The CBGB guitarist Debbie Harry said was destined to be a rock star: “No other life”
Some people were destined for a life in rock and roll from an early age.
It is, for example, hard to imagine Keith Richards thriving in a middle management role at a local law firm, or Jimi Hendrix manning the fitting rooms at a branch of Fat Face. Similarly, the musical landscape would be much worse off had Debbie Harry not realised her knack for performance.
Even by the standards of New York’s blossoming punk scene back in the 1970s, where the city’s outcasts, misfits, and weirdos found their home, Debbie Harry was still something of an oddity. For starters, at 29 years old when she first formed Blondie, the vocalist was older than a lot of her contemporaries at the CBGB club.
What’s more, she already boasted a preexisting career as a model, actor, and BBC secretary before even setting foot on that ramshackled stage in New York. Yet, in spite of those differences, Harry and Blondie soon became a defining act of the CBGBs scene.
A thriving musical revolution, that scene was awash with various characters and, if the views of Johnny Ramone are anything to go by, then the groups that populated the scene were in near-constant competition. “Blondie was just a lightweight pop band, and no one really cared about them at all,” the Ramones guitarist once declared, with more than a hint of bitterness in his voice.
Rivalries aside, though, Debbie Harry could recognise a born rock star when she encountered one, and perhaps that’s why Johnny Thunders always stood out within the CBGB scene. Having already laid the foundations for the entirety of the punk scene, performing with the New York Dolls in earlier years, Thunders arrived at CBGBs a ready-made legend of the scene, and Harry was among those in total awe of the guitarist.
“Johnny, oh he was very passionate,” she recalled to PKM back in 2015. “I mean, there was no other life for him, you know, he was totally – this was it, this was his purpose in life, and he was fulfilling it and he was great.”
Admittedly, even before his days with The Heartbreakers, when he was still the lipstick-wearing rock revolutionary with the Dolls, it would have been difficult to envision Thunders in any other setting than rock and roll.
“He was what he was and that was it, and no question,” Harry added.
With that deeply ingrained destiny for rock greatness, Thunders became one of the defining acts of the CBGBs scene, more polished and innovative than the majority of groups that passed through New York during those years. Although 1977’s L.A.M.F. was the only full-length LP Thunders managed to conjure up with The Heartbreakers, it still blew a lot of contemporary punk at the water upon release.
Regrettably, though, the rock and roll lifestyle that Thunders embodied was not always an easy path, and throughout his career the performer was plagued by heroin addiction – an issue that overshadowed much of the CBGBs scene, and even derailed Blondie for a period. It was heroin that eventually claimed the life of the performer, although exactly how direct the link between drugs and his passing in 1991 is debated.
His addiction might have precluded him from ever reaching the mainstream heights of CBGBs bands like Blondie, but Johnny Thunders always remained an icon of that scene and a ready-made rockstar.
