Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  Built upon a funky disco foundation, ‘Heart Of Glass’ was the most obvious example of this sonic radicalism despite its long-time inclusion on the band’s set list, having originally been written at Thompson Street back in 1975. “Chris always wanted to do disco songs. He’s a Dadaist,” declared Jimmy. “We’re running through this new wave/I hate disco/punk rock scene, and Chris wants to do ‘Disco Inferno’ and ‘Love To Love You Baby’. We used to do ‘Heart Of Glass’ to upset people. It was his idea to bring it back, but as a funky song.”

  “We would like to combine a certain degree of experimentation with mass appeal, like that Donna Summer song, ‘I Feel Love’,” explained Chris. “It was a big hit and the thing to me is very experimental and was probably a real chancy thing for them to put out, not knowing that everybody would accept something that was completely electronic like that.”

  “When we did it, it wasn’t cool in our social set to play disco, but we did it because we wanted to be uncool,” said Debbie. “It was based around a Roland Rhythm Machine and the backing took over 10 hours to get down. We spent three hours just getting the bass drum. It was the hardest song to do on the album and took us the longest in studio hours.”

  When Chris and Jimmy had returned from one of their 47th Street shopping trips clutching the newly-introduced Roland CR-78 drum machine, they were thinking more of exploring Kraftwerk terrain, especially as the machine also boasted a trigger-pulse mechanism which could be hooked up to a synthesizer. Embracing such new technologies created specific obstacles, such as how to manually achieve a mechanically syncopated drumbeat.

  “The original arrangement of ‘Heart Of Glass’ – as on the Betrock demos – had doubles on the hi-hat cymbals, a more straight-ahead disco beat,” recalls Chris. “When we recorded it for Parallel Lines we were really into Kraftwerk, and we wanted to make it more electronic. We weren’t thinking disco as we were doing it; we thought it was more electro-European.” It required getting the most organic of drummers to play in a wholly synthetic manner. “Clem had this attitude that he was Keith Moon and just wanted to play every drum all of the time. My first challenge was to get him to play in time. It was a real challenge to convince them that the early demo of ‘Heart Of Glass’ was out of tune and out of time.”

  “Clem used to have a heart attack and be forced to play it. It was so funny, him having to sit there and play ‘dugga-dugga-dugga’. But it worked! Because it was so hokey and so disgusting that it really wasn’t a disco record,” chuckled Debbie.

  “Jimmy had that Kraftwerk synthesizer, by that time, he had a cheap Roland synth,” said Burke. “There’s a weird 6/8 [time signature] skip in the middle – that was Mike’s idea.”

  “It took us maybe four or five days and it’s all done manually,” remembers Chris. “It’s all completely pieced together. The bass drum took three hours. All those guitar parts took, you know, four hours just going ‘digga-digga-digga-digga’. Because every 16th note was in time with the rhythm machine. That was the foundation of the whole thing … The first thing that was on the track was the little rhythm machine that you hear in the beginning, and the synthesizer just playing ‘bugga-bugga-bugga-bugga’. Everything else was built on top of that. It was punched in, you know, and stuff. But everything is in real time. There’s no looping. There’s no anything. So every time you hear something it’s the only time it’s there.”

  Deborah’s vocals were added last. The song’s title would give rise to the notion that the song was somehow based on the strangely cerebral 1976 Herzog film of the same name. “I came in with the ‘heart of glass’ phrase and that was one of the last things of the lyrics,” explained Chris. “And I really wasn’t aware of the film at all at that point.”

  Written entirely by Chris, the ethereal incandescence of ‘Fade Away And Radiate’ represents another departure from any supposed Blondie template. “‘Fade Away And Radiate’ had been lying around since the first album,” he revealed. “We used to do the exact same arrangement, except I did a modified version of the solo. [Prog-rock heavyweight] Robert Fripp [who had recently recorded ‘Heroes’ with Bowie] came up to us at the Palladium in New York, one of the first times we played there, and said he liked us. We hit it off and he ended up putting his guitar licks on the song. We had it all finished, but we were so excited to have him do it.”

