PHOTO: AXEL DUPEUX | Towards the end of his memoir Under a Rock, which hit shelves on June 11th via St. Martin’s Press, Blondie co-founder Chris Stein reflects: “I remember that back then, Debbie and I never felt we’d quite succeeded, that we’d only attained some cult status; it’s only now in the rearview mirror that people consider Blondie as part of some grand showbiz hierarchy.”
Over the course of the memoir that covers Stein’s youth and formative years as an artist up until present day, Stein confronts his own life and artistic legacy with a down-to-earth grace and enlightened candor rarely found in a rock autobiography. And by reliving Stein’s and his group’s past along with him, one is left with the knowing feeling that they most definitely did succeed insofar as leaving a permanent cultural and artistic imprint on the world of music.
Other musicians contending with the weight of Blondie’s art-forward legacy in a continually digitized world, and the glittering charisma of a beautiful and compelling band frontwoman Debbie Harry (who contributes a warmly enjoyable foreword to the book) may have selected a cynical jaded tone for their first-person narrative. Faced with the alternately perplexing and bizarre post- COVID reality of the 2020s decade we are currently living through, Stein instead uses Under a Rock to treat both the collective cultural past and his own personal past with the respect, inquiry, and celebration they deserve, without negating or damning the present.
But Stein’s understanding of New York art-grunge founded in the era of the mid-late ’70s and ’80s CBGB and Max’s Kansas City rock club glory, and the colorful living that went with it, is well articulated in his book, reminding readers of the music scene’s vitality and immediate youth-based power that still resonates in Blondie’s recordings and those of the band’s contemporaries like Television, the Ramones, and Patti Smith.
Together with Debbie Harry, Stein founded Blondie in 1974, serving as its guitarist and ideological force. The group’s ’76 self-titled debut album introduced an art-first, pop-music-honoring sonic world that continued for a number of lauded records, which included a slue of chart-topping singles whose sonic adventurousness continues to influence musicians today. Blondie designed an aural character that married downtown New York art-hip with occasionally radio-friendly melody, molding a brand new sound character that left a dramatic mark upon the world of music.
In conversation with Chris Stein, infused with his inherent New York-cool, we learn more about the roots of Blondie and the origins of his new memoir Under a Rock, his and Blondie’s creative ideologies and artistic influences, and his ongoing captivation with the Burning Man Festival.
How did you make the decision to write your new memoir, Under a Rock? What brought you to this point?
Well, my age, you know, I wanted to get it out. I have all those crazy stories that even I see as a strange bunch of stuff. I wrote a lot of it during COVID when we were isolated. Debbie had written hers and I, you know, just thought it was time to do it. I had done extensive captioning for my photo books, and I enjoyed that. I enjoy writing, and I have a lot of friends who are authors. I always kept journals, and all that kind of stuff.
This book really showcases your great sense of storytelling and the vividness of your memory. You provide so much colorful and sensory-based details in describing different parts of your life.
There was a lot of research that went on. I was constantly looking things up. My photography also helps with my memories, because I would have photos from different moments throughout the whole thing, and that helped spur stuff. Frequently people would come up to me and say, “you remember, you were at this event?” And I wouldn’t have any recollection with it initially, but then it all would come flooding back.
The way that you discuss New York City in the book almost seems to present the city as its own character.
It is. Certainly. Everything that the band did, and that the whole music scene we were involved with did, is framed by being in New York City and the qualities of the city. The big struggle was just trying to put all these anecdotes together in a way that gave them a flow. That was the hardest aspect of the whole thing, because I have lots of little stories, but to kind of make them link and keep track of the timeline also was part of the research I was doing all the time.
One of the book’s entertaining New York stories is the one about your loft, which ended up being overrun with mice. Which intensified your love for cats.
