Gary Valentine is best known as a member of the rock band Blondie and penning the songs X-Offender and (Im Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear before leaving the band. Since then Valentine has become a popular writer out of London writing about such disparate topics as the dark side of the sixties and writer death by suicide. I got a chance to talk with Valentine about his autobiography New York Rocker: My Life in the Blank Generation with Blondie, Iggy Pop, and Others, 1974-1981.
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Daniel Robert Epstein: What made you want to write this book?
Gary Valentine: The original publisher is Macmillan in the UK and I was writing a book on the 1960s for them. I told them about my past with Blondie and all that and they said Great, would you like to write a book about that as well? So I wasnt about to say no so I did two books with them. The first is called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius and The Disinformation Company published that and then New York Rocker came out.
DRE: Did it feel like the right time to do this book?
Gary: Its been over 30 years. I met Blondie in 74. When I came to the UK I published a few articles on topics that had nothing to do with music. Then like many freelance writers, I was just looking for material that a publisher would be interested in. So I thought, Oh well, this would be a good thing. Aside from Please Kill Me [by Legs McNeil], which is really a collection of interviews with people, no one had really written a first hand account of that time in music. I was there and I was playing in what became one of the biggest bands. I thought someone would be interested in that. It was a time in my life that I wanted to capture before I completely forgot about it. I had some journals from the time and my very good friend Lisa Persky, who was my girlfriend at the time, had lots of photographs. Her photos pretty much make up the bulk of the photos in the book.
DRE: Since you do write many other things, was the process of writing this much different?
Gary: Oh yeah, this is a lot different than my other books. My other books are not exactly academic but theyre more scholarly. I write about intellectual history or cultural history, weird stuff. I write a lot for the Fortean Times and I do a lot of reviewing here for The Guardian and The Independent. Its very different because its about me. But I tried to say, What sort of book are these books like? Everything I wrote is true, I didnt make anything up. But I tried to keep it gritty. I also knew that it was about a New York that no longer exists and it seems to me that it has receded into the realm of myth especially now with CBGB being closed. I dont know whats going to take its place. Probably some overpriced apartment building.
DRE: What will probably go in there is a bank. It seems like there are as many banks now in New York City as theyre are Starbucks.
Gary: Well thats saying a lot. I hadnt been to New York in quite some time and when I went back in 1996 to play with Blondie, I walked around my old neighborhood and into a part of town that nobody used to go down to. You just didnt go down Avenue B or Avenue C unless you went there to score heroin or find a cut rate prostitute. Now you throw a rock in any direction and youll hit a Starbucks or a Gap or something like that.
DRE: Even though you had your journals and Lisas photos did you verify any stories just to make sure things were correct?
Gary: I didnt talk to anyone at all. Nobody has gotten in touch with me and told me I made a mistake. I did look into some things. I looked at some old New York Rockers, which is the paper that was around before Punk Magazine came out. There are great resources for research here. The British Library has practically everything thats ever been printed. There were a couple of things I was unsure of so I asked Lisa because she was there at the time.
DRE: Did any of the things that you did back then surprise you now?
Gary: [laughs] Well, yeah, some things. There are a few things I felt like, Why did I do that? Sadly so many people from that time have passed on to the next level and I think Here I am, relatively healthy and with a second or third career. At one point before I wrote the book, when I was playing with Blondie again, we wound up at a party at some big photographers place. I bumped into a fellow named Lee Black Childers who was around for a long time. We knew each other from back then and we started talking and every other sentence was, So and so passed away. We started counting them but then we were like No, this is too morbid.
DRE: Are you surprised at who is still around?
Gary: Im not surprised that hes still alive, but Ive always wondered how Richard Hell made a living after all that because he was such the archetypal character from that scene. He pretty much invented punk rock.
DRE: What made you decide to put in stuff from before you got into the scene when you were a teenager?
Gary: I was just saying how I got there because I thought it was interesting stuff. I left town when I was 18, I was running around the Lower East Side in makeup during the New York Dolls era. At the time I went through this rather tragic experience because my underage girlfriend became pregnant and the baby never made it out of the hospital. Thats the skeleton in the closet people like to know about. Also it wasnt as if Blondie plucked me out of nowhere. I had been hanging out in the scene and I was writing lots of bad poetry, which thankfully got transmuted into writing songs.
DRE: What made you realize Blondie was going to be successful back then?