  In addition to Fripp’s glacial guitar contributions, the song features portentous electronica and drums, its intense-but-delicate vocal indicating how Debbie had gained strength and honed her technique. “It was difficult for me,” she explained at the time. “The first two albums, with Richard, I would do three and four major vocals in a day, and all the harmony parts and back-ups. I would never do more than three takes on a lead vocal. I would try to go through the whole song, not just verse by verse. With Mike it’s much more careful, and I’m much more discerning about it myself. Now I usually do two leads in a day, and sometimes a few harmony parts. When you sing, you go for the timing, the phrasing. You go for the note, for correctness. And then you have to go for the attitude. So there’s three things you have to get all at once. The note-for-note things I take for granted, because either you hit it or you don’t, and if you don’t you just do it over. But the most important thing is the attitude. Sometimes if you put a lot of feeling into a note, it’s bent – and it doesn’t matter, because it makes it.”

  Chris Stein’s other solo songwriting credit on Parallel Lines is ‘Sunday Girl’, a slice of infectious pop that would subsequently top the UK chart. He also co-wrote the retro-futuristic ‘Pretty Baby’ with Debbie, who hit upon lyrics based loosely around her impressions of the young actress Brooke Shields (who had recently starred in a controversial film of the same name) at almost the last minute. “It’s scary when it’s getting time for you to sing and you don’t have lyrics written. With ‘Pretty Baby’ I was saying, ‘Oh God, what am I gonna write, what am I gonna write?’ The night before I had to record the vocal I finally got an idea.”

  For Nigel the track should have been a sure-fire hit, although it was never released as a single: “I listen to songs like ‘Pretty Baby’ and it sounds to me like it’s got all the ambience, and the magic of the first take. But it wasn’t.”

  Lyrically based on her unpleasant experience of being pursued by a possessive ex-boyfriend, ‘One Way Or Another’ sees Debbie’s growling vocal underpinned by Nigel’s driving melody. “My original music for ‘One Way Or Another’ was this psychedelic, Ventures-like futuristic surf song gone wrong,” he explained. “Jimmy really liked this piece of music, and we would play it while on the road. Then Debbie picked up on it; she came up with the ‘getcha-getcha-getcha’s. The ending, where it gets crazy, was Chapman’s idea.”

  Aside from the moody and unsettling ‘11:59’, Jimmy Destri teamed up with Chris and Debbie to write the anthemic ‘Picture This’ – the only time that the trio would collaborate on a song. “‘Picture This’ is basically my verse music, Chris’ chorus music and Debbie’s lyrics,” said Jimmy. “We all had little pieces of one another’s songs, just throwing in bits. I always write with the band in mind.”

  “I was so excited that in ‘Picture This’ I rhymed ‘solid’ with ‘wallet’,” teased Debbie. “I said, ‘Wow. Things are happening now!’” The valedictory ‘Just Go Away’, which she also wrote, was chosen to close Parallel Lines with the same engaging cattiness that infused ‘Rip Her To Shreds’ with such street-level zest. “The lyrics, which were always third person transsexual anyway, are improving all the time,” Deborah added. “I was always a Walter Mitty character and that whole romantic detachment is beginning to show in the songs.”

  Frank Infante’s maiden contribution to the Blondie canon was the slight ‘I Know But I Don’t Know’, which, the rhythm guitarist recalled, “Came out whole. I just sat down with a tape recorder and started to say words and then I started to sing them and play guitar. What does it all mean? It doesn’t mean anything … You take whatever you want out of it.”r />
  Album opener ‘Hanging On The Telephone’ and the overdriven ‘Will Anything Happen’ were both penned by Jack Lee, latterly of Los Angeles power-pop trio The Nerves. “Jeff Pierce from the Gun Club was a fan of ours. He sent our manager a cassette of ‘Hanging On The Telephone’ by The Nerves, Jack Lee’s band,” recounted Deborah. “We were playing it in the back of a taxicab in Tokyo, and the taxi driver started tapping his hand on the steering wheel. When we came back to the US, we found that The Nerves weren’t together any more and we said, ‘Gee, we should record this.’”