We have four cats now. I always liked cats. That apartment was my place down on Greenwich Street, which was this epic loft that I was in for about 15 years. It was like ten blocks up from the World Trade Center, and we were right there when 9/11 happened. This was down in Tribeca right before it started becoming “Tribeca.” I remember Soho, like, you know, the Scorsese movie After Hours. I remember what it was like down there when there was just one hamburger joint, and the whole neighborhood—there was just nothing there.
PHOTO: MARTYN GODDARD
Do you think certain things have improved about New York City since then?
Yeah, I mean maybe the responsiveness that social media provides people. Different protests being organized neatly on social media—I don’t know if that kind of thing would have been possible 40 years ago. Even in the music industry, there’s always a big music scene going on in New York—there’s a lot of young musicians and bands—and I see all this stuff pretty quickly. So that’s part of being in the modern world, I guess. Another part of the dialogue about what’s changed in New York City, is that what used to be club culture is now fucking hotel culture. All the young people go to hotels for events and things. Individual clubs are around, but it’s different.
I grew up in New York City and I’ve seen it change in the past few decades a lot, as everyone has. How do you cope with the changing city? A city that has lost some of its rawness and is much more, you know, TikTok culture based and all that internet-driven stuff.
Well, you know, my daughter Vali is 19. So I see a lot of things through her eyes at this point. She’s frequently on her phone, and I get to see a lot of stupid memes on TikTok and everything. I rarely use TikTok, but I do Instagram and Twitter. It’s all considerably different. Just the idea that somehow New York is more crime-laden now than it was in 1980 is completely crazy, because if people had Citizen apps on their phones in the 1970s and 1980s it would just be ongoing. It would never stop. Now, you see incidents here and there, but then it would have just been a constant flow of mayhem and crazy bullshit.
A fascinating part of your book is your accounts of all these other great bands you were surrounded by and working with in the ’70s and ’80s. You mention the group Television, and how there was a bit of light rivalry perhaps that went on, and how on occasion Blondie’s music was marketed in a lighter way, while bands like Television were pushed as slightly more serious, a heavier group.
There was a big kind of—I don’t know if was a split, but there was the kind of art rock crowd and the pop rock crowd back then in the US. We were very close to pop rock. Then there were the Ramones and the Miamis, Television, the Talking Heads, Patti Smith. And then some groups that didn’t make it. But I always maintained friendships with everybody. I had met Tom Verlaine very early on when he first came to New York, when he had long hair and was kind of a hippie. Billy Ficca, the original Television drummer, played with us on occasion.
One of the themes in your book seems to be defying the limitations of genre and labeling as artists. You articulate how the various music scenes and cultural hubs going on in the ’70s and ’80s, and the different genres and styles, didn’t cancel each other out but were all happening at the same time. A great example of avoiding artistic limits was your story of wanting Blondie to record “Follow Me” from the Camelot musical. And your bandmates were not initially into it.
It’s a beautiful song. I’m just always seduced by melody and song formation. We saw the play Camelot at Lincoln Center, and that song just really knocked me out. Our Autoamerican album is kind of about American culture, and there was the Camelot JFK reference that nobody’s fucking aware of these days, how people used to call his administration Camelot during his presidency. So that was there also. The theme of the song is about Merlin being taken away right at this pivotal moment in Arthur’s life. So that to me was about JFK being eliminated.
When you discuss Blondie going to the UK, you address how you were kind of pushed as the CBGBs crowd. Did you feel constricted by that image that was being sold in the UK?
No. The UK press over there was so different than it is now. When I look at those old articles in the UK papers, It was just so—I don’t know if crazy is the right word, but it was. They were so deep into this micro-analysis of everything. It’s nothing like what the music press is like today which is broad in general. I mean, these guys were digging into every fucking little nuance and meaning, and then being critical of those things. Some of the writers were people our own age too. And this sort of hyper criticism that went on was crazy. It was the struggle between us and the press all the time. And I said a lot of really stupid shit. I look at a series of articles from like Melody Maker and I can’t believe all the stupid crap I used to say back then. So it goes both ways.
