He’s the enigmatic Blondie guitarist whose relationship with Debbie Harry is pop music legend. Chris Stein talks about hanging out with David Bowie and Andy Warhol, his heroin addiction and the devastating loss of his daughter.
She is moving through the bar: a girl with short dark hair and a face so striking you forget what you’re saying. She climbs onto a stage – a large wooden board that was mounted on top of some chairs or perhaps a pool table. So Chris Stein first saw Debbie Harry.
A bar, waiting around, a fleeting glance. It’s like a Blondie song from before they were Blondie.
“It was pretty much what everybody else saw later on,” Stein says.
It was the beginning of a rock’n’roll romance. Harry would dye her hair blonde and name their band after the word builders shouted at her in the street. They would tour the world; they would take a lot of drugs. She would become a disco and punk icon, a precursor to supreme blondies Madonna and Taylor Swift.
“She was very charismatic and attractive and all that stuff,” Stein says.
He’s quite striking himself, dressed in black, with white hair that hangs in curtains over his brow and large, rounded cheekbones. In her 2019 memoir, Harry writes of staring at a face in the crowd and feeling “drawn to him as if by a magnet”.
“I appreciate her support,” Stein says. Then he adds a correction. “It wasn’t a crowd. It was 20 people.”
He’s a stickler for details. His new memoir, Under a Rock, is chock-full of them: the time Iggy Pop shot a bullet hole in one of his gold records; the time a guitarist’s hair caught fire. There’s David Bowie propositioning his girlfriend, Phil Spector poking his revolver into Harry’s boot and saying, “Bang!”; there’s the Australian tour manager who developed a stutter after a motorbike crash in which he woke up embedded in a horse. “Yeah, Ray,” Stein says. “He told us that story.”
He’s perched on a square section of a huge grey sofa in his flat in the West Village, New York. There’s a crowd of animals around us. Well, he’d correct me about that. It’s not a crowd. It’s four cats and two dogs, surrounding us in this vast room like an audience. Teddy, a Havanese, is stretched out beside me. A seventh member of the entourage, a Frenchie-terrier cross named Simon, who is a noted troublemaker, has been corralled in a dog home for the day. “Otherwise he would be here,” Stein says, “producing chaos.”
Stein’s manager had warned me that I would be entering “an animal house”. I thought this was a reference to the 1978 film and started to imagine scenes of wild debauchery. But he just meant that Stein and his wife have a lot of pets. Also lots of art and photography. In the hallway, there’s semi-hallucinogenic wallpaper featuring a tiger’s face and shelves of books and curios. There’s a porcelain plate of the sort that usually commemorates a coronation or a wedding, with the c-word written across it in an ornate font. There’s a Warhol silkscreen print of an electric chair.
“But you know what? I’ve got the skull he painted,” he says. “I’ve got the actual skull. That’s not here. It’s upstate,” he says, meaning their house in the country.
You probably shouldn’t tell people that, I say. You might get burgled.
“We have guns,” he says.
In the next room there’s a colossal Basquiat that is probably a fake. The founder of Peloton, who used to live in the penthouse upstairs, left it in the rubbish.
Stein gets me some fizzy water. It comes in a tall silver can from a brand called Liquid Death. Even the water here is a little bit rock’n’roll.
In his book, Stein compares the moment that he met Harry to the time that a car nearly hit him outside a knick-knack shop in Greenwich Village. He and a friend were staring through the window at a plaster statue of a squatting monkey holding a human skull. Then they moved down the street. Moments later, a motorist – “Some poor bastard [who] had a heart attack and lost control or something” – smashed into the window where they had been standing.
“I’m a firm believer in the circular nature of time and the idea that the future casts shadows into the past,” Stein says. “Maybe I was just attracted to this gorgeous girl who was a good singer, and maybe fate had conspired to put me in this spot at that particular moment.”
If this sounds a little grandiose, you should know that plenty of people are obsessed by Stein’s relationship with Harry. Quite recently, in NME, someone referred to it as their “doomed romance”, as if they were the Heathcliff and Cathy of rock music.
