Face It: A Memoir. Debbie Harry
Cherokee on my own and sat around in rocking chairs with old-timer Indians as they chewed tobacco and spat juice into paint cans.
In 1967, the First National Uniphrenic Church and Bank released an album, The Psychedelic Saxophone of Charlie Nothing, on John Fahey’s record label Takoma. But I had left by then. I also quit the BBC, which I felt was too time consuming. I got a job at Jeff Glick and Ben Schawinski’s Head Shop on East Ninth Street—the first-ever head shop in New York City. Pipes, posters, bongs, black-light bulbs, tie-dyed T-shirts, incense, the usual stuff, only then it was unusual. Right next door was a peculiar storefront with filthy windows plastered with button cards yellowed from age. The crone who had the store lived in the back. Wrapped in her shawl, she looked like an image from a fairy tale. Veselka, which translates to “rainbow,” is a no-frills, twenty-four-hour-a-day Ukrainian eatery next door. When the old woman eventually died they incorporated her store, enlarging their restaurant. The Head Shop was just around the corner from my apartment on St. Mark’s place, so no commute, and it was fun. All the downtown people, the uptown people—in fact, everyone—came in there and it was a really good scene. The Head Shop was an ideal place to meet people who were looking to break some rules.
Ben’s father was a Bauhaus painter and Ben was a sculptor, furniture designer, and builder, easygoing, very cute, and a ladies’ man. We had started going out and we were pretty interested in each other. Eventually he met these guys from California who had a commune, in Laguna Beach I think. He made all these plans to move out there and be with these people and he wanted me to go with him. I really liked him, but I couldn’t drop everything and blindly follow him. I was still working on music and I was really upset that he wanted me to just throw everything away and go with him. For a while I didn’t know if I had made a mistake or not. Well, a few years later he ended up coming back. He’d had this very fancy Volkswagen bus that he had fitted out beautifully—but as soon as he got out there the van sadly got lost in a mudslide.
One day two handsome, long-haired leather boys strode into my domain—two rebels without a cause. These pierced puppies pressed up against the counter, asking to buy rolling papers and flirting like crazy. I liked the older one, whose name I can’t remember now because he was sweet natured, on the shy side, easy to talk to. The other one, the intense one, just stood staring at me, adding the occasional quip, trying to be funny. That one’s name was Joey Skaggs. Joey came back to the shop a few days later without his friend. It was Valentine’s Day and he had come to see the girl with the heart-shaped lips.
He invited me over to his big funky loft on Forsyth Street below Houston. Joey was truly a man for all seasons. He had three bikes that he kept upstairs, real heavy-duty motorcycles, one of them a Moto Guzzi, one of them British; how he got them up those stairs I don’t know. He was also a performance art hustler. One of his more famous shows was on Easter Sunday in Central Park’s Sheep Meadow, when he carried a gigantic cross on his back and dragged it around the park during a peace rally. He had that Christlike look with his long hair and thin body, though the leather pants and biker boots were a bit of a stretch. He made the papers posing atop a large boulder at the edge of the field, draped with his cross, à la Christ on the way to Golgotha.
Joey had a friend who was a filmmaker. I can’t remember his name either, but he was very handsome. One day Joey invited me over and when I walked in, Joey grabbed me and started tearing off my clothes, kissing me, fondling my breasts, playing with my pussy. Then he threw me down on his bed. He got me really hot and I reached to yank off his pants. But he wouldn’t let me. He backed off, stood up, and out from the shadows slunk this dude with a movie camera. There I was, naked, spread, and very wet—and suddenly this thing, this all-seeing eye, is wiggling toward me, voyeur attached. Well, that was a rush. I felt shocked, furious, betrayed, and disrespected, but I was also very turned on. I wanted to knock his teeth in and fuck him at the same time. Scream, cry, get dressed, or go for it? I tried to be cool, silly me. I finally climbed onto a small pedestal and posed like a statue. All of this is on film somewhere. Don’t ask me what happened to the footage. Absorbed into the cosmic ether of the sixties, I suppose.
This was all pretty typical for Joey, actually, who’s maintained himself as a professional media prankster ever since. I’ve had a few laughs at his antics over the years: his fake ad for a dog brothel, which got covered by ABC and won them an Emmy; his Hair Today company, which marketed a new kind of hair implant—using whole scalps from the dead; his fake SEXONIC sex machine, which he claimed had been impounded at the Canadian border; his Bullshit Detector Watch (which flashed, mooed, and shat). And so much more . . .
I can still remember Joey’s loft. That part of the Lower East Side wasn’t gentrified at all in the sixties; it was Alphabet City, gangland, dangerous. So, whenever I went there, after turning the corner off of well-lit Houston onto dark and narrow Forsyth, I’d run down the street and into the building and up those wooden stairs, the darkest, scariest staircase of them all, and I’d arrive at Joey’s breathless from running and climbing. He probably thought I was just hot for him and couldn’t wait. Which was also true.
Then Paul Klein, the husband of a very close friend of mine from high school, Wendy Weiner, invited me to join them in making some music. We would sit around and sing songs together and I would harmonize. It began casually but eventually evolved into a band, the Wind in the Willows, named after the classic children’s book by Kenneth Grahame. I got the job, for what it was worth, as backup singer. Wendy and Paul were Freedom Riders who went to Mississippi to register black people to vote. Stokely Carmichael, who was the organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, told them, “You can’t share a room in Mississippi without being married and expect not to be arrested,” and so they got married. When they came back they moved to the Lower East Side and we resumed our friendship. I knew I wanted to be a performer—I was still vague on what kind, but at least I knew that.
Paul was a bearded, folky, big bear of a man. He sang and played a little guitar and he was another likeable hustler. It was the age of everyone looking for the golden opportunity and in the midsixties, record companies were working their own major game: so loaded with cash, they’d put bands up in houses and give them money to live on and to record. A kind of patronage system. And if the music didn’t sell, then fine, they had an excuse for a write-off.
Traffics in Saccharine Details
Painting by Robert Williams
The Purposed Mysteries, Fears and Terrifying Experiences of Debbie Harry
Remedial title: The Jersey Towhead Who
Eventually there were eight or nine people in the Willows after Paul kept adding and adding. Peter Brittain, who also played guitar and sang, was married to another of my closest friends since childhood, Melanie. There was a double bass player, Wayne Kirby, who was from Paterson, where both my grandmothers lived, and had left to study at Juilliard. There was a woman named Ida Andrews, also from Juilliard, who was a real pistol and played oboe, flute, and bassoon. We had keyboards and a vibraphone and strings. It was sort of like a small orchestra. A kind of baroque folk music but with these percussive things going on. I played finger cymbals, tamboura, and tambourine. Our producer Artie Kornfeld also played bongos. More famously he went on to create the Woodstock Festival with Michael Lang. We had two drummers, Anton Carysforth and Gil Fields. There was also a very sweet and good-hearted man named Freddy Ravola, whom we called our “spiritual adviser,” because of his positivity. He worked as our roadie. Not that we did many shows.
In the summer of ’68 we released our debut album, Wind in the Willows. It was my first time on a record. I sang lead on one song, “Djini Judy,” but aside from that I was like wallpaper, something pretty to stand in the back in my hippie clothes and with my long brown hair parted in the middle, going “Oooooo.” Artie Kornfeld, who produced the album, was working at Capitol Records as their “vice president of rock” and seemed to have boundless company money to spend on us. It was not a quick album to make. Apparently, Capitol was going to give us a big push. All I can recall is playing one big show in Toronto, opening up for a Platters cover band, the Great Pretenders, or something like that. But what I do clearly remember is Paul encouraging