OCCULT ARTIST: Happy Birthday, ‘Blondie’!
A Dispatch From the Past as Punk Siren Debbie Harry turns 79
“You know I always felt about that period, that all of those drugs that came around that wiped out a lot of us and obliterated a lot of stuff, was all politically sanctioned. I always felt that and Chris [Stein] said that too; that a lot of people who really had something important to say or do were subdued.” — Debbie Harry
“I don't want to live on charity / Pleasure's real or is it fantasy? / Real to reel is living rarity / People stop and stare at me / We just walk on by / We just keep on dreaming…” — Blondie, “Dreaming”
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The headline’s a playful jab to offset nostalgically affectionate happy birthday wishes to a hopefully not-too-wicked-witch. IYKYK. And I know very well!
“BLONDIE IS A GROUP!” My 1981-83 girlfriend Willa used to say to people all the time when they referred to, uh, the group’s super-sexy singer and lyricist Debbie Harry as “Blondie.” Willa even had a hot-pink-on-black ALL CAPS button that preemptively corrected people. Willa often-if-not-always wore the button on her then-trendy Izod shirts or jean jacket when she was playing her wannabe alter-ego and singing in the not-too-bad amateur band Preppy Angst, which covered a few of Blondie, the group’s, songs.
I mostly liked Blondie because my GF liked Blondie, wanted to be Blondie, pardon me, Debbie Harry, and we saw the band a few times live at the tail end of their rock’n’roll reign. But never more memorably than the last time we saw them, which was the last time anybody saw them in the 1980s, or for the next 15 years: August 21st, 1982, at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia, Blondie’s last live performance of their new wave heyday before the band’s mixed bag reunification in the late 1990s, which continues off’n’on ’til today.
I bring that last show up on Debbie Harry’s 79th birthday not only because she and her band were a constant musical accompaniment during my formative final years of high school and first couple years of college, and not only because in 2024 I still very much appreciate how Ms. Harry’s creative energy helped infuse the passions of my sometimes too-conservative GF — blessed be with a nod and a wink, Ms. Harry — but also because there were a few memorable things I saw on stage that August four-decades-back that I didn’t understand in the moment but are peripheral observations that reveal a band on the razor’s edge of ending, and worth recording for posterity, or at least because I want to.
I had all the Blondie albums on LP vinyl. They were one of the biggest bands around for a few years, riding trends from punk to new wave to disco to rap, with four #1 singles and a slew more Top Forty hits. Which was one of the things that sorta bugged me about them when I was a too-cool-for-you college deejay and pretentious (though award-winning!) rock music critic:
Blondie morphed with the trends, following them, not leading, and after playing poseurs as punky outsiders at CBGBs and breaking big in the U.K. in 1977 while they were still under radar in the USA, once they smelled stardom, Blondie, or at least Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, turned into Hollywood starfuckers. They were hanging out with Andy Warhol in Manhattan, playing huge international outdoor stadiums and making a play for movie stardom. Their aloof chilliness, which at first seemed anti-establishment when they couldn’t get radio airplay, later came off as elitist and better-than-you after they did. And boy, did they.
To my eyes and ears, when Blondie, the group, was a punky pop late 1970s New York quintet on their self-titled debut and Plastic Letters albums, I dug them. But as they devolved into disco and hit it really, really big as a sextet with “Heart of Glass” from Parallel Lines and the standalone single “Call Me” from the blockbuster American Gigolo soundtrack, I began to drift away and bad mouth them as sellouts…until I met Willa, tall and smart and athletic and upper crust, with divorced parents and a kindly yet high-class demeanor, electric eyes and beautiful face, who played field hockey and sang lead in a band and would have been admired and desired both coming and going as a gorgeous PAWG back in the day, had the term existed.
