Blondie, ‘Dreaming’: Surviving and thriving in 70s New York

Blondie
‘Dreaming’

Highest UK Top 40 position:
#2 on September 30, 1979

1. When I met you in the restaurant

I don’t know about you, but I have spent a lot of my life feeling like I just missed out on all the epic parties.

I spent the 90s thinking London was the coolest place in the world. When I finally got to live there in the early 2000s, it was still pretty cool, but the specific vibe I’d been chasing fizzled out. Later, I spent time in various European small towns, hearing stories about this place used to be an oasis for roaming artists, until the tourists priced them out.

Then there’s New York. I’ve never been to New York, other than a connecting flight through JFK. I did get to see the iconic Manhattan skyline as my plane arced back towards Europe. This was mid-September 2000. I’ll be back soon, I thought. And there’s no rush. Those buildings aren’t going anywhere.

I have never set foot in New York, and yet I have strong opinions about the place. It’s too gentrified now. Everything’s so expensive. The artists have all moved to the suburbs. It’s not as good as it was in the 70s.

Why do I have such strong opinions about a place I’ve never visited? Because New York is at the heart of most modern culture, which has made it a spiritual home to billions who’ve never visited, not even once. Thousands of hours of Friends and Rent and Taxi Driver and Broad City have tricked my brain into thinking I’m a native New Yorker.

And not just New York as a place, but New York as a time. For me, the most vivid New York is the mugger-infested hellhole of the late 70s, when the city was at both its highest and lowest point. New York City almost went bankrupt in the mid-70s, but this was also the time when CBGBs was a nursery for new bands like The Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, Television, and Blondie.

Are those two facts connected? Did this great art happen in spite of New York’s problems, or because of them?

I guess you’d have to ask someone who was there.

2. You could tell I was no debutante

Face It, Debbie Harry’s 2019 memoir, has some wild stories from the start. At age 12, she was followed home by some older men who refused to leave until Debbie’s parents intervened. One of these men turned out to be legendary drummer Buddy Rich, who offered an autographed picture as a kind of apology.

In general, Harry’s life was like any suburban Boomer teenager: frustrating, boring, illuminated by dreams of making it in the big city. Her family lived in New Jersey, but she felt she belonged across the river, even though New York was in its dystopian era:

“Many people at that time…were afraid to go to New York City. Their idea of New York was that it was filthy and dangerous, full of no-go areas and rampant crime. There had been a massive white flight to the suburbs. Times Square belonged to the dealers and hookers; a trash-strewn Central Park was plagued by muggers and rats. The city couldn’t pay its workers. No one with money would venture below Fourteenth Street. However, the upside was all these abandoned buildings, which were a magnet for artists, musicians, and freaks.”

After art school, she found a job in New York, commuting each day from Jersey. Her experience will sound familiar if you’ve ever tried to balance creative goals with a 10-hour workday:

“I had come to the city to be an artist, but I wasn’t painting much, if at all. In many ways, I was really still a tourist just experiencing the place.”

Things changed when one of a colleagues helped her find a rent-controlled apartment for $67 per month—a steal, even in the late 60s. As a full-time resident, she often found herself stumbling into happenings and concerts on her way home. She saw Janis Joplin and wanted to be a soul singer. She saw The Velvet Underground play and fell in love with Nico. It was at a jazz bar called Slug’s where she started making music herself.

“At Slug’s, you’d get to hear luminaries like Sun Ra, Sonny Rollins, Albert Ayler, and Ornette Coleman—and find yourself at a table next to Salvador Dali. I remember showing up and sitting in on a couple of loose ‘happening’-like gatherings…free, abstract music where I sang or chanted and banged some percussion instruments.

“The sixties were the age of happenings. It was also the time of a great New York loft scene where so many of these wonderful parties and happenings took place. The lofts down below Canal Street and in Soho were former manufacturing spaces and most were illegal living, but they were very cheap, $75 or $100 a month, so all the artists rented these enormous two-thousand-square-foot spaces. That’s where we played our anti-music.”