  Added Frank, “He just came down to the studio in a taxi, and he had those two songs – I haven’t heard anything since, but I don’t think that he has any complaints.”

  The only conventionally sourced cover version on the album was an upbeat interpretation of Buddy Holly’s 1957 cut ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’, which had surprisingly failed to chart when originally issued as a single on Coral Records.

  “The end of that album was the whole group sleeping on the floor of the Record Plant at about six o’clock in the morning, and waking up to see Mike and his engineer at the time, Peter Coleman, walking out of the room and bitching about having to carry these 24-track tapes back to LA,” recalled Clem. “It was just like, ‘Bye – We’ll see ya.’ We all went back to sleep on the floor, and Mike and Peter left.”

  After a week of mixing, Debbie was able to reflect on the finished article. “I think it’s a firmer statement of our principles because what we’ve always done is a wide variety of pop music. Parallel Lines is a better Blondie. Better songs. Better playing. Better singing.”

  Chapman agreed, “That’s what Blondie’s all about … I didn’t make a punk album or a new wave album with Blondie. I made a pop album. If the radio stations would only forget this evil word ‘punk’. It’s modern rock’n’roll.”

  “The stigma of the word ‘punk’ is something that could not be absorbed into today’s American culture as representing anything remotely positive,” added Chris. “And that’s one of the things that held Blondie back for so long.”

  Named after an unfinished set of lyrics Debbie had composed (“about communication, characterisation, and the eventual meeting of different influences”), Parallel Lines emerged as a more accessible album than its predecessors, but was still wholly in keeping with the group’s musical ethos. “What we want to do is to get as many people interested in Blondie as possible so we can show them what we really believe. Not exactly any means to an end, but we’ll use as many hooks as possible to get an audience and then show them what we really want to do,” Jimmy explained.

  “The new album is very definable, normal stuff,” said Chris. “We had a few ideas that Chapman didn’t want to go on … spacier parts that were left off the final mix. Everyone asks if we’re selling out by going commercial, but I view it as a challenge to try to produce something that has mass appeal. To me it’s more a challenge to try and write hit songs than to do something esoteric.”

  “I happen to think that Parallel Lines is a safe album in some ways, and because of that a lot of people are going to accuse us of selling out even more. I think that the album will have more mass appeal, but I still don’t think we have abandoned our principles,” asserted Deborah. “The only thing that might not be better about it is that it’s not as adventurous in terms of our original stance, but maybe our next thing will be a further step in terms of adventure.”

  On the theme of mass appeal, Chris declared, “I’d like to be like a more real Bay City Rollers, because The Bay City Rollers are so appalling. They’re all right, they make good music, but their image … everybody knows they’re not really clean-cut, they’re a bunch of punks and run around like maniacs probably. They chase little girls and all that, everybody knows that. It’d be nice to be accessible to that many people. We aim at little kids, we’re hopeful. Look what happened to the whole hippy generation, they’re all tore up by Madison Avenue, they all got jobs, computer programmers and shit, these are all the same people who were running around being radical, right now they’re all trying to buy real estate saying ‘We’re all part of the system now.’ Which is in a sense what we’re doing, we’re all working in the system but we’re trying to get our creative juices out.”

  However, the system – embodied in the form of Chrysalis Records – was initially less than enthusiastic about how Blondie released their creative juices. “Parallel Lines was rejected by our record company,” revealed Debbie. “We had established ourselves as doing punk-pop with touches of salsa, meringue, mustard, whatever you could spread around liberally, and they got along with that. Then when we got to the third record, they rejected it. Turned it down – flat. They had a listening session with their executives and they said, ‘No. You’ve got to do it over. Fix it.’”

  Chapman intervened to persuade the company the album was indeed the disc full of hit singles it would prove to be. “Mike really had to bat for us with this record,” said Deborah. As if to underline the alarming extent of their incomprehension, Chrysalis passed over ‘Heart Of Glass’, ‘Sunday Girl’ and ‘Hanging On The Telephone’ and opted to issue ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’ to trail the album in the US – its logic being that the recent release of The Buddy Holly Story, starring Gary Busey in the title role, would trigger a Holly revival that never actually materialised on the streets. The single bombed. “I really don’t think we have to dilute what Blondie is to crack America,” mused Destri. “I think we just have to plan what singles we release over there, and continue as we are without changing.”

