When pop star and former teen idol Debbie Gibson was writing her new autobiography, Eternally Electric, she faced a unique challenge as a celebrity memoirist. She’d never lived a life of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. She came from a large, supportive Italian family, with a “momager” who looked out for her and ensured she didn’t succumb to the dreaded child star syndrome. She never even drank her first glass of wine until she was 38 years old. Probably the most scandalous thing Gibson ever did was refine her image when she released her “difficult third album” at age 20 (“It was like, ‘News at 11: Debbie Gibson is wearing all black!’” she chuckles), or, at age 30, pose for a relatively tame Playboy pictorial. (“They were like, ‘We’ve never had this big of a clothing budget for a naked photo shoot.”)
“I’m laughing, because Charlie Sheen’s book comes out the same day as mine,” Gibson tells Gold Derby. “So, if you want [scandal], go get his. I mean, I can’t wait to read his personally — but I don’t think that’s what people want or expect from me.”
While Eternally Electric may not exactly be Motley Crue’s The Dirt, it is a thoroughly fascinating read. It’s packed with amazing anecdotes about an unknown Gibson acting in Ghostbusters (she was “Birthday Girl” in the Tavern on the Green scene) and on the Fame TV show alongside fellow future teen star Janet Jackson; meeting Princess Diana and having dinner with George Michael during her ‘80s heyday; performing the Soft Boys’ “I Wanna Destroy You” at CBGB with the Circle Jerks; and an aborted movie musical she worked on for a year, Skirts, that was supposed to be directed by Kenny Ortega and nearly starred Marisa Tomei, Juliette Lewis, Rosie Perez, David Schwimmer, Billy Wirth, and Jamie Walters, all of whom screen-tested alongside Gibson.
But there’s also some heavy, dark stuff in there, belying Gibson’s colorful and bubbly public persona. She opens up about her health issues, including a battle with Lyme disease that took years to properly diagnose and treat, her financial woes, and professionally “divorcing” her mom, Diane, who had managed her for 25 years. And she’s especially candid about the panic attacks and anxiety she silently suffered when she was thrust into the public eye at age 16.
“For the wiring of a teenage brain that’s still transforming and evolving, [extreme success] is not normal. It’s amazing, yes, but it’s not normal to hear 150,000 people chanting your name or expecting something from you. It’s just an unusual amount of energy to be coming your way,” Gibson explains. “And I think the never wanting to acknowledge that pressure got me in trouble. … I was living my dream, but I think at a certain point you have to acknowledge the psychological [effect] of what’s happening. This psychiatrist who I went to at a very young age put me on Xanax and Prozac, because I had gotten so deep into a hole and I couldn’t meditate my way out of it, and he said, ‘Your body and your mind are interpreting success as trauma. You don’t know how to process it.’ So, there is an overwhelm. And that’s what depression is. You’re depressing and suppressing things. You can’t unravel what’s happening.”
Gibson points out that in “the late ‘80s, ‘panic attack’ wasn’t even on the tip of anyone’s tongue” and there was “such a stigma around it back then.” Plus, she had always dreamed of being a pop star, so didn’t understand why her nervous system was reacting so chaotically once that dream actually came true. She recalls experiencing her first major panic attack while being forced to have dinner with a radio station program director, schmoozing him to get some airplay.
“He was probably in his thirties or forties, and I’m thinking, ‘Why does this older guy need to be sitting at a dinner with me?’ First of all, little girls didn’t go to dinner. I went to the diner with my grandparents or my sisters. We didn’t go to fancy restaurants. So, that in and of itself was weird,” she says. “And then I’m trying to make small talk with this adult who’s not in my family. … I used this expression in the book: It felt ‘energetically slutty.’ And it was questioned by my copy editor at one point, like, ‘Really? You want to say that?’ But that’s exactly what it felt like: giving this piece of yourself in exchange for something. As a little girl, that felt weird.”
Gibson’s next major anxiety episode occurred at her high school graduation party, a “big Italian family celebration” that should have been private, because was instead covered by the media. “There was a magazine photographer there, and he wouldn’t leave,” she recalls. “And I felt like I had to monitor myself. … All of a sudden I was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m so thrilled that press is interested in me, but this has nothing to do with my music. This is my one chance to be normal all summer — and I can’t.’ That was when I felt myself go into a kind of dissociative disorder, where you literally disconnect. It’s like [The Flintstones’] Gazoo on your shoulder. You’re looking at yourself from another perspective, but you’re out of body. I was 17 and having these out-of-body experiences, because I couldn’t process what was going on in my actual body and mind.”
Of course, there were many upsides to Gibson’s meteoric success. After getting her start at age 12, when her original composition “I Come From America,” performed on a Casio keyboard, won a songwriting contest at New York’s WOR Radio, she used her winnings to fund a recording studio in the Gibson family garage. And she unwittingly set a template for female teen singer-songwriters like Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Lorde, and Olivia Rodrigo. (“In the ‘80s, it was pretty unheard-of for young girl artists who write their own music, let alone produce. That was very much reserved for men. That was a boys’ club. I didn’t know any other girls who were wiring a patch bay or splicing tape in their playroom-slash-laundry room-slash-garage,” she laughs.) Eventually she landed an Atlantic Records deal and became the youngest female artist to write, perform, and produce a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1 single, a feat she accomplished at age 17 with “Foolish Beat.” (She still holds that record today.) She even won ASCAP’s Songwriter of the Year award, alongside Bruce Springsteen, when she was 19.
But by the time she was releasing 1990’s Anything Is Possible — her more experimental third record, which Gibson admits was “definitely not cohesive” — the hits were drying up. And a new kind of anxiety started to set in.
