“Blondie is a group.” That was the marketing slogan as Debbie Harry arrested every eyeball in the Western world circa ’78. Her boyfriend and co-bandleader Chris Stein hated it. On the cover of his memoir, he resumes position behind shades and guitar as his ineffably glamorous ex steals focus. Under a rock is just how he rolls.Face It
But in between drawing on his TV with crayons as a toddler and the collage sensibility that permeates this book, in which no character or event assumes much greater significance than any other, the fluke of an era-defining pop group is just a part of Stein’s free-flowing continuum of creation.
Come the mid-1960s, he’s a canny kid plugged into the centre of the universe, chancing on Keith Richards, Frank Zappa and Sammy Davis Jr on the mean streets; stumbling into Andy Warhol’s aura at a Carnegie Hall concert. His eccentric gang’s “drug procurement” quests get him punched by Tony Sirico, who grew up to be Paulie inChris Stein with Debbie Harry and Andy Warhol, who Stein says became “enamoured with celebrities”.
Stein has plenty to say about the commercialisation of these forces, witnessed at close range as Blondie gets swept up in the new wave zeitgeist, then smashed by the usual concoction of exhaustion, dysfunction and, uh-oh, drugs. With poetic timing, the pair become junkies just as they manage to buy their respectable five-storey townhouse on East Seventy-Second Street.“Heroin is like getting a loan consolidation,” Stein writes as Blondie staggers into a contractually obligated swansong in 1982.
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