Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  Supported by power-poppers Advertising, the tour continued on to Dunstable’s Queensway Hall on March 2. The spherical venue was ahead of its time, with good acoustics. Backstage, the mood was in marked contrast to Dingwalls, the band’s road weariness overshadowed by the kind of ebullience generated by a hit single and enthusiastic audiences. Debbie’s pout was now recognisable from a growing amount of official and unofficial merchandise, and the sold-out crowd went suitably bananas.

  “Growing up in England and knowing the power of Top Of The Pops – we were playing a gig in Dunstable and people had seen Top Of The Pops and gone out to the gig and it was just mania,” recalled Nigel.

  “There were some situations where Debbie would just go, ‘Jimmy, get me out of here,’ and I’d just whisk her out, because people were all over her,” Destri added.

  Three days later Blondie broke their run of below-par London shows at the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, which your co-author Kris attended in the company of Motörhead’s Lemmy – who was itching to meet Debbie. Introductions were duly made and mutual admiration established.

  In 1978 the Roundhouse was already in need of the makeover it would receive just over a quarter of a century later, but it was still the funkiest venue in town, water-filled potholes near the rudimentary bar and all. It was packed and this time the equipment functioned perfectly, sparking an energised romp which many felt marked the turning point of Blondie’s fortunes live. Debbie, in particular, rose to the occasion, taking the stage dressed in white with a tiny skirt and knee protectors. She was commanding, effervescent and communicative with the crowd, rather than dodging the yelps of “Get ‘em off!”

  This time reviews were mainly positive, praising Blondie’s “vast potential” and “real stage presence”. However, 1978 was still the year that crystallised their loathing of the mainstream UK press. Perhaps the pivotal event was a visit from a Daily Mail journalist who arrived to ‘hang out’ with the group.

  As Nigel remarked, “What those bastards have done to Debbie is disgusting. She’s been kicked in the face. There was this guy from the Daily Mail. He stayed with us for two fucking days. He was around before gig, after gig and we made ourselves available to him. He kept on saying what a great group piece he was gonna write. It was just three fucking paragraphs on how fucked up Debbie was without her make-up. I don’t know what she’d do to him if she saw him now. That was the last straw as far as she’s concerned. You can’t trust these bastards. She was really straight and honest with him and look what he does.”

  The portrayal of Chris and Debbie’s relationship also veered toward offensive. “They talk about Chris as some sort of Svengali, and Debbie as somebody who doesn’t have brains enough to see through it. It hurts me to see my friends put down,” said Jimmy.

  “The press has always tried to write Debbie off by calling me her Svengali. It’s just another snidely sexist attitude. We’ve always helped each other out. It’s never been a manipulative-type situation,” stated Chris.

  “That’s just sexist shit,” agreed Deborah. “That’s people not wanting to admit that a woman can be powerful without a man telling her what to do. We’ve always shared things equally, complemented each other, when it comes to making decisions and so on.”

  “I’m concerned about the racial issue, which is very heavy,” asserted Stein. “It’s heavy to me, for one thing, because I’ve always kept my Jewish name and there’ve been associations, colouring me as money-grubbing and stuff like that, and that’s definitely related to the fact that I didn’t change my name to an Anglo name back in 1974 when I was supposed to. Because the mentality that says you have to have that kind of name is definitely there in the rock establishment, just as the racism and sexism that exist everywhere else exist in rock’n’roll.”

  Blondie were also routinely tossed around by the British music press. If one weekly had been behind the first album then the second was panned, and it was the same with gig reviews – although Sounds resolutely stuck to its campaign of featuring the band (particularly Debbie) at every opportunity.

  After six long months on the road, Blondie finally returned to New York three days after the British tour had wrapped up at the University of Kent on March 6. Although the gigging, promotion and – most crucially – the huge success of ‘Denis’ had raised the band’s profile and brought them a steadily growing legion of fans, it all came at a price – they were exhausted and broke. “It meant you were in debt for $750,000, but I had a great time,” said Clem, acknowledging the amount accrued from the terms of their contract with Peter Leeds and Chrysalis, offset expenses and advances.

