Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  Just as Marty Thau had anticipated, Uttal recommended that the label take up its option to have the band record an album. After Frankie Valli showed up to check out the group’s show, the deal was rubberstamped. “He came to see us at CBGB’s,” says Debbie. “A limo – on the Bowery? Fuck!” Blondie naïvely signed the contract without getting legal advice, much to their later regret. “We were ignorant and couldn’t afford a lawyer,” Debbie would recall. “We were still considered the band least likely to succeed.”

  Before recording the album, Blondie played a series of gigs throughout July 1976. In addition to further shows at CBGB’s and out-of-town sets at the Stone Pony in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and the Rathskeller, Boston, the group also appeared alongside The Heartbreakers and The Fast at Max’s, where they found they could now charge $200 for the weekend.

  Despite now being a signed band with a single behind them, Debbie remained cautious about Blondie’s potential. “I was always consciously observing and appreciating things, but as far as having visions of success we’ve been realistic. [Chris and I] both have a tendency to play things down, so as not to build ourselves up and get disappointed and there was no feeling that we were going to be successful at the time. Everybody thought we might make it as big as the Dolls.”

  The group were also captured on film by director Amos Poe – who would subsequently feature Deborah in Unmade Beds, his reworking of Jean Luc Godard’s 1959 nouvelle vague classic Breathless. For Blank Generation, Poe’s document of the CBGB’s scene, he filmed the group in and around their loft headquarters. “Amos came to the loft and shot us clowning around like The Beatles in A Hard Day’s Night,” remembered Gary. “Our segment ended with ‘the boys’ pushing Debbie’s Camaro up the Bowery.”

  Sadly, the group were compelled to abandon the loft after Eduardo flipped completely and threw them out. “We’d gotten too serious for him with our daily rehearsals and business meetings,” explained Debbie who, along with Chris, moved into the top floor of a brownstone on 17th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenue. Gary would shack up with his girlfriend, Lisa Persky.

  In August and September Blondie recorded their debut album, produced by Gottehrer and Leon at Plaza Sound Studios. Craig referred to his classical background for “recurring motifs and counter-melodies” as the band worked from noon until one or two in the morning six days a week, then around the clock as the deadline loomed.

  As with most debut albums, it captured their already honed live set. “Blondie was basically done live, with the four musicians playing,” explained Clem. “The playing is pretty straight,” added Debbie. “The only overdubs are one or two keyboard parts and a couple of other lines. We’re less nervous now and have a better rapport with one another. The more you do something, the better you get. Now I’m so much more secure about what’s happening with the music that I can get off more on the performing.”

  “To tell you the truth, I never even knew if Deborah could sing until we went in to make the record,” Jimmy Destri admitted. “I could never hear her on the equipment we had to use on stage.”

  “I always knew the songs were pretty well sussed,” said Burke. “There was a nucleus of maybe 15 or 16 at the time, and there was also the taste we all had in cover songs. I didn’t know too many people in my group of friends who really liked The Shangri-Las or The Velvet Underground. They were all in their bedrooms trying to be the next Jimmy Page. There was a specific vision we had that not many people had at the time.”

  “There was still a lot of stuff left over from previous incarnations Chris and Debbie had had – some old glam stuff and campy sort of things,” remarked Valentine. “My influences were British Invasion, Velvet Underground and, later, Television. Jimmy’s were similar and Clem’s a walking rock’n’roll encyclopaedia, so we decided to go in that direction, and that’s when we became very identifiable.”

  “Clem’s influence was the perfect counterpunch to Chris’ artier side, and that was really a driving force,” commented Jimmy. “It was actually part of the thing that kept me there. Because I walked in with this vision of my own – you know, ‘Here are my songs, and this is what I want to do.’ And it was Clem who sort of took me aside. Otherwise Chris and I would have banged heads from day one.”