  In the UK, ‘Picture This’ was the first single lifted from Parallel Lines. Issued on August 12, it rose to number 12 in the chart, scoring the band another Top Of The Pops appearance.

  While the band was in London, the Mirandy Gallery hosted an exhibition of Chris’ photographic document of the group’s first three years: Blondie In Camera. Kris Needs was there:

  The event had been astutely leaked to their ever-swelling fan network, meaning hundreds of teenage boys and girls clamouring outside the venue, noses pressed against the glass as the elite press corps guzzle the free booze, occasionally giving the pictures a cursory glance. When Blondie are sighted, the horde scream. When Clem starts hurling ‘blonde vinyl’ copies of ‘Picture This’, they jostle and howl. The drummer is getting quite miffed, especially as it’s like a Turkish bath in the small gallery. Meanwhile, Debbie is being shunted around from camera to camera, executive to executive. “Debbie, I’d like you to meet … One over here please … Can you purse your lips?” All while being bugged by tabloid journalists and their endless questions about having kids. From my vantage point at the far end with Chris, I suggest wheeling her around in a trolley, Supermarket Sweep-style. “Oh, don’t give ‘em that idea!” she wails. When we attempt to flee the joint by dashing through the baying mob to a waiting limo, fans leap on the car, paw at the windows and shriek. Not for the first time, The Beatles’ Hard Day’s Night is mentioned. This was the actual point where we agreed that Blondiemania had indeed arrived, in a fashion not seen since the Fab Four. The nation had a new pin-up and a fresh perfect pop outfit that could finally transcend the narrow confines of punk rock.

  A complete contrast comes two days later when I’m invited to witness Blondie work up the new album’s songs in a pokey rehearsal room in Victoria. When I arrive, Debbie is still away doing more interviews so the boys are practising, tonight focusing on ‘11:59’ and ‘Hanging On The Telephone’. The cursed phrase ‘Blondie Is A Group’ takes on new resonance; this lot are skin-tight, energised and having a ball. Debbie walks in wearing shades, says nothing and walks out again. She’s shattered after another gruelling day of repetitive, anodyne questions, taking time to settle into her bunker sealed from the outside world where she can finally get on with the music. The relentless schedules have not eased for her since before the world tour. For all this hard graft she’s being rewarded by mushrooming success, but still broke. By now, I can recognise when
she’s numbed by schedules. Sometimes I see trying to cheer her up as necessary, or else best leave something or someone else to snap her out of it. Tonight her mood is lightened by recounting a room-shaking Chris Stein fart waking her in the middle of the night. “It nearly blew me out the bed!” She starts giggling. Then Debbie perches on a stool and sings ‘11:59’ like an angel. After hearing the song this way it becomes one of my favourite tracks on the album, that haunting refrain of “Today could be the end of me/It’s 11:59 and I want to stay alive,” ringing around my head. Why, what happens at midnight? It’s as mysterious as any Shangri-Las song.

  In retrospect, sitting in a little room as Blondie hone their 1978 set is once-in-a-lifetime stuff, just observing the group at work, passing ideas, laughing frequently (often at my expense). As a ‘typical English fan’ I’m asked to judge if Buddy Holly’s ‘I’m Gonna Love You Too’ should make the set; two minutes later I gibber to the affirmative. But I’m still concerned about Debbie, who seems to be feeling the strain. We talk about her punishing daily schedule. I remark that she’s only human. “I know, but sometimes I forget that myself.” Over the coming weekend, Blondie polish their set on a Fulham sound stage, including encores of Iggy’s ‘Funtime’ and T. Rex’s ‘Get It On’. It’s the same place where I saw Mott The Hoople rehearse with Mick Ronson four years earlier, just before they split. Tonight, it sounds like a rebirth, Blondie bringing the tight work ethos drummed in by Chapman to their live set and the big stage.