Gary: Oh because I was part of it. Thats why I realized Blondie was going to be successful [laughs]. At the time we were we were 25th on the bill and we were known as the band who would open for anybody. No one thought Blondie was going to make it. I looked the part, I was really skinny, I wore dark glasses all the time and I knew Clem [Burke] from high school. Clem asked me, Do you want to audition for the band? Once I started playing with them I was determined to be a star or a poet or a writer or something like that. Aside from Clem, Chris and Debbie, nobody else really had that confidence. People saw Debbie and said Yeah, shes beautiful and she has a great voice and all that but we were really bad. She would forget the lyrics and Chris would look at the guitar as if it just materialized in his hands and he had no idea what it was. The only one who was really dependable was Clem.
DRE: Whats the story with what happened last year at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Gary: It was a typical Blondie debacle. Friends of mine emailed me and said that Blondie was going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and I said, Well, thats good for them. I didnt think Id be included because Id been airbrushed out of their history a couple of times. They said, Your name is on the list. I know now it was a good move on my part to get in touch with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because I didnt hear from them and I knew that if they were just going to go through the Blondie connection I wouldnt have heard from them because Blondie management has said The ex-members will not be performing with Debbie that evening and They will not be on stage at the same time as Debbie. All that crap. I thought, Oh this is just so typical. VH1 showed an edited down version of the evening. What happened was that when it came time for us to go up there and have our ten seconds of fame. Frank [Infante] said, Hey Debbie, wed really love to play. She said, Well Frank, cant you see my band is here. He said, Your band? Well, I thought Blondie was being inducted. This is the Waldorf-Astoria with a packed room of music luminaries and it suddenly just goes quiet and everyones like, What the hell is going on? I think Frank did the right thing to call her on that and apparently they did a very bad set after that. I didnt hear it. I was in the toilet when they were playing but I understand it was a bad performance.
DRE: Was there ever one specific incident that made Debbie not interested in you anymore?
Gary: No, I think it was a series of things. Youve got to remember that I was playing with them when I was 20. Debbie had been around for ten years trying to make it and she realized this was her chance and she wanted to call the shots. Clearly she was the one who was going to get the most attention. But we werent just a backup band, we all contributed to the look of the band. I was the one who did the skinny tie and the retro-mod look and we all wrote songs and we all performed. Ive never been able to kiss ass so I stood up for myself. Also the fact that I jumped around on stage made them afraid that I was going to decapitate Debbie because I had been pogo-ing with this long bass guitar.
DRE: Are you working another book?
Gary: Im doing a book about writers who committed suicide or who wrote about it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Buy New York Rocker
Daniel Robert Epstein: What made you want to write this book?
Gary Valentine: The original publisher is Macmillan in the UK and I was writing a book on the 1960s for them. I told them about my past with Blondie and all that and they said Great, would you like to write a book about that as well? So I wasnt about to say no so I did two books with them. The first is called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius and The Disinformation Company published that and then New York Rocker came out.
DRE: Did it feel like the right time to do this book?
Gary: Its been over 30 years. I met Blondie in 74. When I came to the UK I published a few articles on topics that had nothing to do with music. Then like many freelance writers, I was just looking for material that a publisher would be interested in. So I thought, Oh well, this would be a good thing. Aside from Please Kill Me [by Legs McNeil], which is really a collection of interviews with people, no one had really written a first hand account of that time in music. I was there and I was playing in what became one of the biggest bands. I thought someone would be interested in that. It was a time in my life that I wanted to capture before I completely forgot about it. I had some journals from the time and my very good friend Lisa Persky, who was my girlfriend at the time, had lots of photographs. Her photos pretty much make up the bulk of the photos in the book.
DRE: Since you do write many other things, was the process of writing this much different?
Gary: Oh yeah, this is a lot different than my other books. My other books are not exactly academic but theyre more scholarly. I write about intellectual history or cultural history, weird stuff. I write a lot for the Fortean Times and I do a lot of reviewing here for The Guardian and The Independent. Its very different because its about me. But I tried to say, What sort of book are these books like? Everything I wrote is true, I didnt make anything up. But I tried to keep it gritty. I also knew that it was about a New York that no longer exists and it seems to me that it has receded into the realm of myth especially now with CBGB being closed. I dont know whats going to take its place. Probably some overpriced apartment building.
DRE: What will probably go in there is a bank. It seems like there are as many banks now in New York City as theyre are Starbucks.
Gary: Well thats saying a lot. I hadnt been to New York in quite some time and when I went back in 1996 to play with Blondie, I walked around my old neighborhood and into a part of town that nobody used to go down to. You just didnt go down Avenue B or Avenue C unless you went there to score heroin or find a cut rate prostitute. Now you throw a rock in any direction and youll hit a Starbucks or a Gap or something like that.
