music book review: Chris Stein's "Under A Rock"
It's memoir szn
As regular readers of jukeboxgraduate dot com are aware, it is memoir szn, and so the latest from Blondie guitarist/cofounder Chris Stein, Under A Rock [bookshop | amazon ] was on my list. Stein is smart and thoughtful and observant and I have always appreciated his point of view, and the book does not disappoint on those fronts, at all.
Stein grew up as a New York City kid and I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that I found those early chapters of the book about his childhood engrossing and absolutely fascinating. Some of that is because I grew up in the fucking suburbs and hated every minute of it, and this proves that my insistence that if I just lived in a place that had sidewalks (this was an argument I made when I was 10, my criteria for civilization was not having to walk on the side of the road) things would be better for me. Some of it is that my dad was born and raised in Brooklyn and he would never talk about it because he had a difficult childhood, so I am eager for any window into what it was like before I was born. Of course, Stein had non-conventional parents who didn’t fit into conventional society, which makes the potential for good weird possible.
Stein shares that whenever he’d see one of those old console televisions sitting on the edge of the sidewalk waiting for trash collection, that he’d always stop and take out the speakers, which he would then take home and wire into his existing collection of abandoned speakers, hanging on the wall of his bedroom, where he’d pipe rock and roll music into.
In the pre-bedbug days I cannot tell you how this was absolutely a thing that New Yorkers did constantly because you could find so much incredible stuff discarded and waiting for trash pickup. You’d compare great scores with the guy behind the counter at the bodega, your neighbors, people you worked with, and no one thought, “You’re taking stuff out of the trash? And bringing it into your HOUSE?”
Later in the book he talks about how one day they were offered a free piano, and because they lived three blocks from CBGB’s on the Bowery (266 Bowery, a building I would always acknowledge whenever I was walking down that way – it’s just a short stroll from 222 Bowery, which Burroughs fans will recognize as the address of the Bunker) they called CB’s owner Hilly Krystal, who had a part-time moving company and Stein knew he would be strong enough to help them get a piano up the stairs of their building – which he did.
I was going through some older writing of mine and in one piece I comment that I was not a huge Blondie fan -- which is true! -- but I have also somehow managed to read every single book about them, going back to Lester Bangs’ 1979 Blondie and 1982’s Making Tracks, which Debbie Harry and Chris Stein wrote with Victor Bockris. At the time, there were pretty much zero books about punk rock history and so when something showed up you were going to read it, no matter who the book was about. The arrival of one of these books was an event, like when Iggy’s I Need More was published.
I remember buying I Need More at the Barnes & Noble at the corner of W. 8th Street & 6th Avenue, where they had to put it behind the counter, because in their review of the book, the Village Voice helpfully noted what page browsers could find the full-frontal nude photo, and so in that part of town in particular, it was a constant stream of people who were not ever going to purchase the book making sure they could see what everyone was talking about, and it felt like everyone I knew was talking about it, even though I was only a college freshman at Fordham University (Go Rams), and the D train from Fordham Road stopping at W. 4th Street was the closest I came to being part of any downtown community.
I mention this because if you have also read these books you are going to inadvertently engage in this mental triangulation as you’re reading, because many of these stories are not new to you. You read Making Tracks, you read Debbie Harry’s own great memoir (which I somehow didn’t write about? It came out in 2019. I am absolving myself) and now you are reading Chris Stein’s perspective, some of which you already read in Making Tracks.
Caryn Rose
i kind of talk about Debbie Harry's memoir in this
One of the jobs I had after college was as what was called “a transcriptionist.” It was basically typing up things that were on tape, whatever the thing was. Not court proceedings (although I had done that earlier in my life, the hours were not great and you had to invest in your own equipment) but you would be amazed how much work was done by people talking into tape recorders in the 80s. We got a bunch of raw interviews one day from a documentary company and I fought to be able to get my hands on the ones I cared about, one of which was Debbie Harry. And I remember sitting there typing and the interviewer asked something about drug use and her response was, “I’m not going to talk about that.” I mean, the book was called MAKING TRACKS, guys, you might as well have held up a neon sign advertising your heroin use, but at the time you only knew if you knew and I did not know and neither did anyone I knew well enough to have these conversations with.
Well, now we know! It is in this book. There were a lot of drugs! They did not talk about the drugs back in the day for obvious reasons, but there were a lot of drugs, and they did not help.
This is why I find the back half of the book which discusses Stein's post-Blondie life more interesting, because they were all new information. To be fair, even re-reading stories I already knew was still interesting, because Stein is an engaging narrator and because they were interesting stories, like touring as support for Iggy when Bowie was playing keyboards in his band. I am never going to be tired of hearing about this! “They were great. There wasn’t any class warfare,” is how Stein begins the section, meaning that unlike when they opened for Television in the UK (this is another one of those stories I literally know by heart. I do not have to go pull the book to make sure I get the details correct) they made sure Blondie got a soundcheck and Bowie offered Debbie Harry tips on performing.
Stein confirms that both Iggy and Bowie tried to hit on Debbie – “She gave them both rainchecks, as it were,” is how Stein characterizes it. It takes a lot to compete with something like that, and yet I did not want to put the book down after I got through the parts I was already familiar with. Stein makes you want to root for him, he is not whitewashing anything, he has the same dry humor that was prevalent in Blondie and is the thing that makes them such a New York band even once they blew up beyond that. You’ll be glad when he gets off drugs, when he gets married and has kids, and when Blondie make their comeback. I wanted to write a couple of hundred words on this book and here I am, making myself stop here because otherwise I could just keep going on about it. That’s the best thing you can say about any book.
