Deborah Harry

Before there was a Blondie there was a girl named Deborah Harry. A cute kid adopted by a nice middle-class New Jersey family, a junior college graduate who fantasized about Marilyn Monroe being her natural mother.

Here's Deborah Harry as she looked in her art modeling days. She's having an ice tea and inspecting her face for blemishes. It is a very hot day. She is nude and contemplating. Looking in the mirror she discovers, Yes, it's true. I am beautiful. Maybe I could be a Playboy Bunny and not an artist's model. Not that it's hard work, being an artist's model. I'm certainly not ashamed of my body. But what's with the backbends?

This folk rock thing is really big, she thinks. So she joins a band called the Wind in the Willows, a folkie group but with a name that alludes obliquely to pussy.

She also puts on some clothes and gets a job as a waitress at Max's Kansas City and waits on famous folk rock musicians such as Bob Dylan and Bob Neuwirth, and famous artists like John Chamberlain and Larry Poons or Andy Warhol and his entourage. Waitressing at Max's is educational but not too lucrative.

So Debbie went for bigger tips. She became a Playboy Bunny. The tips were bigger and so were the ears. But this was not enough to fulfill the budding artiste. So Debbie dropped out to consider the existential question: Now what?

While thinking this over, she worked briefly as a hairdresser and began experimenting with blondeness. Blondeness was something Debbie would redefine. With her it was always an attitude, a state of mind, a sort of gorgeous Fuck You. She was never blonde all over or anything resembling natural. There was usually a dark patch in the back. Often it was the way it is now, blonde in front, natural in the back. It was a statement, although Debbie contends it just turned out that way because she did her hair herself and couldn't see back there.

In the early Seventies Debbie met this beatnik-type guy named Chris Stein, who was definitely a real artist. She could tell because he was attending New York City's School of Visual Arts on a welfare scholarship after being released from a mental institution. Chris must have been a real artist, because he didn't hit on her right away. He talked to her and played guitar for her, thus sweeping her off her pretty feet.

Soon Debbie and Chris were playing together in a protopunk band, the Stilletoes. After rocking around for a while with the group, Debbie and Chris went off on their own as Angel and the Snake. (Guess who was the angel and who was the snake.) Not the best name, but this was the germ of Blondie—a name that was suggested to Debbie by truck drivers and construction workers.

Blondie settled down on the Bowery, within walking distance of the band's favorite venue, CBGBs. The band was Debbie on vocals, Chris on guitar, Clem Burke on drums, Gary Valentine on bass and Jimmy Destri on keyboards. Today Destri says he never played at his audition. The band liked his hair and his suit.

Blondie was bad in the beginning. According to legend, Patti Smith told Debbie to get out of rock and roll. But the band had nowhere to go but up. And they were smart. Clem brought an immaculate pop sensibility, Jimmy brought roots in Brooklyn doo-wop melody, Gary brought a punky background. Chris brought enlightening, psychedelic, ironic, artistic dementia. And Debbie brought ... Debbie.

By 1976 Blondie had become a favorite on the small but ready-to-explode punk scene in downtown Manhattan. A legendary music-biz guy, Marty Thau, and producer Craig Leon—who had just produced the Ramones' first record— signed Blondie to work with Richard Gottehrer, who had produced hits such as the Angels' My Boyfriend's Back and the McCoys' Hang on Sloopy. The arrangement worked out well and the band went on to record an album with Gottehrer. The record was well received and the band headed for Los Angeles to spread the news. David Bowie and Iggy Pop picked up on it right away and invited Blondie to tour with them.

Blondie's second album, Plastic Letters, appeared in 1977 and introduced the band's first number one hit in England. They followed quickly with Parallel Lines in 1978, produced by Mike Chapman. This album, which eventually sold more than 20 million copies, produced a slew of hits, including Hanging on the Telephone and Sunday Girl and their first number-one in the U.S., Heart of Glass. The hits kept on coming: Dreaming, Atomic, Call Me, The Tide Is High.

Blondie had the knack for radio hits, but they were also adventurous. Heart of Glass was the first rock-disco fusion, coming at the height of the Disco Sucks movement. "We did it because we wanted to be uncool," said Debbie. And The Tide Is High, a cover of a Jamaican single, was number one. Rapture was the band's homage to rap. Blondie was now huge. It was in constant demand for touring. Debbie got movie offers. All the musicians started working on young acts. Debbie made a solo album with Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards of Chic. Everybody worked every day. Nobody ever took a vacation. Until ... boom.

