Debbie Gibson blasted out of America\u2019s boomboxes in the summer of 1987 with her Top Ten hit \u201cOnly In My Dreams.\u201d It was a teen-crush disco anthem, straight from the shopping malls of Long Island, but it cooked like a freestyle club banger, mixed by Little Louie Vega. Everybody loved this song, but it was more than just a radio hit \u2014 it was a sign of the future. Debbie was a 16-year-old girl \u2014 still in high school! \u2014 writing her own pop mega-smash. In the Eighties, that just wasn\u2019t done.<\/p>\n
But she was just getting started. At 17, she became the first teenage girl ever to write, sing, and produce her own Number One hit, the weepy ballad \u201cFoolish Beat.\u201d She still holds the record as the youngest girl to achieve that feat. In fact, she\u2019s also the SECOND-youngest, since she turned the same trick a year later with \u201cLost In Your Eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n
More from Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Debbie pioneered the whole idea of a teenage pop girl doing her own songs. No glam image, no sexed-up pose \u2014 just an authentically ordinary suburban dork, singing about her own feelings, telling her own story, to her fellow girls in the audience. She wore a black porkpie hat and ripped jeans. Her big fashion statement was painting smiley faces on her knees. She racked up Eighties hits like \u201cElectric Youth,\u201d \u201cShake Your Love,\u201d and her unbeatable \u201cOut of the Blue.\u201d But in those days, she had to fight to prove it could be done.<\/p>\n Gibson tells the story in her new memoir Eternally Electric: The Message In My Music, and there\u2019s no other story like it. She paved the way for the pop-girl era we\u2019re living in \u2014 she walked so Billie, Chappell, Olivia, Taylor, Gracie, and their generation could run. If you love pop music in the 2020s, you\u2019re living in a world Debbie helped create.<\/p>\n She\u2019s been on a roll lately, with her 2021 comeback album The Body Remembers, touring with peers like the New Kids on the Block. It took a minute for her to start getting her props, for the ways she changed pop history. But with Eternally Electric, it\u2019s official: the Debbissance is in full swing.<\/p>\n Debbie was a true Eighties phenomenon. Me, I was a college punk-rock hipster twit at the time, with my Walkman full of indie bands like Dinosaur Jr. and Sonic Youth and H\u00fcsker D\u00fc, but I flipped my wig for \u201cOnly In My Dreams.\u201d (Her deep cut \u201cBetween the Lines\u201d is basically the same song as Sonic Youth\u2019s \u201cCotton Crown,\u201d but I\u2019m not going to lay that trip on you right now.) My middle-school sister Caroline and I loved to trade mix tapes \u2014 she got me into Bobby Brown, I got her into the Replacements \u2014 but we both loved Deb. This was authentic teen melodrama, in a glorious time for pop radio, fitting into the airwaves alongside Prince and Whitney and Bon Jovi and LL Cool J.<\/p>\n She had a chaotically eclectic pop sensibility, mixing up classic rock and Motown and disco and show tunes into her blockbuster 1987 debut Out of the Blue. She aimed for the dance-floor with freestyle beats from Vega and the Miami legend Lewis Martine\u00e9, who produced the shoulda-been hit \u201cPlay the Field.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFoolish Beat\u201d was her big goopy tearjerker, with the most Eighties sax solo this side of The Lost Boys, where Deb sobs \u201cI could never love again!\u201d the way only a high-strung teenager can. (She\u2019d never had a real-life boyfriend when she wrote it.) As for \u201cLost In Your Eyes,\u201d it\u2019s the song Stewie sang on Family Guy when he auditioned for American Idol \u2014 a sign of its place in cultural history.<\/p>\n As she relates in the book, she grew up in the burbs of Long Island, an Italian kid living the regular American teen experience. Her first date was at a Massapequa roller rink called United Skates of America, the site of \u201cmy first grape Bubble Yum-flavored kiss.\u201d But she was guided by her formidable stage mom. Diane Gibson even tracked down Billy Joel\u2019s childhood piano teacher, so Debbie could pick up the torch. The teacher owned Liberace\u2019s old piano \u2014 and ended up selling it to Debbie.<\/p>\n She wrote tunes in her garage studio, gigged in clubs where she was too young to get in. Her big sister did the sound and lights; another sister sewed her satin jackets and miniskirts. The labels recognized her talent \u2014 a geeky theater kid who happened to be a writing prodigy. But she didn\u2019t fit into any format. \u201cDuring that era, the music industry had no idea what to do with a teenage girl,\u201d she writes. \u201cSure, before I came along, Brenda Lee was 12 when she had her first hit. Marie Osmond was 14, Lulu was 15, and Leslie Gore was 16, but none of them were writing their own hits, and there was nobody I modeled myself on.\u201d<\/p>\n Yet as her songs took off, Debbie became an unlikely star, hanging with Whitney, Michael, Princess Di. Like a pop version of Zelig, she shows up in every Eighties story, always wearing that black porkpie hat. When Atlantic Records celebrated its fortieth anniversary with a star-studded HBO concert, headlined by a Led Zeppelin reunion, Deb was the youngest artist there, surrounded by vets like Yes and Genesis. (Her set was sandwiched right between Ruth Brown and Robert Plant.) She sang the National Anthem at the 1988 World Series \u2014 the legendary game with Kirk Gibson\u2019s pinch-hit walk-off homer, which as she notes, \u201cbegan and ended with a Gibson.\u201d (No relation.)<\/p>\n In one of the book\u2019s most awesomely surreal moments, she visits her idol Elton John backstage at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, along with Billy Joel Himself.