Blondie guitarist Chris Stein was born in Brooklyn, New York on January 5, 1950. He first crossed paths with his longtime collaborator, Debbie Harry, as part of a band called the Stilettos in 1974. He was in art college at the time. The band grew out of the rising punk scene in New York City at the time. Stein recalls how they ended up as regulars at the famed CBGB’s:“We used to play CBGB’s on a Saturday night to twenty-five people with Television. You’d trickle onstage and trickle offstage. We were the house band for six months. And how we got into CBGB’s, one of the girls in the Stilettos was screwing one of the guys in Television at the time,” he told Creem magazine.