Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  This resulted in a diverse range of material, driven for the most part by Stein’s ever-growing palate of influences and Destri’s experimentation with synthesizers. “I wrote six songs on Plastic Letters, and not one has a groove that’s similar to the others,” Jimmy later remarked. “‘No Imagination’ is directly inspired by Lou Reed’s ‘Lady Day’ – you know, nightclub decadence. The whole album is like a portfolio of illustrations from a graphic artist. A lot of good songs on there – for Chris it was a stepping stone into what he would finally lock into Parallel Lines.“

  Deborah co-wrote the appropriately energetic (given the title) ‘I’m On E’ with Chris and the self-explanatory ‘I Didn’t Have The Nerve To Say No’ with Jimmy, as well as being solely responsible for the vacation romance vibe of ‘Love At The Pier’. “This was the first time I worked up the lyrics after hearing the music – which is a much better way to write songs,” she observed. This left ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear’ as Gary Valentine’s only contribution to Plastic Letters.

  By the time the band returned from Europe it was becoming apparent that Valentine was dissatisfied. He had been working on a list of beefs since the recording of Blondie, during which his twinkling, bittersweet song ‘Scenery’ had been rejected. “I felt that Debbie did a lax vocal, because she wasn’t into it,” he claimed. “Maybe she didn’t want two songs by me on the album. As long as I stayed where they thought I should be, it would be all right, but I wanted more.”

  On stage, Gary’s energetic antics constantly left him out of step with his less bounding bandmates – particularly when he came close to hooking Debbie’s eye out with his Rickenbacker machine head (an incident that compelled him to switch to a short-scale bass). “Jimmy got annoyed with me in LA because of all my jumping around. He said it could knock the tuning off on his synthesizer, but I think he just didn’t like me trying to draw so much attention to myself. So he picked up my Rickenbacker bass and threw it right across the stage. By the end of that tour, I knew I wanted to quit, so when we got home, and this was pretty naive of me, I told them that because of the tension, the fighting and everything, I thought I should leave after the second album.”

  “I didn’t expect Gary Valentine to be playing on this record,” said Deborah. “I didn’t think he had wanted to be in the group any more for at least half a year before. I think he had a lot of ideas about what he wanted to do and he felt Blondie was holding him back.”

  “We couldn’t get along on a number of things. It was a mutual thing. Gary was going to leave after the first tour but it dragged out a bit,” Jimmy explained. By July 4, things had evidently dragged on quite long enough. By announcing his intentions to leave, Gary had guaranteed himself a creative backseat on Plastic Letters. “I wanted my own band, I wanted to play guitar more, I wanted to sing,” he said. “At the end of the show, I would switch off. I didn’t want to take away from Chris playing guitar. I just thought, ‘Why not?’”

  Although Valentine subsequently claimed that he quit the band, the truth is that he never got around to it. Peter Leeds pushed the bassist before he could jump. “I think Chris and Debbie had decided they didn’t want anybody in the band who wasn’t 100 per cent committed but they couldn’t tell me, so they got Leeds to do it. I think he was more than pleased,” insisted Gary.

  Their former manager categorically denies this. “They wouldn’t have let me throw him out if I had asked them. He was too much of a long-time friend of Clem’s … He didn’t understand why he wasn’t as important as Deborah Harry. So I fired him and then I told the band.”

  Leeds was at least correct in figuring that Clem, in particular, would be less than delighted. “I felt sort of bad about Gary leaving,” explained Burke. “I quit the band right after he left, sort of threw a tantrum. I felt at wits’ end a bit on Plastic Letters, not having a bass player and losing a friend at the same time, and being so new to it all.”

  Given that he was a key facet in controlling the band’s (often dysfunctional) internal affairs, it was fortunate that Clem soon reconsidered and returned to the fold. “The weird thing about Chris and Debbie was, they always needed a scapegoat,” he revealed. “I spent a lot of time trying to keep people in the band. Somebody was always on the outs.”

