On its 40th anniversary in music, Blondie is honored with photo exhibit

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A Look Back Through Chris Stein’s Lens

 
 
The Blondie 40th anniversary celebrations continue with a photo exhibit curated by Jeffrey Deitch on display from September 23-29 at Hotel Chelsea’s Storefront Gallery ((222 West 23rd Street) from 1-8 PM. They’ll be showing photos, like the one above (via Gothamist), from photographers such as Bob Gruen, Annie Leibovitz, Roberta Bayley, Mick Rock, Robert Mapplethorpe, Bobby Grossman, David Godlis, and Blondie’s Chris Stein.
 

Since Blondie formed 40 years ago, one thing has remained constant: if the band’s co-founder Chris Stein isn’t onstage with a guitar slung around his neck, chances are he’s off somewhere with a camera, taking pictures. Now, the results of his four-decade-long hobby have been compiled in a new book, “Chris Stein/Negative: Me, Blondie, and the Advent of Punk” (out tomorrow from Rizzoli), and will appear in an exhibition curated by Jeffrey Deitch at the Chelsea Hotel’s Storefront Gallery alongside band memorabilia and images by the likes of Annie Leibovitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. “I was just in the middle of this milieu and I took pictures,” Stein says matter-of-factly on the phone from Vienna, a recent stop on Blondie’s anniversary tour.

 

The pictures — in which such punk icons as Richard Hell (“after Debbie, probably my favorite person to photograph”), the Ramones and Iggy Pop also make appearances — capture the essence of a lost, romantic moment in New York history. “I do miss that communal feeling of CBGB,” Stein says. “In the beginning, it was very familial, it was like people you went to school with, it was very workshoppy,” he says. “But as nostalgic as people get for that period, at the time I don’t know anyone who didn’t at some point say, ‘I gotta get out of here, it’s so dirty.’”

 

The Blondie 40th-anniversary exhibition will be on view Sept. 23 — Sept. 29 at the Chelsea Storefront Gallery, 222 West 23rd Street.

Blondie: Success And Sexism

AS BLONDIE, THE BAND turn 40 and, against all odds, prepare to release their 10th studio album, Ghosts Of Download, singer Debbie Harry relives the trial-by-chauvinism endured by the post-punk icon who made the mistake of being both female and attractive.

As the group first crawled from the New York Bowery’s punk scene at the end of the 1970s to beam their transcendental pop to millions, the reaction of their hometown peers was not universally supportive. In a burst of misogyny not atypical of the milieu, legendary New York-based rock scribe Lester Bangs wrote of Harry: “She may be there all high and mighty on TV, but everybody knows that underneath all that fashion plating she’s just a piece of meat like the rest of them.”

In an exclusive interview that graces the cover of the new MOJO magazine (street date: Tuesday, March 25), Harry relates how she was initially traumatised by the flak.

“Y’know, I have to say, I got smart,” she tells MOJO’s Tom Doyle. “After the first touring experience and the first real criticism we got, I actually hid under the covers for a couple of weeks. Then after that I just didn’t read it. It was too upsetting and I was too unused to it. It didn’t do me any good in performance because I would be on-stage and all of a sudden one of those lines would flash and completely destroy my focus and concentration and make me not enjoy it. It’s a matter of opinion. There’s no accounting for taste, so f**k ’em! Poor Lester was so confused. He was definitely part of the male conspiracy.”

In a sparky Q&A augmented by exclusive unseen photographs from the archive of Blondie songwriter and guitarist Chris Stein (see above), Harry reveals how she dealt with the group’s early-’80s crash, mixed reactions to her solo albums, and her much-mythologised “retirement” as she nursed boyfriend Stein through a debilitating immunity illness…

“All of that stuff has been totally misconstrued,” Harry bristles. “It doesn’t seem to matter how many times I set the record straight. It was a very difficult time. All I can say is that I did move on in the mid ’80s and I started doing a series of solo albums which Chris wrote on and helped me with. I did not give up my career. I had a lot of tours and I had some smaller hits. I really think that there’s some great material on those solo albums that I feel to a degree has been overlooked.”

Elsewhere she recalls being hit on by Iggy and Bowie and immortalised by Andy Warhol. Despite the knocks, she declares herself satisfied with Blondie’s place in musical history and a life “being blindly drawn like a moth to a flame.”

“I can make a long list of things I would do differently,” she tells MOJO, winningly. “But if I were actually thrown back there, I’d probably do it all the same.”

MOJO’s Blondie issue hits the shelves in the UK on Tuesday, March 25. Watch out for in-depth features on David Bowie’s 1974 transformation from glam icon to soul boulevardier, Jake Bugg’s irresistible rise and Al Kooper’s portfolio of pop prestidigitation. Damon Albarn, Terry Hall, Jeff Beck, Ben Watt, Pixies, Metronomy, Slint and Death Disco – a free 15-track CD of post-punk greats – also await.

Watch Blondie Performing at CBGB in the Summer of 1975

Watch Debbie Harry play an unreleased tune

Blondie’s debut album didn’t arrive in record stores until December of 1976, but by that point the band (originally called Angel and the Snake) had been gigging around New York City for over two years. One of the few female-fronted bands on the CBGB scene, they got a lot of press early on, but it took them a little while to actually land a record deal.

It’s unclear exactly when in 1975 this black and white video of the group was shot at CBGB, but the best sources indicate it’s from August 15th. Needless to say, Debbie Harry looks absolutely stunning, especially to a crowd used to staring at Joey Ramone. She’s also rocking the naughty schoolgirl look a good quarter-century before Britney Spears made it cool. They’re playing a very early Blondie song entitled “A Girl Should Know Better” that never wound up on any album.

“It was hard to concentrate at CBGB’s because it smelled so bad,” Harry wrote in the band’s official biography. “Hill Kristal, the owner, kept dogs in the back, and they used to throw up and shit indiscriminately. The kitchen was covered with grease, rats, flies, maggots, and shit too.”

Blondie played CBGB every weekend through much of 1975, but after signing with Chrysalis they worked their way up to the more upscale Max’s Kansas City, and by early 1977 they were playing all across the country.