LIFE AFTER BLONDIE : Deborah Harry’s San Juan Date May Indicate Whether She Can Regain Platinum High Ground

Like it or not, pop culture revolves around the creation of appealing, salable images that will set off Pavlovian bells in a mass audience’s collective brain. Deborah Harry looks back with pride on her own contribution to the mythology of pop image-making: the creation of Blondie.

“I was always fascinated with film stars,” Harry said in a recent phone interview from a tour stop in San Francisco. (She opens a three-night stand tonight at the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano.) “What I did with Blondie was take the blond sex-symbol film star and put her in front of a band. That’s why people fell for that right away. They recognized what (the image) was, and this was a new way of seeing it.”

Transposing already-existing pop-culture currents into new settings became the foundation for Harry’s success with Blondie, a name that applied both to her persona as a bleached-blond pop siren, and to the six-member band that she fronted in 1975-82.

Blondie emerged from the New York City New Wave rock movement that also begat such influential bands as Television and Talking Heads. Blondie was the most lighthearted, pop-savvy of those bands, and the first to hit it big. At the start, Blondie transposed pure-pop forms from the ‘60s--including surf music and girl-group rock ‘n’ roll--into the rough, hard-edged setting that defined the New Wave bands and their punk rock offspring.

But it was by assimilating such ‘70s and early-’80s pop trends as disco, rap and reggae that Blondie really came to prominence. In 1979-81, that approach gave Blondie four No. 1 hits: the disco-tinged originals “Heart of Glass,” “Rapture” and “Call Me,” and “The Tide Is High,” a remake of a Jamaican reggae tune.

“Chris Stein really gets the credit for that,” said Harry, 44, referring to the guitar player who has been her mate and collaborator since before Blondie began.

Disco and rap were “what was in the air, and he was fascinated by it and tried to incorporate that in what we were doing.”

Harry went along willingly--”I was always interested in rock music and shaping it in different ways.”

But other Blondie members were not happy with the stylistic dabbling, and musical dissension contributed to the band’s breakup.

By then, Harry had already launched a career of her own with a 1981 album, “KooKoo.” But something all-to-real interrupted her image weaving: Stein came down with a rare, debilitating genetic illness called pemphigus. Harry put her recording career on hold while he recovered.

“This is something that’s a very valuable lesson,” Harry said of the illness, which she said can be brought on by severe stress. “Chris is a worrier, and maybe this is something he had to figure out. You can destroy yourself with worry--many people do. It’s something he just had to learn to deal with.”

For herself, Harry said, the experience “gives you a hip perspective about values. It just gives me a better point of view, period, whether as a performer or in anything else I do. I just appreciate life a little bit more.”

Last fall, Harry and Stein went back to touring for the first time since their Blondie days, promoting Harry’s current album, “Def, Dumb & Blonde.” (Harry had remained active in her side career as an actress, taking roles in the TV series “Crime Story” and “Wise Guy,” and a fun turn as a comically villainous, rock-hating matron in the John Waters film, “Hairspray.”)

Like “Rockbird,” a 1986 album that she did not promote with touring, “Def, Dumb & Blonde” is given to the alternately dreamy and sassy romantic personas that Harry has portrayed on record since Blondie rose to popularity.

“This last record was an attempt to reach as many people as possible, to make a very commercial record,” Harry said. “Because of my business situation, I was trying to re-establish myself and get a record deal. I had to make a specific kind of record.”

The album has failed thus far to crack the Billboard Top 100, but Harry continues to plug away. She recently completed a month of arena touring as an opening act for Tears for Fears. The next step is touring in Australia.

“There are pockets (of strong sales), but an overall sweep didn’t happen for the record,” she said. “I haven’t really been in the public eye as I once was. That’s why I’m out promoting the record. People start to remember you and play your record--witness Bonnie Raitt.”

Is Harry contemplating the sort of stubborn trouper’s approach that Raitt followed as she toured through some lean years before her current, Grammy-anointed success?

“We’ll see what happens,” Harry said. “I’m really enjoying playing and writing and performing. I’m not making big decisions about my future.”

The focus on romantic songs in her two most recent albums does not mean that the zany, kitsch-loving sensibility that cropped up in Blondie from time to time is gone, Harry said.

“Perhaps the next (album) will be a little bit weirder,” said the co-author of songs about ants who destroy humankind, jetliners that go down in the Bermuda Triangle and Martians who devour discotheques. Harry continues to work Blondie favorites into her shows. If she sings the deliciously catty Blondie song “Rip Her to Shreds,” it could be directed at a certain star who has followed Harry’s lead in bringing the Marilyn Monroe, blond-bombshell image into the pop music arena.

“I was sort of up-tight that (Madonna) did it in such an obvious way after I had already done it. But it’s fine--I don’t cop to owning any privileges or rights,” Harry said, before breaking into a wry laugh of confession. “I was (mad) that she was so successful.”

Deborah Harry and Thirteenth Step play tonight through Saturday at the Coach House, 33157 Camino Capistrano, San Juan Capistrano. Tonight’s show starts at 8; Friday’s and Saturday’s start at 9 but are sold out. Tickets for tonight: $25. Information: (714) 496-8930.