The “agonising” tour that almost destroyed Debbie Harry and caused Blondie’s split
“That fucking tour. We never should have gone.” – Debbie Harry
For Blondie, 1982 was the year when everything changed. And it wasn’t just about losing steam or figuring out that the unstoppable force of their music had since lost its spark. No, it all came crashing down following a series of tour dates that pushed them past the point of no return. It was so harrowing, in fact, that Debbie Harry once said drugs “were the only way we could handle the stress”.
The Tracks Across America Tour wasn’t just a nightmare waiting to happen because of the band’s recent lack of hits; it was an inevitable disaster from the off, with half-empty venues and dates left unfulfilled because of a lack of ticket sales. As well as using drugs to self-medicate or to hide from embarrassment, Chris Stein’s health took a turn for the worse, and he lost a lot of weight in a short amount of time because of some mysterious disease the doctors had no answers to (this would later be revealed as a rare autoimmune disease that made it hard for him the swallow).
“Chris was wasting away,” Harry later recalled, his deterioration a stone-cold fact that there would be no chance of ever giving their European leg a shot when this was clearly more than just a band in commercial turmoil. The harsh reality was that this was also a group no longer with the means to actually pull off their high-energy shows to the crowds that were slowly but surely filtering out, leaving nothing but a shadow in the place of a success story that once defined the entire new wave scene.
But, according to producer Mike Chapman, the Tracks Across America Tour wasn’t the trigger – it was the catalyst. In his view, Blondie’s downfall didn’t just occur along the rough tides of a tour that probably shouldn’t have happened in the first place, but in the studio during The Hunter, when he thought for the first time that something was off. But the worst part of it was that he couldn’t put his finger on why; just that he had the overwhelming feeling that somehow, this was the beginning of the end.
The feeling was so strong, in fact, that it drew attention to the particularly bleak fact that, had Stein not taken ill, Blondie would have split up anyway. Maybe solely because of the tour, but certainly in the moments after, when the lack of success pushed Harry so far into the depths of despair that it was only substance that could help her “feel less” about the reality of their situation.
In her memoir Face It, Harry was understandably gruelling about the entire experience, describing it as “agonising”. She said, “That fucking tour. We never should have gone. Chris was sick. Very sick. I have pictures of him where he was emaciated and weighed 110 pounds. That tour nearly killed Chris. I can’t say exactly when the problem started, and I think that Chris has succeeded in putting it out of his mind, but he was unable to eat.”
She continued, “Chris kept getting sicker and sicker. We were in the US touring with Duran Duran in stadiums at the time, with a UK and Europe tour to follow. Chris was wasting away. More than once, he collapsed. We managed to get through the last night of the Duran Duran tour in August 1982. There was no way we could go to Europe. And that was it. It was over. Not just the tour but Blondie. The band officially broke up a few months later.”
To make matters worse, Blondie’s elusiveness about the whole thing in the moments after allowed for some gnarly press reports, many of them assuming it was Harry who’d ultimately called it quits or worse, “walked out” on Stein when things got particularly bad. But while it did, in fact, mark the beginning of the end for one of the greatest bands in history, that assumption was far from the truth – their ultimate downfall a result of a handful of fatal details that nobody could have ever avoided.
