Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  “Basically, I saw the Live At CBGB’s album as documenting the bands like a Harry Smith or Alan Lomax project, a field recording of what was happening on the streets of New York in 1976. I actually saw that as a very important bunch of recordings, if you had the whole thing still intact, rather than what came out. Now it’s like when they find a book of The Bible or the Dead Sea scrolls and some pages are missing! All the pages are missing from what that document should have been. It would have been the Smithsonian version. I knew enough about musicology to know this was an important era. It was, to me, the end of an era, more than the beginning of it; the intellectual takeover, or the elitist intellectual bohemian takeover, of rock’n’roll before it became too corporate for its own good. I was quite happy: ‘Yeah, I’ll record all this stuff.’

  “Kim and I were recording everybody. Hilly gave Blondie a five or six o’clock in the afternoon slot or something, an ‘OK – let’s get ‘em in and out’ kind of thing. We were going to record Blondie then we were going to go for dinner down in Chinatown. It might not have been five or six because any time before 11 was early then! But there was nobody in the club and we recorded all of Blondie’s set.”

  At that time Craig had only recently joined Instant Records in partnership with Marty Thau – who had been impressed by The Stillettoes two years earlier – and Richard Gottehrer. A former member of garage band The Strangeloves (of ‘Night Time’ and ‘I Want Candy’ fame), Gottehrer had also co-written ‘Sorrow’ for The Merseybeats (covered by Bowie on Pinups), co-written and produced ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’ for The Crystals and produced ‘Hang On Sloopy’ for The McCoys, who he also discovered.

  “Craig and I became good friends when we discovered that we had similar tastes in music and also people, which was an important part of it as well,” Marty Thau recalls. Almost every night we would meet at about 11 o’clock, then go to CBGB’s and clock all the different groups that were playing there. We would occasionally go over to Max’s, but we always felt it was old and, from the Warhol days, kind of washed-up to a degree. They would put on some good acts who only played there because of the pay cheque, not that they felt it had an impact on their career. CBGB’s was what it was all about.

  “I was trying to reach Seymour Stein and found it impossible to contact him, so I thought, ‘Oh, I know Richard Gottehrer.’ I didn’t know he had split from Stein and become an independent producer on his own, so I contacted him and we got into a discussion about what was going on downtown. He said, ‘That sounds amazing, I thought it was maybe just a downtown hype, but it sounds real. Let’s go check it out together.’ So we met and went downtown and Richard immediately fell in love with what he saw, and understood. Shortly afterwards, we formed Instant Records and hired Craig Leon to come aboard. Then it was the three of us.

  “Then we thought, ‘Who should we sign? Who would be the best group to sign?’ We unanimously agreed it was Blondie. Who else was there? There were other groups but Blondie seemed like the most possible mainstream group; the acceptable face of ‘new wave’, as they really weren’t punk.

  “Debbie kept coming into the truck when me and Kim were recording this and listening back to stuff,” continues Leon. “Richie was there too and we were just goofing around. She turned around and said to him, ‘Would you produce my band?’ Richie said, ‘I’m in a partnership with Craig and Marty,’ which she knew, because Marty was hustling to be their manager and she wasn’t dumb by any long shot. It basically transpired that I would go do my arranging thing with them and Richie would produce a single.

  “Marty was always a champion of Blondie, and quite honestly both Richie and I thought he was out of his mind! We knew that Debbie was good looking, but you’ve got to remember that, at that time, it was almost unheard of for an assertive female to be a frontperson. It was a very hard sell, and she wasn’t like a hippie chick … well, she was a hippie chick originally; she’s on the cover of Look magazine with the Volkswagen going to Woodstock with the flower on her face. The thing is, she didn’t fit that image.

