"The Censored High Times Interview with Debbie Harry" by Victor Bockris
INTRODUCTION
In 1996 the music editor of High Times, Steve Bloom, asked me to interview Debbie Harry. I had sporadically kept in touch with Debbie over the years, but we had hardly ever sat down together or had any kind of sustained conversation. We met at the apartment of an important photographer and New Yorker, David Croland. We had an animated conversation, after which Debbie drove me home in her enormous beat up old boat of a car. As I was working on the interview it struck me that it might be interesting to look back into some of the old material and see how it would work in with the new stuff. In retrospect, it should not have come to me as a surprise that they matched perfectly, for Debbie has always had a lot of continuity in her character, it's part of her strength. Anyway I called her up and explained that I had come upon some material that had not been used in Making Tracks but that fit in with what we had been discussing in the recent interview, with an emphasis on the influence of drugs etc. We talked it over and decided that this was a good opportunity for Debbie to speak out honestly about her heroin addiction back in the late sixties, and how it had affected her. Heroin was continuing to be a big problem for a lot of young people who didn't know much. High Times appeared to be the perfect magazine to address the subject in....