A L S O_.T O D A Y

Blue Glow
Monica Lewinsky talks to Barbara Walters: Has anybody invented a drinking game for this?

Blondie: Where are they now?
By Johnny Angel
The reunion is a love-fest. So why are two ex- members of New Wave's biggest band hopping mad?

BLONDIE: BEHIND THE MUSIC | PAGE 1, 2
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There's also a strong jazz influence on "No Exit," especially on Harry's vocals. The playfully snaky phrasing on the loungey "Boom Boom in the Zoom Zoom Room" and the funky "Happy Dog" seems gleaned from her work with the Jazz Passengers, a New York avant-garde jazz combo known for its theatricality and wild improvisations. Bittersweet ballads like "Double Take" and "Night Wind Sent" are ideal showcases for Harry in her chanteuse mode. Age agrees with Harry -- her voice here is richer and sultrier, as sexy as ever but tempered with wisdom. "Double Take" especially aches with a world-weary compassion born of outrageous experience and resilience in the face of loss. After all, one of the most striking things about Blondie is that, despite their dizzying trip from the insanely nihilistic, drug-drenched New York punk scene to worldwide fame and then to relative individual obscurity, its founding members are all still alive.

"So many people have died in our lives, with the drug epidemic and AIDS epidemic," says Harry. "I was at a photo show about the punk scene at CBGBs a couple years back, and as I walked through the show and saw all the faces, I realized at least 50 percent of the people in the pictures were gone. I don't think that's normal for people in their 20s and 30s, except during wartime." Adds Destri, "We've gone though our own little hells. We consider ourselves lucky that we made it out the other end. We've lost so many friends to the plague, drugs, freak accidents. It's a rough game we're in, but my three closest friends all came through it unscathed."

Seeing so many of their friends and contemporaries flame out or fade away may have lessened any bitterness the band feels about watching other artists get rich off Blondie's innovations. "I was really proud when I heard our style go on and influence other people," says Destri. "But I also saw that people were having massively successful careers based on aspects of us, so there was a bit of jealousy there -- but also a bit of gratification."

"No Exit" is such a fantastic album that it carries with it the melancholy question of how many other great records the band could have made if it had gotten back together sooner. "Clem and I were discussing this once. Clem sees a lot of glasses as half empty, whereas I see them as half full," says Destri. "Clem said, 'Man, we could have went on into the mid-'80s, gotten paid and walked away hugely successful.' I said to him that I believe if we had gone on, we would have made less and less inspired records and would have been left without such a great legacy. We would never have had the opportunity to come back as strong as we did."

Says Harry, "I'm lucky. I've had an interesting life, a lot of success and an equal amount of failure. No matter how famous any of us are, we all probably have the same ups and downs, some things that are good and some things that really suck. I think I'm happier now than I was when I was younger. I know more about myself. I've had a lot of really cool experiences. The worst part is thinking that someday it's going to be over."

She won't admit any resentment toward Madonna and her millions. "It's very funny, but everybody asks me about Madonna. Just in asking that question you have the answer. Some of the fundamental things she used image-wise were directly influenced by me, that's pretty obvious. In Madonna's defense, she has worked extremely hard in her career and she's done some incredible things. Some of her music is really great, and anyone who achieves that kind of success has of course worked her ass off for it."

Ironically, with her keen business sense and genius for appropriation, Madonna has made it easier to see the shrewdness behind Harry's persona and has illuminated Blondie's brilliance. When the band first made it big, after all, many critics saw guitarist and co-founder Chris Stein (then Harry's lover) as the brains behind the group. Harry's parody of the bitchy blond bimbo was lost on many, and her contribution to Blondie's music was written off. The women in rock who followed her, though, have made it impossible to condescend to Harry in the same way, and hopefully everyone who listens to "No Exit" will hear her influence.

"I think that people's eyes have been opened a lot," says Harry. "That sexist approach has changed, the industry has opened up a lot more, and it's now apparent what my real contribution was. I worked on the music. I put my ideas into melody. I wrote a lot of the lyrics. I created the style and attitude of the band. I was holding my own, honey."

Likewise, the rest of the band professes to have come to terms with the fact that for many people, Debbie Harry is Blondie -- a misconception once so prevalent that the group adopted the blunt slogan "Blondie is a band."

"When I was younger, there was a point where I was like, damn, here she is and the photographers are pushing me out of the way again," says Destri. "But there are other things that I've always found worse than that -- like digging ditches for a living, or having to do manual labor under a nasty boss. In the first incarnation of Blondie, I wrote a couple of great songs and I was very lucky to have this superstar sing them for me. Of course there's a lot of times when people don't recognize the members of Blondie for the creativity that they have, but at the same time it also hurt Debbie, because nobody looked past the image to her creativity."

In 1999, those conflicts seem fabulously far away, and Blondie have nailed their place in both the music history books and on the contemporary pop charts. "If you asked me if I would do it all over again," says Destri, "I'd say give me a beautiful blond chick with a voice."
SALON | March 3, 1999

Michelle Goldberg is arts editor of Metropolitan magazine in San Francisco.