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| Not the inspiration, btw. |
The format I used for the posts on Black Sabbath and Blitzen Trapper doesn’t feel like a good fit for this. It probably wasn’t a good fit for either of those, but there’s just…something about Blondie’s history that makes more sense of telling it all at once.
“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"
"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)
A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:
“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”
I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.
There’s also the blurry line between Debbie Harry’s iconic presence and Blondie, the full band. As (very) young man, I’d heard rumors about how much the rest of them resented the way industry and media made her the centerpiece, but that rates little more than a mention across most of the sources I read. For all that, the biggest thing that slipped my notice as all the years past was how big Blondie was. On the one hand, sure, you still hear their songs in random places - my kids know hits like “One Way or Another,” “Heart of Glass” and “The Tide Is High” as well as anyone my age - on the other, my brain hiccupped a bit when Cryptic Rock called them “one of the most important bands in rock ‘n’ roll history," even though I can't explain why. What is the space in between, basically?
In some ways (that might piss off the other members), the story of Blondie is the story of a couple: Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. They met knocking around the New York punk/no-wave/art scenes of the mid-1970s - Harry, an escapee from New Jersey (and an abusive relationship), Stein always with a camera in his hand - with a place called The Kitchen at the center of it. Watching other bands play the space inspired Stein to start figuring out how to either find a band or start his own. Harry had done all kinds of things to that point - e.g., working as a waitress and/or a Playboy bunny, not auditioning terribly well for acting parts, some time as a driver for the New York Dolls, and singing with a late 60s folk rock band called the Wind in the Willows - but she was fronting a band called the Stilettoes when Stein met her. He came in as a guitarist and, shortly thereafter, as Harry’s boyfriend of 13 years.
When The Stilettoes dissolved, Harry and Stein borrowed Billy O’Connor (drums) for that band plus a bassist named Fred Smith to start another project. They tried on a couple names - e.g.., Angel and the Snake, then Blondie and the Banzai Boys - before clipping it to Blondie in 1974, a name inspired by the cat-calls Harry got walking the streets of New York. They became regulars at the New York punk scene’s most famous venues, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, and dropped Smith for Bobby Valentine (aka, Gary Lachman) and O’Connor for Clem Burke. Once keyboardist Jimmy Destri joined in 1976, they had all the pieces in place.
Industry people had discovered the scene by then and it didn’t take long for a small label called Private Stock Records to sign Blondie. Their debut album came out in December of 1976. It didn’t go far with the public, but it traveled far enough for David Bowie and Iggy Pop to hear it, who invited Blondie to tour with them in 1977. A second, odder break came when an Australian TV show called Countdown aired them playing “In the Flesh” instead of “X Offender” as originally planned. The song became a big enough hit Down Under for fans to riot when the band had to cancel a show in Brisbane. Those things between them gave Blondie the juice to buy out their contract with Private Stock and switch to Chrysalis Records for their second album.
With Valentine’s departure, Blondie recorded Plastic Letters as a four-piece and, in what became the norm for them, they landed two hits on the UK charts with “Denis” (a cover of Randy and the Rainbows’ 1963 hit, “Denise”) and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”; for whatever reason, Blondie generally fared best in English-speaking countries that were not the U.S. They broke through the rest of the way with the release of 1978’s Parallel Lines - that despite the misstep of trying to use their cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” as the lead single. The other songs broke through own their own, “Hanging on the Telephone,” “Picture This,” and, most important, their re-worked version of “Heart of Glass,” which hit No. 1 in the UK, then finally in the U.S. The story behind the change was interesting:
“It was a reworking of a rock and reggae-influenced song that the group had performed since its formation in the mid 1970s, updated with strong elements of disco music. Clem Burke later said the revamped version was inspired partly by Kraftwerk and partly by the Bee Gees' ‘Stayin' Alive,’ whose drum beat Burke tried to emulate. He and Stein gave Jimmy Destri much of the credit for the final result, noting that Destri's appreciation of technology had led him to introduce synthesizers and to rework the keyboard sections.”
