Blondie’s Chris Stein On The Influential Band’s Career Via His New Memoir
forbes.com
By David Chiu – 17th June 2024
In his newly-published autobiography Under a Rock, Blondie co-founding guitarist Chris Stein documents his legendary band’s transition from ‘70s downtown New York City punk scene regulars to pop superstars fronted by their alluring lead singer Debbie Harry. But more than just another history of the influential Rock and Roll Hall of Fame band, Under a Rock is also a fascinating chronicle of the changes that New York City (where Stein was born) experienced in the last six decades that saw periods of growth, economic turmoil, crime, artistic creativity and gentrification. And it is the city that has always loomed large in Stein’s life and creativity.
“In the book,” Stein says recently, “the quote is, ‘Everybody back then that I knew was complaining about New York and saying how horrible it was. And they had to leave, but nobody ever left.’ The whole concept of gentrification didn’t exist back in the ’70s. It’s a recent state of affairs.”
Published in the same year as Blondie’s 50th anniversary, Stein’s memoir follows Harry’s 2019 autobiography Face It. Stein says that various people, including his wife Barbara, were encouraging him to write a memoir (he had previously released two books of his art photography, Chris Stein/Negative and Point of View). “Then the COVID stuff was going on,” he says. “So I had a lot of time. I just thought, ‘Do all this stuff while I still can remember things.’”
In addition to the stories about Blondie, Under a Rock (published by St. Martin’s Press) is chockfull of interesting and quirky anecdotes from Stein’s life, including mentions of notable people like David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Phil Spector, William Burroughs, Andy Warhol and even Donald Trump’s former physician. “I should have kept notes during the Blondie period, but I didn’t,” he adds. “I used to do journaling from the ’80s on, but that didn’t come into it that much. But the photographs spur a lot of memories. I researched a lot of stuff while I was writing, and I referred to at least one or two other Blondie books for the bones of the thing to get the timelines right.”
From an early age, Stein, a product of Brooklyn and the son of bohemian parents, had a rebellious upbringing from him sneaking into concerts to taking pot. “I was never forced to adhere to normalcy,” he says. “It was just what you did as kids. I was going to the city. Back in the early ’60s, I don’t know how there wasn’t a sense of lingering danger that you’re going to get kidnapped and murdered at any second. I don’t know if that was true for all the kids my age.”
One of his recollections from his teenage years included an encounter with a local tough guy named Tony Sirico, who would later find fame as Paulie Walnuts in The Sopranos. “He was legendary in my neighborhood,” he says. ”That guy was the real deal. I wish I had met him. I never met him, and then he passed recently. But we all knew about him. He must have just been in his late teens.”
Stein’s depiction of his youth is neither entirely romantic nor nostalgic – in the book, he discusses a stint at a rehab facility after he experienced hallucinations at the age 19 in 1969. “I totally had a psychotic break from drugs and a delayed reaction to my father dying,” he explains. “So mental health facilities were a little primitive back then, but I managed to work my way through it.”
Stein was exposed to the music of late ‘60s psychedelia and hippie rock–he recalls seeing performances by the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane and the Mothers Invention; he even attended Woodstock. All of this seems like a contrast to Blondie’s foray into punk and New Wave. “I was always a big fan,” he says of psychedelic music. “It’s very diverse. All the things I pulled into the Blondie repertoire.”
Stein writes about meeting Harry for the first time in 1973 at New York City’s Bobern Tavern where she was performing as a member the Stillettos. Both Stein and Harry later became musical and romantic partners. “She was super charming and gorgeous and all that stuff,” he remembers. “As I say, it was kind of what everybody saw later on was still there. And she was a good singer. I just was very immediately attracted.”
By the mid-1970s, Stein became immersed into the downtown New York City scene that saw the venue CBGB as the epicenter of the punk rock movement. According to him, Blondie’s sound was still in flux when he formed the band with Harry in 1974.
“It was just all trial and error and working things out and pulling in different elements,” Stein recalls. “The Ramones were much more formed right from day one. They had a very specific worldview, as it were. Same with the Talking Heads–it was very focused. Blondie was all over the place.”
