If you want to make Chris Stein laugh, ask him how he feels about the latest view that New York City has become nearly as violent today as it was when his band Blondie emerged from its sooty streets in the 1970s. “That’s crazy!” Stein, now 74, says with a snort. “You know how today you can have that Citizen app on your phone that tells you the bad things that are going on in your neighbourhood? If you had one of those things in the New York of the Seventies and Eighties, it would be like turning on a faucet. You’d never hear the end of the mayhem.”
Small wonder parts of Stein’s riveting new memoir, Under a Rock, read as much like a crime novel as a musical biography. Like the day in 1975 when he and girlfriend Debbie Harry casually stumbled across a corpse in the doorway of the dilapidated building they lived in on the Bowery. “Some poor bastard had frozen to death on the street,” Stein says now.
Or the night he was walking across the Manhattan Bridge when he saw a young man sprawled on the pavement, dead from a gunshot to the head. “I kept going and never found out what had happened,” Stein says. Or the several times he chatted amiably with Daniel Rakowitz, who later became infamous for chopping up his girlfriend and storing her rotting skull in a plastic bucket of kitty litter. “He seemed like an OK guy to me,” Stein says with a shrug.