  “The band’s playing was really slovenly and they were really ramshackle-looking. Nobody really took them seriously, but Marty said they were going to be the only band that really makes it out of CBGB’s. He said they were gonna be the biggest thing ever. He had that same vision about The New York Dolls, who were equally ramshackle and could barely get through a song. He wasn’t so right about The New York Dolls, except they became very influential, but he was quite right about Blondie. Nothing that could show what they were gonna do as songwriters was really evident back then. If it was, it was in such a rudimentary form that you wouldn’t know it. But Marty was always pushing that one.

  “I thought she was obviously very beautiful and there was talent within the group, but they sure couldn’t play,” Thau asserted. “But they had very good musical ideas; it was obvious that they had a sense of arrangement, and colour, and drama, and build. As a frontperson I liked her, but a lot of people thought she was kind of awkward and self-conscious. I didn’t include this in my evaluation, it didn’t turn me off because I thought she was such a case study to watch.”

  “It was really Marty Thau, I think, who should have the credit, because he’s the one that got Gottehrer and Craig Leon to come down and see us,” recalled Chris.

  Regardless of initial reservations, Gottehrer soon found Blondie’s naïve zest to be infectious. “I remember going to a rehearsal and watching them play and grinning from ear to ear. These were people that had great songs and were playing arrangements almost beyond their means. The execution wasn’t perfect, but it had so much spirit. So that got me interested.”

  “Richard came to our rehearsal to audition us for the album,” recalled Clem. “He was blown away that we had 20-30 songs, because nobody [else] could play.”

  “I could see immediately that the songs were great but that they weren’t quite ready to execute them yet,” qualified Gottehrer. “They were doing musical things within the songs that two years later all came together – a lot of them were on the Parallel Lines album. At the time, their ideas almost exceeded their ability to play them. In the case of the Blondies, their genius and their originality came from their own heads and almost from their inability to execute things, just from their desire to experiment.”

  Having recently produced The Ramones’ landmark debut album at Plaza Sound Studios in Manhattan, Craig Leon took Gottehrer and Blondie to the cavernous thirties-style space previously used to record big bands in the early days of radio. “I did a lot of arranging, rearranging and restructuring of material,” explains Craig. “I had already done a massive amount of restructuring on The Ramones, getting them to end and begin at the same time! There’s not a lot you can do with The Ramones, just a lot of layering and texturing on that album we did, but it’s all purposefully subtle. But with Blondie I did a lot of structural work on the songs and arranging in demo form, trying to get the songs to be more recordable. A lot of these bands weren’t really recordable at the beginning. Blondie was definitely one of those.”

  Two songs were recorded with a view to a single: ‘X Offender’ and ‘In The Sun’. Written by Debbie and Gary toward the end of 1975, ‘X Offender’ lyrically conflates Valentine’s experience of being charged with statutory rape with Debbie’s sensuously spoken introduction, suggesting the song is the tale of a hooker who falls for the cop who arrested her. “I wrote ‘X Offender’,” asserted Gary. “The tune came to me one night in Max’s Kansas City, and I went back and played it for Debbie and she came up with the lyrics. She turned it into the story of my problems with the law. It became our theme song and we would close shows with it.”

  “I love to sing about love and sex,” Debbie declared. “It’s the most popular thing, but I think that some of my twists in the theme are good. Like on ‘X Offender,’ the first thing that came out on the record that’s about a legal thing actually is about how you define what a sex crime is. It’s from the woman’s point of view. Everybody
thinks it’s about a hooker but it’s not. It’s about a young boy who makes love, and it’s like a crime of innocence. He becomes tagged for five years of his life as a rapist because he makes a 16-year-old girl pregnant and he’s charged with statutory rape.”

  Debbie’s introduction, written by Gottehrer, referenced the doomed romanticism of the sixties girl groups while Jimmy Destri’s fairground Farfisa and Clem Burke’s Spector-style big beat enhanced the sense of homage. Swapping places, Gary Valentine’s ‘Born To Run’ riffage and Chris’ driving bassline imbued the song with a contemporary attack that placed ‘X Offender’ squarely within the same postmodern canon as The Ramones’ ‘You’re Gonna Kill That Girl’. The whole confection was spectacularly adorned by a confident and assertive vocal performance from Deborah.

