NYLON Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 150) AMERICAN IDOL Debbie Harry needs no introduction. By April Long. Photographed by Wendy Bevan “Never meet your heroes,” the old adage goes, “they can only disappoint you.” The first time I met Debbie Harry—she who had inspired countless one-shouldered outfits and two-tone dye jobs over the course of my life—that warning rang crushingly true: When we were introduced backstage after a Blondie concert during the band’s first reunion tour in 1999, she uttered only a single sentence to me, and it was about lunchmeat (we were standing at the craft services table). Even worse, she did the talking through a monkey puppet she was holding. “I don’t like turkey,” she said in a weird, low voice, twisting her hand so that the stuffed simian appeared to frown in disappointment. Then she grinned distractedly and shuffled away. A meeting of the minds, it was not. It is a tremendous relief, then, that when we talk again now, not only is there no puppet intermediary, she is not—as I had feared— crazy. As a matter of fact, she’s everything I, or anyone who grew up fascinated by her deathlessly cool Blondie persona, could ever hope for: smart, funny, a little bit salty, and surprisingly self-deprecating. It’s also refreshing that even at 62, Harry still possesses an undiminished creative drive and enthusiasm for with New York’s downtown art and music scene (“I go out and see a lot of bands that are in their early stages,” she reports with a smile, “and sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re not”), even as her legacy towers over it. When Blondie emerged in the mid ’70s, female-fronted rock ’n’ roll bands barely existed (Janis Joplin and Grace Slick were among the few exceptions), so in the absence of role models, Harry did her own thing: She synthesized the Marilyn Monroe-esque blonde bombshell archetype with the attitude of a sneering punk-rock tigress. It was this duality that carved her image so indelibly in pop history: The way her face’s stunning geometry— those broad, high cheekbones, those limpid, ice-blue eyes—was unexpectedly softened by dimples and a gummy, goofball smile, and the way she punctured her own studied, sublime poise by stepping onstage and breaking into a clumsy zombie dance that became as much her signature as her hair color. “I just kind of fell into the whole thing,” she says, with typical understatement, as if becoming a globally adored music icon was as accidental as tripping over a curb. “Music really turned me on, and it seemed like something
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