One night, on the way home to her apartment in St Mark’s Place (four rooms for $67 a month!), she dropped by the Balloon Farm, where she witnessed the Velvet Underground performing its Exploding Plastic Inevitable with Nico on vocals, Gerard Malanga on whips and leathers, Andy Warhol doing lights. Friends of friends drew her into a hippie band, Wind in the Willows, for which she played ‘finger cymbals, tamboura and tambourine’ but was mostly ‘a decorative asset’. She quit, and moved in with the drummer, who got her into heroin and a job waitressing at Max’s Kansas City, where she served steaks and lamb chops to Jefferson Airplane, Miles Davis, Candy Darling, Janis Joplin. Among other things. ‘One night I did Eric Emerson, upstairs … in the phone booth. My one-hour stand with a master of the game.’ Another night, she met a rich man who took her to California, where he bought her Gucci dresses and put her up in the Hotel Bel-Air. She stuck it out for a month before running back to New York and taking a job as a Playboy bunny. ‘It felt like I had come to a dead end.’ Exhausted, penniless, depressed, she went back home to her parents, got a job in a health club and dated a painter and decorator she calls ‘Mr C’, later immortalised as the stalker in the Blondie song ‘One Way or Another’.
But she couldn’t keep away from ‘the downtown scene’ for long, and started driving in at weekends to see the New York Dolls. ‘They were so exciting to watch … Strutting, swaggering about in their tutus, leatherette, lipstick and high heels.’ She figures now, she writes, that she ‘wanted to be them,’ but she didn’t know how, so instead of that, she ‘made it’ once with David Johansen, the Dolls’ lead singer, and drove the band around, together with their girlfriends, in her father’s turquoise Buick.
It was while she was following the Dolls around that Harry met Elda Gentile, who had the idea of forming a band called Pure Garbage with the Warhol superstar Holly Woodlawn. But Pure Garbage didn’t happen, so Harry and Gentile formed the Stilettos instead (top tunes: ‘Wednesday Panties’; ‘Dracula, What Did You Do to My Mother?’). Stein joined to play bass, Stein and Harry fell in love, the Stilettos broke up, and Harry and Stein went through a few more iterations before Blondie, as we know it, began.
The name came from Harry’s experience of being shouted at by men on the street: ‘Hey, Blondie!’ It was ironic, and to do with voyeurism and harassment, from the start. ‘My Blondie character was an inflatable doll but with a dark, provocative, aggressive side,’ as Harry put it. ‘A lot of my drag-queen friends have said to me, Oh, you were definitely a drag queen … Girl drag, not boy drag, [which] was then an act of transgression.’ She was, she writes, ‘furious’ when the band’s record label advertised ‘In the Flesh’ with a picture of her without the others, the focus very much on her ‘little nipples’: ‘Sex sells, that’s what they say, and I’m not stupid, I know that, but on my terms, not some executive’s.’ The band’s next single, ‘Rip Her to Shreds’ – clearly camp, clearly about groupies – was advertised with a poster inviting the viewer to rip Harry to shreds if they liked.