‘I’ll always love her’ – my wild life in Blondie

The Sunday Times – Culture magazine – 9th June 2024

Books – Pages 20 & 21

Serial killers, heroin addiction and a mental breakdown: the Blondie guitarist Chris Stein evokes the shabby glamour of 1970s New York – and his years with Debbie Harry

Book of the week

Under a Rock – A Memoir by Chris Stein
Corsair £25 304pp

Victoria Segal

Apart from Liverpool and London in the 1960s, or Seattle in the late 1980s, few music scenes have been so lovingly mythologised as 1970s New York. The world does not lack for descriptions of Bowery flophouses and derelict lofts, from Patti Smith’s tender memoir Just Kids to Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s Please Kill Me – an oral history so grubby you need a prophylactic penicillin shot after handling its pages. In 2019 the Blondie singer Debbie Harry added her brittle, gritty Face It to the pile of NYC punk memoirs. Now it’s the turn of Chris Stein, her enduringly stylish bandmate and former longtime partner, to share his memories.

A dedicated photographer who studied at New York’s School of Visual Arts, the guitarist has already published three books of Blondie-related pictures, and Under a Rock has a similar flashbulb starkness. He’s not given to deep analysis, flowery description or dwelling things. At 74, he’s still the cool Brooklyn kid taking his street-level pictures and moving on, preferring a kind of snappy reportage. If there is sometimes a loss of detail, his high-grade subjects are compensation: Iggy Pop telling off Jean-Michel Basquiat for trying to smoke a joint in a classy restaurant, for example; or William Burroughs sending a doctor round to Stein and Harry’s house with klonopin to help them to kick heroin. Documenting the event and the people are what matters here; feelings, not so much.

Stein was born on January 5, 1950, to parents who met as members of the Syracuse Communist Party. His mother, Estelle, was a thwarted artist; his father, Ben, died when he was in high school, a shock that seems to have shaken the junior Mensa member off the straight and narrow. Even without the indulgent “Stel” granting him and his friends freedom of her house – he includes a copy of a 1969 letter from their landlords warning against “transient visitors at all hours of the day and night” – he was perfectly placed to experience the explosion of US pop culture, being part of the generation whose refusal to cut their hair placed them at odds with the establishment. Stein completed his high school education at the delightful sounding Quintano’s School for Young Professionals, an establishment for showbiz kids whose alumni included the actor Sal Mineo and the Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler.

With his sartorial flamboyance escalating to match his taste for pot – once, during an inept attempt to score, he was punched in the face by Tony Sirico, the actor who played Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos – the young Stein pinball through countercultural big bangs. He was in San Francisco’s hippy epicentre Haight-Ashbury as the Summer of Love gently peaked; in Washington he witnessed Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs try to levitate the Pentagon in protest against the Vietnam War. He inevitably headed for Woodstock, where he saw Jimi Hendrix and fell asleep to Jefferson Airplane.

Yet a combination of his father’s death and heavy drug use nearly derailed him, leading to a spell in hospital and a diagnosis of schizophrenia. Re-emerging into the world, he attended art school and navigated the ungentrified terrain of early 1970s New York. Stein’s mapping of this lost New York makes for some of the book’s most atmospheric moments, a city of ghosts, garment industry remnants, shooting galleries and feral cats.

His life shifted on its axis in September 1973 when he met the dark-haired Harry, who was at the time in a girl group called the Stilettos. They pair-bonded like beautiful urban pigeons, splitting into their own band in 1974. It was temporarily called Angel and the Snake, but they fortunately decided to change it to Blondie after catcalls directed at the recently peroxided Harry. Blondie played their first gig at the club CBGB on October 12, 1974.

It is easy to romanticise these times, but Stein’s account repeatedly strikes a clanging cautionary note. It’s not poetic to come home from tour, for example, to find somebody defecating on your doorstep. The serial killer Son of Sam was stalking the city, looking out for long-haired victims; there were unexplained fires and equally mysterious blood-stained mattresses; friends died of overdoses or accidents, or joined cults. “The veil was thinner on the Bowery,” Stein writes in a rare flight of fancy, mentioning encounters with at least two dead bodies on the streets. Most horrifically he briefly related how he and Harry were ambushed in their apartment by a man who tied them up and raped Harry. Perhaps not feeling it is his story to tell – Harry addresses it in Face It – he allows an unusual moment of high emotion: “All these years later and I still want to kill this person.”

Blondie’s burgeoning fame didn’t seem to add much comfort to their lives. Stein offers his perspective on the grim sexism round the band. He witnessed an early exchange in which a photographer persuaded Harry to wear a see-through mesh shirt on the understanding that she would only be shown shoulders up. Inevitably the “boobs and all” image ended up all over Times Square: “People thought they were ads for a massage parlour called Blondie.” On stage he was in a state of high alert, watching for menacing fans: “I felt like a secret service agent looking for threats during the shows.” He’s more phlegmatic about David Bowie and Iggy Pop making moves on his girlfriend, however. “Can I f*** you?” Bowie apparently asked Harry. “I don’t know, can you?” she replied with withering nonchalance.

The advert they placed in the Village Voice that recruited the drummer Clem Burke promised “fun” and “money”, but both appear to have been in erratic supply. Their glorious run of his – among them Sunday Girl, about the couple’s missing cat – brought them fame and such houseguests as Jane Fonda and Mick Jagger, but there were issues with managers and power struggles over songs. Stein and Harry’s heroin use escalated, “embryonic sheep-cell shots” in Switzerland only partly mitigating the effects. Stein developed the autoimmune disease pemphigus vulgaris: everyone thought he had Aids. (He was, he says, “lucky” only to get hepatitis C.)

He and Harry kicked their addiction with methadone, but they also fell “out of sync” with each other and broke up after 13 years together. After their split Stein went to stay with Burroughs, whom you wouldn’t imagine to be so great with ice cream and heartbreak advice. That he and Harry (who provides the forword) remain friends is the quiet joy at the core of this book. “I’ll always love her,” he writes, “she and my wife [the actress Barbara Sicuranza] and my kids are kind of my only immediate family.”

There is a painful epilogue, though, as he writes about losing his daughter Akira to an overdose last May. “There’s a tendency to present tales of personal addiction as colourful ‘war stories’,” he says self-laceratingly, touching a nerve in the memoir industry. With this document of his remarkable life, Stein instead presents a precise record of a wild time and place, a catalogue of snapshots, a way to picture it all.