Beat Punks

by Victor Bockris

  BOCKRIS: When did you first get involved in the music scene?

  HARRY: In 1967. But I was so depressed and so upset, I knew that I would do it wrong and get so far in one direction that it would make people think of me in another way. This happens to many people, like Lou Reed. I knew I couldn’t do it the way I wanted to, so at the end of the Sixties I stopped doing music. I had come to a point that seemed like a tunnel. I was at the entrance, and I could either go down into the tunnel and continue or I could take this little winding road off to the side. So from ’69 to ’73, I took a sabbatical.

  BOCKRIS: When you came back out in ’73, what was the first thing you did?

  HARRY: That was the early glitter period when I used to hang around the [New York] Dolls. They were put down by the critics, but they were the pets of the New York scene. That period – T Rex, Jonathan Richman, the Dolls – was when I jumped back in mentally. I had a little car and used to drive them around, but I was more on the fringes of everything. When I started performing with The Stilettoes in 1973, my intuition was no one was dancing to rock’n’roll. And that was what The Stilettoes wanted to do – bring back rock dancing.

  BOCKRIS: How did you learn to become a singer?

  HARRY: In the early ’70s, when I was living with a guy who was a musician from when he was four years old, I used to practice all the time with earphones on. I was always going to rehearsals and watching people play, trying to learn about the structure of music. That was my musical training period, and it was really necessary. I knew I had to really learn how to sing more and I had to learn how to sing with all different attitudes. I could only sing in a very soft voice. I could never express a lot of emotion, otherwise I would start to cry, so I could only sing like a nice, sweet girl. I could never really let go, so I would practice shouting and singing as loud as possible whether it sounded good or not.

  BOCKRIS: When you started Blondie, what was your motivation?

  HARRY: I wanted to be successful, but success was not my goal. That was not my obsession. My obsession was actually to just do it and everything else was secondary. I survived the hard times by not being obsessed. I was afraid of not being good enough musically. Blondie were never touted as being musical innovators, but we really had a terrific amount of feeling for the songs and the lyrics we did. They really meant something to us, and we did them with everything we could put into them. That’s what made it happen with the audiences.

  BOCKRIS: How do you reconcile carrying around the enormous shadow of the legend of Blondie?

  HARRY: That’s funny, because to me it’s grossly out of proportion. It’s ridiculous and preposterous, yet it’s totally accurate in relation to what is considered really vital and really valuable in the culture. But it just seems totally out of proportion that I should be considered anything other than another singer. The mythologizing of it is absurd. I was just being a driven, obsessed, star-crazed rock’n’roller, and doing my best to be part of all that, and wanting to say a few things that were relevant at the time, and now it’s gone way out of proportion.

  The concept of the youth culture has an awfully powerful effect, which is incredibly fucking misleading. It’s so boring, so incredibly ridiculous, but it controls many people’s lives. They think they better get it done now because when they get to be forty-five they’re not going to have anything.

  BOCKRIS: Where do you see rock heading?

  HARRY: The only place left for rock to go is toward more girl stars. There’s nothing left for men to do. There’s bound to be more male stars, but they can’t express anything new. What girls are saying is: “Don’t treat me like that, treat me like this.” Which Nancy Sinatra initially did with ‘These Boots Were Made For Walking’! That’s the sort of predominant attitude. It’s not the same as ‘Take another little piece of my heart now’, or ‘Baby love, baby love’ – all that kind of gush. It’s giving girls a chance to develop, get to the stage where their style of living and thought is the same [as men’s], not some clandestine activity.

  The rules of the game nowadays are: if you can screw somebody and get away with not paying for something and make somebody else pay the price, that’s cool. It’s a horrible, rotten status quo, and it’s not going to get any better by itself. That’s the really bad thing about the downfall of religion. Religion said everybody must be good so that everything would stay in balance. I can look at it like a scientist, but still have respect for the powers that would be gods.