  For Chris, such manufactured stresses were simply part of the creative dynamic. “Tension is not a bad thing. To me, it’s equal to excitement. If there’s no tension, there’s no excitement,” he declared. “The music wouldn’t be half as good without the tension,” agreed Jimmy. “It’s good to have Chris come up with a brilliant song, and my unspoken reaction is, ‘Motherfucker! I gotta do something better!’ – and vice versa. It gets you off your ass and makes you work hard, especially when there are people in the group who are as smart as you are. It would be a lot easier for ourselves if we were a very laid-back, commune-type group, but we’re not – and it makes our music better.”

  In the short term, Gary’s dismissal – which initially led him to follow his girlfriend Lisa to Los Angeles, where he formed power pop trio The Know – meant that Blondie were missing a bassist halfway through recording their second album. Although Chris picked up the four-string slack on ‘Fan Mail’, ‘Denis’, and ‘Youth Nabbed As Sniper’, it was only a temporary solution that could never work live. To fill the gap, Clem recruited another of his Jersey pals, Frank Infante. “Joining Blondie was such a surprise,” declared Frank, “they just asked me if I’d play on the record. I played [rhythm] guitar on a lot of the songs too.”

  Born on November 15, 1951, Frank was already a local legend for his part in World War III, an MC5-type band that hardly ever played without some kind of hassle going down. “All these social misfits would come out, and the cops, too,” he recalled. “We were loud, into ‘the revolution’, but the songs were good. There’d be trouble whenever we played, because we were down on everything.” The height of World War III’s five-year career had been a stint supporting Aerosmith in 1971.

  “I always liked music, even when I was a kid. My mother and father used to play records a lot. I was 13 when I got a guitar, and then I got a bass because I liked the bass a lot. At that time I used to buy music sheets. But they weren’t the same key as the record, so I gave up on that. The way George Harrison would play a song wasn’t like how it was written on the sheet. To me the best way to learn to play the guitar is to first learn the chords from a chord book. Then just jam along to records and stuff.”

  Nicknamed ‘The Freak’ on account of his deathly pallor, Frank’s first group was a rhythm and blues covers combo called The Rogues. From there he graduated through a series of Jersey power-chord bands including The End, Rocks and, finally, World War III – where he first encountered Clem, who was playing with Sweet Revenge at the time. A devotee of Keith Richards and Johnny Thunders, Infante soon developed a down-and-dirty, no frills approach to playing guitar. “I like straight-ahead rock, that feeling of power,” he declared. “Ultimately the thing is to get to a really primitive point, like the natives in Africa who just beat themselves into a trance, captured by the rhythm. Drums are the main thing.”

  Although Blondie’s sound was decidedly more pop-orientated than anything Frank had been used to, he found he was drawn to the group’s lack of orthodoxy. “They were just having fun. ‘Blondie has more fun’ – that was a slogan. It wasn’t a serious muso thing, the energy was there, and the songs were there. Before I joined, the bands I was in were trying to be more musical,” he observed. “Rock’n’roll isn’t music, it’s an attitude. You can play the wrong note and it can be the right note.”

  With Infante on board as ‘guest’, Blondie resumed work on Plastic Letters. The tensions within the group that bubbled to the surface during Gary’s dismissal and Clem’s short-lived departure gave the album a darker aspect than its predecessor. Jimmy’s synth-driven sound produced an electronic coldness, while Chris’ ‘I’m On E’ ploughed a decidedly existential furrow. “‘I’m On E’ was about running out of
gas – being empty,” explained Stein.

  “The second record was more of a transitional experience,” remarked Clem. “I was pissed that [Gary] left. I brought Frank into the fold, but it wasn’t really a unit. I remember doing the photo session, going, ‘Somebody’s missing.’”

  Irrespective of any resentful undercurrents, Blondie’s very nature ensured that Plastic Letters emerged as anything but downbeat. Aside from immediately accessible slices of edgy pop such as ‘Denis’ and ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear’, ‘Contact In Red Square’, ‘I Didn’t Have The Nerve To Say No’ and ‘Detroit 442’ ensured there was plenty of energy on offer.

  “Blondie records have always had an assortment of styles,” explains Debbie. “For example, there was a song on Plastic Letters called ‘Cautious Lip’ [featuring lyrics by Ronnie Toast, a close friend of Chris and Debbie’s who previously supplied stream-of-consciousness sleeve notes for Blondie] that explored our appreciation of the late sixties jam bands.”

