Early Blondie champions Iggy Pop and David Bowie, street artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, Beat godfather William Burroughs, Australian artist-dancer Vali Myers and scores of other names less favoured by history whiz around like cogs in a machine energised by the chaotic appetites and imaginings of the untamed NYC underground.
Stein has plenty to say about the commercialisation of these forces, witnessed at close range as Blondie gets swept up in the new wave zeitgeist, then smashed by the usual concoction of exhaustion, dysfunction and, uh-oh, drugs. With poetic timing, the pair become junkies just as they manage to buy their respectable five-storey townhouse on East Seventy-Second Street.
Chris Stein and Debbie Harry (London, 1979).Credit: Robert Rosen
“Heroin is like getting a loan consolidation,” Stein writes as Blondie staggers into a contractually obligated swansong in 1982. “You trade a lot of problems and distractions for one overreaching one. We started getting into some trouble.”
Though Harry was more circumspect in her book, there’s little doubt in Stein’s account that his decades of addiction — freebase cocaine was still to come — played a large role in his near-death wrangle with the autoimmune disease, pemphigus vulgaris. The power couple quietly split up, though she continued to care and to score for him: as sad an ending as any rock band, surely, ever had.
Except that the group called Blondie would return, of course, shedding members but releasing a mixed swag of new albums and touring their dazzling catalogue of now-classic hits pretty much constantly these last 25 years.
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“As a segment of the macrocosm, I’m caught up in a pursuit of nostalgia,” Stein philosophises with decidedly mixed emotions late in his relentlessly gripping tale. “At best it forms a bridge to where I am now. Conversely, it’s a trap that negates the modern and makes me suspicious of the onrush of the future. So much forfeiture is involved, it sometimes feels like everything is sacrificed to some idol of loss.”
Stay tuned for a final, utterly devastating loss in his epilogue, but Stein’s calm, ever-curious embrace of life’s every curveball as just another stroke on some terrible and magnificent canvas of chaos makes for a fascinating lens on a lost world.
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