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Summary
Summary
Filled with never-before-seen photos and art throughout, the much-anticipated autobiography from rock icon and lead singer of Blondie, Debbie Harry
BRAVE, BEAUTIFUL AND BORN TO BE PUNK
Musician, actor, activist, and the iconic face of New York City cool, Debbie Harry is the frontwoman of Blondie, a band that forged a new sound that brought together the worlds of rock, punk, disco, reggae and hip-hop to create some of the most beloved pop songs of all time. As a muse, she collaborated with some of the boldest artists of the past four decades. The scope of Debbie Harry's impact on our culture has been matched only by her reticence to reveal her rich inner life--until now.
In an arresting mix of visceral, soulful storytelling and stunning visuals, Face It upends the standard music memoir while delivering a truly prismatic portrait. With all the grit, grime, and glory recounted in intimate detail, Face It re-creates the downtown scene of 1970s New York City, where Blondie played alongside the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Iggy Pop and David Bowie. Aesthetically dazzling, and including never-before-seen photographs, bespoke illustrations and fan art installations, Face It brings Debbie Harry's world and artistic sensibilities to life.
Following her path from glorious commercial success to heroin addiction, the near-death of partner Chris Stein, a heart-wrenching bankruptcy, and Blondie's breakup as a band to her multifaceted acting career in more than thirty films, a stunning solo career and the triumphant return of her band, and her tireless advocacy for the environment and LGBTQ rights, Face It is a cinematic story of a woman who made her own path, and set the standard for a generation of artists who followed in her footsteps--a memoir as dynamic as its subject.
"I was saying things in songs that female singers didn't really say back then. I wasn't submissive or begging him to come back, I was kicking his ass, kicking him out, kicking my own ass too. My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious."--From Face It
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
The singer of the New Wave band Blondie and star of art-house movies Videodrome and Hairspray looks back on lots of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll in this rough-and-tumble memoir. Harry recounts her plunge into bohemian New York in the 1960s and her navigation of the music scene as it shifted from hippiedom to disco to punk. It's a story of creative ferment, as she infused the burgeoning punk aesthetic into her own glammed-up style--Marilyn Monroe with "a dark, provocative, aggressive side"--and used Method acting techniques to hone her singing while slogging through gigs in gloriously grungy clubs including CBGB's and L.A.'s Whiskey a Go Go . Her portrait of Blondie's success in the late '70s feels less effervescent, full of wearisome touring and business wrangles. Harry offers a frank look at her life on the edge, including "oversexed" erotic adventures, a mugging and rape that she shrugs off ("the stolen guitars hurt me more"), an attempted abduction by a man she thinks may have been serial killer Ted Bundy, and unapologetic drug use. ("Heroin was a great consolation," she reflects of a period when she supplied herself and her hospitalized bandmate and boyfriend Chris Stein with the narcotic.) The narrative rambles, but Blondie fans will love its piquant atmospherics and the energy and honesty of Harry's take on her singular saga. (Oct.)
