Under a Rock
A Memoir
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4.7 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Foreword by Debbie Harry
"A Downtown Memory" by Romy Ashby
Debbie Harry defined iconic band Blondie’s look. Chris Stein—her performing partner, lover, and lifelong friend—was its architect and defined its sound. “Parallel Lines”, their third album, catapulted to #1, sold 20 million copies, and launched singles like “Heart of Glass”, "Hangin' On the Telephone," and “One Way or Another”, providing the beat when Bianca Jagger and Halston danced at Studio 54 and the soundtrack to every 1970’s punk-soundtracked romance.
Chris Stein knows how to tell a story. Under A Rock is his nothing-spared autobiography. It's about the founding of the band, ascending to the heights of pop success, and the hazards of fortune.
Famous names march through these pages—Warhol, Bowie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and more–but you can get famous names anywhere. What you can’t get anywhere else is a plunge into the moments that made a giant 1980's artistic sensation. Stein takes us there in this revelatory, propulsive, distinctive memoir.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Blondie guitarist Stein (Point of View) chronicles in this knockabout personal history the colorful scenesters, grueling gigs, and desperate scrounging for drugs that have marked his musical career. Among other episodes, he recalls a Brooklyn boyhood in the 1950s and '60s ; coming-of-age as a hippie; his musical and romantic linkup with Blondie front-woman Debbie Harry in the early 1970s; the band's breakthrough with such hits as 1979's "Heart of Glass"; and the exhausting tours, creative tensions, and escalating drug use that partly led to the band's 1982 breakup. The last chapters slow down to cover Blondie's return to touring after a 17-year hiatus along with Stein's marriage and family life. The atmospheric narrative immerses readers in gonzo celebrity cameos ("Phil came to the door... performatively drunk and doing a W.C. Fields voice"), grungy punk tableaux, and rock star excesses, though Stein keeps a clear eye on the consequences of such a lifestyle. In the book's heartbreaking epilogue, he discusses his teenage daughter's death from a heroin overdose in 2023 ("I thought that I presented my own drug experiences in a negative light to our kids... I'm wracked with guilt that any discussions might have been misconstrued"). The result is a candid if somewhat chaotic account of life in the spotlight.
