When I was a kid back in the seventies, Debbie Harry was so freaking cool. She was like a sexy glacier drifting across the magazine pages and through the radio speakers. Nothing seemed rushed about her or her music. It just lingered along and stayed in your head all day. A good thing.
Although Chris Stein – Blondie guitar player, songwriter, keeper of the Blondie flame via his years of photography – has published a few books, it was Debbie we wanted to hear from. Did she know how cool she appeared to all us pre-pubescent girls? Where did her cool outfits come from? The lyrics to the songs? Was there ever a moment when she was just a kid like me? In Face It, her new memoir, Debbie gives us some insight into her life as Deborah and Debbie and Angela … wait, who is Angela? Page 8 answers that question but more importantly, you learn in those early pages that our future punk rock goddess was simply, “A dreamy kind of kid,” a tomboy who played in the woods and loved her pets (still does), adored her baby sister and since she can remember, attracted the opposite sex.
“How do we edit our life into a decent story,” Debbie ponders in chapter 12. “What to reveal, what to keep hidden, what to embellish, what to downplay and what to ignore?” Throughout 300 plus pages, Debbie shares with readers what she really went through without becoming boring, too bogged down in detail and too, well, stereotypical. Remember, punk is always daring and new and feisty and to the point. And since Debbie remains true to her calling as a punk rocker, she has built her book with the same punk music foundation. She gives you just enough details to satisfy that curiosity before writing about something else. Nothing more to see here, move on, she seems to say between the lines.
For me, a big plus is in the number of photographs she has incorporated into the book itself, not just in that middle photo gallery common in most biographies. When someone talks about being Gerber baby model material, you’d like to be able to see for yourself. And Debbie has gone one step further by including sections of fan art given to her that she has kept all these years. How many of us have given a favorite star something like this or written a fan letter and wondered if they saw it, liked it? Debbie puts the proof on the pages. It did mean something to her and still does.
“Memory is subjective. A lot of it depends on the angles you see things from.” Debbie is not shy about broaching the subject of a rape or stalking or criticism about her music and her clothes. It is what it is and she was who she was. The few times she seems to lose her cool is when talking about Stein and his debilitating illness, which took forever to diagnose, and how the IRS swooped in on them at a time when money was virtually non-existent as Stein was finally getting treatment: “The sickest thing of all was that the IRS took away our health insurance while Chris was in the hospital.”
Debbie also has stories of the famous people she has met along the way, before and after she became famous. While working at Max’s Kansas City as a waitress, she saw Jazz great Miles Davis, “Still as a dead calm, statuesque with his ebony skin shining softly in the dim red light of the upstairs back room.” Walking past the Balloon Farm, she heard the Velvet Underground with Nico, “This haunting, mysterious Nordic goddess.” Famed drummer Buddy Rich spotted her on the street at Cape Cod when she was barely a teen and followed her home, thinking she was older. She went to Woodstock, worked as a Playboy Bunny waitress, opened for Iggy Pop and David Bowie in the early days of Blondie, rubbed shoulders with everyone from Patti Smith to William S. Burroughs to Jean-Michel Basquiat; and she swears she was almost a victim of serial killer Ted Bundy. And when it comes to Andy Warhol, his death was a tragedy that stayed with her for years.
Blondie the band never falls far from her streams of thought, working on albums, going on tours, dealing with managers and producers. Tom Petty opened for them during their first shows in LA and Phil Spector invited them to his mansion where she sang Ronettes songs with him despite being bone-tired after a performance. The hit singles – “The Tide Is High,” “Call Me” – that took them to Europe and across America are talked about but not as in-depth as some would like; and finally the pinnacle of the band’s fame before the end and the resurrection. She talks admiringly of Stein, giving him the highest of credit for what Blondie, and she, became; and about the 1982 tour for The Hunter, their sixth album, that nearly killed Stein. And did kill the band.
Overall, the music is there, the fashion is there, the art is there, the acting is there, her adoration for Stein is there and her passion for New York is there. “New York is my pulse. New York is my heart,” Debbie writes near the end. “As a rock artist, to be coming out of New York City was the best thing in the world that could have happened to me.” Going on this written journey with Debbie Harry was eye-opening and intriguing, yet she retains this cool aloofness that makes her still a bit mysterious after all these words and all these years.