  “I think ‘X Offender’ is the best thing we’ve ever done,” insisted Clem in 1981. “It’s so compressed and tinny and so Spectoresque. It’s almost like an art piece. ‘X Offender’ totally amazed everybody, because they didn’t know what to expect from us and it was a total production, not just the live sound at CBGB’s.”

  “We did a lot of rehearsals at their loft and then a lot of preliminary recording at Bell Studios, which was this great old studio, which became part of a lot of their work, not just the first album,” Leon explains. “It was the studio where Shadow Morton did The Shangri-Las and The Four Seasons did all their hits. It was a very funky but cool-sounding place. The night manager there was prone to letting bands from downtown come in for 10 bucks under the table, then you could use the studio all night from midnight to six o’clock in the morning or something. We would just record there constantly, all the time. That gradually shaped into the material for the first Blondie album. I did a lot of stuff there with Blondie; basically, routining and taping all of it, also with Mink DeVille and Richard Hell And The Voidoids. A lot of this was all going on at the same time.”

  In recording two versions of ‘X Offender’ that respectively appeared as a single and on the eponymous Blondie debut, Craig found the process straightforward. “It’s pretty much the same recording but two different mixes. There’s the one with double-tracking vocals, the very Beatley, echoey kind of vocal which, with Debbie, got a kind of nice, whispery kind of sound as well. The later version is the album mix, which is much tamer. I was running around all over the place while the album was being made, also doing Richard Hell And The Voidoids wherever they were.”

  Rather than release a single under their new Instant imprint, Gottehrer, Leon and Thau began shopping around for a deal for the group. “Nobody would sign Blondie,” recounts Craig. “Richie was running around with all his contacts and I took them into people who’d offered me a job, including Columbia Records, which is the most corporate thing in the world! It was another one like Suicide: ‘Excuse me sir, there’s the door there!’ But in any case, nobody wanted to sign them and had every excuse why they wouldn’t sign them: ‘Girls don’t work out front,’ ‘She’s too old,’ every A&R trick in the book not to want to sign them. We played it to the guy at Atlantic who was putting together Foreigner at the time. He said, ‘I’ll eat my hat if that ever sells anywhere, I’ll resign, that’s the worst piece of crap I’ve ever heard!’ Just total vitriol. For the man who went on to put together things like Foreigner, of course it was horrible crap. He was the origin of everything rock’n’roll became that we all grew to hate!

  “Finally Richie was able to go to an old friend of his named Larry Uttal, who originally had a label called Bell Records [no connection with Bell Studios], who’d had The Syndicate Of Sound and Ronnie And The Daytonas. Larry had sold Bell to a conglomerate which became Arista Records and started his own label called Private Stock. It would have been fitting because Blondie was the band everybody thought was least likely to succeed and Private Stock was the label that was least likely to. They had to have been the worst crap label. Back in those days there were all these places where, if you really needed money for the weekend and you wanted to buy some weed or go out to dinner with your girlfriend, you could nick a bunch of promos and go down and sell ‘em. If you had to exist on Private Stock, you couldn’t buy a hotdog! You could bring in 100 clean copies and you’d probably get a nickel, as opposed to a couple of Ramones promos and your evening was set. The best thing they had was the very watered down Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons. He was one of the owners of the label. They made a lot of money though. I think they were the first with this Simon Cowell-type crossover junk. They had a guy from New Jersey called Peter Lemongello – very sappy middle-of-the-road, Barry Manilow-type things. Private Stock must have sold millions without it going on the charts. He was huge.”