Blondie managed two more decently successful albums - 1979’s Eat to the Beat and, arguably their most ambitious album, 1980s Autoamerican, both of which yielded some solid hits (again, mostly in the UK, where they landed six No. 1s, the only artists besides Michael Jackson to do so across three decades) - as well as the outta-nowhere hit “Call Me,” a collaboration with someone outside the band (Girogio Morodor, who’d worked with Donna Summer) on the soundtrack for a Richard Gere vehicle called American Gigolo (1980) - but slow, inevitable process of dissolution started around the same time. It didn’t happen all at once, obviously - e.g., they showed they still had legs when Harry’s dabbling around the uptown/hip hop scene led to “Rapture,” tragically, the first U.S., No. 1 to feature rapping - but it still featured the usual distractions and dissatisfactions that consume most bands of a certain magnitude.
First, a late-ish addition to the band, a bassist/guitarist named Frank Infante who joined after Plastic Letters and before Parallel Lines, sued the rest of the band “regarding a lack of involvement” during the recording of Autoamerican. I’m still struggling to find grounds for a lawsuit in that, but Infante would, for lack of a better word, haunt Blondie for the next couple decades: when they reunited in the mid-1990s, he attempted to sue to prevent them from touring as Blondie; more egregiously, Infante and another, once-and-barely member named Nigel Harrison, demanded to play with the band at their 2006 induction into the Music Hall of Fame leading to “an on-stage spat” and a hard pass.
There were solo projects, of course, - e.g., Debbie Harry’s KooKoo and Burke and Destri’s Heart on a Wall, both in 1981; or Harry and Stein working with the Gun Club on their second album, Miami (Stein produced and Harry recorded backing vocals as “D. H. Lawrence, Jr.”; the Gun Club’s lead singer, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a big fan) - but Blondie ultimately did the bankruptcy thing, where the band broke up slowly at first, and then all at once. The usual stressors - e.g., drug use, fatigue, jealousy - came into play, but the one-two punch came with the poor reception of their (then) final studio album, 1982’s The Hunter, and Stein being diagnosed with a rare autoimmune skin disorder called pemphigus. After a little time playing to less than less-than-full venues and the IRS coming to call about back taxes, Blondie cancelled a European tour and called it quits. Harry focused on helping Stein recover (even slipping him Stein heroin in the hospital; both were using at that point), and everyone went their separate ways - including Stein and Harry, though that came later - until Stein got the band back together again in the mid-1990s.
Confident as I am that I got at least “five interesting” things about Blondie in the above, the reason it felt right to dump Blondie story all at once is that later interview with Stein and Harry, while often cute as the dickens, tend to talk about their past as a blur. The drop amazing stray anecdotes - e.g., friendship and loss with, say, the Ramones, how Alan Vega’s band Suicide could have hit bigger had that band come out two years later, or even the assault/robbery/rape she and Stein survived - with an off-handed politeness that suggests that they don’t want to bore people with the details. It could also be they feel like, between Harry’s Face It: A Memoir and Stein’s two collections of photos of the New York scene, Point of View: Me, New York City and the Punk Scene and Chris Stein / Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk, they’ve already told the story.
About the Sampler
I dabbled in a couple later albums - though not No Exit (1999), because Spotify didn’t have that one - but none of it really worked for me. I suppose the same goes for (most of) Blondie’s biggest hits. I linked to plenty of them above, but also figure most people already know those. As such, and with several exceptions I couldn’t say no to, I built the sampler around songs that didn’t come off the greatest hits compilations.
For what it’s worth, and so very predictably for an indie fan, and to the point where it pains me to write it…yeah, I like Blondie’s earlier material better, though not exclusively. Still, nearly half the 25-song sampler comes from the debut and Plastic Letters. And here’s where I get in my head as to whether (any) readers would prefer that I just list the songs on the sampler, or if they like having short descriptions of them to steer them toward songs they might like better. Feel free to let me know, if you care to, but I’ve decided to go with listing the songs from each album, but with a note on one song. Here goes, and without links to anything already linked to above:
Blondie: “In the Flesh,” “X Offender,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” “The Thin Line,” “In the Sun,” and, a personal favorite that nails the girl-band gone bad vibe, a 50s-tinged ballad about accidentally sanding down a bad boy’s rough edges, “Out in the Streets."