  Despite having a direction and a repertoire of material upon which to draw, Blondie had very limited studio experience. “They were shambolic,” recounted Marty Thau. “But through that you’d start hearing this great kind of re-creation of the Shangri-Las mentality, mutated with all these other things. So I got to thinking, ‘Well, I kinda know what they’re going for; there’s this little Herman’s Hermits guitar thing here, and it’s coming from all these different sources.’ Then it hit me why they had never come across on tape, because that really had to be channelled into, like, ‘Let’s take the best bits of all these ideas and make it so you can actually hear them one at a time!’”

  “The concept of that first album was based on the personality Blondie brought to the subject matter,” explained Deborah. “When you listen to the whole thing you notice a predominant theme of violence and gunfire. I don’t think there’s a song without a reference to someone getting shot, stabbed, degraded, or insulted. It’s prime-time television on record.”

  So far as Thau was concerned, much of the credit for Blondie’s distillation of pop-cultural influences on vinyl belonged to Craig Leon. “Richard Gottehrer was in the studio and thought he was in charge, but it was really Craig who was the backbone of the whole thing.”

  Indeed, contrary to the sleeve credits, Leon mixed the whole album. “When it went over to Chrysalis, all of a sudden the ‘Craig Leon’ disappeared,” he reveals. “But I was much more involved with them than one might think. I never cared about stuff like that and was very free with credits – much to my chagrin now. I was a musician and part of the underground scene, so I thought people should get credit for what they do; hence Tommy Ramone gets an associate producer credit on that first album for coming up with the concept, which now gets turned into that he’s the producer of the album, which he’s never claimed.

  “Richie was this kind of executive vibe producer. He’s exactly like the Brill Building producer that he was. He’d be the guy that would show up and everybody would be rehearsing and trying to get a guitar in tune and refine that thing, ‘Chris you should play bass and Gary should play guitar,’ things like that, which happened a lot. Then he’d show up and say, ‘Hey, we really need a tambourine here,’ and start beating on a tambourine and jumping all round the studio and just vibing everybody up. That was Richie’s forte.”

  “I always thought Richard Gottehrer was a very good producer,” offered Jimmy. “He maybe wasn’t as strong and committal with us as he should have been, or as Mike Chapman was later. But he was always very good, always has a great sound and he makes great records, fun records. Very entertaining records. He’s basically a nice guy. He wasn’t tough enough to get into the pain and misery of being here.”

  Certainly, Gottehrer found directing the band’s raw energy a challenge. As a means of adding some further experience to the company, he recruited former girl-group songwriter Ellie Greenwich and her backing singers to provide additional vocals for ‘Man Overboard’ and ‘In The Flesh’. “They really weren’t very good, and I was looking for more of a voice,” observed Ellie of her limited role. “But little did I know!”

  “We had always been trying to contact Ellie,” Chris recalls. “We had tried to contact her a couple of years previously when we did a demo with Alan Betrock. We did ‘Out In The Streets’, which is one of her songs. She’d got it but couldn’t do it because I guess she was busy with her other affairs and stuff. Our producer was friends with her from the old days and she was happy to do it. We were really happy to have her come into it. It was great. She’s a really nice person.”

  “On both those songs they worked it out in the studio, but Debbie really conducted it,” he explained around that time. “Those are the two gi
rls that Ellie works with all the time. She lives right over on 57th Street. She was very sweet, and she did it really slick. Gottehrer got about three versions of ‘Man Overboard’ and 10 versions of ‘In The Flesh’. I tried to get some of them off him, but he probably threw them out.”

  “He made so many mixes of ‘In The Flesh’ it was just crazy,” added Debbie. “‘Man Overboard’ was supposed to have a Latin sound, and I think Richard gave it more of a girl-group sound.”

  “There was this big Las Vegas sound and this little minimal band sound,” continued Chris. “Ran the gamut. The one that’s on the record is sort of in between.”

  “We went through a lot of their material and chose the ones that appear on the album,” recounted Gottehrer. “For the most part the arrangements are theirs. They have a terrific awareness of what they’re about and what their music is about. I think it’s a great record – I think their style, sense of humour, their meaning comes through from the first note to the last.”

