FILTER BOOKS
Under A Rock ★★★★
Chris Stein
CORSAIR. £25
Super-cool guitarist tells the story of Blondie and beyond in overflowing memoir.
Even before he met a dark-haired Debbie Harry in late September 1973, Chris Stein was in deep with the counterculture. Raised in Brooklyn by communist parents before becoming a full-blown hippy – he put in acid-fried time at Haight-Ashbury and various human be-ins – he returned to New York to become an art school freak, playing in a band that once supported The Velvet Underground ( “Andy thought you were fabulous!”). In this richly packed memoir, Stein unsentimentally traces Blondie’s journey from pre-punk NYC’s scuzzy downtown streets to a pop stardom only slightly less scuzzy thanks to leering audiences, mean-spirited journalists and Stein and Harry’s escalating heroin habit. As a keen photographer, Stein has an excellent eye for little textural insights – squalid lofts, cool boots, and among the A-list hipster cameos, William Burroughs, Iggy Pop and Mick Jagger – and while he faces illness, addiction and finally real tragedy, that desire to document his world, frame by extraordinary frame, never dulls.