ‘New York City’s musical melting pot’, rising above any ‘Disco Sucks’ prejudice early on to work with Chic and being one of the first downtown musicians to pick up on the burgeoning hip hop movement emanating from the South Bronx. The disparate roster of the Animal label he ran between 1982 and 1984 established him as one of the few from NY’s class of ‘76 to put his money where his mouth was, projecting a panoply of pioneers and misfits to wider public attention via the reflected glare of Blondie’s spotlight.

Christopher Stein was born in Brooklyn on January 5, 1950. His mother, Estelle, was a painter and window designer, while Ben, his dad, was a salesman and frustrated writer who had been a labour organiser and wrote for the radical press in the thirties and forties. “I remember the FBI coming to our house when I was a kid,” explained Chris. “And I used to listen to my parents’ Leadbelly records, and they had black friends, which was a little unusual at that time.”

“Both of them were ‘reds’,” added Stein. “They had met in the party so my Jewishness was limited. They were more atheistic in their views, and I didn’t have a barmitzvah, although of course I had plenty of relatives who were practising. In retrospect, I wish I knew a little more Hebrew. My father used to speak Yiddish with my grandfather quite fluently. I love listening to Lenny Bruce – I admire his ability to make Yiddish sound cool.”

Visits from The Man notwithstanding, the Steins ran a typical non-practising Jewish liberal artistic household. His parents chose a gentile name for their son, specifically so that he would not be subjected to antisemitism. “Yeah, that was really bizarre,” he reflected. “There are a lot of ‘Chris Steins’ now if you look it up, but not then. I remember guys saying when I was growing up: ‘Oh, that’s a weird name for a Jewish boy!’”