Plastic Letters: “Fan Mail,” “I Didn’t Have the Nerve to Say No,” “Love at the Pier,” “No Imagination,” “Once I Had a Love (aka, the Disco Song” (aka, the original “Heart of Glass,” and the funny, power-ballad "Poet's Probem" that, 1) captures the album’s more polished sound, and 2) covers ground that I never knew Blondie covered.
Parallel Lines: “I’m Gonna Love You Too” (fun!), “Will Anything Happen,” “Pretty Baby” (a throwback to the throwbacks on the first album), and the semi-soaring, more “new-wave lush” “Fade Away and Radiate,” which reminds me of something Bowie might have done.
Eat to the Beat: “Dreaming,” “Atomic,” and “Union City Blue” (all UK hits), and “Die Young Stay Pretty,” which stands up slipping reggae into Blondie’s bag of tricks before “The Tide Is High.”
Autoamerican: “Call Me” (which I still love), “Go Through It,” “Here’s Looking at You” (which throws way back to standards from the first half of the 20th century), the disco/funk mash-up, "Live It Up," and “Angels On the Balcony,” in which, at least I think could hold up as “prog-new-wave.”
With the exception of Parallel Lines, I don’t think I’d ever listened to a Blondie albums all the way through until this week. Felt pretty rewarding, for what it’s worth. Even if I can’t get the words, “one of the most important bands in rock ‘n’ roll history” out of my mouth, I have no trouble saying they showed that rock still had some new places to go in the late 70s and Debbie Harry arguably changed what having a woman lead a band looked like.
“Q: What do you think it is that makes your songs so appealing to so many generations?"
"[Chris Stein]: They’re cheerful. You know, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don't know. We tap into a lot of things from musical history when making the songs. They’re based on a lot of stuff that’s come before us so maybe that’s… You know, we got one review recently from one of those Canadian festivals. It [was] a really great glowing review, and she said that the band almost sounds psychedelic in its presentation, which I thought was great because I always think that, but I never really see it in print. There’s a lot of influences from the ’60s, ’70s, [and] later music in there, so I think maybe that clicks with people.”
- Time Magazineinterview with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein (2014)
A number of sources I read while researching this post praised Blondie’s genre-bending progress throughout the band’s short, original career. This comes from Wikipedia's section on their “style and legacy,” but something much like it topped several interviews:
“The band is known not only for the striking stage persona and vocal performances of Harry but also for incorporating elements in their work from numerous subgenres of music, reaching from their punk roots to embrace new wave, disco, pop, rap, and reggae.”
I get that and I don’t. The bulk of their eponymous debut listens like a throwbacks to an early-60s sound, if with a “bad girl” twist, and they did more or less leave that behind for the follow-up album, Plastic Letters, only to call it back now and again. There’s no question their music expanded and evolved - the distance between Plastic Letters and Autoamerican is wider than I knew going in - but it all sounds more like...Blondie than any one of the genres they dabbled in. To hit that from the other direction, it feels more natural to say someone else’s song sounds like Blondie than the other way around, even as it’s fair to acknowledge that most Blondie songs sound like something else.
There’s also the blurry line between Debbie Harry’s iconic presence and Blondie, the full band. As (very) young man, I’d heard rumors about how much the rest of them resented the way industry and media made her the centerpiece, but that rates little more than a mention across most of the sources I read. For all that, the biggest thing that slipped my notice as all the years past was how big Blondie was. On the one hand, sure, you still hear their songs in random places - my kids know hits like “One Way or Another,” “Heart of Glass” and “The Tide Is High” as well as anyone my age - on the other, my brain hiccupped a bit when Cryptic Rock called them “one of the most important bands in rock ‘n’ roll history," even though I can't explain why. What is the space in between, basically?
In some ways (that might piss off the other members), the story of Blondie is the story of a couple: Debbie Harry and Chris Stein. They met knocking around the New York punk/no-wave/art scenes of the mid-1970s - Harry, an escapee from New Jersey (and an abusive relationship), Stein always with a camera in his hand - with a place called The Kitchen at the center of it. Watching other bands play the space inspired Stein to start figuring out how to either find a band or start his own. Harry had done all kinds of things to that point - e.g., working as a waitress and/or a Playboy bunny, not auditioning terribly well for acting parts, some time as a driver for the New York Dolls, and singing with a late 60s folk rock band called the Wind in the Willows - but she was fronting a band called the Stilettoes when Stein met her. He came in as a guitarist and, shortly thereafter, as Harry’s boyfriend of 13 years.