Her big break came when she met Elda Gentile, who was in a group called Pure Garbage with Holly Woodlawn (aka, Holly from ‘Walk On The Wild Side’). Debbie and Elda started their own band called The Stilettos, a kind of glam-punk revue heavily influenced by Harry’s favourite band on the local scene, New York Dolls.

The Stillettos had something that few bands have: a creative director. Tony Ingrassia, who had worked on some of Warhol’s films, helped them assemble their aesthetic and create captivating, confrontational shows. He also taught Harry about Method acting, a technique she would use to develop the character of Blondie.

“Blondie” was part Marilyn Monroe and part Patti Hearst. In her book, Harry describes her as “some kind of transsexual creature…playing a man’s idea of a woman…an assertive woman in girl drag, not boy drag.” The band evolved into Blondie and the Banzai Babies, with musical support from her new boyfriend, guitarist and creative partner, Chris Stein. Eventually, Blondie and the Banzai Babies become just Blondie, and Blondie became rising stars at CBGBs.

“In those days it was a dive bar on the ground floor of one of the many flophouses that lined the avenue. The Hells Angels lived on Third Street so it became a biker bar. In 1973 Hilly Kristal, who ran the place, named it CBGB/OMFUG which stood for ‘Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandiers’. Hilly was a big slow-talking hippy. Apparently, he had grown up on a chicken farm and he though that country music was going to be huge. Then Hilly decided to give the local ‘street bands’ as he called them a try. He would say things like ‘These kids have something to say and we should listen’. CBGBs was a pit, but it was our pit.

“When we were first there, it was mostly derelict stores and flophouses and a pizza parlor across the road. There was an alley at the back of the club full of rubbish, rats, pissed-on garbage and shards of broken glass. Inside, the club had its own special reek—a pungent compound of stale beer, cigarette smoke, dog shit and body odor.

“We played CBGB’s every weekend for seven months straight. We didn’t make money; we got paid in beers. You were lucky if they were charging two dollars at the door. And Hilly was big-hearted, always letting people in for free.”

Harry and Stein lived together in increasingly squalid apartments, and each tenancy seemed to end in horrifying violence. One place was abandoned after it was broken into Harry’s ex-boyfriend, the stalker described in ‘One Way Or Another’. In another neighbourhood, she was narrowly escaped a kidnapping—Harry is convined the attacker was Ted Bundy. They intervened in a racially motivated attempted murder and were forced to flee in fear of reprisal.

One time, Blondie actually got paid after a gig. Harry and Stein were mugged later that night, but they’d already spent their earnings on cookies. The mugger walked them back to their apartment, tied them up, assaulted Harry and stole all of the band’s equipment.

Harry’s telling of this story ends with her saying:

“I can’t say that I felt a lot of fear. I’m very glad this happened pre-AIDS or I might have freaked. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape. I mean, we had no equipment.”

This wasn’t their lowest point. A few months later, they were woken up by the smell of gasoline, followed by screams of “Get out! The building’s on fire!” The next day, they learned that their upstairs neighbours had gotten in trouble with some drug dealers. They had tied the guy to a chair, tortured him, doused him in gasoline, and burned him alive.

New York in the 70s, man. Wild place.

3. I don’t want to live on charity

Things started turning around when they found a cheap place in a doll factory that used child labor:

“We were invited by Benton Quinn to move into his loft at 266 Bowery, just down the street from CBGBs. It’s still there and still pretty beat-up. Benton was a flamboyant character much like the androgynous Turner character played by Mick Jagger in the movie Performance. He had an elegant, ethereal, otherworldly feel about him, like someone out of a pre-Raphaelite painting.

“We had use of the first floor. There was a shared bathroom and a kitchen on our floor, Benton lived on the sconed floor, and the top floor was semi-derelict. Stephen Sprouse [designer who collaborated on much of Debbie Harry’s style] moved into that space later with a hot plate.

“One day we found a dead wino on the sidewalk down the street. There was always something dead out there, rats or winos. But on the upside, it was great having all that raw open space where we could play.”

The Blondie Loft, as the space became known, became home to most of the band members, giving them the freedom to rehearse night and day, only occasionally stopping to worry about freezing or starving to death. The Blondie Loft also became a hub for other artists—experimental filmmaker Amos Poe used the loft as interior sets for many of his films, starring Blondie and other CBGBs bands.

