The making of Debbie Harry: Life before Blondie
Every pop culture icon needs to find the right time and place. Once the sixties got grooving, Elvis Presley’s hip-shaking seemed a little old hat, and in the gloss of the eighties, dirty punk struggled to retain its relevance. For Debbie Harry, it wasn’t until she was 31 that fame was finally bestowed upon her.
In New York, 1974, the city had fallen into some sort of comic book dystopia. Andy Warhol’s factory stepped one toke over the line, and the prelapsarian dream of the sixties lay in wreck and ruin, like a long-forgotten civilization that the History Channel would say was built by aliens and abandoned in some program centuries from now. The zeitgeist was one of gritty tumult and grimy turmoil. The pastures of flower power had been paved over and, in its place, was some brutalist edifice to commerce. Opiates had replaced opulent excesses, and the only ubiquitous munificent bounty that money couldn’t buy was poverty.
The boon to this drudgery was the greatest decade of music in history; however, by the mid part of the seventies, like a champion sports team worrying about the average age of its roster, even music needed something new. It was in this melee of simultaneous triumph and transition, artfulness and apathy, that a New York nightclub called The CBGB became the Mecca of the latest cultural zeitgeist, and Debbie Harry was not only one of its favourite denizens, but its brightest future star. In December 1976, two years after Blondie first formed, their debut album catapulted them to critical acclaim and global success, but like a diamond finally thrust to the surface after years underground, this was a crystalising moment long in the making for one of music’s greatest frontwomen.
At the start of this journey was the moment that she was adopted as a baby. Her quiet New Jersey childhood was forever permeated by the knowledge of her adoption. As she candidly writes in her memoir, “I guess somewhere in my subconscious, a scene was playing on a loop of a parent leaving me somewhere and never coming back.” This lingering nag led her to search out a purpose and place in the world with more fervour than many of her friends.
When she came of age, this daring pursuit of belonging had its own dangers. She found herself in an abusive relationship with a man who once held a gun to her head and threatened to rape her because he suspected she was sleeping with another man. She then spent time as a secretary for BBC Radio’s offices in New York, worked as a waitress in the renowned rock joint Max’s Kansas City, became a go-go dancer at a New Jersey discotheque and even tried her hand at being a Playboy Bunny.
Her first exploits in music were a world away from the glam-punk epitome that we now know her as. In 1968, her first recorded work was as a backing singer for the folk group The Wind in the Willows. The album was released on Capitol Records, and it just about grazed the charts at number 195. In a critical sense, you’ll struggle to find a review that isn’t a retrospective one overstating the barely noticeable presence of Harry. During all of this, she was a brunette and her peroxide moment in the sun seemed to be shaded by the heavy cloud cover of living in obscurity in every which way.
That is until she met Blondie co-founder and guitarist Chris Stein, with whom she would enjoy a stable romantic relationship up until 1989. However, aside from describing the meeting as the best thing that ever happened to her, the pair endured some truly harrowing incidents. They experimented with drugs and found themselves occupying dangerous neighbourhoods. One night in the early seventies, the pair returned home from a gig when a man forced his way into their apartment while wielding a knife. He tied them both up and ransacked the apartment for drugs. Then, setting a stash aside and stealing Stein’s guitar and camera, he proceeded to rape Debbie Harry while Stein helplessly watched on. In her memoir, she curiously remarks, “I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape.”
Perhaps more notable than her downplaying, which is psychological protection from the harrowing incident, is that her life was frequently scored by such brushes with death. She once even accepted a lift from Ted Bundy at 2am. The VW Beetle she was welcomed into was stripped down on the inside, the doors had no handles, there was only a tiny crack in the window, and apparently, Bundy smelled putrid — it was a horror movie scenario. It was clear that this was not a good position to be in. Harry had to do something, and fast.
The singer began to roll down her window, trying to remain covert in her escape. With her arm hanging out of the car she began trying to open the door from the outside. “As soon as he saw that, he tried to turn the corner really fast,” she told Dazed, “And I spun out of the car and landed in the middle of the street.”
All these incidents and struggles would come out in the shrug-off of punk. The CBGB was, in many ways, a homage to waywardness and hardship in the same way that Greenwich Village had been in the folk revival of the early sixties. This time rather than lean on the spiritualism of the past for exultation and cognizance of the current state of play, the proto-punks of New York were set to snarl their way into a visceral future.
Debbie Harry had the life experience behind her at this point to seize the moment. She had always been an affiliate of cutting cultural movements, but now she had found her time and place. Snubbing the cares of her past out under a sauntering fuck-me pump, she illuminated the future of music with peroxide style that made punk sexy and guitar music fun again.
With the support of fellow CBGB acts like the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and others, the culture clique was infusing new ideas into the art that had led them there in the first place. In short, Debbie Harry had found her time and place, and she’s never looked back since.