  In keeping with his broad spectrum of musical tastes, Chris saw Blondie as being wholly inclusive, about “bringing all people together. I think it’s dangerous always to have an ‘out’ group, the way punk alienated itself from other music.”

  As they had already discovered in Britain, the band’s apolitical nature could sometimes be taken a bit too seriously by the press. While the group were aiming for a wide appeal, they were self-conscious about addressing the issues of the day. “When we talk about things like the environment, people are just gonna say, ‘They’re full of shit. They’re just saying this as a cop-out, to protect themselves,’” opined Stein. “And yet those people who accuse us of copping out, what are they doing? Nothing. They just sit there.”

  Richard Gottehrer’s uncertainty about the overall direction on Plastic Letters led him to adopt a simple approach to unify such a diverse set of songs. “His idea of production was to put handclaps on it. He wasn’t real precise, he was more into creating a mood,” observed Clem.

  “That was another trip,” agreed Frank. “His approach was, ‘You do four takes, and pick the one you like.’”

  In retrospect, Burke remains appreciative of Gottehrer’s work. “I think that album’s really good; Richard Gottehrer’s a really good producer. Those early albums hold up to this day,” he declared. “The ultimate thing would have been for Bowie and Spector to produce us together. I was thinking maybe they’d kill each other because they’re both such egotists. That’d be fantastic.”

  With Plastic Letters in the can, Blondie returned to the road during September and October 1977 for their first gigs since Gary Valentine had been sacked. After shows at CBGB’s and My Father’s Place in Roslyn, NY, the band headed west for a run of gigs at The Old Waldorf in San Francisco, Huntington Beach, CA, and a week’s residency at The Whisky in LA. Arranged by Peter Leeds, these were the first in a series of tours where the manager would work his band non-stop for a solid six months.

  “Instead of going right to LA for those gigs with Frank on bass, we should have stayed in New York and got a good player, figured out what we were gonna do, or gone to LA to get somebody instead of having to do gigs right away,” Deborah asserted. “We had never had a period of time when we weren’t booked or didn’t have something to do, where we weren’t under pressure to come up with product or have an obligation to fulfil. Our manager … put us on the road before we had a chance to regroup, as it were – reorganise the band. That threw us totally off balance for about two years.”

  Although competent, Frank’s bass technique was not sufficient to secure him a full-time spot in Blondie. While in Los Angeles, Leeds sounded out Nigel Harrison, previously a member of British sleaze/glam outfit, Silverhead.

  “I sort of met the Blondies in LA at the Whisky, then met them officially when I flew into New York,” Nigel recalled. “I got in at seven in the morning; it was cold and rainy. Peter Leeds called me and the band met and we all went down to this cold, damp, scuzzy rehearsal hall and I just threw myself into it.” With a European tour looming in just over a month, he learned two albums’ worth of material in two days and did enough at the audition to land the bassist gig, with Frank retained as Blondie’s full-time rhythm guitarist.

  Hailing from Stockport in Cheshire, Harrison was 26 years old when he joined the group. In addition to being Blondie’s only English member, he brought with him a relative wealth of professional experience. Having sent off for a mail-order guitar when he was 12 and received a bass, Nigel settled for four strings, formed a group called The Musketeers with some teenage friends and graduated through a series of blues-infused beat combos, including Aylesbury band The Farm and The Smokey Rice Blues Band. Relocating to Abbey Road in London, Harrison found that proximity to one of the world’s most famous recording studios didn’t necessarily guarantee access to a rock’n’roll lifestyle.

  “I used to wash dishes and search the ads in the back of Melody Maker. I called up about anything – ‘Topless Go-Go Dancers for Zurich Wanted’ – anything to get out! So there was this ad which was meant to read, ‘Erotic Relaxed Musicians Wanted,’ but read, ‘Erotic Relaxers Wanted.’ So I called and subsequently joined Michael Des Barres and Silverhead. They gave me £25 a week and I was extremely happy. Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice of Jesus Christ Superstar managed us for a month and then we went with Deep Purple’s management and Purple Records. We did a first album in 1972 and toured the US with Deep Purple.”