  Leeds had organised the punishing tour schedule that saw them bouncing back and forth between England and Australia, then England and Europe – made worse for Debbie by the promotional tour of Australia ahead of the first tranche of UK gigs. The band were on wages of $125 a week, operating with a minimal road crew, and any enquiries about how their tour income and record sales were impacting on their debt were evaded.

  As Deborah reflected, “It didn’t help that our manager told all the boys they could all be replaced. We’re out on the road doing a world tour with two roadies, and he flies in and drops that bombshell.”

  Leeds had identified Debbie as the marketable element of the band and evidently believed treating the rest of the group as hired help served to keep them in line. This was particularly insulting to Chris, who had been the creative powerhouse behind Blondie since its inception. And Leeds, of course, had his own side to the story.

  “All of the band was pissed because of the attention that was focused on Debbie,” he claimed. “I had long talks with them – ‘Don’t you understand, she’s the ticket?’ None of them appreciated how second rate they were without her … She was the ticket.”

  Leeds sought to separate Debbie from the group, with another promotional tour aimed at securing airplay from stations nervous about broadcasting anything from the punk movement. “We were supposed to have a month off, then go do some stuff on the West Coast and start our next album,” Deborah explains. “Everybody but me got a month off – I had to go out and do a promo tour all over the United States. I was flipped out ‘cos I was really tired – but forced into doing this tour, which was really necessary at the time. So I did it; I made a compromise and I did it for two or three weeks. I was underweight and exhausted, so I put my foot down and directed my demands to the company: I said I would have Chris on the road with me, and no one else except one of the people from the record company as a liaison, and that’s the only way that I would do it.”

  Once Debbie returned home with Chris, they were greeted by Leeds’ latest managerial wheeze – T-shirts emblazoned with the legend, ‘Blondie Is A Group’. If it had been devised as a genuine statement of unity, it was based on shaky logic: refuting the idea of separation between Debbie and the rest of the band by drawing attention to that very fact. Either way, the band hated it.

  With Debbie and Chris back from their three-week round of meeting and greeting, it wasn’t long before Leeds had the band back on the road for a short sequence of West Coast dates, beginning at the Starwood Club in Los Angeles on April 25. Four days earlier, ‘(I’m Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear’ had been issued as a single in the UK, where it reached number 10 despite the song having been available on Plastic Letters for over two months. This delighted Clem: “I put in a lot of work on that. It was a fitting swan song for Gary,” the departed bassist who’d written the song.

  While in Los Angeles Blondie hooked up with producer Mike Chapman, whom they had first encountered the previous year. “I went to the Whisky A Go Go to see them in early 1977, and I couldn’t believe what I saw,” he recalled. “I was so knocked out with this band, I was dying of laughter – they were funny, they were intense, they were very, very much a part of what was brand new in music, so I saw them three nights in a row. I took my wife the second night, and she agreed they were incredible. I had Smokie over here at the time recording, and I
was hanging out with the Smokies one night when the Blondies were in town, and we ran into Clem and Jimmy from Blondie one night. I told them I’d love to make records with them one day, if there was a chance, and they said they thought that would be a good idea.”

  “I think he’d have the right idea about what to do with us. I like working with Richard but I think, if we were going to continue making records, I don’t know if I’d want to use the same producer continuously. It would be a different slant on things to work with Mike Chapman,” reflected Clem. “Mike was a songwriter – I mean, he wrote [The Sweet’s] ‘Little Willy,’ one of the most bubblegum songs of all time. He appreciated a lot of qualities that other people didn’t really appreciate.”

  Australian-born Chapman had relocated to London in 1967 and, after a spell with psychedelic pop quartet Tangerine Peel, formed a songwriting partnership with Nicky Chinn, whom he met while working as a waiter at A-list nightspot Tramp. The duo got in touch with RAK Records supremo Mickie Most and were invited to his office, to show what they had. After rapidly passing on the first four songs Chinn-Chapman had played him, Most declared the fifth a hit. He was right – the song, ‘Tom Tom Turnaround’, made the UK Top Five for Australian popsters New World, initiating an unprecedented run of chart success for the ‘Chinnichap’ songwriting-production duo, which included hits for The Sweet, Mud, Suzi Quatro, The Arrows and Smokie. By 1975, with his relationship with Chinn deteriorating, Chapman had moved to Los Angeles where he continued to write and produce.