When The Stilettoes dissolved, Harry and Stein borrowed Billy O’Connor (drums) for that band plus a bassist named Fred Smith to start another project. They tried on a couple names - e.g.., Angel and the Snake, then Blondie and the Banzai Boys - before clipping it to Blondie in 1974, a name inspired by the cat-calls Harry got walking the streets of New York. They became regulars at the New York punk scene’s most famous venues, Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs, and dropped Smith for Bobby Valentine (aka, Gary Lachman) and O’Connor for Clem Burke. Once keyboardist Jimmy Destri joined in 1976, they had all the pieces in place.
Industry people had discovered the scene by then and it didn’t take long for a small label called Private Stock Records to sign Blondie. Their debut album came out in December of 1976. It didn’t go far with the public, but it traveled far enough for David Bowie and Iggy Pop to hear it, who invited Blondie to tour with them in 1977. A second, odder break came when an Australian TV show called Countdown aired them playing “In the Flesh” instead of “X Offender” as originally planned. The song became a big enough hit Down Under for fans to riot when the band had to cancel a show in Brisbane. Those things between them gave Blondie the juice to buy out their contract with Private Stock and switch to Chrysalis Records for their second album.
With Valentine’s departure, Blondie recorded Plastic Letters as a four-piece and, in what became the norm for them, they landed two hits on the UK charts with “Denis” (a cover of Randy and the Rainbows’ 1963 hit, “Denise”) and “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”; for whatever reason, Blondie generally fared best in English-speaking countries that were not the U.S. They broke through the rest of the way with the release of 1978’s Parallel Lines - that despite the misstep of trying to use their cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” as the lead single. The other songs broke through own their own, “Hanging on the Telephone,” “Picture This,” and, most important, their re-worked version of “Heart of Glass,” which hit No. 1 in the UK, then finally in the U.S. The story behind the change was interesting:
“It was a reworking of a rock and reggae-influenced song that the group had performed since its formation in the mid 1970s, updated with strong elements of disco music. Clem Burke later said the revamped version was inspired partly by Kraftwerk and partly by the Bee Gees' ‘Stayin' Alive,’ whose drum beat Burke tried to emulate. He and Stein gave Jimmy Destri much of the credit for the final result, noting that Destri's appreciation of technology had led him to introduce synthesizers and to rework the keyboard sections.”
Blondie managed two more decently successful albums - 1979’s Eat to the Beat and, arguably their most ambitious album, 1980s Autoamerican, both of which yielded some solid hits (again, mostly in the UK, where they landed six No. 1s, the only artists besides Michael Jackson to do so across three decades) - as well as the outta-nowhere hit “Call Me,” a collaboration with someone outside the band (Girogio Morodor, who’d worked with Donna Summer) on the soundtrack for a Richard Gere vehicle called American Gigolo (1980) - but slow, inevitable process of dissolution started around the same time. It didn’t happen all at once, obviously - e.g., they showed they still had legs when Harry’s dabbling around the uptown/hip hop scene led to “Rapture,” tragically, the first U.S., No. 1 to feature rapping - but it still featured the usual distractions and dissatisfactions that consume most bands of a certain magnitude.
First, a late-ish addition to the band, a bassist/guitarist named Frank Infante who joined after Plastic Letters and before Parallel Lines, sued the rest of the band “regarding a lack of involvement” during the recording of Autoamerican. I’m still struggling to find grounds for a lawsuit in that, but Infante would, for lack of a better word, haunt Blondie for the next couple decades: when they reunited in the mid-1990s, he attempted to sue to prevent them from touring as Blondie; more egregiously, Infante and another, once-and-barely member named Nigel Harrison, demanded to play with the band at their 2006 induction into the Music Hall of Fame leading to “an on-stage spat” and a hard pass.