  Maybe more ritual would install a sense of order and balance. If the proper ritual is followed it has some kind of electromagnetic implication that further on down the line more and more of your circuits will be completed so that you’ll be able to do more of the things you want, and more of the things you want to happen will happen. This is what magic really is. You should always strive to summon up your own magic on a daily basis.

  BOCKRIS: I’m confused by the Nineties. Historically, the last five years of any decade are supposed to be a fantastic time. But nothing’s happening!

  HARRY: There’s so much information, Victor. People are too aware of history, too informed. There’s going to be a new perception, a new idea of what people are. People will be a different thing. The human race will be a different thing. It will be much more sophisticated and aware of its animal motivation. It’ll become more intellectual.

  BOCKRIS: That’s the greatest non sequitur I’ve heard in a long time: aware of animal motivations so it will become more intellectual.

  HARRY: The human animal is motivated by food and sex, right? And now, because we’re so informed about political history – the nature of people going after money, power and sex – everybody’s exposed. There’s no way you can actually do those things without a secretive, animal, clandestine thing. It’s just a different kind of behavior. You’re going to have to be very psychic and slinky.

  “Will You Shut Up?!”

  The following conversation between Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and Victor Bockris was recorded at Harry and Stein’s penthouse apartment on West 58th Street in 1980, when Blondie was the No. 1 rock band in the world. As Harry and Stein lay in bed, we discussed the text for Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie.

  CHRIS STEIN [to Debbie]: At the beginning here you definitely should say I experimented with drugs. Everybody knows it. If you leave it out it’s just a fucking whitewash. You say if you didn’t try [drugs] you’d have ended up killing yourself, and yet there’s nothing in the first page to suggest why you’re miserable enough to want to kill yourself.

  DEBBIE HARRY: I was miserable. I just thought that’s the way everybody was.

  STEIN: If you don’t say you took drugs and you were depressed and you couldn’t sing and you couldn’t talk … if you don’t put the negative side in, it just comes off like a normal life.

  HARRY: It was normal. Why don’t you put in the nitty gritty about your life then, Chris?

  STEIN: [switching the subject] This stuff on writing a popular song is a little cheerleadery.

  HARRY: The method of writing a hit song is to fucking die and then come alive again. Just experience as much pain as possible, then you could write a hit song right. Get four Stella D’Oro breadsticks and a big jar of Vaseline and wait for the full moon in Cancer on a warm night and go down to the street and ram the breadsticks up your ass and then lie down in front of the taxicab so it runs over your stomach and makes the sticks into crumbs. Then belch, throw them all up, take the breadcrumbs and cook them into a cookie and mail it to Ahmet Ertegun. After he eats the cookie, you bring in your tape. This is the magical formula. Or, get a big jar of peanut butter and plug it into the wall. Spread it all over your face while you’re holding onto an electrical wire. Rent a twenty-dollar-per-month one-room apartment without a bathroom, lock yourself in with a year’s supply of Dexedrine and just sit there and never sleep and just bang on the guitar. Then, at the end of the year, just take the last three minutes of the session and that’ll do it. Guaranteed hit.

  VIC
TOR BOCKRIS: When you started Blondie, did you think it was going to be a big, international sensation?

  HARRY: Not at first. Things were picking up gradually, but everything was so burned out at the time I never thought, Wow! A hundred people are coming to see me. I’m making it. At that time, who cared? New York wasn’t a place for live entertainment, except in cabarets. At first, we played around sporadically. Our first drummer used to pass out from anxiety. At the most important moment when we really needed him to play he would pass out. He was always lying on the dressing room floor after drinking half a glass of champagne. That’s when we played at Brandy’s. The biggest song we did was ‘Lady Marmalade’. One night, this girl Maud Frank the Third came in and invited us to play at her townhouse for a party for the Equestrian Club. This was more or less Blondie.

  STEIN: They offered us two hundred dollars, so we jumped at it.

  HARRY: We got more than that!

  STEIN: The thing was, we were only supposed to play three sets.

  HARRY: We got FUCKING FIVE HUNDRED DOLLARS up-front, then we said: For a thousand we’ll play all night.

  STEIN: You’re out of your brain!

