Drugs, rats and Debbie Harry: the scuzzy side of life in Blondie
On May 12 1974, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, Blondie played a gig supporting Television at the underground music club CBGB. Later that night, upon arriving home at one in a long and startling line of condemnable apartments scattered through the pages of Under a Rock, Blondie’s guitarist Chris Stein and singer Debbie Harry were accosted by “a big guy who forced us at knifepoint” into different rooms in order to steal their possessions and rape the 29-year old Harry. “All these years later and I still want to kill the guy,” writes Stein. “[It’s] not a good feeling.”
That this dreadful encounter is dispensed with in fewer than 100 words says much about the scene that Under a Rock recalls. Welcome to New York, a bankrupt necropolis in which drugs and danger run wild in the streets. Headless Body in Topless Bar screams a headline in the Post, while the federal government’s refusal to save the city’s five boroughs from the threat of insolvency is reported in the Daily News beneath the banner [President] Ford to City: Drop Dead. But amid these weeds of decay, artists prospered, musicians most of all. Like rats in leather jackets, groups such as the New York Dolls, the Dictators, -Talking Heads, the Ramones and Blondie strode defiantly into the night.
Despite attaining genuine blockbusting fame, Blondie’s initial time in the sun was brief. They split up in 1982, just three years after their first US and UK No 1 single, Heart of Glass. One minute the band were fielding calls from children on the BBC Saturday morning show Swap Shop, the next they were dusted and done on the Manhattan streets. (They would eventually re-form in 1997.)
In the 1980s, as the money ran dry, five-storey townhouses on the Upper West Side gave way to the routine ruinations of heroin and cocaine addiction. When Stein was hospitalised for three months with the skin disease pemphigus vulgaris, Debbie Harry roamed the boulevards scoring drugs that would get the pair through the night. In a book littered with corpses and casualties, the revelation that the guitarist’s eldest daughter, Akira, died from an “accidental overdose” aged only 19 is its own wholly shocking moment.
Despite its fertile terrain, though, swathes of Under a Rock hang limp as a windsock on a tranquil day. A listless opening throw of childhood recollections drags on for 80 pages. “Across the street from [my] school,” Stein writes, “were a corner soda fountain and an ancient-style penny-candy store,” in which “there was one particular round, blue space-themed candy that I consumed frequently before somehow discovering it was gum.” On page after page, Stein guides his reader into equally uninteresting cul-de-sacs. In the role of raconteur, Ustinov he is not.
He’s also hopeless when it comes to casting light upon the magic of music. Despite Blondie having been (rightly) inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Under a Rock’s recollections of the genesis and realisation of such masterpieces as Atomic or Denis are so mechanical, they might as well have been written by the kid who made the coffee at the recording studios.
This is odd. Elsewhere, the book sparkles with life in unexpected moments of startling pop-cultural literacy. After watching Sesame Street with a young Akira, Stein notes – rather brilliantly, I think – that “Big Bird is some kind of depressive… the Count is obsessive-compulsive… [and] the Cookie Monster is the only one who seems well adjusted, clear about his goals, and with a sense of humour.”
The book is at its best, though, when recalling a New York that no longer exists. The hip-hop scene up in the Bronx, the punk crowd down near the Bowery, the frugal-as-French-fries lofts and basements bordering Alphabet City, the methadone clinics south of Harlem. Popping in and out of homes and lives are a cast of characters – Andy Warhol, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop among them – both creative and deranged. I can see why Stein quietly laments the gentrification of the City That Never Sleeps. It’s not for nothing that the last half-decent major rock band to emerge from the city were the Strokes, who broke through more than two decades ago.
For all Under a Rock’s flaws, its moments of wit and wisdom still shine through. On the subject of Blondie’s continued existence in its members’ pensionable years, Stein shares a joke about a man employed to clear up dung at a circus. “Why don’t you get a decent job rather than shovelling elephant s---?” an onlooker asks him. The reply comes: “What? And give up show business?”
Ian Winwood is the author of Bodies: Life and Death in Music. Under a Rock is published by Corsair at ￡25. To order your copy for ￡19.99 call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books
