1. Debbie Harry
performing with
Blondie on Saturday
Night Live on
October 13, 1979.
photographybyFredHermansky/NBC/NBCUPhotoBankviaGettyImages
Longevity is rare in rock ’n’ roll, which makes
Debbie Harry, of the groundbreaking New-Wave
band Blondie, an unusual songbird indeed. Four
decades after Blondie started making a splash in
the downtown music scene at CBGB and Max’s
Kansas City, Harry is performing in a two-week
run of solo shows at one of uptown’s most
venerable venues, the Café Carlyle. Over the
years she’s sold more than 40 million records with
Blondie, recorded five albums as a soloist, and
duetted with some of the hippest gents in the
music biz, including Nick Cave and Elvis
Costello. “I guess I’ve either been really stubborn
and hardheaded and determined,” Harry says of
her long career, “or I’ve been really lucky.”
The shows at the Carlyle will be a chance for
Harry to “put together an interesting list of songs I
don’t usually play with Blondie,” she says. “The
basis for the whole thing is collaboration—it’s
about the people I worked with on these songs,
who I wrote them with, who I recorded them
with.” Surprise guests will stop by to perform with
her, and though she wouldn’t divulge their names
at press time, one imagines they’ll be impressive
given the caliber of artists she’s partnered with
over the years, from Franz Ferdinand to the Jazz
Passengers. The intimate space at the Carlyle will
allow for a show that’s “much more interactive on
a personal level,” Harry says. “In a club, it’s like
having a conversation.”
Never one to rest on her stardom, Harry
remains committed to New York City as an
incubator for the arts, and she lends her talents to
a variety of causes, from the glamorous to the
obscure. On March 5 she joined Philip Glass,
Patti Smith, and other luminaries at the annual
Tibet House benefit concert at Carnegie Hall.
She’s also performed at benefits for the music
program at the Institute for Collaborative
Education, a progressive school on 15th Street
where her friend Roy Nathanson of the Jazz
Passengers teaches. “It’s a throbbing, exciting,
intense, urban universe,” she says of the city’s
creative community. “A force unto itself.” March
24–April 4. Café Carlyle, 35 E. 76th St., 212-744-
1600; rosewoodhotels.com G
Rapture
Debbie Harry of the iconic
band Blondie sings at Café
Carlyle. By Jennifer DeMeritt
gotham-magazine.com 45
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