Drink, drugs and a brawl with Debbie Harry: How Blondie blew up

Clem Burke loved rock ’n’ roll. To the late drummer, music was a lifeline – he spent his adolescence stumbling in and out of such famous New York City punk institutions as CBGB and Max’s Kansas City, falling head over heels for the New York Dolls and David Bowie. His diet consisted of cheap bodega sandwiches and cigarettes, and any spare cash went on swish clothes and strong booze. His dream? To be a rock star. Then came Blondie.

Burke’s posthumous memoir The Other Side of the Dream is not your typical rock-star autobiography – filled solely with bragging “when I met…” anecdotes (though he met everyone) and stories of drug-fuelled excess (though there were a lot of drugs) – but an ode to the bands who changed his life, long before Blondie hit the big time. It took Burke, who died of cancer last year aged 70, 20 years to write (and was completed with the help of his lifelong friend, Kathy Valentine of the Go-Gos). A vivid portrait of rock’s unapologetically messy glory days in the 1970s and 1980s, with so much detail you wonder how he remembered it all (diaries? Post-Its? Tape recordings?), its only negative is that he won’t be here to read all the glowing reviews.

Raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, Burke honed his drumming skills in youth bands that toured local proms and bar mitzvahs. When he was 17, his mother died of cancer, and shortly after, he swapped education for the magical island across the Hudson River. New York City looms large in Burke’s memories; the seedy, crime-ridden streets of downtown Manhattan in the 1970s and early 1980s, filled with dirty clubs and exciting new bands, offered as much promise as the glittering lights of Oz.

A self-declared Anglophile enamoured with British musicians from a young age – especially the Beatles, Kinks and David Bowie – Burke later fell hook, line and sinker for New York punk. We walk with him through the doors of CBGB, witnessing this New Jersey boy thrust into a world populated by Johnnys Thunders and Ramone, not to mention then-strangers Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. Soon enough, Burke was auditioning for Harry and Stein in a Lower East Side loft. Little did anyone know that those early jam sessions would result in sold-out world tours, hit songs from Heart of Glass to Dreaming, and that Blondie would one day become “as synonymous with CBGB as the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads and Patti Smith”.

Burke describes meeting and performing with his boyhood idols Bowie and Iggy Pop: the former had been endlessly kind, the latter charismatic yet chaotic (“Iggy’s concert rider dictated that there be no food backstage, only alcohol and drugs”). He smoked weed with Allen Ginsberg, hung out with Jean-Michel Basquiat and partied with John Belushi. While on tour in Thailand, Burke bumped into Gary Glitter poolside at his hotel, where the “world-renowned paedophile” dragged himself away from the “several young Thai girls” he was entertaining to introduce himself to the Blondie gang.

In his post-Blondie years, while making music with Eurythmics’ Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart in north London, Burke met Bob Dylan, who asked him one day what caused Blondie’s demise. “Drugs,” he simply replied. It’s a one-word summation that could apply to 99 per cent of rock ’n’ roll’s greatest tragedies.

However, fans hoping for play-by-play descriptions of why Blondie fell apart in 1982 may feel short-changed by Burke’s diplomatic account. Firstly, Harry and Stein’s move to freeze out guitarist Frank Infante caused internal upset (Infante and Burke were long-term friends), while Stein’s heroin addiction and related illnesses also caused trouble. (A bout of illness while on tour in London resulted in an onstage brawl at Dingwalls in Camden, a fight between Stein and Burke descending into Harry “kicking the living s---” out of the drummer to protect her man.) Managers, producers and tour managers came and went. After years of massive success, especially withParallel Lines (1978), Blondie’s cool-kid status began to fade, leaving ticket sales stagnant and new bands such as Duran Duran replacing them in the charts.

Throughout the book, Harry and Stein appear more like Burke’s hip, aloof, older siblings than his equals in the band. They were the decision-makers and law-enforcers; he was the creative soul just happy to be there. Harry in particular never really comes into focus – we’re reminded of her beauty, talent and charisma, and not much else. I guess that’s the point. After decades in a band spearheaded by one of rock’s most iconic frontwomen, where he spent his nights hiding behind his kit, here, Burke wants to be the star attraction. As one of American music’s greatest ever drummers, he deserves it.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]