Guardian Review
Taking heroin, being flashed by David Bowie, and punk-pop brilliance - but in this long-awaited memoir the Blondie singer remains mysterious to the last. When Blondie's singer, Debbie Harry, was crafting her image as a pop star in the mid-70s, she looked first to cinema. Her love of cartoon fantasy figures led her to Barbarella, as portrayed by Jane Fonda in the Roger Vadim film, though her biggest influence was Marilyn Monroe, who she recognised "was playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and the big-girl body, a woman playing a man's idea of a woman". As the only woman in an all-male band, Harry knew she had to make her mark. With her peroxide hair, thrift-store clothes and expression that sat somewhere between a pout and a sneer, she was a pin-up with a subversive streak: "My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side. I was playing it up yet I was very serious." In Face It, Harry, who is now 74, outlines the influences and events that led to her rise to fame. Written with the music writer Sylvie Simmons, the memoir is based on a series of lengthy interviews, which makes for a conversational style, though anyone looking for an excavation of the soul might be disappointed. Harry has rock 'n' roll stories to burn but the memoir as a confessional isn't her style. For the most part, the Blondie character remains. The music, which merged punk rock with pop sensibilities, is only part of the picture; having been awarded the title "best-looking girl" in her school yearbook, Harry knew the value of her attractiveness early on, and later created an industry around her image. It was she, for instance, who saw an upturned car on a New York street and, rather than moving on, declared it ideal for a photoshoot. Before designers were lining up to work with her, she would find a pillowcase and turn it into a stage outfit; later, years before Lady Gaga's meat dress, she would step out in a gown made of razorblades. Harry was driven not by a quest for fame but for creativity. "Ultimately for me," she notes, "it's the overwhelming need to have my entire life be an imaginative out-of-body experience." We learn how, having been given up for adoption at three months old, Harry was raised by her adoptive parents in New Jersey. Before Blondie took off, she worked variously as a model, a secretary at the BBC's New York office, a waitress and a Playboy bunny, all the while trying to figure out her next move. When she first moved to New York, she wanted to be a painter but, after seeing the likes of Janis Joplin, the Velvet Underground and, later, the New York Dolls, she decided music was her calling. Harry joined and left various bands including the Stilettos, through which she met Chris Stein, who would become her principal collaborator as the guitarist in Blondie, her partner for the next 13 years and, after their split, one of her dearest friends. Early on, Harry offers a vivid portrait of a seedy, bohemian scene in late-60s New York in which drugs were "part of your social life, part of the creative process, chic and fun and really just there. No one thought about the consequences." Describing her first encounter with heroin with her then-boyfriend, she recalls: "It was so delicious and delightful. For those times when I wanted to blank out parts of my life or when I was dealing with some depression, there was nothing better than heroin. Nothing." A similar matter-of-factness runs through her recollections of the man who approached her and Stein one night outside their front door and threatened them with a knife. When they said they didn't have any money, he insisted on accompanying them into their apartment. There he tied up Stein and Harry while he piled up their guitars and amps by the front door. He then untied Harry and raped her. "I can't say that I felt a lot of fear," she recalls. "I'm very glad this happened pre-Aids or I might have freaked. In the end, the stolen guitars hurt me more than the rape." Her account of the incident indicates the somewhat detached tone of this memoir. Whether reflecting on her fruitless search for her birth parents, or the New Jersey ex-boyfriend who stalked her and threatened her with a gun, or the close shave with a man who offered her a lift, and whom she believes to have been the serial killer Ted Bundy, Harry allows no room for shock, sadness or vulnerability. This is, of course, the author's prerogative and doesn't mean that the book is without depth or charm. She can be caustic and funny and is drily unfazed by the antics of her mostly male peers. While on tour with Iggy Pop and David Bowie, the latter flashes his penis at Harry in the dressing room "as if I were the official cock checker or something". Noting Bowie's generously proportioned appendage, she is moved to wonder "why Iggy didn't let me have a closer look at his dick". As her star rises in the late 1970s, towering cultural figures drift in and out of her orbit, among them Miles Davis, Patti Smith, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol. While playing a series of shows in LA, she and Stein are invited to meet Phil Spector at his mansion. He greets them "with a Colt 45 in one hand and a bottle of Manischewitz [kosher wine] in the other". Elsewhere, there are forays into film - she played a neglected wife in Marcus Reichert's Union City, and Velma Von Tussle in John Waters's Hairspray. She and Stein were keen to re-make the 1965 film Alphaville, and even bought the rights from its director Jean-Luc Godard for a thousand dollars. Only later did they learn that they weren't his to sell. By the early 1980s, band relations were fraught. A last-minute tour cancellation because of Stein's ill health (he was later diagnosed with a rare auto-immune disease) was the final straw and Blondie fell apart. Shortly afterwards, they discovered they had accrued two years' worth of unpaid taxes, prompting Harry to lose her house, her car and even some of her clothes. Swallowing her fury, and having nursed Stein back to health, she got back to work. Inevitably, Harry's tales of her solo ventures and Blondie's eventual reunion lack the atmosphere and excitement of the early years, and it's with more than a little awkwardness that she shoehorns in details of her current day-to-day life to spice things up. "Could my routines reveal further insight into what makes me tick?" she asks, treating us to her morning schedule of letting the dogs out and making coffee, to which the answer is: no. But when not resorting to padding, Face It makes for an engaging and occasionally surprising read. It's a shame that Harry passes up the chance to dig deeper into her experiences of objectification and the nature of fame, but more disappointing is that we learn so little about her interior life, and how she really thinks and feels. Perhaps that's to be expected from a notoriously private star with such an acute understanding of image. Rather than expose her inner workings to the world, Harry has determined to stay mysterious to the last.
