Mick Jagger: Debbie Harry’s ultimate icon
Debbie Harry needs no introduction. From the moment she stepped onto the stage, everyone could tell. Record labels scrambled to pin her down, bands tried to get her and hold on, but she was always going to come into her own as the face and front of Blondie. In short, she’s a star. The undeniable kind. Just like her idol.
But before she was that, or at least before she was discovered, Harry was a true wild child of the decade. During the 1960s, she was a Playboy bunny and a go-go dancer before landing in the eye of the storm at Max’s Kansas City, serving as a waitress to New York’s countercultural crowd. She was there in its prime when Andy Warhol ruled the roost, and the clientele revolved around his shiny factory world or the sun of rock and roll.
“It’s quite a long list: Steve Winwood, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jefferson Airplane, Andy Warhol… Miles Davis, I served once. He didn’t really talk,” she recalled of that time when her entry into the world of music was shiny and thrilling. It was here that she learnt everything, really. She watched the stars of the scene move around the space, saw their style and their attitude and adapted it into her own.
By the time she stepped on the stage at the CBGB with Blondie, she embodied it all. She merged her rebellious youth with a sense of New York cool, taking note from the idols she had right around her at Max’s or that she’d grown up reviling.
She stepped up to the mic and, suddenly, when trying to embody all that, she seemed to channel one man in particular: Mick Jagger.
In early Blondie performances, Harry’s presence quickly got the band noticed. She stared her audience down with a seductive glare, shaking her hips. At one point, she was being paraded around like an actual beast on a chain. She was endlessly styled, becoming just as much of a fashion icon as a music pioneer, and she was, and still is, obviously and undeniably, a model-esque-looking woman.
Switch the gender, and who do you have? Jagger. It was the same story with the Stones’ frontman—his style and swagger drew people in, helping to make him one of the greatest bandleaders the world has ever known. His attitude, look, and energy were just as much a part of it as anything else.
That’s a fact Harry leaned into with Jagger as her inspiration. When people started accusing her of being too much of a ‘sex symbol’, the band encouraged them to look over at Jagger, look what he does and understand it. “I don’t think we [play into sex appeal] any more than the Stones did with Mick Jagger. He was always a big sex symbol,” Chris Stein said.
“I always thought Mick Jagger was sexy. I’ve always been heterosexual and I’ve always sort of identified through him, you know as a big stud and I knew he could pick up all the girls he wanted,” Stein explained. But to him, and to Blondie, their singer was trying to be the same, but for the ladies, as he added, “I think girls identify through Debbie.”
Jagger was a major inspiration for Harry musically, too, as she covered many of his songs. But largely, the Stones’ singer influenced her attitude as Harry wanted to harness the same seductive and energetic power to win over the girls too and empower them to the stage as she said, “So many girls come up to me and say Great, keep going, do it, ya know. They say that to me. I’m not making enemies of girls, I’m making fans of girls.”
