Debbie Harry’s Wild 1977: Blondie, Jimmy Destri and Gary Lachman on the Brink

New York in 1977 was broke, dangerous and weirdly perfect for a band like Blondie. In the Bowery’s ruined blocks, Debbie Harry was sharpening a pop persona that looked like Marilyn Monroe left too long under neon, while behind her Jimmy Destri and Gary Lachman were quietly rewiring what punk could sound and feel like.

This was the year Blondie stopped being just another CBGB act and started turning into a global problem for rock purists. To understand how, you have to zoom in on three very different misfits: the frontwoman who weaponised glamour, the keyboardist who sabotaged songs from the inside, and the bassist who quit just as his strangest song became a hit.

1977: Blondie stop playing dive bars and start rewriting pop

Blondie formed in 1974, but by late 1975 the classic line-up had finally locked in: Debbie Harry on vocals, Chris Stein on guitar, Gary Valentine (later Gary Lachman) on bass, Clem Burke on drums and Jimmy Destri on keyboards.[2] That group cut early demos and their self-titled 1976 debut for the resolutely uncool Private Stock label, sounding like a girl group trapped in a grindhouse.

According to one detailed punk discography, things accelerated brutally in 1977: Blondie crossed the Atlantic to support Television on a UK tour, and in July, right as the band’s profile began to rise, Valentine walked out to start his own project. Within months Blondie had signed to Chrysalis, and the line-up was in flux even as the songs were getting sharper.

When they entered the studio to make their second album, Plastic Letters, the band was officially a quartet: Harry, Stein, Destri and Burke. A hot-pink latex dress by downtown tastemaker Anya Phillips was pulled over Harry for the sleeve, while Frank Infante quietly played most of the bass parts without appearing on the cover; the record would later be remembered as the moment Blondie stopped being purely underground and started edging toward the mainstream.

By early 1978, a US press kit was bragging that Plastic Letters was Blondie’s debut on Chrysalis and a “hard edged, rock’n’roll album” written almost entirely by the band. The only members listed were Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, drummer Clement Burke and keyboardist James Destri, a pointed snapshot of how awkward the bassist situation had become after Valentine’s departure.

Debbie Harry in 1977: the most dangerous blonde in punk

Visually, 1977 Debbie Harry was a trap. The peroxide bob, thrift-store mini-dresses and doll-like features promised pop sweetness; the deadpan stare and streetwise body language made it clear she could eviscerate you in three lines. Years later, she would talk about how her DIY dye jobs and the catcalls that gave the band its name turned into a look Vogue credits with redefining punk-era platinum hair and cementing her as a lasting style icon.

Study the Plastic Letters cover and you can see the trick. Harry sprawls across a police car in that radioactive-pink latex dress, the word “Blondie” looming like a tabloid headline, while the men of the band lurk in the blue-black background. Even on the sleeve, the music is a gang effort, but the narrative belongs to her.

Onstage at CBGB, the image got even more dangerous. A 1977 film of Blondie tearing through “Rip Her to Shreds” shows Harry prowling the tiny stage “like a predatory cat,” eyes locked on the crowd as the band crashes behind her; it is the sound of bubblegum pop held at knifepoint by punk attitude.[12] You can hear why the Manhattan rock snobs dismissed them and why teenagers elsewhere would soon be obsessed.

That same year, Blondie leapt from filthy clubs to big theaters when they opened the North American leg of Iggy Pop’s The Idiot tour. Gig logs from Bowie-focused historians list Blondie as the support act at shows like New York’s Palladium, with David Bowie himself tucked away on keyboards behind Iggy. For a few surreal months, Debbie Harry’s still-underground band was sharing stages with two of the decade’s most volatile stars.

Harry has since talked about one backstage moment that sounds like a dirty joke punk fans might have invented, except she keeps confirming it. On that 1977 tour Bowie, half-kidding, exposed himself and asked if he could sleep with her; she shot back, “I don’t know, can you?”, a crack she now describes as a very punk, very smartass reflex in a bizarre but essentially humorous situation. It is a perfect Debbie Harry vignette: sexual tension, celebrity absurdity and a woman who refuses to play victim or groupie.