They got kicked out of The Blondie Loft in August 1976, but things were finally happening for the band. They were on a label run by Frank Valli, who had surprisingly good punk instincts. He came down to CBGBs in a limo to watch Blondie play, and suddenly the band were getting a big push.

Blondie wasn’t a hit, but it vibed with Britain’s emerging punk sound, and the band went on tour in the UK. The next album, Plastic Letters, did spawn a UK chart hit, ‘Denis’, leading to yet another British tour. But bad news arrived from back home. Harry and Stein had their own New York apartment now, but it had been destroyed by an electrical fire. Blondie were famous, successful—and homeless.

This wasn’t uncommon in New York. Jean-Michel Basquiat, legendary artist and Harry’s friend, was homeless for much of his creative peak, relying on girlfriends to put a roof over his head. The film New York Beat Movie, aka Downtown ’81, features Basquiat as himself, struggling to survive in the early days of hip-hop cultures. In one scene, he meets a homeless lady who asks for a kiss. Basquiat kisses her and it turns out that it’s his fairy godmother, Debbie Harry, who rewards his chivalry with a stack of cash.

(In real life, Harry did give Basquiat some cash by paying $200 for a painting. Basquiat felt bad for ripping her off. That painting is now worth at least $10 million.)

Blondie weren’t homeless for long. They achieved serious success in 1978 with ‘Heart Of Glass’, a song that had originally been written in The Blondie Loft before they’d been signed. ‘Heart Of Glass’ was Number One in the US and UK, and follow-up ‘Sunday Girl’ was also a British charttopper. ‘Dreaming’ almost completed a Top Of The Pops hattrick, held off only by The Police’s ‘Message In A Bottle’.

After the success of Parallel Lines and Eat To The Beat, their accountant advised Harry and Stein to buy a property in New York—a nice one in a nice neighborhood. After years of precarity, Blondie were homeowners.

4. We just keep on dreaming

That’s a very condensed version of the Blondie story. I recommend reading Face It for the full narrative (and to learn why you shouldn’t always listen to your accountant.)

But how does all this answer the original question, which was “Did 70s New York produce great art because it was a shithole, or despite that?”

Well, there are two really important details in Debbie Harry’s story.

First of all, the namedropping. Harry isn’t going out of her way to impress you by mentioning famous friends (except, possibly, Ted Bundy). This was simply the reality of Manhattan in the 70s. Hanging out in CBGBs, as anyone could, meant crossing paths with the likes of Tom Verlaine and Patti Smith. Stick around long enough, you’ll eventually bump into Bowie or Warhol.

The other, more important, thread is rent. Rent is a recurring character in the book. Everyone is on the lookout for an affordable place, even if that means risking muggers and trenchfoot. It’s worth it just to be among all of the other artists.

New York’s affordability is a constant topic of debate. David Byrne once threatened to leave if the city didn’t act to help young artists (they didn’t; he’s still there.) Looking at some of the discussion threads on Reddit, you see that it’s just about possible to exist in New York if you are willing to have 3 jobs and make art in your spare time. To which a young Debbie Harry would say, “You might as well live in New Jersey”.

Accomodation isn’t the only problem. Low rents (and relaxed attitudes towards squatting) also allowed artists to access spaces that could be used to make and exhibit art: studios, rehearsal rooms, galleries, theatres, venues. Today’s generation of artists might have somewhere to live, but do they have anywhere to work?

When you listen to Blondie’s 70s work—the furious drumming on ‘Dreaming’, the spiky guitar riff in ‘Hanging On The Telephone’—it’s tempting to say, “Yes, this is clearly an echo of the mean streets of 70s New York. You can hear the plaster falling off the walls and the rats scrabbling in garbage cans”. Maybe that’s true, maybe that’s just romanticising poverty. Maybe it’s both.

But what’s undeniably is true is that 70s New York was a place where people could scrape by just enough to make art their full-time job. When you look at comparable scenes in London, Paris and elsewhere, the same is also true. The economics allowed people to focus on their craft, explore ideas, and collaborate with other artists.

And those places are rapidly vanishing from the face of the earth. We are poorer without them.

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