PHOTO: CHRIS STEIN
Throughout the book you address different drug experiences from different times in your life. Some people like yourself who’ve experienced both sides of that, using substances and then withdrawing away from them, seem to have this somewhat hard-won extra degree of wisdom.
Using drugs causes you to have a different relationship with yourself. I remember feeling very cut off from—I don’t know if society is the right word—but just feeling very cut off from the world. Especially having a heavy opiate addiction as I did. And using lots of cocaine also makes you paranoid and crazy. So what I mean is, it’s unavoidable.
We lost our daughter Akira to a fentanyl overdose.
I was so sorry to learn about your daughter. The fentanyl crisis really is at epidemic proportions in this country, and it’s truly terrible.
It’s just tragic and crazy what’s going on, and nobody seems to be doing anything about it. Certainly not the government. There’s vast sums of money involved with this stuff, and I feel like it’s going everywhere in our society from the top down. People are making money from this shit. Otherwise they would do something about it.
Burning Man was a captivating part of your book. Why do you think you were drawn to that particular festival experience?
Seeing it really early on when it was just, you know, a handful of people out in the desert going crazy. One of the first things I saw was they had a store there, and you were encouraged to go in and steal stuff, but if you got caught, they’d penalize you somehow. The whole object of the installation was for you to go in and steal things.
So when I met my wife, one of the first things we talked about was Burning Man. I guess ’99 or 2000 was the first year, and we went for eight years in a row. It’s great. There was always this big divide of rich guys, even way back then. I mean, we could go to some guy’s huge tent with sofas and refrigerators and that kind of stuff. I think it’s just a microcosm of the world, what goes on there, and I kind of recommend it to everybody. One of the last times we were there, as we were driving out in the middle of the dust and this crazy environment, there was a giant stretch limousine ahead of us, which I had never seen before. Some Diplo who goes every year or whatever.
In addition to your musical legacy, your work as a photographer is fascinating. Do you have a favorite photographer or someone who influences you the most?
Dennis Stock, Mary Ellen Mark, and the usual suspects.
Are you a fan of reading memoirs and biographies?
Not really, no. And certainly not music memoirs. I avoid most music memoirs and music movies. If I’m reading stuff, it’s fiction and fantasy. My favorite music movie is probably the Coen Brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, that’s just great.
I love how it’s a film narrative that doesn’t tell a success story, but rather the opposite.
It’s just great, and it really has a great atmosphere of the period. It’s how I remember it because I was hanging out around the periphery of that scene as a teenager.
PHOTO: ALLAN TANNENBAUM
How do you feel about vinyl records in general? Do you value vinyl as a mode of music- listening?
It’s nice, but I feel like it’s a fetish. It’s like film, you know? I mean, film is a fetish. Vinyl records are a fetish. If I’m shooting photography, I’m just going to use digital. My iPhone shoots great pictures. And streaming is fine for music for me. I mean, it’s nice to have the material objects and solid box sets and all that stuff. I have a big record collection, but I don’t have a record player.
Do you have a favorite guitar player?
John Fahey. He’s pretty obscure. He was acoustic mostly. I don’t know if folk is the right word, more kind of roots. Just absolutely brilliant stuff. Very unique. He inspired generations. It’s all very simple stuff, just guitar and the studio. He’d never played with a band. Some of his records have effects, but he was a real hero. I got to talk to him a couple of times and saw him play live all the time. Mike Bloomfield, who played with Paul Butterfield, and who was in the Electric Flag, was also a personal hero. He was with Dylan when Dylan was still being pissed on by folk music purists for going electric. Bloomfield was a great character. I used to be a huge Butterfield fan. And I was always a Hendrix guy. That stuff holds up so. It’s borderline jazz. I only saw him at Woodstock.
Do you play guitar regularly nowadays?
No, not much. Johnny Ramone told me, he never picked up a guitar unless he was onstage. I don’t know if that was true or not, but, yeah.
Chris Stein’s memoir Under a Rock is in stores now via St. Martin’s Press.