Stein is a little bemused by it. In his book he writes that they were together for a decade or so and then fell “out of sync”, acknowledging, as he does it, the tremendous demand for a more detailed explanation.
“We are still very close,” he says. “But I’ve been married for 25 years now.”
It must be quite odd, I suppose, to have people constantly asking about your ex-girlfriend.
“Yeah,” he says. “Well, my wife puts up with it. She does.”
When they met, Harry was part of a girl group called the Stilettos and worked at a hair salon in New Jersey. Stein was from Brooklyn, back when it was better known for mobsters than hipsters.
Stein’s father, a salesman for a paint company, died when his son was a teenager, and Stein and his mother, an artist, bounced between different flats. Stein, who became a hippy and a dedicated stoner, began taking psychedelic drugs with gusto and experienced psychotic breaks that eventually landed him in a psychiatric ward. Afterwards he was eligible for various government benefits that helped pay for art school and the rent on a Manhattan flat. Officials from social security got in touch too, saying he was eligible for payments because he had lost his father – enough to buy “a lot of pot”, an official from the department assured him cheerfully over the phone.
He went to San Francisco. He was at Woodstock, naturally, “tripping pleasantly” on a tab of acid and watching streams of people pass by. “I was in all these f***ing situations that were relative to the culture and music,” he says.
And he became part of the punk scene on the Lower East Side, living for a while with Eric Emerson, a larger-than-life figure who starred in Andy Warhol films. Emerson’s girlfriend was in the Stilettos, which is how Stein came to be in the bar where he was smitten by the sight of Debbie Harry.
In her memoir, Face It, Harry recalls seeing a chap “with long hair and kohl around his eyes and a sort of ripped-up glamour”, while, “I probably looked like I came from some preppy suburban cocktail party.”
Stein volunteered to fill in as a guitarist with Harry’s band; the two of them then split off into their own group, taking a bass player and a drummer with them and playing under various names.
She struck him as very together, with her job at the hair salon and her 1967 Camaro, in which she drove back and forth to New Jersey. She had a stalker too, an ex-boyfriend calling her at all hours, threatening her, following her and breaking into her flat one night armed with a gun, which he pressed against her cheek while trying to force himself on her. The police said they could do nothing. It was only after he called once and Stein picked up and spoke to him that he seemed to back off.
“People say, ‘That was the time,’ " Stein explains. “That’s the f***ing phrase they use... But it’s probably just as dire out there today.”
Harry often sounds almost blasé about it. When she bleached her hair blonde and builders and truck drivers started yelling, “Hey, blondie!” at her in the street, her reaction was: good name for a band.
She also describes coming home one night with Stein and being assailed, at their door, by a large man with a knife who tied them both up and raped Harry. He then stole guitars and Stein’s camera.
“In the end the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape,” she writes. “I mean, we had no equipment.”
Stein, describing the same attack, sounds angrier. “All these years later I still want to kill this person. Not a good feeling.”
As Blondie took off, Harry became the focal point. A photograph of her in a see-through mesh shirt became the poster for their first album. “It got back to us that people thought those posters were for a massage parlour when they saw them around Times Square,” Stein says.
Stein, who had studied photography at art school, took her portrait for magazines. Harry recalled that he did this very slowly and deliberately. “I knew... I had a good face but I was always unsure about my body,” she wrote in Face It. “Chris made me look better. He had these voyeuristic leanings, staring at me fixedly for hours in the heat of the lights... Chris and I always ended up in bed together after a shoot.”
Stein thinks that by today’s standards they were really quite prim and proper with her image. “I dunno if prudish is the right word, but we didn’t put out nudes or... that kind of stuff,” he says. “I mean, we probably could have been a lot ruder with her presentation.”
They went on tour with Bowie and Iggy Pop. Bowie gave Harry some advice on how to work a stage, Stein says: divide it into three parts and make sure to distribute yourself evenly across them. He also asked, “Can I f*** you?” Harry responded like an English teacher to a pupil who requests to use the lavatory. She said, “I don’t know, can you?”
I imagine there are men who would be threatened by this: David Bowie, global superstar, asking to sleep with your girlfriend.
