Gaffney, Joe
Debbie Harry
Issue #33
The legend Joey Ramone tagged as ‘really hot but really cool’ calls her first solo album in 14 years aggressive
By Charlotte Robinson
Published: September 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
It’s somewhat surreal to hear Deborah Harry’s voice on the phone. After all, it’s a voice most of us have grown up with — the one that lamented the love that “turned out to be a pain in the ass,” cautioned that she was “not the kind of girl who gives up just like that,” and even joined Kermit the Frog for a duet of “The Rainbow Connection.” As the lead singer and primary lyricist for Blondie, Harry scored countless now-classic hits, including “Heart of Glass,” “One Way or Another,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “Call Me,” “The Tide Is High,” and “Rapture.” In the late 1970s, when women were largely absent from mainstream rock (with a few notable exceptions like Heart’s Wilson sisters and the ladies of Fleetwood Mac), Harry became a superstar who not only fronted a successful band, but had a hand in writing its material, which often showcased her wit and flair for the absurd. Only Harry could insert a bizarre line like “your hair is beautiful” into a disco song (as she did in “Atomic”) and sing it with the utmost sincerity.
Although her stunning good looks probably played as much of a role in Blondie’s success as the quality of its music, Harry was hardly a pop tart with prepackaged sexuality. Besides being largely in charge of her own image, which was often as aggressive and weirdly arty as it was movie-star seductive, Harry had an impressively supple voice that easily handled the many different genres Blondie explored, including bubblegum pop, reggae, jazz, and disco. She and her band mates were even pioneers in the world of hip-hop, becoming the first act to take the sound from urban streets to the top of the charts with “Rapture” in 1981. Harry always led these musical experiments with tongue firmly held in her streetwise New York cheek. As Joey Ramone once put it, Harry was not only really hot but really cool.
Today Harry and her Blondie cohorts are members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and she is hailed as a trailblazer for female artists like Madonna, Shirley Manson, and Gwen Stefani. Still, respect has come much more slowly for Blondie, and for Harry in particular, than commercial success did. The backlash started almost as soon as the band reached the height of its success. Many fans cried “sellout” when “Heart of Glass” topped the charts in 1978, feeling that Blondie, one of the acts that got its start at the legendary club CBGB, had abandoned its punk roots for a more lucrative disco sound. Still more were turned off by the genre experiments of 1980’s Autoamerican. It was Harry herself who took the brunt of the abuse, including criticism from rock critic Lester Bangs in his 1980 Blondie biography that she used her sexuality to sell the band — as if no one would have noticed that she was attractive otherwise. More unfairly, as Harry puts it, “I think people tended to overlook the fact that we did some serious, musically groundbreaking things.”
Although journalists still occasionally slag Harry for her voice — which, ironically, was one of the group’s strengths and, even more unfairly, for not looking like she did 30 years ago — the tide has largely shifted in Blondie’s favor in the past decade, culminating with the band’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2006. “I think we’ve really been acknowledged for our little contribution,” Harry says modestly. “Blondie was never a huge group like U2 or something. In a way we’re more like Iggy [Pop]. Iggy was a real innovator and ground-breaker and he’s never been super huge.”
Although Blondie may be getting its props at last, what remains a challenge is getting people to remember that Deborah Harry is not Blondie. Even though she is now 62, it is difficult to hear Harry’s name and not associate it with her blonde bombshell image and those classic Blondie songs. But even before Blondie formed in 1974, Harry had established herself as a colorful character to say the least. She recorded an album with a hippie group called Wind in the Willows, was a Playboy bunny, waited tables at Max’s Kansas City when it was Andy Warhol’s hangout of choice, and claims she was nearly abducted by serial killer Ted Bundy. More importantly, she started carving out a career as a solo recording artist and actress even before her original stint with Blondie ended. Since the mid ’90s, however, she has traded solo efforts for collaborative work, first tapping into her lounge-lizard side with the Jazz Passengers (she sang on their 1996 release Individually Twisted) and then on Blondie’s two most recent albums and numerous tours. So why is Harry finally returning to her solo career with Necessary Evil after a 14-year hiatus?