Willa loved Blondie, played their albums all the time and tried to affect Debbie Harry’s chilly demeanor, but she was fundamentally too nice. There was very little bitch to Willa, she was a good girl, intelligent, inquisitive and liked to stay active, doing stuff, travel. I totally respected and lusted for her, it’s an exhilarating blend, but my vanity also recognized she was a status symbol, quite the catch, so I kinda sold out just like Blondie, the group, and decided they were great again —What diverse music! Five stars for Auto-American even with the disco and reggae and rap! — and I’m sure there are men who have compromised much more of their integrity to spend high quality time with such a prime time fetching lass.
Whatever Willa wanted Willa usually got, especially because she usually asked in such a nice way, and that was how Willa and I ended up at JFK Stadium (R.I.P.) in Philadelphia near-end of August, 1982, a couple weeks before we were to head back to our respective colleges, for what unbeknownst to us would be Blondie, the group’s, last live show in the 1980s.
We saw it up close, too. It used to be at those huge outdoor shows that if you could get to the field, it was every man and woman for themselves. I loved seeing shows at JFK Stadium, about 75 miles from my parents’ place in North Jersey, but only a baker’s dozen from Willa’s in Haddon County in South Jersey. Over the course of a few years in the 1980s, I was able to get within 10-20 feet of some of the biggest and best musical acts of the era: The Rolling Stones, Police, Journey, Foreigner, Genesis, Elvis Costello, R.E.M., The Kinks, Joan Jett, Huey Lewis, George Thorogood, Loverboy, and so on.
Like I mentioned, Willa was loaded with gusto, she was a good girl but not an uptight one, and totally on board with pushing, shoving, nudging, conniving, shifting, swerving, following the flow, all the way up to the front. The lineup of that all-day concert placed Blondie, the group, smack dab in the middle, late afternoon, hitting the stage after local Philly openers Robert Hazard (R.I.P.) and the Heroes — biggest hit, “Escalator of Life,” but best known as the writer of Cindy Lauper’s signature tune “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” — and A Flock of Seagulls, a quartet of aggressively-coiffed futuristic U.K. weirdos (founded by a pair of hairdressers!), who were flying high with a pair of back-to-back big hits from their eponymous debut album: “I Ran” and “Space Age Love Song.”
While I’m going back in time, an aside about A Flock of Seagulls, one of those bands who were in the right place at the right time for me, the band I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more than any other except Van Morrison, simply because they kept opening for bands I liked more: That JFK show, but also The Police, GoGo’s, The Fixx, a couple others in the early 80s. I saw A Flock of Seagulls so many times that I think the lead singer may have recognized me at a show at West Virginia University in October, 1982, the third time I’d seen them in four months, when I got close to the stage and the freaky-albino-haired lead singer (and former hairdresser) Mike Score kept pointing at me from behind his keyboard.
Anyway, Blondie, the group, was set to perform in the middle of the day, followed by Elvis Costello & the Attractions and then the Phil Collins version of Genesis, who would go forward past sunset and into the night. Willa and I used the opening two bands’ crowds’ ebb and flow to work our way towards the stage. It proved a total Mission: Accomplished success. Blondie, the band, was maybe ten feet away, tops, by the time they hit the stage, and Willa, my blondie, was in seventh heaven. The band, not so much.
I remember thinking they put on a great show, the audience was into it, Willa was totally into it, I was into it, but you could tell this was a band hanging on by a thread.
Debbie Harry looked and sounded on point, and bopped around in a black’n’white minidress, a bleached bottled blond with black streaks, foxy and leggy and full of confidence and stardom. Mostly wearing loud white dark sunglasses to match her dress, she seemed to be having a great time entertaining 100+K people....even though she may have been acting, because she also kept casting occasional flashes of worried glances at BF/guitarist Chris Stein, who was clearly whacked out of his mind.
Years later, thanks to retrospective interviews and Debbie Harry’s memoir, Face It, I now realize at least half the members of Blondie, the group, were very much heroin junkies. There were needle and drug allusions constantly through their music by that point — the 1982 tour was was branded as the "Tracks Across America" tour, yikes, while Harry’s failed solo album KooKoo depicted her with needles through her face — and Blondie, the group, broke up three months later, November, 1982.
