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Face to face with Debbie Harry
On my first day of my very first class at UC Berkeley, I sat next to a guy who looked a little like John Lennon, was wearing a Bruce Springsteen button, and had been christened with the same name as a member of the Rolling Stones. He was easily the coolest person I had ever met up to that point, and the very coolest thing about him was that, in his apartment (he had his own apartment!) he had one of those life sized, stand-up cardboard cutouts of Debbie Harry.
Today those markers might not sound so magical, since Bruce and Blondie are almost as big as the Beatles. But back then, as Harry herself remarked at a recent appearance at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center, the world was a lot smaller. Harry was responding to the statement, made by her interviewer, that it seemed odd that she and her musical partner Chris Stein had been to so many of the same shows (Woodstock, for example) before they met.
“What do you mean by smaller?” said the interviewer.
Harry paused briefly, I hope to emphasize what a stupid follow up question that was, and then said: “That there were fewer people.”
And she is right. Not only were there fewer people overall, but there were way fewer people who were into the same things as us, like Blondie and Bruce and the Beatles and the Stones. Finding one of those people amongst a throng of…