“She told me at the time,” Stein says. “She didn’t seem like she was going to follow through then and there. She didn’t at the time tell me he had pulled his dick out.”
Harry told this story in her memoir. She said Bowie was always doing this and that it was perfectly fine and actually rather charming.
“He was a professional,” Stein says. “So it’s just business. Not personal.”
Iggy propositioned her too, I read.
“Again, that was the climate of the time,” Stein says. “He had a girlfriend with him on the whole tour.”
More tours followed and a succession of hits: Heart of Glass, The Tide Is High, Hanging on the Telephone. They pumped out disco numbers with charmingly homespun subjects. A ballad called Fade Away and Radiate was all about Harry falling asleep in front of the television. Stein wrote Sunday Girl about a missing cat, or at least he got it out of his head and onto a tape. “I never learnt to read music,” he says. You would think they would now be rich as Croesus, but they were not well advised.
Returning from a six-month tour, packed with press and television appearances and with their cover track Denis high in the charts all over Europe, they had to ask Stein’s uncle to co-sign for the lease on a New York flat as they still had neither bank accounts nor a credit card. Instead, their manager would give them a weekly allowance.
There was a legal fight involving a former band member. There was an accountant who didn’t pay their taxes during the years they were making the most money, leaving Stein owing US$100,000; it “soon became a million bucks with penalties and interest”. And when they finally managed to extricate themselves from their manager, they owed him “our children’s DNA and a piece of Blondie for ever everywhere in the universe”, he writes.
He describes the night Blondie switched to a new label in a deal conducted in a tower by Central Park, the band arriving at midnight to sign the paperwork and being shunted into an empty lawyer’s office to wait “while these guys finished arguing and running up their bills”.
At 9am when they were still waiting they went out and “bought some weed, came back and got as wasted as possible”, Stein writes. “We trashed the guy’s office. We threw his papers around, moved furniture, made phone calls to Hawaii, then hung the phones out the window by the cords. We started fires in ashtrays. When the crew of attorneys eventually came to get us, they were just completely f***ing horrified. At least we had maintained our punk aesthetic.”
They nearly always managed this. Years later they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame alongside the Sex Pistols. The Pistols sent a fax saying, “Piss off, we’re not coming,” Stein writes. Which was quite punk. But then Blondie trumped them by having an actual row at the podium, a former band member complaining that he wasn’t asked to play. People thought it was staged. It wasn’t.
In the midst of the touring and chaos, Stein and Harry began using heroin. Harry describes it as just the ticket if you want to stop thinking about your problems for a while. Stein writes about a neighbour who got mugged in Central Park and came round to their flat rather “banged up”. They smoked heroin with him without mentioning what it was, much in the manner that you might offer someone a cup of tea. “I think he thought it was some form of weed,” Stein writes. “He definitely left feeling better.”
Stein says heroin was rather like consolidating all your loans: “You trade a lot of problems and distractions for one overreaching one.” Stein lost so much weight that he could fit into Harry’s trousers. He also developed sores in his mouth and a skin condition caused by an immune deficiency that landed him in hospital for three months. Eventually, he was put on a methadone programme. He got off that about 20 years later.
By that time he was married to the actress Barbara Sicuranza. They had two children, Akira and Vali. Last year in May, “We lost our daughter,” he says. Akira, their elder, died of an overdose at 19. “It was a terrible thing,” he says.
He worries that he might somehow have glamorised his own addiction, that he might have “unintentionally communicated” this to his children.
In his book, he writes of “a tendency to present tales of personal addiction as colourful ‘war stories’, art produced by pain. I thought that I presented my own drug experiences in a negative light to our kids, but I’m racked with guilt that any discussions might have been misconstrued.”
There’s a quote in his book about how, if you are given your life again, you are likely to make all the same choices; to repeat the same mistakes. He was addicted to heroin before there were industrial-strength additives and alternatives.
“There’s this epidemic now,” he says. But when he first encountered heroin, “It was amusing and easy and we looked up to our heroes, [William] Burroughs and Lou Reed and all these people,” he says. “It wasn’t like it was definitely going to kill you.”