Blondie never officially broke up. The band's chemistry was volatile after the sixth album, The Hunter, was released. It involved the ego dueling that often accompanies sudden success, as well as some of the usual pharmaceutical catalysts. But Blondie's 17-year hiatus was a direct result of Chris' contracting a rare, life-threatening illness. He was hospitalized for months before doctors figured out the problem. Debbie dropped out of sight to nurse Chris back to health. The band members went their separate ways. Clem briefly joined the Eurythmics. Jimmy went to exotic places like Paris and Staten Island and dropped out of music for a while to raise a family. Debbie acted in movies and made solo records. But after the passage of years they all realized that they had some unfinished business.

Clem recalls, "My dad died about two years ago and Debbie and Chris came to the funeral—I never would have expected that. I think it was around that time we decided we would be able to work together." Nobody was broke or anything, but maybe the band realized there was a musical void out there they were eminently qualified to fill. Blondie wouldn't have come back just to cash in on the punk revival, like the Sex Pistols did. But they came back with higher motives, such as artistic expression and revenge.

"We never would have done a nostalgia thing," Chris says. "Get out and play our old hits. That would be too talky." So the band went into the studio with Craig Leon as producer, the first person ever to get them into a studio. It took longer than other Blondie albums to record, but No Exit features 14 new songs that rock to the band's high standards. A few weeks after the album's release, the single Maria hit number one in England and the top-ten charts in the U.S. And it's not just a resurrection of the Eighties Blondie sound. The band is still experimenting, doing weird progressive music—Transylvanian vampire rock, bebop-tinged lounge, a far-out rap duet with Coolio. And then there's stuff that just has Blondie hit written all over it, like Forgive and Forget.

Blondie 1999 is a band of grownups, more or less. Mellowed juvenile delinquents at worst. "Everybody's a lot less fucked up now," Chris says. "Well, everybody's still fucked up, but it's more natural. In the old days we were stoned and horrendously fucked up and negative about everything. Today nobody's stoned and we're still horrendously fucked up, but now we're really positive about everything. Our neuroses used to be free-floating. Now they are firmly anchored."

It's surprising how little they have changed. There's (concluded on page 167)Deborah Harry(continued from page 122) youthful enthusiasm in the way they insult each other. They even look pretty much the same. Especially Clem, who still looks like the teen drummer. Jimmy says, "Well, I have a little McCartney neck now and Chris has become the Jerry Garcia of the Lower East Side, with his gray hair. But our chops were never better."

Today, in her early 50s, Debbie is still a supervixen, a head turner. Her body has changed significantly since these pre-Blondie photos were taken. Deb hadn't stopped growing in her art model days, because today her cup runneth over, while back then she was pectorally pert. Devoted fans will recall her rolling around the floor topless in David Cronenberg's 1983 film, Videodrome. She was a woman of substance even then. Debbie is a bigger woman today. She has muscles—a development that can be traced back to her involvement in wrestling. For many years Debbie and Chris were pro-wrestling nuts. In the Eighties Debbie got a chance to star in a Broadway show about female wrestling, Teaneck Tanzí, co-starring with Andy Kaufman. She became a gym rat and learned how to kick ass. Today she doesn't really need a bodyguard.

Debbie's athleticism is evident in the current Blondie stage show. She never was one just to stand at the mike and sing, but today Debbie is a more full-tilt performer than ever before. She stalks the stage, incites the audience, shakes her mane and pumps her fist in the air. Singing is an art, even in rock and roll, and Debbie is a much better singer today than the very good singer she was in the Eighties. That may have something to do with the fact that for the last few years she has worked as a vocalist with a forward and funky New York jazz band, the Jazz Passengers. Today her voice is a virtuoso instrument, more precise and powerful than ever. Ironically, she's also more of a punk rocker today than ever before.

After everything Deborah Harry has been through, she can afford to let her attitude hang out a little bit, and she does. She's been there, done that, so she's eager to keep improvising music and life. She's still icy cool at times, still simmeringly sultry at others. But when the tempo turns up, when she heats up, there's a blonde dervish up there fronting a band that's just as powerful, edgy and eccentric as it was—shit, can it really be 17 years ago?

Blondeness was something Debbie would redefine. With her it was always an attitude, a state of mind.