Old Punks Never Die (They Just Sell Out)

I first heard of Debbie Harry and Blondie in the 7th grade. Being too young to know about any type of music that was outside of mainstream radio, like Punk, I didn't know about Blondie until their 1979 punk-disco crossover hit "Heart of Glass" climbed the charts and received major national radio airplay. At the time, I was kind of intimidated by Debbie Harry. She looked so tough. She was junkie-thin, and wore those Candies high-heeled slides that my mother wouldn't let me have. Her black roots revealed that her peroxide-blonde hair was a dye job, and what's more, she didn't give a shit! And most intimidating of all was that she sang the word "ass" in the song (cuz it rhymes with "Glass"). I heard it, once or twice, before radio stations replaced it with the censored version. But as scared as I was of Debbie (remember, I was only 12, growing up on Long Island in a conservative suburb of New York City), I did like "Heart of Glass." And when Blondie released their next single, "One Way or Another," I put aside my fears and bought the 45 rpm single at my local Record World. It shared Top 40 space with disco holdouts like Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive" and last-ditch efforts at '70s mellow music like Poco's "Crazy Love." But while disco ultimately died, and mellow music gave way to the New Wave and Heavy Metal noise of the '80s, Blondie was well on their way to becoming a hallowed musical institution.

Fast forward twenty-eight years. "One Way or Another" is now used in a Swiffer dry mop commercial. "Call Me," Blondie's theme song from the 1980 film American Gigolo, has been grossly misappropriated by a Massachusetts used-car dealership. And this week, I was shocked to see a commercial for NBC's game show The Singing Bee touting the fact that this Friday Debbie Harry would be joining rock and roll legend Little Richard, and the show's host Joey Fatone (of N'Sync fame) as the musical guest. Huh?

With the Hollywood writer's strike in its seventh week or so, network television is scrambling to come up with reality shows to fill the void left by the scripted dramas and sitcoms whose production has been halted by the strike. The commercial for The Singing Bee proudly heralds the show's "return." Translation: the show was pulled due to low ratings, but is back on the air because of the writer's strike. So why is Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-inductee Debbie Harry appearing on a tacky mid-season replacement game show that includes the likes of Fatone, and which has its own dancers, The Honey Bees (hey, wasn't that the name of the Beatle-esque pop group that Ginger, Maryann and Mrs. Howell formed on Gilligan's Island?). Does she really need the money? Of course, she is in her sixties by now. And in the grander scheme of things, one could argue that there really aren't all that many old punks, as many of them died in their prime, either by OD (Sid Vicious, or Malcolm Owen of The Ruts) or by suicide (Ian Curtis of Joy Division). So maybe selling the rights to songs and appearing on television shows is the punk rock star equivalent of Social Security. And punk itself doesn't evoke the same emotions as it used to. In 1976, punk scared the crap out of The Establishment. Over thirty years later, punk, like disco, is considered a farcical music and fashion movement of a past decade, as evidenced by a chocolate chip cookie commercial featuring claymation punkers singing "Chunky Chips Ahoy, oi, oi, oi!" I bet the kids watching that cookie commercial today wouldn't even know the origins of Oi (the Cockney Rejects' single "Flares and Slippers," FYI). But for someone who once sang "Die Young, Stay Pretty," Debbie looks pretty darn good for her age.

I for one will not watch Debbie Harry on The Singing Bee. I prefer to remember the Debbie Harry of the good old days of "Atomic" and "Rapture", ringing in 1980 on Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve, and of course, her Gloria Vanderbilt Jeans commercial (didn't she seem really stoned in that one?). We'll always have "Rip Her To Shreds."