The first oddity on stage was that Blondie, the group, had added a third guitarist, a talented Latino guy I later found out was named Eddie Martinez, to pick up the slack. Dude could play, and he def needed to, because the band’s co-founder, co-songwriter and former lead guitarist Stein could barely strum more than rhythm stuff. Stein was literally having too good a time on his drugs that August afternoon; he was barely better than useless, and at one point stopped playing completely to gape and point at the back of the stadium. We all turned to look. There was a 747 flying behind and above JFK. Stein traced it with his pointing finger all the way across, grinning like an idiot, guitar hanging unused around his neck, as Debbie Harry turned her head to him in concern while she continued singing and Eddie Martinez stepped up and in front of him to re-command our attention.
It was definitely a memorable show musically, because I remember a lot of it. I remember they opened with "Rapture," closed with "Call Me." There was a crowd-pleasing cover of the Stones' "Start Me Up" in there too. Best of all, Blondie (the group!) played their best song, “Dreaming,” one of the pre-eminent pinnacles of power pop punk in the 1980s.
I also remember the band’s not-so-secret weapon, drummer Clem Burke, “part Keith Moon, part octopus,” as I once described him in an album review when I was winning honors for such probably meaningless things, having a temper tantrum onstage, as confirmed by Philadelphia Inquirer rock critic Ken Tucker’s review. Perhaps he was angry about Stein showing up smacked out of his gourd, perhaps he was on drugs himself, perhaps it was a stage hand’s mistake, perhaps it was something else entirely. In any event, the band seemed in-tune on stage, but it was obvious they weren’t in tune with each other.
Didn’t matter. Martinez stepped up to save the day with guitar hero virtuosity, Debbie Harry delivered the sexy, energetic goods we paid to see with “her trademark lustrous vocal flatness,” (h/t Ken Tucker) and Clem Burke, despite his early tantrum, played those drums like a man possessed (and maybe he was?).
We loved it, it was the highlight of Willa’s day, though mine came later when Elvis C. & and the A’s hit the stage to support his best album since his first, Imperial Bedroom. Genesis, another band I saw more times in my life than would be appropriate in comparison to my fondness for their music, were fine, though I remember nothing about their show other than a long strange segment where Phil Collins took turns inciting cheers and boos by going to the front of the stage and alternating between giving the audience goofy grins and smiles, and then his middle finger.
All in all, it was a great day, with an asterisk to history because it proved the last live show for Blondie, the group, just after they peaked but while they were still really good, fun and entertaining, despite all the hell going on behind the scenes.
I was always into Willa more than Debbie Harry, but without Debbie Harry, there would’ve been no Willa, at least not as I remember her. So Happy Birthday, Deborah Ann Harry (née Angela Trimble). You cast your spell on a generation of young women, and they could’ve done a lot worse. In fact, look around today and you can see that they have. At least Blondie, the group, could really play. Bold, double-bar, out.
Great stroll down memory lane, Tom. New Wave restored my faith in culture. I despised disco. My novel "The Unreals" is filled with references to my hatred for it. Elvis Costello was my favorite. He went from computer operator to rock star. I went from computer operator- well stayed one for a long time- to lowly paid published author. Did you like Graham Parker? Very Elvis-like,. While researching my book "On Borrowed Fame," we became friends through email. And then I met him twice at his local concerts. Great guy, but he broke my heart when I interviewed him a few years back, and told him how much I loved New Wave, and hated disco. To my shock and disappointment, he said he liked disco better. Go figure. Great stuff- thanks!
Funny that FoS were really hairdressers! Rick Meeder, an Atlanta bassist and wit whose dad ran 96 Rock back then told a story about hollering across the hall to the DJ, “Hey, are you going to that Flock of Hairdressers concert tonight?” only to discover they were sitting in the studio being interviewed.
I can never forgive Blondie for what I’ve always considered the first rap song.