  Given Chapman’s mutual admiration society with Clem and Jimmy and his commercial track record, it was hardly surprising that, upon return to Los Angeles, Peter Leeds sought him out. “That’s when Terry Ellis from Chrysalis, and their then manager … sent a little note over to me, which said that if there was ever any intention of changing producers – their current producer was Richard Gottehrer – that I would be the first person considered,” Chapman recalled. “It all happened very quickly. I was in the dressing room and met Debbie, and next thing I knew, I was sent to New York to meet with Debbie and Chris, and they terrified me.

  “They lived in a world I knew nothing about … They were New York. I was LA. They thought I’d been sent to destroy their music,” explained Chapman. “I sat down in this little hotel room in New York with the two of them, and Debbie didn’t say a word. She just stared at me. It was three o’clock in the morning, and I said, ‘I’ve come up here to talk about the possibility of producing you.’ I didn’t want to force myself on them, and Debbie was just sitting there going, ‘Yeah, yeah, is that right?’ Chris eventually said that they were sort of interested, but it was a really horrible atmosphere, and I didn’t know what to say.”

  “We didn’t know him,” explained Debbie. “We only knew him by reputation.” Fortunately, the frosty atmosphere slowly thawed as she and Chris played Mike some of their new material. “In the next half hour I heard one creative and beautiful song idea after another. The embryos of a musical masterpiece. My life with Blondie had begun. For better or worse.”

  The impact of early versions of ‘Sunday Girl’ and ‘Heart Of Glass’ left Mike Chapman too embarrassed to tell Chris and Debbie he had considered offering them ‘Some Girls’, a track he wrote with Nicky Chinn that would provide a hit for bubblegum fifties revivalists Racey in 1979. “The sort of success that Blondie requires has to come from within the group, from their songs, their attitude,” he conceded. “I don’t write Blondie-styled songs, and I wasn’t gonna shove my songs down their throats.”

  Instead, Mike offered to help arrange the band’s new songs with a view to potentially producing their third album. This proved acceptable and rehearsal sessions began shortly after. “At the first rehearsal, we worked on ‘Heart Of Glass’,” recounted Chapman. “This proved to be a blessing and a huge step forward in cementing our relationship. It was a great idea that needed to be put into the right shape to find a home on American radio playlists. Since both Debbie and Chris were intrigued by the current disco avalanche that was sweeping the country, we decided to go there with the arrangement. Walking down the street after rehearsal, Debbie caught up with me, sort of smiled and said, ‘I really like what you did with “Heart Of Glass”.’ The ice had started to melt.”

  In June 1978, Blondie entered the Record Plant in New York to record what would become Parallel Lines with Mike Chapman. “On Parallel Lines, I was given the responsibility by Terry Ellis to put this band at the top of the charts,” explained the producer. “He knew they could achieve that and I knew it, too, but I also knew that, given how they were when I began working with them, it might never happen. Terry said, ‘Can you do it, Mike?’ and I said, ‘Yes, I can.’ He said, ‘OK, I’m going to leave you alone. You’ve got six months.’ So I had to go in there and knock this band into shape.

  Although the process would take just six weeks, the group were unprepared for Chapman’s determination to run a tight ship. “They didn’t know what had hit them. I basically went in there like Adolf Hitler and said, ‘You are going to make a great record, and that means you’re going to start playing better.’”

  “Everybody was excited about working with Mike Chapman but nobody was prepared for it,” said Chris. “Gottehrer is very relaxed and was interested in capturing inspired moments rather than personifying a performance or making a hybrid performance. Mike’s theory is that if you can do something once, you can do it again better. He would make us do things over and over again until we got up to his standards. And nobody was prepared for that.”

