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: 'Rock and Roll Woman: The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers'

Who would you select if tasked with choosing “The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers”? Once I was through grumbling about that measly number, I wouldn’t select a lot of the ones who make it into Meredith Ochs’s new book Rock and Roll Woman: The 50 Fiercest Female Rockers. To the writer’s credit, she makes a strong case for even the ones who made my eyes roll while perusing the table of contents. Ochs’s colorful prose and infectious love for her subjects nearly brought me to the precipice of reconsidering the artistry of Gwen Stefani or Sheryl Crow.

Review: 'White Trash: Uncut'

Try as they did to puke forth the impression they didn’t give two shits about the sentimentality of pop past, the punks started documenting themselves almost from the very start. 1977 saw the release of Wolfgang Büld’s Punk in London, likely the first punk documentary. That same year photographer Christopher Makos published White Trash, a collection of stark, B&W images of such scene staples as Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, John Waters, Divine, Iggy Pop, Debbie Harry, Patti Smith, and the New York Dolls, as well as key influences Warhol, Jagger, and Bowie. A collaborator of Warhol’s, Makos wasn’t necessarily looking to eulogize punk. He’d just snapped some photos of his friends in LA and NYC over a week in 1976. It just happened his friends would all become punk icons.

As originally published, White Trash was not purely Makos’s baby. Art director Fred Meyer had his way with the images, cropping them in angular, punk style. Glitterati’s new edition of White Trash affixes Uncut to the title because Makos’s photos are finally allowed to breathe full frame without Meyer’s crops. Yet we still get a very cropped series of images. Makos favored close ups, not just of faces (and he really forces you to appreciate the lush beauty of Hell’s lips), but of other body parts. A pair of tits here. A crotch bulge there. Patti Smith and Sylvan Sylvan’s dancing feet. Debbie Harry’s thigh on the cover. The approach de-eroticizes the erotic, makes the normal odd. The photographer’s knack for catching people like Grace Jones, John Waters, and Divine at their most disarmingly casual normalizes the odd. That’s pretty punk.

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.