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Face It: A Memoir

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Recent years have brought a wealth of memoirs from women who served pivotal roles in the creation of punk and its descendants: Patti Smith, Carrie Brownstein, Kim Gordon, Viv Albertine, Linda Yablonsky, Chrissie Hynde, Alice Bag, as well as associated works like Sarah Marcus’s Girls to the Front and Vivien Goldman’s Revenge of the She-Punks. What I got was a book with uninteresting random facts that had no bearing on Blondie and a bunch of weird fan art. Still, gazing at any one of the thousands of photos and videos of Harry from the 1970s and 1980s, you have to concede the guy had a point. I'm still doing a good job of sticking to my resolution not to read any more rock memoirs written by dudes, but for whatever reason, I still really like reading accounts from the 1970's era of music - so I'm always looking for books written by the women who were around for that era. Harry’s childhood sounds like a middle class idyll, growing up under the benign parental neglect that allowed suburban children to roam the woods and abandoned shacks where hobos holed up, and “play with a few sticks, dig a hole, poke at an anthill, make something or roller skate.

Debbie Harry shares secrets to youthful looks after comparing Debbie Harry shares secrets to youthful looks after comparing

There are a lot of descriptive scenes of New York in the 70's and name dropping of people of whom some I were familiar with but others that I had to look up. The contractor turned out to be a controlling stalker, the inspiration for Blondie’s 1979 hit “One Way or Another. There are books that chronicle those times better ( Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk by Legs McNeil, Gillian McCain) but hey, it's Debbie Harry - nice to read her perspective of her journey and learn of how some of the band's top hits and records were created. She has outlived many of her friends and the New York characters who populate her book, such as David Bowie, Warhol and Joey Ramone. This goes some way to explain how she managed to cram in so much before she became the superstar frontwoman of Blondie.In 2010, Harry began a series of recordings (featuring solo songs and duets with Nick Cave and others) for The Jeffrey Lee Pierce Sessions Project. Just a few months later, she reflected on having a facelift, and confessed she felt under pressure to cave into the pressure from today’s beauty standards. In the UK, Harry's long tenure with Chrysalis Records also came to an end after Debravation 's lackluster sales, but the label released all of Blondie's albums and Harry's KooKoo album (for the first time on CD) as remastered editions with bonus tracks. Harry has also engaged in an acting career with over 30 film roles and several television appearances to her credit.

Debbie Harry The much anticipated autobiography by Debbie Harry

Before that, there was junior college, where her boyfriend’s psychoanalyst mother arranged for the young couple to drop acid with Timothy Leary on the Upper East Side. The CBGB’s alumni list is very impressive considering the overall size and squalor of both the bar and its neighborhood. All I really wanted, and all I ever want from memoirs like this, is a clear-eyed, no bullshit look at the past while also giving me a good amount of hot gossip. her inherent nerdiness (comics and the space program, oh my), something you would never think possible in the life of an Icon of Cool like Debbie Harry. I wouldn’t want to venture a guess, but I think that she’s tremendously motivated and smart, and I have no doubt that she would have had a great career without me.She released the single "Rush Rush" in 1983 (produced by Giorgio Moroder and taken from the film Scarface), but it was commercially unsuccessful. Her face – those killer cheekbones and heart-shaped mouth – is immortalised on Blondie album covers and in Warhol’s famous portrait. Back in 2009, the rocker said she had cosmetic surgery to “stay in the game”, and has no regrets because she did it for “business reasons”. The fact that she’s survived and thrived this long in an industry that eats its young underscores that impression.

Face It: A Memoir by Debbie Harry | Goodreads

After college she worked various jobs—as a dancer, a Playboy Bunny, and a secretary (including at the BBC in New York)—before her breakthrough in the music industry. The stories from 1945-1981 are lifted from Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie a bio published in 1982, which was written by Victor Bockris from interviews with Debbie and Chris Stein. Ebooks fulfilled through Glose cannot be printed, downloaded as PDF, or read in other digital readers (like Kindle or Nook).Harry continued to appear in independent films throughout the 2000s, including Deuces Wild (2002), My Life Without Me (2003) and Elegy (2008).

Face It: Debbie Harry’s cool and forthright memoir

Debbie Harry is 74 and I'm sure she's lived a colorful and interesting life, but the only real interesting parts of this seem to be made up (she claims to remember being three months old, as a child she "had bedroom eyes" and always "received a lot of sexual attention", she says she was almost kidnapped by Ted Bundy--which has been debunked several times, she's claims to be psychic, she was raped at knifepoint but it didn't really bother her because she was more worried about their stolen equipment, etc. She spent a few years in New York after college, waitressing, failing at auditions and playing in bands.She jumps around and and talks about everything under the sun, but without really making much sense at all. The same year, she collaborated with Jazz Passengers' Bill Ware in his side project Groove Thing, singing lead vocals on the club hit "Command and Obey". Harry said of her relationship with Warhol, "I think the best thing [Andy Warhol] taught me was always to be open to new things, new music, new style, new bands, new technology and just go with it. Yes, Harry glides over some darker days (drugs, assaults and near-death experiences), but counters them with the simple joy of collaborating with the likes H. As a kid, the beautiful women on the silver screen were fairytale versions of what life is for a woman, because when I was coming up there was no such thing as women’s lib.

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