  When Silverhead broke up in 1974 after their second album, 16 And Savaged, Nigel remained in Los Angeles, hanging out on Sunset Strip with the likes of Rodney Bingenheimer and notorious impresario Kim Fowley, while playing with keyboardist Ray Manzarek’s post-Doors project, Nite City. Having first heard Blondie’s ‘X Offender’ on Bingenheimer’s radio show, he was introduced to Leeds and the group by his friend Toby Mamis, who was working as Blondie’s publicist. “Toby thought I’d be right for the band but felt odd about pulling me away from Ray Manzarek. I’d been with Ray since September of 1974 and he was very good to me.”

  Although Plastic Letters was initially conceived with a view to being released on Private Stock, Peter Leeds had other ideas. Blondie’s spring tour of the UK had opened their manager’s eyes to breaking the band in Europe and he was keen to establish a British record label as a commercial beachhead. To this end he set his sights on Chrysalis Records, an English imprint set up in 1969 through a licensing deal between Island Records and the label’s founders, Chris Wright and Terry Ellis. “[Terry Ellis] had been Jethro Tull’s manager and I knew he would relate to management, and … I knew that Europe would be vital,” said Leeds.

  To attract Ellis’ attention, Leeds hit on the approach of sending packages of press cuttings to the label boss’ home address. It aroused Ellis’ curiosity enough to have him enquire about the group and, on discovering they had scored a hit in Australia with ‘In The Flesh’, he got in touch with Leeds who brought him over to catch Blondie at CBGB’s. Although Leeds kept Ellis from talking to the band, he was sufficiently impressed to pursue his interest. All Leeds then needed to do was to extract Blondie from their Private Stock deal.

  “I’m in a meeting with Larry Uttal and I say, ‘We’re not going to make any money together, the band isn’t going to be a success here, I want to buy the band’s contract out,’” asserted Peter Leeds. “So Larry says, ‘It’s not for sale,’ and I say, ‘Everything is for sale, it’s just a question of price.’ He says, ‘OK, I want a million dollars.’ And I say, ‘Larry, we’re not talking about fucking Led Zeppelin for Christ sakes! They sold no records and no concert tickets – what are you holding on to?’ So he says he needs the weekend to think about it. On Monday he says, ‘OK, $400,000.’”

  Leeds raised $500,000 to buy Blondie out of their contract – $100,000 went to Richard Gottehrer for his piece of the band, with the remainder paid to Private Stock. “You know I made a little history when I made the Blondie deal,” he claimed. “When in the history of rock’n’roll mu
sic did somebody lay down $500,000 to buy the recording rights to a group that had sold 14 records?” He then broke the news to those it affected most.

  “It all got totally done behind closed doors,” remembered Clem. “I can’t say enough about Richard, because he really helped us, but he had us tied up, basically. And we were $500,000 in debt, instantly.”

  After an all-night session with a series of lawyers, the band finally signed with Chrysalis then immediately blew off steam by getting high and trashing the office. “We were up on this high-rise, 12 floors up, literally trapped in this room, and Jimmy said, ‘Here’s the phones! Let’s call England, let’s call France!” Contracts were flying back and forth,” recounted Debbie. “I think the sun came up when the deal was done – it was the most cathartic experience for us.”

  For Blondie, being signed to Chrysalis represented a big deal and, consequently, bigger commercial pressures. This became evident almost immediately, as Debbie was compelled to accompany Peter Leeds on a short promotional tour of Australia at the end of October, while the rest of the band stayed home and bedded in their new personnel ahead of a European tour to coincide with the UK single release of ‘Rip Her To Shreds’.

  Like Private Stock, Chrysalis wasted little time in exploiting Debbie’s image for promotional purposes, captioning tour advertisements with the distasteful, ‘Wouldn’t you like to rip her to shreds?’

  “I was furious when I saw that,” she asserted. “That’s the problem of art and commerce. We came from the New York City underground. We were trying hard to be artists. We didn’t have any idea about merchandising or marketing. The whole thing was a complete, gigantic shock and smack in the face. Everything was horrible – we’re losing our identity.”