There’s probably never been a wildly successful rock band as versatile as Blondie. Starting out as a punk band in New York City in the mid-1970s, Blondie (emphatically a full band with many members and creative voices, beyond platinum-tressed lead singer Debbie Harry) smoothly pulled off its attempts at other then-emergent genres.
Blondie scored hits with disco (“Heart of Glass”), reggae (“The Tide is High”), club music (“Atomic”), hard rock (“One Way or Another”), New Wave (“Dreaming”), and rap (“Rapture”).
But as this group of seasoned former punks dominated the pop chart and pop culture in the late 1970s and early 1980s with its unpredictable and varied sound, its members experienced an equally baffling and widespread array of personal tragedies. The negative hits just kept on coming for Blondie’s musicians, before the group was together, during its peak, and long after it broke up and reformed, too. Here are the most tragic stories lurking in the personal and professional lives of Blondie.
After attending college, Debbie Harry moved to New York City with aims of finding employment or major fame and success in show business. She landed acting auditions, but was never cast in screen projects and performed with a succession of bands that never took off, so in her twenties, she moved back to her home state of New Jersey. Harry struck up a romantic relationship with a man that quickly turned sour, frightening, and violent.
On one occasion, the man became convinced that Harry was carrying on a dalliance with another guy in her apartment; the boyfriend entered Harry’s home by force and held the musician against her will. Accusing her of cheating, the former boyfriend placed a gun against Harry’s head, threatening to kill her as well as sexually assault her. Soon thereafter, Harry moved back to New York City to give entertainment another shot. “I was just happy to get away from him and move on with my life,” she wrote in her memoir “Face It” (via The Guardian).
