Book review #35: Under a Rock

Split screen reveals 'webwork of coincidences'

Under a Rock by Chris Stein (Corsair, 2024)

By Steven Taylor

WHILE I WAS waiting for my copy of Chris Stein’s memoir, I read Debbie Harry’s Face It (2019). Chris must have read it while writing his, and both of them mention talking about their history while writing. It’s cool to have two takes on the same scenes, like a split screen. The filmic metaphor is apt. While reading Stein’s account, it occurred to me that Blondie was a movie, a work of visual art with a soundtrack. If you want to see the splices in what follows, you’ll have to read both books.

One important aspect of some rock memoirs of the past dozen years – Patti Smith (2010), Richard Hell (2013), Kim Gordon (2015), Debbie Harry (2019) and Thurston Moore (2023) – is their portrayal of New York in the 1970s, when a fiscally bankrupt city met an aesthetically bankrupt pop machine and produced something new.

They all came as young adults, but Stein gives us Brooklyn in the 50s and the Village in the 60s. He is of the city from the start. Where else can a twelve-year-old exit a movie theater, try an unmarked door across the alley, and step into a Stan Getz set at the Café Au Go Go? There are a lot of alley crossings, lots of coincidences.

In her memoir, Debbie writes, ‘Coincidence came calling for me big-time in the early seventies…It’s supposed to mean just these random, disconnected events that concur or collide. But coincidence is not that at all. It’s the stuff that’s meant to be.’ Meant-to-be, like memoir, is retrospective fiction, filmic truth, coincidences are made meaningful in the edit. Click. Our protagonists’ mystic bent lends a touch of intimacy to the read.

My coincidence upon cracking Chris Stein’s Under a Rock was that I was reading it two blocks east of the walkup where he spent his childhood, and five blocks north of the home of his high school years. Brooklyn can be like that. You’re retracing some charged tracks around here. A city is a webwork of coincidences.

‘Things that connect and become woven and then shoot off to form previously unimagined combinations. Small changes that tumble into a fresh dynamic –coincidence and chaos give birth to a new creation.’ Debbie said that. At first Chaos came to be, then Earth and Eros. Hesiod said that.

Recalling New York in the 1940s, Claude Lévi-Strauss said, ‘It was then a city where anything seemed possible. Like the urban fabric, the social and cultural fabric was riddled with holes. All you had to do was pick one and slip through it if, like Alice, you wanted to get to the other side of the looking glass and find worlds so enchanting that they seemed unreal.’

Downtown in the 70s could be like Alice’s mirror, except the hole might be shit-hole bar with a plywood stage and a deaf (though competent) soundman. The first time I played CBs, I went in early for soundcheck, got a beer, sat down, and then stood up to hazard the toilets. The chair stuck to my butt. This must be the place.

One rare virtue of Stein’s memoir is that it has an index. A non-fiction work without an index is a pain in the ass. Particularly in an artist’s autobiography, you want multiple entry points. Maybe you want to scan their network first, or see what he says about your fave beatnik, or to see if your band gets a mention. A good index means you don’t have to slog through 50 pages of adolescent trauma to get to the faces. This is not to suggest that Stein’s early history is not engaging. Quite the opposite.

It seems to me that most memoirs are more focused on the author-subject. Stein is always of a group. That, too, is of the city. It’s as if his Brooklyn junior-high crew gets transposed up the years to a larger constellation. He was a collective from the start. Maybe that’s the Commie parentage. He reminded me of Ginsberg in that regard.

He’s a photographer. He tells you what he saw. After ‘Howl’’s ‘I saw…’ and Kerouac’s ‘stop to see the picture better…’, writing is to say what one sees. Like Ginsberg, Stein was a photographer early on, and it became the main thing after a career in another field. A strong visual sense is a virtue in a memoir. I wasn’t counting, but it seems to me he named more films and directors than albums and musicians as major influences.

His early reading is mainly science fiction, though he told Reality Studio, ‘I read Junkie as a kid and was very embedded in the tone. I had one of those old double paperbacks.’ He also explained to RS that his parents had been ‘borderline beatniks’, adding ‘I knew who Ted Joans was at age 11. They had his poetry books.’ But Burroughs is his major Beat connection.

He gets into music via the movies. ‘It was film soundtracks that led me into buying records before ending up a music enthusiast. West Side Story (1961) was a huge event.’ Lawrence of Arabia (1962) is a lasting influence. Later, when he gets hold of session players in LA, his horn section has guys who had played on Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence soundtrack. ‘I was totally knocked out by this.’