  “He definitely drove us nuts at the beginning, because we weren’t into stuff like that,” declared Frank. “He was really into getting the timing right, even the guitar parts. I’d do it over and over to get it pretty precise. The basic tracks were always me, Clem and Nigel.”

  “I love their first LP; the arrangements and ideas were great, but it was badly put together,” remarked Chapman. “Initially I was nervous because I didn’t know if I could better record what they’d done before, but still keep it fresh. It was a hard album to make because nobody was used to the discipline I require when I make an album. In the past they’d record and it’d be, ‘I guess that’s OK.’ It took lots of energy to get the tracks down and make them better than OK. I’m glad I did it.”

  “It probably was a bit tense at first,” mused Clem. “But I think that was the idea – actually going professional. With Mike it was very intense. Our first two albums weren’t done with the idea of making hit records; they were just playing, almost free-form. But then the idea with Mike was to make a hit album. Parallel Lines was the hardest we had yet worked on an album.”

  “Everybody was really concentrating, trying to make a good record,” Deborah added. “Mike worked us really hard. I don’t think Clem was ready for it. Gottehrer let him get away with murder, so to speak, but Mike was Mr Perfection. Clem was real surprised; he really worked on that record.”

  Although Chapman felt that Burke was “a gifted drummer but he was totally out of control,” it was Nigel Harrison, experiencing his first taste of recording with Blondie, who initially took exception to the producer’s exactitude. “Nigel Harrison and I got off on entirely the wrong foot. During the basic track recording of ‘Heart Of Glass’ I rode him so hard that he threatened to take me apart piece by piece if I didn’t back off,” confessed Mike.

  “He drove us to insanity at times,” explained Nigel, who gradually came to understand his attitude and admitted, “I could never understand what a record producer was meant to do until I met Chapman.”

  Equally, Jimmy Destri – initially so vexed by Chapman that he threw a $50,000 synthesizer at him – gradually came to see Mike’s involvement as part of a generally positive vibe. “The first time we all had a strong belief that Blondie could work was just before Parallel Lines. We were changing producers, changing labels, money was being poured into us – people in the industry started to believe in Blondie. We’d had a couple of hits in England, and that gave us
the belief that if we could do it there – we have the right producer now, and he was thinking the same thing. So it was an initial concentration on the part of Mike Chapman and us to break America.”

  Although the standards of musicianship on Blondie and Plastic Letters are inferior to that of Parallel Lines, it’s inaccurate to simply credit Chapman and ignore the developments that had taken place within the band in the year since they entered Plaza Sound to record their last full-length set. Given that much of the bass guitar on Plastic Letters was supplied either by Chris – who had settled on guitar as his main instrument – or Frank – who’d hardly had time to acquaint himself with the material he was asked to record, having Nigel on board made a significant difference. Additionally, Infante had now been in the band for around a year, allowing him to find a space for his rhythm work within the overall framework. Blondie had improved technically before Chapman got to grips with their new material, itself containing some of the best songs the group would ever write.

  “I was on the road with Blondie for six months, all around the world, before we recorded Parallel Lines, so musically we were real tight,” Nigel Harrison asserted.

  “I really love and respect [Chapman], but he has a crazy view of things and he still presents the whole picture as if we were a bunch of wild, out of control maniacs that he was roping into whatever,” added Chris. “I saw him learning stuff as we were doing it. He did stuff with us that I’m sure he had never done before. I know he was inventing things as he went along.”

  Previously, Blondie’s albums were afforded a sense of unity by Debbie’s distinctive vocal style and little else. Although the group were known for Jimmy’s fairground Farfisa and Clem’s drum fills, for every song that confirmed any kind of signature sound there was one that did not. This was due in part to Chris’ restless experimentalism and search for new sounds, but also because the songwriting was spread around the group. While both of these dynamics remained firmly in place on Parallel Lines (the bulk of the credits shared between Chris and Debbie, with Jimmy contributing two numbers and Frank and Nigel one each), one of Chapman’s key contributions was a veneer of cohesion across a set that included some of Blondie’s most radical material to date.