Review: Debbie Harry's 'Face It'

The apparent irony of Debbie Harry’s career is that despite being in her thirties by the time she became a star, despite her classically fine voice, despite Blondie’s radio-ready pop songs, she and her band got lumped in with the punks. Look, no one is going to mistake “The Tide Is High” for “Blitzkrieg Bop”, but Harry’s story is actually pretty punk. She survived in the heart of infamous mid-seventies NYC when rats and violence were in equal abundance, she survived drug addition and sexual assault and now speaks of both nonchalantly, she survived a turbulent career at odds with her consistently massive fame, she survived getting ripped off by music-business weasels, she survived the severe illness of boyfriend and band mate Chris Stein. Don’t get taken in by how Sid Vicious’s tragic trajectory is glamorized—surviving is punker than dying.

Harry lived through it all to tell her story in Face It. Through 350 pages, she burns through uncountable harrowing experiences without ever seeming excessively bothered or bitter about the hard times or overly impressed with the triumphs. Debbie Harry is nothing if not cool.

Along with discussing her musical career in satisfying detail, she discusses her troubled personal background and attempts to reconnect with her biological family, her strange pre-fame encounters with Buddy Rich and Timothy Leary, her relationship with Chris Stein (though she’s still mum about the specifics of their break up), her less celebrated couplings with thPenn Jillette and Harry Dean Stanton, her film work with David Cronenberg and John Waters, her odd projects (stand out: attempting to remake Godard’s Alphaville with a starring role for Robert Fripp), her infatuations with pro wrestling and some weird shit she calls “sprang-a-langs,” her sexual, chemical, musical, and fashion preferences, and her own iconic status.

Face It is also a fabulously designed book. Photos are often embellished with cheeky cartoons and there are several multi-page sections devoted to fan art. It’s a gas to see that Harry’s style-consciousness is even at work in her autobiography.

Review: ‘Parallel Lives: Blondie’

For obvious reasons, Blondie was disgusted with their record companies’ decision to market the band by exploiting Debbie Harry’s sexuality. They were equally put off by the “Blondie is a Band” campaign intended to give extraordinary songwriter Chris Stein, brilliant drummer Clem Burke, iconic keyboardist Jimmy Destri, and the rest of the guys their due. They felt the catch phrase drew too much attention to the band’s imbalance of power, which still hasn’t really been resolved some 36 years after their debut album. Take Dick Porter and Kris Needs’s new bio Parallel Lives. The writers clearly sympathize with all the fine musicians who’ve passed through Blondie over the decades, but they just can’t keep their narrative from zooming back to Debbie as a magnet finds steel. With the exception of Stein, the other members of the band largely remain background players to Rock’s most recognizable front woman, because her story remains so unique. From small town Jersey girl to Greenwich village hippie to the voice of the biggest American rock band of the New Wave era to reluctant thirty-something sex symbol to recovering heroin addict and grand dame club kid loath to play the nostalgia game, Debbie Harry has a tale quite unlike most women in Rock. In the ample interviews the writers conducted with her, she displays a refreshingly ego-free perspective on her gargantuan fame, viewing her younger self as a carefully cultivated character named Blondie, while maintaining as down-to-earth a lifestyle offstage as anyone with her history could hope to achieve.

Because Parallel Lives is so Debbie-centric, we sometimes crave more information about non-Debbie matters. Porter and Needs never fully explain Frank Infante’s fall out with the band, which is frustrating because it got so severe that his lawyer once instructed him not to “talk to” or “hit” anyone while filming a music video. In any event, such acrimony is fairly par for the course for a band as successful as Blondie. What isn’t par for the course is the Debbie Harry story, and Dick Porter and Kris Needs fashion a fascinating look at a great Rock band by homing in on the main ingredient that made them great.