Even before he co-founded Blondie – who swiftly transcended their roots in the New York punk scene to become one of the biggest bands in the world, selling around 40m records in the process – Chris Stein had lived quite a life.
His father died of a stroke in Stein’s first year of high school: thereafter, as his bandmate and former partner Debbie Harry notes in Under a Rock’s introduction, his adolescence was spent “on a very long leash” in late 60s New York. By 14, he had gravitated to the bohemia of the West Village and MacDougal Street, intent on “falling into the final frontier of existential freedom, whatever that means”. He became a hippy, acquired a set of friends with names like Mortician George and Action, formed a band who supported the Velvet Underground in the Warhol era, holidayed with friends in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury and took so much LSD that he ended up in a psychiatric hospital before his 18th birthday: after being discharged, he went to Woodstock, where he proceeded to take more LSD. Thereafter, he briefly flirted with Scientology and the Unification Church, colloquially known as the Moonies, and fell into the milieu of radical drag queens and sundry oddballs around Greenwich Village’s Mercer Arts Centre, where the New York Dolls had a residency: his big pal was Eric Emerson, a heroin-addicted minor Warhol “superstar” and singer, obsessed with tattooing himself, who died in mysterious circumstances in 1975. Stein is one of very few people who could reasonably suggest that his life got a little less nuts after forming a hugely successful rock band.