Jimmy Destri: the keyboard saboteur of Plastic Letters

If Harry was Blondie’s face, Jimmy Destri was the quiet saboteur in the corner, wiring strange circuitry into the songs. A session-by-session breakdown of Plastic Letters shows how deeply he shaped it: recorded in mid-1977 at Plaza Sound in New York, the album credits Destri with grand piano, Farfisa organ, Polymoog and Roland synths plus backing vocals, and gives him sole or co-writing credit on tracks like “Fan Mail,” “Contact in Red Square,” “No Imagination,” “Kidnapper,” “Detroit 442” and “I Didn’t Have the Nerve to Say No.”[7]

Listen to “Fan Mail” and you can hear Destri’s brain all over it. The lyric is a paranoid letter from a starving musician beating on a Fender amp and counting the cost of every snapshot, while the keyboards tilt between carnival swirl and cheap sci‑fi. It is pop, but it feels like it was written by someone who has stared too long at fluorescent lights.

Throughout Plastic Letters, his parts drag Blondie away from straight guitar punk toward something nervier and more European. The Farfisa wheezes like a busted fairground; the synths buzz under Harry’s voice like neon in a bad dream. Destri is not often mentioned in casual Blondie nostalgia, yet without his songs and textures the jump from CBGB scuzz to the sleek menace of Parallel Lines would have been a lot less convincing.

You can hear the same DNA a couple of years later on “Dreaming,” where Blondie wrap breakneck drums and chiming guitars in a melodic rush that critics still single out as one of their finest moments; it is exactly the kind of nervy, melodic pop a later generation of writers now celebrate on lists of great “dream” songs. The seeds of that sound were already on tape in 1977, sitting underneath Harry’s voice and waiting for radio to catch up.

Gary Lachman: the occult bass player who left a spell behind

Gary Lachman, still calling himself Gary Valentine in 1977, might be the most quietly subversive figure in Blondie’s early story. A memoirist and critic later pointed out that he only played bass in the band from 1975 to 1977, but those were the crucial years when Blondie found its identity, and he was the one who wrote their first single “X‑Offender” and the future cult favourite “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear.” After quitting, he formed his own band The Know, did time in Iggy Pop’s group and eventually reinvented himself entirely as a writer on mysticism and the occult.

In a later interview, Lachman explained that “Presence, Dear” came straight out of his obsession with the strange. While touring, he and his then-girlfriend Lisa Jane Persky realised they were having the same dreams and seemed to know what the other was doing, even when they were thousands of miles apart, an experience he describes as a kind of telepathic connection.[10] The song’s references to psychic frequencies, outer entities and theosophy were not decorative poetry; they were his attempt to sneak genuine esoteric ideas into a three-minute love song.

Here is the delicious irony: by the time Blondie recorded “Presence, Dear” for Plastic Letters, Lachman was already out of the band. His former bandmates cut this paranormal valentine without him, turned it into a UK hit, and let Harry pour her cool, slightly detached vocal over words about shared dreams and levitating lovers. The bassist who had just been fired became the ghost in their machine.

Lachman’s later books on the occult and consciousness feel like an extension of that moment. In 1977 he was the kid in the band poking at kismet and telepathy inside a pop framework; decades on, he is still worrying at the same questions in print, while “Presence, Dear” quietly sits in Blondie’s catalogue as probably the only near-hit single to rhyme “psychic frequencies” with “our theosophies.”

Three misfits, one pivotal year

What ties 1977 Blondie together is tension. Harry was busy turning herself into a pop icon who could stare down both punks and TV cameras; Destri was twisting garage-rock songs into something jittery and synthetic; Lachman was sneaking occult love poetry into the set list and then walking away just as it started to pay off.

The band’s own archival box set, Against the Odds 1974–1982, pulls together basement demos, outtakes and liner-note testimony that underline how fast this transformation happened: within a few years they went from CBGB nobodies to a group selling millions and pioneering everything from punk‑disco hybrids to early hip‑hop crossovers. Seen from that vantage point, 1977 looks less like a stepping stone and more like an explosion caught in slow motion.

If you want to hear that explosion for yourself, cue up Plastic Letters and pay attention to three things. Listen to how Harry toys with the line between vulnerability and threat, especially on tracks like “Denis” and “Cautious Lip.” Follow Destri’s keyboards and songwriting from “Fan Mail” through “Detroit 442,” warping the band’s old-school influences into something sleeker and stranger. Then drop the needle on “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear” and remember that the man who wrote it was already out the door, headed toward a life of occult studies and long-distance telepathy.

In a single chaotic year, Debbie Harry, Jimmy Destri and Gary Lachman helped Blondie escape the Bowery without losing the dirt under their fingernails. The charts would never sound quite as innocent again.