  Ultimately, 11 tracks were selected for inclusion. A reworking of ‘X Offender’ stated the band’s intent for a set that featured other extremely danceable uptempo numbers such as ‘Little Girl Lies’, the bitchy ‘Rip Her To Shreds’ and ‘Kung Fu Girls’. These were interspersed with songs drawn from other regions of the group’s influences: the surf-toned ‘In The Sun’, ‘Attack Of The Giant Ants’ (complete with horror-show sound effects) and ‘In The Flesh’ – a memorable teen ballad inspired by Debbie’s crush on David Johansen, which would become Blondie’s second single.

  Much of the implied bitchiness is delivered with Debbie’s tongue lodged firmly in her cheek, “‘Rip Her To Shreds’ is a combination of personalities,” she explains. “It can’t be pinned down on one person because it wasn’t about just one person. And I would have to include myself amongst them. That song was very self-deprecating – it was scathing about some other creature, but it was scathing about myself as well. It’s a take-off about the whole bitchiness thing. We can all be a bitch every now and again.”

  Blondie celebrated completing the album with a party in the studio attended by The Ramones, The Miamis, Richard Hell and assorted hangers-on. “From the point of view of what a record is,” observed Richard Gottehrer, “it’s something that’s got a life about it, I could feel the record living … I just thought the songs were outrageous, and I think with a sense of humour and fun about it all. The interesting thing is the first album’s a bit out of tune, and just the way it goes together makes an interesting noise, an interesting sound. That’s what I think the charm of it is, too. It’s almost like listening to the early Bob Dylan records when he first went electric. You know, those overtones are as important as the notes people are playing. That’s what we caught there.”

  “There’s a great difference to what they sound like on the album and what they actually sounded like,” observes Craig Leon. “That’s why they had to eventually get the other two guys in the band. They didn’t have the greatest equipment in the world, even at that stage. They were broke. I don’t think they made any money from the Private Stock deal and if they did it was only a couple of thousand dollars between all of them.”

  “I think the strongest art comes from the strongest people, not the weakest ones,” Debbie declared. “I didn’t think I was strong enough at one time, but I do now.”

  With Blondie the album in the can, Blondie the group returned to Max’s for the latest of their landmark 1976 performances. Although time spent in the studio had assisted the group’s musical development and collective confidence, their visual image could only be honed before a live audience. In keeping with their stripped-down, sixties-driven sound, Blondie had hit upon an unfussy postmodern take on classic rock’n’roll styling.

  “The only way to make everybody look good and cool was to go to second-hand stores and get really tight things, little suits with the narrow lapels, small-collared suits which nobody was wearing,” explained Deborah. “The reason we got these clothes is because they were what we could afford at first. I was always raving in the early days about straight leg pants. Bell-bottoms used to really make me crazy because they’d ‘swoosh’ and get in the way and I was always falling down in them.”

  “There was this shop right down the street from Blondie, a Jewish used clothing salesman who only had black suits and black leather jackets for sale really cheap for the Bowery bums,” recalls Craig Leon. “That’s why everybody was wearing black leather jackets and black suits on the Bowery! That’s where they all bought their clothes, myself included, because it was a lot of fun. That was the only shop they could afford to buy clothes in.”

  “We never did any sort of deliberate thing,” clarified Chris. “Just certain style elements that we thought worked.”

  With the four guys kitted out in tight jackets and straight trousers, the smart musicians presented a largely monochrome background upon which their frontwoman could be projected. At Max’s, Debbie walked on stage in a striking zebra-striped mini-dress that generated admiration and desire in equal measure. The impact of the dress, fashioned from a discarded pillowcase by Stephen Sprouse after Eduardo fished it out of the garbage, was enhanced immeasurably by photographer Bob Gruen capturing the show on film. “I walked on stage in the zebra dress … and the audience went wild,” recounted Debbie. “It was the first time that this had happened to us, and that picture by Bob Gruen has been around the world a million times. After that gig, we began to gain some balance, whatever we did now somebody was there to approve.”