  “Nobody was interested in Blondie,” asserts Marty. “There were always various comments like, ‘She looks great and the band suck,’ or, ‘The band’s great but she’s too sweet,’ or whatever. They were silly, uninformed comments but the reality was that we couldn’t get a label to sign them. But I knew Howard Rosen, who was the head of promotion at Private Stock, because his grandfather and my father had been in business together years before, so in a sense I knew a lot about his family history. He was doing a very good job at this little label, although the style of music they were into was removed from Blondie. But I figured any label that will get the music out there will be rewarded because there’ll be such a buzz on it that they wouldn’t know what hit them. So I went to Howard’s house and played him ‘X Offender’ and he said, ‘If Bruce Springsteen can have a hit with “Born To Run” this could be a hit.’ That’s a bit of a stretch but I’m not gonna comment. We struck up a deal with Private Stock but with the proviso they had to schedule or guarantee an album, and all the budget that goes with it, within 30 days or Blondie would be free from their contract. Sure enough, when ‘X Offender’ came out there was an immediate buzz on it. We had reviewers calling for copies and they didn’t know what hit them at Private Stock and immediately picked up the option. All of a sudden Blondie had an album, when nobody would touch them.

  “People criticise Private Stock and they deserve some criticism in the respect that they weren’t really naturally married to this kind of music and, in many respects, did not have a clue what to do with it. But it ended well because Chrysalis, who were smart enough to recognise what was going on, arranged to purchase the contract. That’s the true story behind the whole thing. Nobody was attached from Instant’s point of view to Private Stock, but they performed a very needed function: they got a record out there.”

  The only minor quibble with the two-single Private Stock deal was the label’s insistence that the debut 45 be retitled. “They made me change the name,” Deborah explained. “That song was supposed to be called ‘Sex Offender’. But renaming the song turned out all right. It was the first of a big trend of things beginning with the letter ‘X’.” Concerned that being called ‘Blondie’ would cause confusion between the band’s identity and her own, Debbie also toyed with the idea of renaming the group ‘Hitler’s Dog’ – archly referencing the fact that the Fuhrer’s sheepdog was named Blondie. “The label would have dropped us,” she observed. “I loved that name, though. It’s really funny, isn’t it?”

  “I personally like ‘X Offender’ better because it adds some double meaning to it,” asserts Chris. “But when you think about it, did ‘Satisfaction’ get played on the radio?”

  Released on June 17, 1976, ‘X Offender’ was a turning point for Blondie. “People realised we could actually make a good record,” recalled Clem. “Initially, when we were playing at CBGB’s, we may not have been the greatest live band, but we were experimenting with different ways of presenting ourselves. Making the record was the thing for us. We always wanted to have hit records. We didn’t really want to be underground. We wanted success on our own terms.”

  “It was definitely a sixties sound,” added Gary. “It was sort of an anthem, and got us the record deal. It defined what Blondie was about; we were getting more and more poppish.”

  “Bl
ondie were sort of the exception to the CBGB’s rule in that they were actually a very good-looking group,” said Mary Thau. “They were young and they were happy and positive, and their songs were loaded with hooks. They were really the pop dream.”

  For Blondie, who had been dismissed as the lightweight runt of the CBGB’s litter, there was satisfaction to be derived from hearing the single booming out of the bar’s jukebox. “That was more important than hearing it on the radio,” beamed Clem. “I remember walking into CBGB’s when it was crowded and the song came on. It was phenomenal that someone had actually paid to hear the song.”

  More paid to come and see Blondie over three nights across June 17-19, as the quintet delivered their most assured live performances to date. “We played in tune, we didn’t flub, we had a stage presence, and it worked,” recalled Gary. “We went from being a band that would open for anybody to packing CBGB’s.” Private Stock president Larry Uttal was among those impressed by the gigs: “I was very turned on by the sound of her voice. She had that early sixties sound that was becoming popular again. She reminded me of Rosie And The Originals,” he claimed, referencing the doo-wop quartet who scored a number five hit with ‘Angel Baby’ in 1960.