“I used to walk into [Atlantic Records president] Ahmet Ertegun’s office with a brown paper lunch bag of individual 10-minute cassettes, and I would dump it on his desk and go, ‘Here’s my album!’ … They trusted that I knew who I was and knew who my audience was. But once [record executives] all started getting their hands in it, it became very convoluted,” says Gibson. “And that accountability and responsibility, being responsible for other people’s finances — like, if I go down, the whole team goes down, the label loses money, my mom loses — that’s a lot of pressure. … I talk about my mom going into that ladies’ room after the [discouraging Anything Is Possible] meeting and us looking at each other, so deflated. We were like, ‘What are we going to do? This is not fun anymore.’
“To me, [artistic experimentation] is what a body of a career is all about. But I think the label thought they signed, as I put it as a chapter title, the ‘Pop Bullseye Girl.’ Like, I’ll have a hit at any cost and just want to be on the charts. And weirdly, what they got was this mainstream artist, but with a very indie spirit who also wanted to do all that experimenting,” Gibson elaborates. “And that’s when they were kind of panicked. That album didn’t hit the ‘bullseye.’ And nothing good ever comes from a place of panic.”
Unlike some other female teen-pop stars, including Janet Jackson, who as they matured became more overtly sexual to prove they were no longer innocent girls-next-door, Gibson didn’t go that route. “Everybody was in a rush for little girls and little-girl pop stars to grow up,” she recalls. “I think I weirdly had the knowledge that you do only get to be young once, so I literally clung tight to my stuffed animals and my high-tops and my clothes that were kind of baggy. I just remember thinking, ‘I’m going to have time for all that.’ I had this arrested-development thing, always. I still have it! … I definitely wasn’t in a rush to lose that little-girl side of myself. And everyone kept wanting me to. That just felt a little creepy. It was like, ‘Why are these grown men invested in that about me?’
“It’s really strange when you start,” she continues. “It is a little golden prison that you’re in, when you start out as this very innocent little girl. Because any time you try to go anywhere [artistically or stylistically], people have an opinion on it. In terms of men and that kind of sexualization, it’s been around since the beginning of time, but because I wasn’t so blatantly sexual in my everyday life, it wasn’t something I was that comfortable with dealing with.”
Creepily, Gibson had first been approached to pose for Playboy right after her 18th birthday. She finally agreed to do it 12 years later, but when her semi-clothed “theatrical” photo shoot wasn’t nearly as racy as her March 2005 issue’s full-frontal Playmates, the magazine used a contractual loophole to not put her on the cover, despite promising to do so. “I just wasn’t as explicit as they wanted,” she shrugs. But later, “word came down from Hef [Playboy founder Hugh Hefner] that he’d made a mistake. Because he saw all the media that I got from it. He was like, ‘You know what? It shouldn’t be that these pop personalities and celebrities have to be the same as what the centerfold Playmate is doing.’ He realized that certain celebrities showing anything at all was a big deal. And so again, I joke that I am a ‘pioneer,’ but that changed — the [Playboy] rules changed after that. I kind of quietly did that a lot more than maybe people know, and that feels good. I can sit back with that knowledge and just go, ‘Yep, I was on the frontlines of that too.’”
Gibson may have no longer been on the pop charts or top 40 radio in the ‘90s and 2000s, but she still worked tirelessly, doing theater, TV, and film. After grinding and hustling since she was literally in middle school, she simply didn’t know how to turn off or have any work/life balance. But as she says, “I appeared to be superhuman stamina woman, but I was always a little more fragile than I appeared. … I had certain vulnerabilities in my system, my adrenals were never what they appeared to be, and if I pushed too hard, I paid the price.” So, once she was diagnosed with a “debilitating illness,” Lyme disease, at age 43, she knew she had to resist the “knee-jerk reaction and temptation” to say yes to every job offer — even if the money was good, or if there was that nagging feeling that such an opportunity might not come along again.
“I really like even taking the word ‘hustle’ out of my vocabulary now,” says Gibson, who just celebrated her 55th birthday. “The beauty of being an independent artist is I can control it. It often means I’m bringing in less money. I might just break even. But if I break even and I enjoyed it and I have my health, my vocal health, and my sanity at the end of it, I prefer that to ‘let me keep grinding it out and make the money, and then fall apart.’ Those days are over, which is great.”
And now, Gibson is at peace with her legacy, as chronicled in Eternally Electric — whether it’s setting Billboard chart records, being one of the first mainstream pop stars to cross over to Broadway, or even changing Playboy’s rules — whether or not she’ll ever fully get the credit.
“[My] imagery [was] so kind of distinct and strong, it looks like [I was] a creation. I really believe that it upstages things, so it almost felt like there could have been some male mastermind behind my hits. Like, ‘We’re going to write her a song called “Shake Your Love” and put her in a plaid dress!’ But it was all me,” she grins. “I just don’t think people are bothering even to read the credits at that point. And it doesn’t matter, in a way, because for me, the music always was meant to be the star. So, if someone’s hearing the song, I kind of don’t care if they’ve read the credits. It’s like a little-cat-who-swallowed-the-mouse kind of feeling of like, ‘Yep, that was me!’
“My ego doesn’t actually need it. I’m not going to be bitter because people aren’t walking around every day going, ‘I wonder what Debbie Gibson’s piano chops are like?’” she laughs. “I don’t have that sense of self-importance. But I guess it’s fun to be surprising people all these decades later.”
Debbie Gibson’s interview, from her Las Vegas home with her “Electric Youth” vintage neon sign and Liberace’s piano in the background, originally ran on Gold Derby. Watch it in full above.