Kirkus Review
The iconic singer reveals her legendary journey.In this whirlwind tour of her life, Harry, one of the most photographed faces in music, deploys an irreverent style well suited to her story. Her tales of life before, during, after, and beyond her time with Blondie are intermixed with interludes that capture the eclectic and electric passion she has for the creative process. In a narrative that feels simultaneously heartfelt and spontaneous, Harry recounts close encounters with violence and harassment with the same immediacy as the moments that catapulted Blondie to worldwide fame. Harry doesn't focus on the challenges of being a woman in the music industry but rather on the collaborations that fueled her creativity. Though her sound and style influenced rock, and especially women in rock, there's refreshingly little self-congratulation in these pages. Instead, readers will find reflection on life with a budding band and an uncensored view of what it took to succeed. Whether she's recounting her experiences making clothes, waitressing, meeting artists, or playing early gigs at CBGB, Harry's intimate portrait often reads like a love letter to a bygone version of New York City. The narrative reflects the energy of the punk and new wave scene as the author weaves personal stories with entertaining descriptions of partying and playing with the likes of the Ramones, Andy Warhol, Iggy Pop, and David Bowie. There is no shortage of notable cameos in Harry's chronicle of her journey to stardom, and she maintains effervescent senses of humor and grace throughout. From small venues to world tours, bankruptcy to gold records, this account of life behind the fame offers a candid view of the hard work, big breaks, and tough times that came before and after celebrity. The co-founder of Blondie, Chris Stein, provides the introduction.A wild ride of fame, friendships, music, and drugs sure to appeal to Blondie fans and 1970s rock in general. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
She remains the enigmatic face of the band Blondie: the cool, elusive beauty with the punk attitude. After reading her conversational memoir, readers may still not really know what makes her tick I still have so much more to tell but being such a private person, I might not tell everything, she coyly writes, but it is a start. She describes her birth parents a Scottish-Irish girl and a French boy, and her New Jersey adopted parents. Right from the start, Harry was blessed with good looks and abundant sex appeal. As soon as she could, she moved to New York with the idea of being an artist, before turning to music. First, though, she worked as a waitress at the influential rock club Max's Kansas City, then as a Playboy bunny. She writes candidly about her drug use, the madness of Blondie's salad days, and the Blondie character she played with the then-controversial idea of a very feminine woman fronting a macho rock band. Harry sees Blondie as an inflatable doll but with a dark . . . side. --June Sawyers Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Blondie lead singer Harry's (Making Tracks) memoir is a rambling mess with questionable reliability, proclamations of clairvoyance, obvious memory lapses, and a heavy thread of sexual abuse that leaves readers feeling as if they have intimately experienced trauma. For every moment of positive sexuality, there are horror stories about the men surrounding her. From the pediatrician who said she had bedroom eyes to drummer Buddy Rich following a preteen Harry home to Joey Skaggs and his filmmaker friend flat out assaulting her, we see a pattern of constant exploitation. Her treatment of the subject is equally horrifying. When she doesn't gloss over the events with a sort of nihilistic detachment, she makes excuses for her assailants, blames her irresistible sexuality, and, in one passage, attributes her abusive ex-boyfriend's possessive and paranoid behavior to his previous girlfriends. Harry is at her best when talking about the New York of her youth and the fashion and music she loved and worked on throughout her life. That's where readers will connect with her. VERDICT Harry indicated that she didn't want to write a memoir, and it shows. Not recommended.--Melissa Engleman, Univ. of Tennessee at Martin