Blondie became a regular staple at CBGB with those aforementioned groups plus Television and Patti Smith during that golden era of New York City punk rock. “There was a certain naivete,” says Stein. “The standard question is, ‘Did you think about this 40 years?’ I remember this very much in the moment. The phrase “punk” is part of the normal musical lexicon now. I don’t think anybody saw that coming.”
He adds: “When the record company started showing up, there was more rivalry. Before that, it was very much copacetic between everybody. It was a little competitiveness, but it wasn’t severe. It didn’t dampen any friendships that we had.”
Blondie’s first two albums, Blondie (1976) and Plastic Letters (1978), did not immediately burn up the U.S. charts. But it was Parallel Lines (1978) that elevated the band as mainstream pop superstars thanks to the addition of Mike Chapman as producer and the number one disco-styled smash “Heart of Glass.”
“Chapman was like the George Martin for the group, says Stein. “He was influential, instrumental in us having that polished sound. And I’m also very appreciative of the fact that those songs don’t sound dated now. You listen to a lot of stuff from the ’70s and ’80s–it sounds like it was done in a certain period. Somehow, we managed to avoid that with the stuff.”
After that success, it was a whirlwind period for Harry, Stein and the other Blondie members – Clem Burke, Jimmy Destri, Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison – that consisted of more hit songs (“The Tide Is High,” “Rapture” and “Call Me” all went to number one) and news media coverage that focused on the photogenic Harry.
“A photographer would show up and take five shots of the band and then want to do 30 shots of Debbie,” says Stein. “That was very standard. But I never had a problem with it – we were together, so I always identified through her. I also saw it as kind of Mick Jagger syndrome where he was singled out. It was even more so because Debbie was a pretty girl, so that’s what it was. But it made for some tensions [within the band].”
Blondie broke up the first time following the release of the 1982 album The Hunter as Stein was battling pemphigus vulgaris, a rare autoimmune disease. People initially thought that he contracted AIDS, which at the time began to draw media attention. Harry was taking care of him during his hospitalization. “It’s more well known now, and I’ve spoken to people who are dealing with it,” he says of pemphigus. “I was just really lucky. I never had it recurring. But once I was done with it, I was done with it.”
Did he ever think he was going to die at that point? “No, I don’t think so,” he says. “I’m always pretty optimistic. I don’t know if I thought I was going to necessarily drop dead, but I was also distracted and doing drugs through it all and all this kind of stuff.”
Stein and Harry broke up as romantic partners afterward, but they continued together as musical collaborators. In the late 1990s, they reformed the band with Burke and Destri and scored a hit with “Maria” from the No Exit album. “It was always in the back of my mind,” Stein recalls of the reunion, “and then it just seemed presented itself. I had this person tell me, ‘If you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it.’ So it seems like the right moment.”
Blondie has subsequently recorded more albums, including 2017’s Pollinator. Stein had not been performing onstage with the band recently because of health issues. And while he does miss it, Stein is not regretful about the grind involved such as air travel and hotels. “[The band] just went to the U.K.,” he says, “and Debbie told me she got stuck at the TSA for an hour because she had magnesium capsules with her — like vitamins, basically. So yeah, that stuff is what it is.”
Meanwhile, the group is planning to release a new record produced by John Congleton, who previously worked on Pollinator. “It’s a little raw and experimental,” Stein says of the upcoming album. “There’s more in-house stuff, stuff we wrote ourselves. There’s a Johnny Marr track, different things. Pollinator was almost exclusively outside writers. So this is the opposite back to where we were, kind of.”
Looking back at his life – with its ups and downs within the world of rock and roll – is there anything Stein would change? “As I mentioned at the end of the book, [if] you could go back and do your life over again, you’ll probably make all the same mistakes,” he replies. “But it gave me an overview that I might not have previously seen – the big picture, maybe. What did we learn from this? I don’t know.”
Under a Rock: A Memoir by Chris Stein is out now. On June 27, he and Debbie Harry will appear at New York City’s SVA Theater for a conversation to mark the book’s release. On that same day, Morrison Hotel Gallery, also in New York City, will host an exhibition of Stein’s photography that runs through July 15.