  The following month saw the release of ‘In The Flesh’ as the second single for Private Stock. Backed with ‘Man Overboard’, the swoonsome track was earmarked early on as a potential seven-inch. “‘In the Flesh’ was intended as a single, because Gottehrer put a lot of work into it, with back-up singers and all that stuff,” said Clem. Although, like ‘X Offender’, the disc made little impact outside the New York scene, in Australia it provided Blondie with far wider international exposure and a surprise hit.

  “The video of ‘X Offender’ was supposed to have been shown on an Australian TV show, Countdown,” explained Burke. “But when the tape came on it was ‘In The Flesh’. Everyone rushed out and said they wanted ‘In The Flesh’, so ‘In The Flesh’ became a number one hit in Australia. It created huge problems when we finally got to Australia, because the people that were tuned to such things knew we were a New York underground punk rock group from the depths of the Bowery. But then the other half of the audience expected a band that played light pop ballads.”

  With the album scheduled by Private Stock for December, Blondie continued developing their live act with gigs at the Cuando Gym on Seventh Avenue (where they took the stage at 2.30a.m. and made such an impression that everyone assumed they were the headline act – leaving genuine headliners The Dictators with no audience), Max’s (with Tuff Darts) and CBGB’s. Reflecting on the Cuando Gym show, Debbie recalled, “That was the first time I felt really good after playing. Super heaven. Perhaps it was because that was the first real stage we played on … Afterwards The Dictators and the promoters were pissed off with us.”

  When Blondie hit the shelves six weeks later, it was Debbie’s turn to be annoyed. Although the group were moderately happy with the album, particularly as it was recorded after they’d been together for only nine months and still had much to learn, the way their label chose to market it became another matter entirely. “Private Stock put out this infamous photo of Debbie in a see-through blouse, which was not the character of the band,” recounted Gary. “She did sexy stuff on stage but it was tongue-in-cheek, very camp. That pissed us off, and I don’t think she even liked that picture very much.”

  Debbie – who had been assured that the shot would not be used ‘uncropped’ – was horrified by use of the picture, describing it as a “fiasco … [which] insulted the band considerably”. Chris recalls she was “very pissed off”, adding himself, “It’s not selling us in the right way.”

  Like the vexat
ious image of the vocalist, the album’s sleeve was shot by Shig Ikeida, who produced an image of the band lined up diagonally, dressed largely in black and white, with Debbie to the fore. “For the album photo session I remember we all got loaded,” recalled Valentine. “I was drinking White Russians, one after another, and I’m absolutely plastered in that photograph. It’s amazing that it came out such a real good cover.”

  Former Wind In The Willows manager Peter Leeds had re-established contact with Deborah though Richard Gottehrer, who had played Blondie for him. “I thought it would be avant garde-y,” said Leeds. “Then I got to Richard’s house and heard the first album and it was, you know, the sixties, the organ, what have you, and I just fell down, I loved it so much.”

  Suitably enthused, Leeds began making overtures toward the band with a view to taking them under his managerial wing. He too recalled the furore caused by Private Stock’s cynical marketing. “This poster came out and they just hit the roof. I remember they were in my apartment on 75th Street screaming about this poster … That particular poster, as far as she was concerned, was not sex but sleaze. And she hated it. It was not the revealingness [sic] of it, it was the attitude she hated. And not beautiful, you know, not classy.”

  This kind of prurient promotion would play a part in establishing the myth that Blondie were some kind of musical burlesque, with Debbie prone to stripping or taking the stage without panties. “I’ve never taken anything off,” she explains. “I’ve only ripped up outer garments in an effort to articulate a song. Rip it to shreds – it’s just little movements and campy gestures, I’ve never done any porno rock’n’roll.”

  Jody Uttal, Private Stock’s director of publicity, later told Rolling Stone, “At the time, it was really the only way we had to market them.” More accustomed to selling MOR and novelty records, the label had little idea of how to promote something new. But, as Debbie reflects in retrospect, “Maybe tomorrow’s music is what we’re doing today.”