Book review: Rock music industry’s heart of glass

Chris Stein's 'Under a Rock' is far more than the sum of its many parts and consciously or not, this is an unfiltered morality tale about loss: of life, love, friends, money, dignity, and health

Christ Stein: His testimony is compelling and a difficult read. Picture: Getty

• Under a Rock: A memoir
• Chris Stein
• Corsair, €19.99

Chris Stein, the creative lead behind the fabled pop group Blondie has a stunning power of recall.

Faces, places, names, dates and set lists are remembered liberally here with an obsessive’s zeal.

Kicking against the cliché that if you remember the 1960s, then you weren’t there, the level of detail here is spectacular.

And even more impressive given that, for decades, Stein was a keen drugs enthusiast who dabbled deep, far, and wide.

Premature death, addiction, and bad business practice pockmark the great histories of popular music and are all dominant themes here.

However, Under a Rock is far more than the sum of its many parts: in their pomp, Blondie was a formidable commercial and cultural consideration but Stein’s focus is elsewhere. 

Consciously or not, this is an unfiltered morality tale about loss: of life, love, friends, money, dignity, and health.

And in the telling, Stein’s music and his band’s legacy are relegated to the side-stage.

An art college graduate specialising in photography, his love of silver bromide and Kodachrome is matched only by an appetite for phosphoryl chloride. 

And, appropriately enough for someone soldiering in an industry over-populated with back-stabbers, a life-long interest in knives.

‘The mid-70s and the '80s,’ he writes, ‘were a golden age of American custom knife-making and I was lucky enough to have met and bought knives from some legendary smiths.’ 

But by the time of Blondie’s implosion in the mid-80s, Stein was in hospital with a rare skin disease, was heroin-dependent, out of money, out of home, and out of love.

Facing an enormous tax bill, he was forced to get sober and get real. 

Reading like a stream of recovered memories born in treatment replete with apologies, regrets, and admissions — Under a Rock uses popular culture as an entry point into a darkness from which it never emerges.

Referring to the loss of his 19-year-old daughter from an accidental overdose while he was working on this book, Stein states: ‘Going into writing all this I hadn’t considered writing about so much addiction and death,’ he concludes. ‘But it was unavoidable.’

Yet despite the level of minutiae — Debbie Harry, Blondie’s vocalist and Stein’s long-time lover, describes his memory as tireless — he lets an awful lot just hanging. 

He refers nonchalantly to an incident in which Harry is raped in a downtown apartment after a robbery and just moves on quickly. 

The loss of one of his first girlfriends through suicide is brushed over, as is the mysterious death of Eric Emerson, a musician and actor from the Warhol school who had been in an early Blondie iteration, The Stilettos.

Blondie emerged from the fringes of the Andy Warhol-inspired pop art scene in New York City during the early 1970s.

This period has been overly mined by writers, novelists, and documentarians to the point where the lines between fact, fiction, history and opinion have long been blurred beyond all recognition.

The Blondie story too has previously been told, most recently — and unconvincingly, in Face It, written by Debbie Harry with Sylvie Simmons in 2019.

But as a critical and stylistic counterpoint to much of that body of work, Under a Rock does a fine job: Stein is a credible and self-deprecating witness and his testimony is compelling. 

In so candidly joining the dots, it’s a difficult read too and is all the better for that.