DRE: Even though you had your journals and Lisas photos did you verify any stories just to make sure things were correct?
Gary: I didnt talk to anyone at all. Nobody has gotten in touch with me and told me I made a mistake. I did look into some things. I looked at some old New York Rockers, which is the paper that was around before Punk Magazine came out. There are great resources for research here. The British Library has practically everything thats ever been printed. There were a couple of things I was unsure of so I asked Lisa because she was there at the time.
DRE: Did any of the things that you did back then surprise you now?
Gary: [laughs] Well, yeah, some things. There are a few things I felt like, Why did I do that? Sadly so many people from that time have passed on to the next level and I think Here I am, relatively healthy and with a second or third career. At one point before I wrote the book, when I was playing with Blondie again, we wound up at a party at some big photographers place. I bumped into a fellow named Lee Black Childers who was around for a long time. We knew each other from back then and we started talking and every other sentence was, So and so passed away. We started counting them but then we were like No, this is too morbid.
DRE: Are you surprised at who is still around?
Gary: Im not surprised that hes still alive, but Ive always wondered how Richard Hell made a living after all that because he was such the archetypal character from that scene. He pretty much invented punk rock.
DRE: What made you decide to put in stuff from before you got into the scene when you were a teenager?
Gary: I was just saying how I got there because I thought it was interesting stuff. I left town when I was 18, I was running around the Lower East Side in makeup during the New York Dolls era. At the time I went through this rather tragic experience because my underage girlfriend became pregnant and the baby never made it out of the hospital. Thats the skeleton in the closet people like to know about. Also it wasnt as if Blondie plucked me out of nowhere. I had been hanging out in the scene and I was writing lots of bad poetry, which thankfully got transmuted into writing songs.
DRE: What made you realize Blondie was going to be successful back then?
Gary: Oh because I was part of it. Thats why I realized Blondie was going to be successful [laughs]. At the time we were we were 25th on the bill and we were known as the band who would open for anybody. No one thought Blondie was going to make it. I looked the part, I was really skinny, I wore dark glasses all the time and I knew Clem [Burke] from high school. Clem asked me, Do you want to audition for the band? Once I started playing with them I was determined to be a star or a poet or a writer or something like that. Aside from Clem, Chris and Debbie, nobody else really had that confidence. People saw Debbie and said Yeah, shes beautiful and she has a great voice and all that but we were really bad. She would forget the lyrics and Chris would look at the guitar as if it just materialized in his hands and he had no idea what it was. The only one who was really dependable was Clem.
DRE: Whats the story with what happened last year at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?
Gary: It was a typical Blondie debacle. Friends of mine emailed me and said that Blondie was going into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and I said, Well, thats good for them. I didnt think Id be included because Id been airbrushed out of their history a couple of times. They said, Your name is on the list. I know now it was a good move on my part to get in touch with the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame because I didnt hear from them and I knew that if they were just going to go through the Blondie connection I wouldnt have heard from them because Blondie management has said The ex-members will not be performing with Debbie that evening and They will not be on stage at the same time as Debbie. All that crap. I thought, Oh this is just so typical. VH1 showed an edited down version of the evening. What happened was that when it came time for us to go up there and have our ten seconds of fame. Frank [Infante] said, Hey Debbie, wed really love to play. She said, Well Frank, cant you see my band is here. He said, Your band? Well, I thought Blondie was being inducted. This is the Waldorf-Astoria with a packed room of music luminaries and it suddenly just goes quiet and everyones like, What the hell is going on? I think Frank did the right thing to call her on that and apparently they did a very bad set after that. I didnt hear it. I was in the toilet when they were playing but I understand it was a bad performance.
DRE: Was there ever one specific incident that made Debbie not interested in you anymore?
Gary: No, I think it was a series of things. Youve got to remember that I was playing with them when I was 20. Debbie had been around for ten years trying to make it and she realized this was her chance and she wanted to call the shots. Clearly she was the one who was going to get the most attention. But we werent just a backup band, we all contributed to the look of the band. I was the one who did the skinny tie and the retro-mod look and we all wrote songs and we all performed. Ive never been able to kiss ass so I stood up for myself. Also the fact that I jumped around on stage made them afraid that I was going to decapitate Debbie because I had been pogo-ing with this long bass guitar.
DRE: Are you working another book?
Gary: Im doing a book about writers who committed suicide or who wrote about it.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
zoetica:
Gary Valentine is best known as a member of the rock band Blondie and penning the songs X-Offender and (Im Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear before leaving the band. Since then Valentine has become a popular writer out of London writing about such disparate topics as the dark side of the sixties...