Debbie Gibson blasted out of America’s boomboxes in the summer of 1987 with her Top Ten hit “Only In My Dreams.” 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 — it was a sign of the future. Debbie was a 16-year-old girl — still in high school! — writing her own pop mega-smash. In the Eighties, that just wasn’t done.
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 “Foolish Beat.” She still holds the record as the youngest girl to achieve that feat. In fact, she’s also the SECOND-youngest, since she turned the same trick a year later with “Lost In Your Eyes.”
Debbie pioneered the whole idea of a teenage pop girl doing her own songs. No glam image, no sexed-up pose — 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 “Electric Youth,” “Shake Your Love,” and her unbeatable “Out of the Blue.” But in those days, she had to fight to prove it could be done.
Gibson tells the story in her new memoir Eternally Electric: The Message In My Music, and there’s no other story like it. She paved the way for the pop-girl era we’re living in — she walked so Billie, Chappell, Olivia, Taylor, Gracie, and their generation could run. If you love pop music in the 2020s, you’re living in a world Debbie helped create.
She’s 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’s official: the Debbissance is in full swing.
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 Hüsker Dü, but I flipped my wig for “Only In My Dreams.” (Her deep cut “Between the Lines” is basically the same song as Sonic Youth’s “Cotton Crown,” but I’m not going to lay that trip on you right now.) My middle-school sister Caroline and I loved to trade mix tapes — she got me into Bobby Brown, I got her into the Replacements — 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.
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 Martineé, who produced the shoulda-been hit “Play the Field.”
“Foolish Beat” was her big goopy tearjerker, with the most Eighties sax solo this side of The Lost Boys, where Deb sobs “I could never love again!” the way only a high-strung teenager can. (She’d never had a real-life boyfriend when she wrote it.) As for “Lost In Your Eyes,” it’s the song Stewie sang on Family Guy when he auditioned for American Idol — a sign of its place in cultural history.
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 “my first grape Bubble Yum-flavored kiss.” But she was guided by her formidable stage mom. Diane Gibson even tracked down Billy Joel’s childhood piano teacher, so Debbie could pick up the torch. The teacher owned Liberace’s old piano — and ended up selling it to Debbie.
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 — a geeky theater kid who happened to be a writing prodigy. But she didn’t fit into any format. “During that era, the music industry had no idea what to do with a teenage girl,” she writes. “Sure, 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.”
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 — the legendary game with Kirk Gibson’s pinch-hit walk-off homer, which as she notes, “began and ended with a Gibson.” (No relation.)
In one of the book’s most awesomely surreal moments, she visits her idol Elton John backstage at a sold-out Madison Square Garden, along with Billy Joel Himself. With no warning, Elton asks her to come out with them and sing “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds.” What could be more authentically Eighties than a high-school girl who’s 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’t know the chords, but followed on piano by watching Elton’s hands — now that’s a pro.)
When her teen-pop moment was over, she didn’t get stuck in the past — 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 — a role that forced her to start facing up to the emotional damage of growing up with a momager of her own.
She didn’t suffer the usual nightmares of kids who got famous in the Eighties — 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’s 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.
She kicks around every corner of the biz, doing reality-TV gigs like Dancing with the Stars. (She tries the tango to Camila Cabello’s “Havana.”) She releases a techno remake of the 1970s Tony Orlando oldie “Knock Three Times,” dueting with Tony — her mom’s crush. She even hits the road for a production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat with seven of the Osmond brothers. Baby, that’s show business for you.
But she never gives up, and never falls into self-pity, which is why she’s a delight to hang with in the pages of Eternally Electric. One of the funniest moments comes in the 1990s, when she can’t get arrested career-wise. She gets a call from the veteran L.A. hardcore punk band the Circle Jerks — in the post-Nirvana grunge gold rush, they’ve got a major-label album. So they want to celebrate with — what else? — a Debbie Gibson duet. So she shows up with them onstage at — where else? — CBGB, to belt a bratty cover of Robyn Hitchcock’s “I Wanna Destroy You.” Debbie marks the occasion by taking her first-ever stage dive — with an MTV crew on hand filming every second. The Nineties, man.
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 “I Think We’re Alone Now.” At the time, the two girls were seen as rivals, with Debbie’s theatrical voice vs. Tiffany’s countrified yowl. Deb was the yin to Tiff’s yang, the Beatles to her Stones, the Shirelles to her Shangri-La’s. But — maybe disappointingly — there was no beef. “Despite the fact that the teen magazines pitted us against each other, there had always been a camaraderie,” Deb writes. “I love Tiffany because she’s a girl’s girl.” (Tiff’s finest radio hit was “All This Time,” but don’t sleep on cult faves like “Kid on a Corner.”)
When Deb and Tiffany finally teamed up for the first time, they really knew how to pick their moment — 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: “I think we’re alone now.”
Debbie lives in Vegas these days, still with Liberace’s 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 — they can always smell a phony or a hype. But they recognized Deb as one of their own.
“People should have known better than to dismiss a young girl writing about her feelings and the fans who connected to it all,” she writes in the book. “Yes, sixteen-year-olds write about sixteen-year-old things, including puppy love and the people we like in social studies class.” 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’s what pop music is all about. We all owe Debbie Gibson so much.
