Under a Rock by Chris Stein

Under a Rock book cover

Musician and author Chris Stein

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Publishers for allowing me to preview Chris Stein’s unflinching memoir Under a Rock. While I’m not a major Blondie fan, I’ve always enjoyed their poppy music, and I generally love memoirs by musicians, especially those detailing the downtown/CBGB’s music scene of the mid to late 70’s. Chris Stein’s book is a great addition to other books detailing this important time period in American music and beyond. Beyond the music, Stein has led a really interesting life, and reading about his pre-Blondie years, growing up in Brooklyn, travelling to the West Coast and going to Woodstock, as well as attending an alternative school in NYC with other musicians and artists was fascinating. His stories feature some amazing characters and incredible events. The strength of his book, though, details his time with Blondie, forming the band, starting up around the same time as the Ramones and Television, and eventually gaining popularity. Beyond being more pop oriented than some of the other downtown bands, Blondie also incorporated art in unique ways, and Stein’s background as a visual artist, both in photography and videography, probably added to the band’s integration of visual arts with their music. It’s interesting to look back on Blondie’s output and realize how much Debbie Harry’s image was associated with Blondie. However, Stein also shares that Blondie was also one of the first bands to create a video album to go along with their LP. I loved reading about Stein’s time with other musicians and artists, especially how close Blondie was with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol. Although this larger section detailing the development and success of Blondie was the strongest of the book, it was also the most harrowing since this was also the time when Stein’s casual drug use eventually spiraled into full-blown heroin and cocaine addiction. Stein details his addictions and some of the depths that it took him to, eventually seeking out methadone treatment to manage his heroin addiction. As Stein notes in his epilogue (which you must read), it’s important not to glamorize addiction the way some artists have. He documents friends who died from overdoses, and the health struggles that he experienced as a result of his habit. The later chapters dealing with the dissolution of Blondie and eventual reformation kind of fly by. I actually had a hard time following along with his timeline of events, and it wasn’t until the section dealing with 9/11 that I kind of caught up with his timeline. In fact, this is probably the one shortcoming I found with Stein’s writing. There weren’t many transitions or connectives in the text, and this led to a kind of stream-of-consciousness thought-process on the page. I found it more with his early life and his later sections. The events jumped around and paragraphs were listed without any sense of how one event related to another—whether it was sequential, emotionally linked, or some other kind of connection. Sometimes, events that were seemingly non-events were listed without any explanation of their significance, making me question its inclusion. Nevertheless, Stein is an important musician and artist, and I appreciated learning more about his involvement in this seminal scene of music.