One way or another
Blondie’s frontwoman writes about making it in a tough town at a tough time
Face It: A Memoir Debbie Harry Dey Street Books
Blondie’s Debbie Harry paid her dues. Her ambition never waned and she was there — there being New York in the late ’60s and ’70s, a city full of garbage, rent-controlled apartments, and people discovering new ways of making art and music. Harry’s story is an illuminating one, considering how much New York has changed and how stars are made and marketed today.
In her new memoir, Face It, Harry describes a life formed by the desire to leave suburbia and become a performer. That Harry succeeded is a tribute to her ambition, perseverance, talent and good looks.
Harry’s mother gave her up for adoption, reluctantly, in 1945, when Harry — given name Angela Tremble — was three months old. Harry was raised in Hawthorne, N.J., by Richard and Cathy Harry in a migrant worker’s house near a park, where she spent most of her free time on her own, daydreaming — a tomboy who loved to play in the woods with her dog, Pal. Seeing a show at Radio City Music Hall piqued her interest in performing. By age 20 Harry was living in the East Village, where, listening to the sounds of the city, she felt like she was “in the place where my next life would begin.”
Harry took to the artistically combustible downtown scene, watching the Velvet Underground and Janis Joplin, and playing “anti-music music” with a fellow who called himself Charlie Nothing. She befriended street people and later the drag queen Divine. She had a hookup with an Andy Warhol protégé in a phone booth in Max’s Kansas City and began what she blithely calls “chipping and dipping” in heroin. (Harry is quite explicit in her descriptions of her drug use and sex life.)
The chapters about New York and Harry’s early adventures making music are the most compelling. About her experience playing at the notorious club CBGB, birthplace of punk, Harry writes, “It was a time of felt experience — no special effects, just raw, visceral, uncut living.” Nothing seemed to faze her. There were loft fires and relocations, and she once was raped at knife point: “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear,” she writes of the experience. “I’m very glad this happened before AIDS or I might have freaked.” In these chapters, Harry is introspective, as she writes about death, time and the serendipitous, sometimes hazardous life she was living.
In 1974, she and her lover, guitarist Chris Stein, founded Blondie. After playing in New York’s punk scene, the group gradually rose to stardom. By 1979, Blondie’s song Heart of Glass was No. 1 on the American charts, and the band’s popularity blossomed. Unfortunately, fame can make for a rather dull narrative. Once Harry digs into Blondie’s heyday, the book suffers in ways other rock memoirs often do — rehashing the next album, the next tour and so on.
More engaging is Harry’s effort to categorize her music, which she calls a “crossover between glitter-glam and punk.” She also loved drag’s performative qualities, especially its attention to fashion and gesture, two practices Harry perfected while shaping her own image. “I’m not blind and I’m not stupid: I take advantage of my looks and I use them.”
Her commentary on the sexual politics of the music scene of her time are insightful. Rock, she writes, “was a very masculine business in the mid-’70s.” Patti Smith “dressed more masculine ... my approach was different.
... I was playing up the idea of being a very feminine woman while fronting a male rock band in a highly macho game. I was saying things in the songs that female singers didn’t really say back then. I wasn’t submissive or begging him to come back. I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up but I was very serious.”
Throughout this visually evocative book are photographs and a lengthy gallery of fan art. If she sometimes comes across as self-interested, so what?