There were solo projects, of course, - e.g., Debbie Harry’s KooKoo and Burke and Destri’s Heart on a Wall, both in 1981; or Harry and Stein working with the Gun Club on their second album, Miami (Stein produced and Harry recorded backing vocals as “D. H. Lawrence, Jr.”; the Gun Club’s lead singer, Jeffrey Lee Pierce was a big fan) - but Blondie ultimately did the bankruptcy thing, where the band broke up slowly at first, and then all at once. The usual stressors - e.g., drug use, fatigue, jealousy - came into play, but the one-two punch came with the poor reception of their (then) final studio album, 1982’s The Hunter, and Stein being diagnosed with a rare autoimmune skin disorder called pemphigus. After a little time playing to less than less-than-full venues and the IRS coming to call about back taxes, Blondie cancelled a European tour and called it quits. Harry focused on helping Stein recover (even slipping him Stein heroin in the hospital; both were using at that point), and everyone went their separate ways - including Stein and Harry, though that came later - until Stein got the band back together again in the mid-1990s.
Confident as I am that I got at least “five interesting” things about Blondie in the above, the reason it felt right to dump Blondie story all at once is that later interview with Stein and Harry, while often cute as the dickens, tend to talk about their past as a blur. The drop amazing stray anecdotes - e.g., friendship and loss with, say, the Ramones, how Alan Vega’s band Suicide could have hit bigger had that band come out two years later, or even the assault/robbery/rape she and Stein survived - with an off-handed politeness that suggests that they don’t want to bore people with the details. It could also be they feel like, between Harry’s Face It: A Memoir and Stein’s two collections of photos of the New York scene, Point of View: Me, New York City and the Punk Scene and Chris Stein / Negative: Me, Blondie and the Advent of Punk, they’ve already told the story.
About the Sampler
I dabbled in a couple later albums - though not No Exit (1999), because Spotify didn’t have that one - but none of it really worked for me. I suppose the same goes for (most of) Blondie’s biggest hits. I linked to plenty of them above, but also figure most people already know those. As such, and with several exceptions I couldn’t say no to, I built the sampler around songs that didn’t come off the greatest hits compilations.
For what it’s worth, and so very predictably for an indie fan, and to the point where it pains me to write it…yeah, I like Blondie’s earlier material better, though not exclusively. Still, nearly half the 25-song sampler comes from the debut and Plastic Letters. And here’s where I get in my head as to whether (any) readers would prefer that I just list the songs on the sampler, or if they like having short descriptions of them to steer them toward songs they might like better. Feel free to let me know, if you care to, but I’ve decided to go with listing the songs from each album, but with a note on one song. Here goes, and without links to anything already linked to above:
Blondie: “In the Flesh,” “X Offender,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” “The Thin Line,” “In the Sun,” and, a personal favorite that nails the girl-band gone bad vibe, a 50s-tinged ballad about accidentally sanding down a bad boy’s rough edges, “Out in the Streets."
Plastic Letters: “Fan Mail,” “I Didn’t Have the Nerve to Say No,” “Love at the Pier,” “No Imagination,” “Once I Had a Love (aka, the Disco Song” (aka, the original “Heart of Glass,” and the funny, power-ballad "Poet's Probem" that, 1) captures the album’s more polished sound, and 2) covers ground that I never knew Blondie covered.
Parallel Lines: “I’m Gonna Love You Too” (fun!), “Will Anything Happen,” “Pretty Baby” (a throwback to the throwbacks on the first album), and the semi-soaring, more “new-wave lush” “Fade Away and Radiate,” which reminds me of something Bowie might have done.
Eat to the Beat: “Dreaming,” “Atomic,” and “Union City Blue” (all UK hits), and “Die Young Stay Pretty,” which stands up slipping reggae into Blondie’s bag of tricks before “The Tide Is High.”
Autoamerican: “Call Me” (which I still love), “Go Through It,” “Here’s Looking at You” (which throws way back to standards from the first half of the 20th century), the disco/funk mash-up, "Live It Up," and “Angels On the Balcony,” in which, at least I think could hold up as “prog-new-wave.”
With the exception of Parallel Lines, I don’t think I’d ever listened to a Blondie albums all the way through until this week. Felt pretty rewarding, for what it’s worth. Even if I can’t get the words, “one of the most important bands in rock ‘n’ roll history” out of my mouth, I have no trouble saying they showed that rock still had some new places to go in the late 70s and Debbie Harry arguably changed what having a woman lead a band looked like.
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