In the early 60s, the biggest sound a kid could get happened at the cinema. Some of the old movie palaces were still in business, vaudeville halls built with pre-microphone acoustics and then wired up with sound systems. And after the war, some serious composers were operating in Hollywood. A full orchestra blasting over Technicolor could be mind-blowing.

Chris starts experimenting with audio in his bedroom, wiring his turntable and reel deck up to multiple speakers salvaged from TV and radio sets left on the street. ‘Poverty hifi’ he calls it. At 12, he gets a Harmony Rocket and a Silvertone amp for Christmas. It takes him a while to figure out the basics (There were no YouTube tutorials. You were on your own. It took me months to get my 12th birthday Sears rig tuned and learn some chords).

The Shangri-Las and the Supremes at first seem ‘commercial’ to this kid ( but he later repents). The Beatles were off-putting due to the hype, until he played some tracks over and over. He plays the Ventures’ ‘Lolita Ya-Ya’ all day until the neighbors complain (There’s definitely Blondie in that track). He’s mainly into folk music, because of the whole ‘authenticity’ thing that came with the folk revival. He makes compilation reels of Dylan and listens late at night on his Wollensak tape-recorder.

His mother, an abstract painter who’d come through the Village and worked decorating shop windows uptown, arranges for him to take the entrance exams at Mensa. Membership hinges on scoring in the top 2% for IQ. He’s in at 13. Brooklyn high school is a bust, so his mom finds a cheap private school in a dance studio across from Carnegie Hall populated by showbiz kids.

He plays bass and guitar and starts to jam around. At 17 his band opens for the Velvets, his first gig in a big room with a PA. Somebody tells him, ‘Andy thought you were fabulous.’

We all got our first weed at 16 and stayed stoned for years. Then came the great catalyst – LSD. At 19, I was tripping once a week. At 19, Stein is in a chronic state of hallucination. He dreams, ‘I was chasing the Ocean Avenue bus as it pulled away from our big old building.' He’s running after the bus and is inside it at the same time. ‘Standing in the bus was a blonde girl who said, “I’ll see you in the city”.’

By this point he thinks that every time he plays the White Album, the Beatles have to play it live for him through the ether, and he regrets the inconvenience. Finally, he gets a break, as in a psychotic breakdown and a fortunate series of events.

Mom puts him in a taxi to Beth Israel downtown (Ginsberg’s final hospital). After a week in solitary, he’s allowed to wander the halls. On a regimen of Thorazine, he settles into depression and anxiety. He sees people being dragged into electroshock therapy, so behaves well enough to be allowed out on supervised day trips.

On a visit to a gym he’s approached by a guy who asks if he’s OK. Chris says something about his situation and the guy delivers a helpful pep talk. ‘He said his name was Garland Jeffries and that he was a musician.’ The future Atlantic Records artist played that year on John Cale’s first solo album, but would not have been well known at the time.

The way out isn’t bad. Now that he’s in the system of the People’s Republic of New York, he’s going to get welfare payments and the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation is going to float his tuition at the School of Visual Arts. Going to school in New York, you can get some amazing teachers (My own kid’s high school music teacher played with Debbie Harry post-Blondie).

At SVA, Chris has a music class with Steve Reich. It’s the time of minimalism and conceptual art (Guess who is going to take that to rock’n’roll?) He takes the first video production class at SVA after the school invests in the new Sony Portapak and schleps the unwieldy thing everywhere.

That first summer out of the bughouse, he hears about something happening upstate and hops on a bus to Woodstock. Back at school, he sees a flyer on a bulletin board ‘for something called the New York Dolls.’ He’d been answering ads in the Village Voice and auditioning for bands. He connects with Tom Verlain but doesn’t follow up. Years later, Richard Hell writes that he’d auditioned for their Neon Boys. Richard says he didn’t get in because he was ‘too nice’.

He goes to see the Dolls and realizes that David Johansen had been at his house in Brooklyn while dating a mutual friend. The opening act are the Magic Tramps, ‘the first real glitter band in New York,’ according to Debbie. He becomes their photographer and roadie and occasional bassist. Someone gives him a four-track recorder and he starts layering sounds.

On a date, he goes to see ‘this poet, Patti Smith’ do a reading, and thinks she should start a band. He has long hair, eye makeup, junk store clothing, and knee-high green boots.

In September of 73, he hears about a girl group playing in a bar in Chelsea. It’s extremely low-tech. The stage is a slab of plywood on a pool table and some chairs. Debbie says the lighting was a drag queen (Holly Woodlawn) standing on the bar holding a lamp and some gels.

Chris says before the show, in the crowd he sees ‘a very striking girl…She had short dark hair and fantastic features.’ Debbie says it’s her first gig with Amanda Jones and Elda Gentile and a male backup band and she’s nervous, so she fixes on a backlit figure in the shadows. She can’t see his face but she feels his gaze. After the set there he is, long hair, ‘ripped up glamour and smelling of patchouli’ with ‘incredible eyes’. Next day, the Stilettos need a bassist. Click.

