Book Review (2): Picture This; Mick Rock, Deborah Harry

Deborah Harry is not a big icon here



Debbie Harry just isn't that big an icon in the United States, maybe
outside NYC vintage punk and gay circles. As someone else said she has
a big head and a figure like a teenage boy, and she was in her
mid-thirties when the rock media started treating Blondie as if they
were The Who with a female Roger Daltrey. Mainstream rock fans and U.S.
rock radio-AOR-never bought into it at all. And while I agree she has
some acting talent, the fact is she needed to be out there twenty years
before she was, at the very least ten.

Age isn't the only issue: Blondie's music just didn't fit in, and rock
success in America-almost as much as in country, where it's
everything-is about fitting in and being there, touring like a dog in
towns like Cleveland, Cincinnati, St.Louis, Dallas, on and on. And
going over in those towns. Blondie gigged heavily in NYC, Boston, LA,
San Fran, and college towns-punk band territory-although Debbie's Doris
Day pipes were sorely out of place there. In arenas, Blondie the band
were variable in performance (as were the Grateful Dead-but they had a
throng of fans for whom they could do no wrong that went with them) and
even on good nights they lacked what more successful female acts-Heart
and Pat Benatar-had: loud riffing or shredding guitars, the main
obsession of arena rock audiences.

Mick Rock was a leading rock photographer and I can see where having a
decent looking girl-especially one being so openly compared to Monroe
and Bardot as she was back then-would have been a welcome change of
pace from the short pasty Englishmen and longhaired, smelly,
codpiece-stuffing American hard rockers. But that doesn't change the
fact that his subject just isn't of all that much interest. Overseas
sales will probably exceed those in the U.S. by such a wide margin that
they will probably wonder why they didn't just let the few hardcore
"Debheads" import their own from UK or Euro Amazon.