\u00a0 With no warning, Elton asks her to come out with them and sing \u201cLucy in the Sky With Diamonds.\u201d What could be more authentically Eighties than a high-school girl who\u2019s never tasted anything tripper than root beer going onstage to fake her way through a John Lennon acid freakout with the Rocket Man and the Piano Man? (Debbie didn\u2019t know the chords, but followed on piano by watching Elton\u2019s hands \u2014 now that\u2019s a pro.)<\/p>\n When her teen-pop moment was over, she didn\u2019t get stuck in the past \u2014 she just moved on to the theater. She became a Broadway star, playing Eponine in Les Miserables, Sandy in Grease, Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She also starred in Gypsy, going up against the fearsome Betty Buckley as stage mom Mama Rose \u2014 a role that forced her to start facing up to the emotional damage of growing up with a momager of her own.<\/p>\n She didn\u2019t suffer the usual nightmares of kids who got famous in the Eighties \u2014 no addiction, no predators, no harassment, no tabloid scandals. But she chronicles her ups and downs in Eternally Electric, with health struggles, the death of her mother, and career disasters. When she\u2019s broke, she gets a gift from a loyal friend to tide her over: Lance Bass of NSync sends her five thousand bucks in a brown paper bag, with no strings attached.<\/p>\n She kicks around every corner of the biz, doing reality-TV gigs like Dancing with the Stars. (She tries the tango to Camila Cabello\u2019s \u201cHavana.\u201d) She releases a techno remake of the 1970s Tony Orlando oldie \u201cKnock Three Times,\u201d dueting with Tony \u2014 her mom\u2019s crush. She even hits the road for a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with seven of the Osmond brothers. Baby, that\u2019s show business for you.<\/p>\n But she never gives up, and never falls into self-pity, which is why she\u2019s a delight to hang with in the pages of Eternally Electric. One of the funniest moments comes in the 1990s, when she can\u2019t get arrested career-wise. She gets a call from the veteran L.A. hardcore punk band the Circle Jerks \u2014 in the post-Nirvana grunge gold rush, they\u2019ve got a major-label album. So they want to celebrate with \u2014 what else? \u2014 a Debbie Gibson duet. So she shows up with them onstage at \u2014 where else? \u2014 CBGB, to belt a bratty cover of Robyn Hitchcock\u2019s \u201cI Wanna Destroy You.\u201d Debbie marks the occasion by taking her first-ever stage dive \u2014 with an MTV crew on hand filming every second. The Nineties, man.<\/p>\n She also goes on the Journey Through the Eighties tour with her fellow Eighties teen-pop star Tiffany, who hit it big with her remake of \u201cI Think We\u2019re Alone Now.\u201d At the time, the two girls were seen as rivals, with Debbie\u2019s theatrical voice vs. Tiffany\u2019s countrified yowl. Deb was the yin to Tiff\u2019s yang, the Beatles to her Stones, the Shirelles to her Shangri-La\u2019s. But \u2014 maybe disappointingly \u2014 there was no beef. \u201cDespite the fact that the teen magazines pitted us against each other, there had always been a camaraderie,\u201d Deb writes. \u201cI love Tiffany because she\u2019s a girl\u2019s girl.\u201d (Tiff\u2019s finest radio hit was \u201cAll This Time,\u201d but don\u2019t sleep on cult faves like \u201cKid on a Corner.\u201d)<\/p>\n When Deb and Tiffany finally teamed up for the first time, they really knew how to pick their moment \u2014 they co-starred in the 2011 Syfy trash Mega-Python vs. Gatoroid, as a duo of ass-kicking superheroes battling giant human-eating monsters. After one epic fight scene, Debbie staggers to her feet and utters the punch line: \u201cI think we\u2019re alone now.\u201d<\/p>\n Debbie lives in Vegas these days, still with Liberace\u2019s piano. But the reason her legend lives on is that she was never a fake. She blew up in the Eighties because the pop girls could tell she was the real thing. Then as now, teen girls are the toughest crowd in show biz \u2014 they can always smell a phony or a hype. But they recognized Deb as one of their own.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople should have known better than to dismiss a young girl writing about her feelings and the fans who connected to it all,\u201d she writes in the book. \u201cYes, sixteen-year-olds write about sixteen-year-old things, including puppy love and the people we like in social studies class.\u201d Yet whatever the lyrics, the message was in the music: an ordinary teenage girl telling her own story. These days, as the daughters of Debbie rule the airwaves, that\u2019s what pop music is all about. We all owe Debbie Gibson so much.<\/p>\n Best of Rolling Stone<\/strong><\/p>\n Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter<\/a>. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook<\/a>, Twitter<\/a>, and Instagram<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Debbie Gibson blasted out of America\u2019s boomboxes in the summer of 1987 with her Top Ten hit \u201cOnly…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":64583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[264],"tags":[41117,45591,18,45594,117,45592,19,17,45588,45589,45593,337,45590],"class_list":{"0":"post-64582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-debbie-gibson","9":"tag-diane-gibson","10":"tag-eire","11":"tag-electric-youth","12":"tag-entertainment","13":"tag-foolish-beat","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-kirk-gibson","17":"tag-little-louie-vega","18":"tag-lost-in-your-eyes","19":"tag-music","20":"tag-only-in-my-dreams"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}