  HARRY: I am not out of my brain.

  STEIN: Are you just making this up? [To Bockris] She doesn’t have a real good head for details, believe me.

  BOCKRIS: [To Harry] You mean this is just a little fantasy in your mind?

  HARRY: We did it for more than two hundred dollars.

  STEIN: We got two hundred dollars for fucking three sets is the way I remember it, and then they said, Well, play one more time and we’ll give you another hundred dollars. We came out with three hundred or three-fifty. I certainly don’t remember getting a thousand dollars – for anything at that period!

  HARRY: Well, I guess you’re right.

  BOCKRIS: You only had a couple of songs. How could you play all night?

  HARRY: Victor, what are you talking about? You don’t even know what our repertoire was. We did ‘Poor Fool’. We did Tina Turner songs. We did ‘Narcissima’ and …

  STEIN: We didn’t do any of those songs! We never did ‘Narcissima’. C’mon, Debbie.

  HARRY: I’m beat now.

  STEIN: So shut up! Why don’t you watch TV? [To Bockris] The thing is, when we played at Brandy’s we did cover material like ‘The Little Tootsie Roll Song’ and ‘Honeybee’.

  HARRY: The early disco stuff that came out in ’73 and ’74 more or less overlapped into Blondie. We just jammed out.

  BOCKRIS: So you really were drawing an audience that early on?

  STEIN: Around this time Patti Smith said to Debbie: I love you, come away with me. We’ll live as lesbos. Let’s stick our tongues down each others’ throats. Shall we put that in?

  BOCKRIS: [To Harry] Why can’t you just tell the story that Patti Smith came up to you and told you to get out of rock’n’roll?

  HARRY: ’Cause it’s tacky.

  STEIN: Yeah, just leave it out.

  HARRY: Just say around this time people came up to me and told me to get out of rock’n’roll. Patti wasn’t the only one. I was pretty horrible. I deserved to be told to get out of rock’n’roll. I was pathetic. Horrible and pathetic. I was very shy and stiff.

  BOCKRIS: You weren’t good enough for rock’n’roll?

  STEIN: No, that didn’t have anything to do with it. Everybody knew she was too good-looking and she was a threat. Our bass player Fred’s last show was Jungle Night when Debbie, Tish and Snooky dressed up as jungle girls.

  HARRY: We all wore leather thongs. Fred quit that night.

  STEIN: He didn’t really quit.

  HARRY: He quit.

  STEIN: He didn’t.

  HARRY: He stopped playing, didn’t he?

  STEIN: Well, he ran off the stage.

  HARRY: For God’s sake, when did he quit?

  STEIN: He ran into the street in the middle of a song because the set was so horrible and disgusting.

  HARRY: It was always disgusting! To say we were a garage band was a compliment, because we were a gutter band. We were a sewer band. We were disgusting.

  STEIN: But all this stuff about us being shattered and blown out wasn’t any more than usual.

  HARRY: You know that’s true, Chris! It’s true! It was so, because all we did was lay in bed for a while.

  STEIN: What are we doing now?

  HARRY: That’s all you ever do!

  STEIN: That’s all we ever do.

  HARRY: Bullshit! It was a new thing to me then. I wasn’t into it then. I had a day job.

  STEIN: Shut up! [To Bockris] Just say that Fred quitting really ripped the bottom out from underneath us. Period.

  HARRY: It ripped the bottom out from underneath me!

  STEIN: Will you shut up?

  HARRY: Because it meant the bass part went out.

  STEIN: Stop it! There’s not much tape left. Please! I don’t want to do this if you’re going to keep carrying on, Debbie!

  HARRY: [In a very small voice] Sorry.

  STEIN: You gotta shut up and stop it! If you don’t I’ll kick your fucking ass! Now shut up. Watch Meteor on TV. Look, look!

  Marianne Faithfull has an ability to create an immediate intimacy, drawing you into the circumference and atmosphere of her life with a jolt of time travel that is extraordinarily powerful if at first a little unnerving. I enjoy seeing her more everytime I see her.

