I first met Chris Stein and Debbie Harry of Blondie around Christmas, 1978. It was on the set of TV Party. I was enrolled at Medgar Evers College, but being part of TV Party—the gonzo public-access cable talk show hosted by Interview’s Glenn O’Brien—felt like Downtown Hipster University, PhD level. I was a guest on episode one and became a regular, both on camera and behind it, as a camera operator. For the next couple of years, TV Party was a Tuesday-night ritual, total immersion in Lower Manhattan bohemia. There was Glenn and his cohost, Chris Stein. Debbie Harry. John Lurie of the Lounge Lizards. Robert Mapplethorpe. Klaus Nomi. James Chance and his girlfriend, Anya Phillips. Nile Rodgers and Robert Fripp and Cookie Mueller. You never knew who might show up. One night, at my invitation, the Bronx rapper Kool Kyle the Starchild freestyled with the TV Party Orchestra. David Byrne came by and eventually David Bowie did, too. I brought my friend, one-time studio mate, and fellow Brooklynite Jean-Michel Basquiat into the fold and he became a TV Party regular, too. We even had my Parliament-Funkadelic hero, George Clinton, straight from the Mothership. He declared what we were doing “Anarchy Howdy Doody Guerrilla TV.”
Fred outside his Clinton Street apartment with his artwork, circa 1980.
Photograph © Elinor Vernhes.
Chris and Debbie ended up buying a few of my paintings, and we got really tight. As a commercial force, Blondie had blown way past the downtown punk scene: “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” and then, at the start of 1980, “Call Me.” Chris and Debbie had become full-on rock stars. For long stretches, they would be AWOL—on tour for weeks at a time.
But whenever they were back in New York, I’d head up to their penthouse at 200 West Fifty-Eighth Street, a classic three bedroom, nothing flashy. They would open the door and be like, “Hey, Freddy! Can we get you something? A drink? You hungry?” That was the vibe—warm, domestic, generous. They were sky-high pop stars, yet down to earth and determined to stay connected to the underground.
‘Everybody’s Fly: A Life of Art, Music, and Changing the Culture’ by Fab 5 Freddy and Mark Rozzo
We’d talk about music, art, film, politics, whatever crazy stuff had gone down on TV Party that week. I’d bring up the graffiti scene I was involved in and how I wanted to take it into the galleries, into the art world. They were tight with Andy Warhol (whom I met around this time), so they were perfect sounding boards when I was planning my Campbell’s soup can train: a rolling, whole-car homage to Warhol and Pop art that I executed with my art partner, Lee Quiñones, the NYC street-graffiti master. With Chris and Debbie, I would talk about the emerging rap scene—including Grandmaster Flash, whose mixtapes I had racked up—and how the energy was similar to the punk and New Wave they knew: urban, DIY. I broke it all down for them—DJs, MCs, B-boys. “Yo, there are fly guys and fly girls,” I’d say. “This cat Flash is the fastest DJ…”