Since childhood Chris has collected knives. Debbie’s band may have been named for high heel shoes, but it’s also a name for a switchblade. This is me talking, not him, but it’s remarkable.

They start out friends and bandmates. The final push comes when her stalker ex starts phoning her friends. Chris gets the call one day and sets the guy straight. Debbie says, 'Chris and I hadn’t made it, but right after that we did. Then we kept on making it for thirteen years.’

She abandons her Jersey apartment and gets a pad in Little Italy. They split off from the girl band and form Angel and the Snake with Fred Smith (soon to defect to Television). Debbie was still working her beauty parlor job in Jersey, and one day, when there were no customers, to stave off boredom her co-worker dyed Debbie’s hair blond.

Back in the city, she says, ‘When I walked down the street the construction guys and truck drivers would yell, “Hey Blondie!”’ Click. They open for the Ramones and Television at CBGB. There’s no real money (If I recall correct, headlining at CBs might get you $300).

Debbie is making her own outfits from scraps of fabric and castoffs she finds in junk shops. While living in a bombed-out loft, they offer space to a design prodigy who’s working for Halston. Debbie says he helped her fix her look out of pity. The boys in the band cut their hair and start dressing in the cheap-because-passé mod style.

Chris documents everything on film. They’re gigging, but they’re broke. He’s on welfare and she’s a bikini waitress on Wall Street. Rent could be cheap in those days. Ed Sanders says that the 60s happened because of rent control. You could wait tables part time, find a cheap pad, and obsess about your art.

In the 70s, I had lovely old Italian neighbors paying $30 a month because they’d been in those tenements all their lives. And the old industrial district of Soho had vacant workshops, illegal as residences, but the landlords would take rent rather than let them stay vacant, and nobody was watching.

I still know dancers and musicians who got in there in that decade and stayed. Blondie were based for a time in what had been a doll factory. Conditions could be rough. Richard Hell says he pulled down a bit of tin ceiling and got showered in roaches. Stein did it at his place and got showered in a half-century’s worth of rodent droppings.

There is a blip of business interest in the band early on. One producer likes Debbie’s looks, but says she’s too quiet. They work on her character. Chris says she ‘comes off as part little kid doing a pretend show in front of a mirror and part erudite, glamorous, risky woman.’

I recall that when Blondie started to make it, there was chunnering among the CBs rats, but come on, Debbie was fabulous. She sounded like a young woman just singing. Fresh and no frills, but full-on. When she’s rockin, she reminds me of that scene in The Misfits (1961), where Marilyn is going off on the horse-killers.

Blondie played hard. And that look. When the band takes off and they play LA, film people get interested. She’s up for a role in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, but they gave it to Darryl Hannah, maybe because control freaks at the label or in management nixed it. Just imagine Debbie as an acrobatic killer android. Dreaming is free.

At one point she’s chastised in print by Lester Bangs, of all people, for being sexy on stage. Compared to what was happening a few years later on downtown stages, Blondie was demure (Wow. Never thought I’d use that word).

Of the six memoirists invoked above, three had drug problems, but Stein goes into the most detail with it. I won’t rehearse the tale, but it’s admirably vérité and a real bummer. He winds up in hospital for three months with a possibly fatal disease with an unpleasant sounding name.

His friends assume it’s AIDS. Debbie drops everything to care for him, sometimes sleeping on a cot in his hospital room. She smuggles in junk to put off withdrawal while he’s so ill. She says the doctors turn a blind eye. Eventually they both kick, but she goes first.

Burroughs accomplice Brion Gysin used to sing a poem that goes ‘Junk is no good baby’, and then goes into every possible combination of those five words. Junk is every possible kind of no good. It undoes things. People, places, and scenes get wrecked. It breaks things, relationships, hearts. Of their breakup after 13 years of partnership Debbie doesn’t say much. Chris says maybe it had to do with Debbie getting clean before he did, and being afraid of using again.

One thing that came of the junk nightmare was the friendship with Burroughs, who recommended a doctor and later hosted Stein in Kansas when they were both on Methadone.

The Reality Studio interviewer refers to Burroughs as Stein’s mentor, and Stein does not correct him. Aside from the stuff, they connect through their visual art, collecting weapons, and literature. ‘He was very calm and measured and no bullshit and that was nice to be around […] I consider myself very fortunate to have been able to hang out with Bill. He was a wonderful guy.’

Congratulations on the book. Thanks for the music and memories. I am sorry for your loss.