  8

  An Interview With Marianne Faithfull

  “I had this thing that I wasn’t good enough because I’m white.”

  At her hotel on East Fifty-third Street in New York City, I met Marianne Faithfull. We walked one block east to 11 Nido, an Italian restaurant, where we were given a quiet corner table and served an exquisite meal, although I cannot remember what we ate. Within minutes of sitting down with Marianne, I was completely caught up in the rhythms of her being – her energy, pain, strength, anger; her edges.

  A star in 1964 – when she recorded Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and Andrew Oldham’s ‘As Tears Go By’ – Marianne saw her career crash at the end of that decade as a result of a lethal combination of drink, drugs, and being a woman in The Rolling Stones. She returned in 1979 with the brilliant album Broken English, and the years that followed culminated with her 1990 album Blazing Away, a moving and joyous testament of her life. She has just completed a year-long international tour for that album.

  When we left the restaurant after this interview, appreciative waiters applauded Marianne, who went her own way outside. I had to sit down on a stoop for several minutes to collect myself before proceeding. Marianne Faithfull is a very intense person. She was right there all the time I was with her.

  VICTOR BOCKRIS: Do audiences react differently to you now than in the past?

  MARIANNE FAITHFULL: Yes, they do. I feel very much, especially in America, that they’ve been with me through everything. People have seen me through these things. Their love and acceptance has worked, and now I’m really able to give it back; I’m capable.

  BOCKRIS: Small halls and clubs like the Bottom Line are such good places for you. There are so many people who get stuck in that bigger scene, and then they lose contact with the audience.

  FAITHFULL: Well, I’m determined not to do that. I need a place where I can see the people and where they can really see me. It’s so important that I never try to compete in any way with the male rock thing – whatever that is. I hate it. I hate those concerts. I don’t go to them myself. I want to do things that I would like to see.

  BOCKRIS: Changing the subject to songwriting, was ‘Why D’Ya Do It?’ written with Heathcote Williams?

  FAITHFULL: It’s a poem, and he wrote it. I went to see him and asked him if he had anything for me. He brought this out and said, “I’ve got this, but I really would like Tina Turner to do it.” And I said, “Will you read it?” And he did. I just laughed. “Are you kidding? You think Tina Turner would do this? You’re out of your mind. I’ll do it. You won’t get anyone else to do this, so
let me have it.” And he did.

  BOCKRIS: You once said that ‘Sister Morphine’ was the most redeeming song you’d ever performed.

  FAITHFULL: God.

  BOCKRIS: How was ‘Sister Morphine’ actually written?

  FAITHFULL: Mick Jagger had the tune and was playing it around the house we lived in in London, in Cheyne Walk, in the Sixties. I never would have imposed myself on the tune if he had done anything with it. But it never seemed to happen, and I got to like the tune. Then I got impatient, so I sat down and wrote the words.

  BOCKRIS: Did Keith Richards write the music?

  FAITHFULL: No. Keith Richards didn’t have anything to do with it, as such. What he did, which is good, was write to Allen Klein [ex-manager of The Rolling Stones] to tell him that I had written the words; otherwise, I would not have gotten any of the money. But what I want now is the credit.

  BOCKRIS: Why didn’t you get the credit? Was that just the way things worked in those days? The Stones put only their names on the material?

  FAITHFULL: You’d have to ask Mick Jagger that. It’s an odd thing. I wrote the words, I did the work; why didn’t I get the credit?

  BOCKRIS: Did you make formal attempts to get it?

  FAITHFULL: Well, I don’t know if I did, actually. It’s only slowly that I’ve come to realize that I deserved the credit. I know I wrote the song, but I was in such a lowly place that I was just pleased when I got the money. That pleased me for a long time. Then I realized, This is mad. I should also have the credit. On my record, of course, it says, ‘Jagger/Richards/Faithfull’. I don’t know what to do, because I don’t want to see Mick Jagger, and I don’t want to ask him for anything. I don’t think I should. I think I should just get the credit if I did the work. It’s crazy.