In the park, “I would see people outside nodding out,” he says – falling asleep after a dose. But there were not “these visuals that you see nowadays”.
He was in his fifties when he had children. “Akira was such a great character,” he says. “We just couldn’t...” He breaks off. “She had tremendous anxieties and she was numbing herself. It’s a long story. I’ve been in therapy about it.”
She was taking fentanyl, the synthetic opioid that is 50 times as strong as heroin.
“She wasn’t forthcoming about her stuff with me. She just didn’t discuss her problems except very superficially. She was in and out of rehab, the whole thing.”
His voice is quiet. “I feel like she was in a burning building and I couldn’t save her from it,” he says. “Because it was going on for years with her addictions and struggles.”
Her name is spelt out in a neon sign in the hallway. On the wall there’s a black and white photograph that Barbara took of Akira bundled up in a coat and hood on the pavement outside their building. It’s snowing; it looks as if she is walking past the camera lens and away down the street.
“We have made friends with Drena De Niro, Bob’s daughter, who lost her kid a month later,” Stein says. That was also to an accidental drug overdose involving fentanyl. “We sort of came together with that,” Stein says. “But it’s so hard.”
His younger daughter, Vali, comes in while we are talking. She is at the same art school that Stein went to. She has long black hair and wears a red sleeveless shirt and green trousers with silver buckles and rings on them. She sets herself up at an easel in the next room working on a portrait of Toby, one of the cats.
Then Barbara arrives too. She’s tall, with long dark hair with a hint of purple in it, and she’s rather charismatic. When Stein is having his photograph taken and we are talking about whether he should smile or not, she says, “I know how to make him smile,” and pulls up her top and flashes him.
I keep thinking of a theory that was said to have been espoused by Jane Fonda that some people, regardless of their actual gender, are “masculine-masculine”, “feminine-masculine” or “feminine-feminine”. Marriages, friendships, political alliances all work better, so the theory went, regardless of gender or sexuality, if one partner has some masculine traits and the other some feminine ones.
“Yeah, I get it,” Stein says. “I certainly have a feminine component. Debbie and my wife both have masculine components for sure.”
They’re living now in this enormous place that is actually two flats knocked together after years when they could not afford to live in Manhattan. This happened about 10 years ago when he finally got his finances in order, Stein says.
It was just as another New Yorker, Donald Trump, was gearing up for a run for the presidency. Stein and Barbara happened to have the same doctor as Trump, Dr Harold Bornstein, the fellow who became famous for predicting that Trump would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” and later acknowledged that Trump had dictated the statement, which he had signed.
“He was a great guy,” Stein says. Once, in his office, Stein suggested that the doctor ought to surreptitiously dose Trump with LSD. The doctor’s wife, apparently thinking that the surgery was bugged, shouted, “That would be illegal,” Stein says.
What would be the effect of giving Trump LSD, I ask. I mean, what would be the point?
“That’s a really good question. I don’t know,” Stein replies. Once, years earlier, “Debbie met him for a minute. She said she thought she was way too short for him, thank goodness.”
Stein credits his recent financial stability in part to his new manager, Tommy Manzi. He began selling Stein’s photographs in a New York gallery. “The one I sell most is just the close-up of Debbie with the mirror shades,” he says. “It’s the image she used on the cover of her memoir.”
I ask him about her comment that he is a voyeur.
“I definitely have voyeuristic tendencies,” he says. “I don’t know how. I mean, I wasn’t actively walking around looking at people’s windows.”
But he did go through their bins. There’s a story in his book, from when he was at art school, about how he and a friend took to rooting through the bins of a business across the road that blew up people’s photographs into posters. The company rephotographed these private images, making negatives that they chucked away. Stein and his buddy developed them, gaining a “behind the scenes” view of America’s psyche: lots of photographs of people’s cars and children and also lots of sexual pictures, some of them quite grotesque, that someone wanted poster size, hanging on their wall.
Stein nods. He wasn’t sure if the story would make sense. He’s glad it made an impression. “Some of these things are so weird,” he says. “I was concerned with trying to present a concise version of what the f*** was going on.”
- Under a Rock by Chris Stein (Corsair) is published on June 6.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London