According to Harry, the new disc was not planned, but fell into place when the singer found herself with some free time between projects. Harry had worked with the Brooklyn-based production team Super Buddha (Barb Morrison and Charles Nieland, whose other clients include Rufus Wainwright and the Scissor Sisters) on a club-ready remake of “In the Flesh” for Blondie’s Sound & Vision compilation. “Guy Furrow from the Toilet Boys was the one who introduced me and he was doing a club night in New York called Charm School,” Harry explains. “So I said I had an idea for a song called ‘Charm Alarm.’ We wrote that song and did it in the studio with them and it grew.” Along with “Charm Alarm,” Necessary Evil contains several other collaborations with Super Buddha, including the rocking “You’re Too Hot,” raunchy “Dirty and Deep,” pure pop “Two Times Blue,” and disarmingly straightforward ballads “If I Had You” and “What Is Love.” Super Buddha has given many of the songs a club-friendly feel, and that’s a direction with which Harry is comfortable. “I go to clubs,” she says. “I like new stuff. I’m not closed off or stuck with one particular thing. I think that’s one of the reasons I did this. When you’re in Blondie, people want you to play Blondie songs.” Besides having a club vibe, the songs on Necessary Evil are, in Harry’s opinion, “even more aggressive than some of the Blondie stuff. I really am a rock person.”
Harry raised some eyebrows by skipping her Blondie hits in favor of solo material while performing on the True Colors human rights tour this summer, but she remains unapologetic. “That freezes you,” she says. “That puts you there in that time capsule. It’s very debilitating sometimes.” Harry says recording her new solo material “really gave me a great opportunity for growth and to say things in the way that I feel today.” That’s not to say Necessary Evil is a complete break from Harry’s past. Besides the Super Buddha material, the album also features contributions from the Jazz Passengers’ Roy Nathanson and Blondie’s Chris Stein, with whom Harry has collaborated since the early ’70s. When asked about her creative relationship with Stein, Harry calls him her “punk soul brother.” “He’s just a lovely, sweet person with a great sense of humor and great talent and I just adore working with him.”
All things considered, the Deborah Harry of today is not all that different from the Deborah Harry of yesterday, even if she’s updated her sound and is expressing herself a bit more. “I know that physically I’m getting older, but mentally I’m still the same stupid punk, you know? I’m so glad that I was a punk and I’ll always be a punk,” she declares. “I just think that having that little edge and fighting spirit really helps me and suits me.”
In addition to the new disc, solo appearances, and a summer tour with Blondie, this year sees the release of several films in which Harry has a supporting role. Although she has studied with Harold Guskin — whose other students include Kevin Kline, Glenn Close, James Gandolfini, and Steve Martin — and appeared in films by James Mangold, David Cronenberg, and Jonas Akerlund, Harry insists, “I don’t have a really big film career. I just get lucky and I really love doing it.” One of Harry’s most memorable roles was in John Waters’ Hairspray, playing Velma Von Tussle, the diabolical stage mother with a giant beehive hairdo. “Who would’ve thought that this guy,” Harry says of Waters, “this crazy director who worked with Divine on all these weird very underground, controversial little movies, would ever come up with something like this, that’s become an American classic?” Among Harry’s latest films to start hitting theaters are Elegy, a drama starring Penélope Cruz and Ben Kinglsey and directed by Isabel Coixet, and Full Grown Men, in which, Harry says, “I play a woman who was a retired Weeki Wachee mermaid. It’s a coming-of-age kind of picture.”
Despite a work schedule that would put most 20-year-olds to shame, Harry isn’t planning to slow down anytime soon. “I don’t feel like I’m juggling or I’ve got plates up in the air or anything like that,” she says. “I feel like I’m at a really good point in my life and artistically I’m just really happy.”
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