Chris Stein was 19 when he had a psychotic breakdown during the summer of 1969. He began hearing voices, having hallucinatory visions, and eventually wound up on a psych ward at the Beth Israel Hospital in downtown Manhattan. “I had been taking a lot of LSD,” the 74-year-old musician best known as the co-founder of iconic ’70s band Blondie explains from his home in New York.
A doctor told Stein he had schizophrenia. “I think I was misdiagnosed,” he says. “Because I never had any similar episodes after that.
” The incident is one of several encounters with illicit drugs detailed in Stein’s memoir, , which is published on June 6. Stein was born in 1950. He was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn and studied fine arts at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan.
While there, he developed an interest in photography and the memoir includes many of his images from Blondie’s early days in the mid-1970s. As a teenager, Stein played in a garage band that warmed up for the Velvet Underground, who were managed by Andy Warhol — then a leading figure in the Pop Art movement. “Andy was a sweet, charming guy who was a good listener, but by the time I got to hang out with him, he was enamoured with celebrities,” says Stein.
From 1970 to ’73, Stein spent his days wandering Manhattan’s derelict urban environments, taking photographs. He occasionally jammed with his friend Tom Verlaine, who went on to form Television, another iconic New York band. Verlaine asked Stein.