Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  “That’s the reason we came,” asserts Debbie. “We came here for our audience. It’s inevitable that part of the game is to get the press but it’s really silly, I wish that these people really had to do something off their own initiative, something creative so they could see what it’s really like, because they’re full of shit. Plain English, they’re full of shit.”

  “I feel the same way,” adds Chris. “We’re not doing a show for the critics, especially this time around. We’re doing it for the fans.”

  As usual, the quaint British custom of finding fault with Blondie was initiated by a couple of live reviews that criticised Deborah for moving around too little. “I move all over the place,” she contests. “They must be fucking crazy! I sometimes think they don’t even watch the show. I got one review from some girl up north, in one of the local papers and she said I had on a gold sequinned outfit and that we did less than an hour. I think she was home watching TV. She didn’t see our show because we played for almost an hour and 45 minutes and I had on a green jumpsuit. They say I don’t move around enough – they come in for one song, like I stand still in a couple of songs because it becomes redundant to keep doing the same thing. There’s a limited number of moves that you can make that carry it off. I was standing stock still for ‘Shayla’. What am I supposed to do? Run around during a ballad? Yeah, sure! I’ll trot back and forth, run up and down those ramps and make it look realistic.

  “I’m really surprised at a lot of things. I don’t know, I don’t think anybody really knows what the fuck is going on any more. I think everybody is so ditzed out and struggling so much just to survive that they can’t be rational. I don’t think anybody’s very rational any more. Criticism means less and less and less to me, whereas now it should be meaning more and more. When I see something in a newspaper that tells me something about the music or lighting or things that are really important to me, I read ‘em. But when it comes to slagging me off as some kind of she-bitch … those aren’t the reasons that I do what I do.”

  “I’m still happy with 75 per cent of the coverage,” states Chris. “We expected a backlash for the album, so I guess it came later for the tour. I think the idea of a review is sexist crap because they can’t tolerate the idea of a woman having any power. [To] put down Debbie based on her sexual stance is a bunch of bullshit, but if they want to put us down on a musical level, that’s great. That’s what I consider criticism.”

  “That’s why I go on [BBC Radio 1 singles review show] Round Table,” Debbie interjects. “Here I am, sort of on top of the heap in terms of a lot of new groups coming up and I’ve the opportunity to go on national radio and slag off the competition. I can destroy the competition verbally. God knows how much I could really do to somebody’s career. But when I go on there I’m really cautious about listening to what things are and I evaluate different sections of the song and I give my review on that, because that’s what I am, I’m a musician and I’m an artist and when I listen to something there’s content to be evaluated rather than a social attitude. I really liked listening to The Pretenders’ record and I heard some reggae I really liked. I don’t remember all the songs that I had to listen to because there’s quite a few, but I certainly try and treat people as I wanna be treated, and I certainly don’t want everybody to like everything that I do, that Blondie does, because I think that’s an impossibility.” Heedless of any sniping from the press pit, the four-week-long tour showcases the group at their best yet, as Ingrassia’s choreography combines with Blondie’s most assured performances to create an audiovisual feast. “We’re a lot more confident now. I haven’t been smoking or drinking before any of the shows,” admits Stein.

  “Me and Chris go on stage totally straight,” Deborah confirms. “I don’t do anything any more, I just go on totally fucking straight, and it’s really cool. I really had a good time on stage on Friday. I took it for granted Friday was gonna be press night and I figured I’m not gonna get uptight about anything, because I wanna have a good time and I did, and I know that it showed. I think we got the audience up in a real way, God bless ‘em – we weren’t demanding of a reaction, they just did it, they responded. That was really cool … I get more inspired because I’ve more control over what I’m doing now than ever before. I’m singing much better now.”

  Freed from management and legal hassles, the sextet found touring far less exacting than on previous trips to Europe. This is despite a schedule that sent them ping-ponging up and down Britain, returning to play their final Hammersmith shows after a two-night excursion to Paris. “This time is really one day after another. There’s no pauses. We’ve days off but there’s days of travelling and press when we’re not doing shows. We’re here only for two or three weeks total so everything’s jam-packed in,” explains Debbie.

  “We’re not making money on this trip. If we’re lucky we’ll break even,” adds Chris.

  “Even the last major tour here lost money, several thousand pounds,” Deborah reveals. “So touring is definitely an outmoded way of making a living.”

  Even so, rather than taking the low-maintenance option and packing out Wembley Arena for a couple of nights, the band afford their fans a greater level of intimacy by sticking with smaller venues. “The promoter was begging us to do bigger gigs,” says Deborah. “We had to go to war for that too, to do the gigs that we wanted to do … I wouldn’t mind playing Hammersmith Odeon for a week.”

  The only downside came in Edinburgh, when a member of the lighting crew named Eddie was badly burned when a flash pot prematurely detonated in his face. “It was awful,” shudders Debbie.

  “We got another man but the lights are about 50 per cent of what they were,” explains Chris. “One of the worst things about this is disappointing people. The more successful you are there are a lot of people who have good reason to wanna talk to you and get to know you, and you can’t do it. I used to be able to hang around in the front and talk to the kids. Now you can’t. Debbie used to hang out in the street if the weather was good.

  “Doing the shows is great, and the money we do have is great. I can buy things like video cameras. We’re able to equip ourselves now. I don’t really think I’ll go in for buying Rolls-Royces and that shit … I’m a little disturbed by the commercialism of the whole thing. Just the way that Blondie is. I think now we’re so successful we can reach people. We can still reach those kids maybe with a different message, something else.

  “I’ve a feeling the next album may not come out for quite a while, because we can’t do another album in the series of ‘Blondie’s Smash Hits’. It has to be something different. I don’t know how it’s going to be yet. The gap will be much longer than before though,” he continues. “Next time we come back we’ll do fucking stand-up gigs. We can come back and play four or five nights in every town in a small place, if we can get it together.”

  By now it was time for Debbie and Chris to get ready for the gig so I wandered off. As I said, the show was dynamite. Afterwards there was a party. Last thing I remember is Debbie and a visiting Joan Jett in the bathroom plastering my eyes with black stuff for Chris’ video camera. He still mentions this footage today.

  Or, in Chris Stein’s own words:

  My main memory of Needs and our association is reinforced by a little bit of video I shot of him many years ago. During a period in the late seventies-early Eighties, I dragged around the world a very primitive and bulky VHS video recorder; the battery was larger than many of today’s high-end professional cameras, the camera was the size of a small suitcase. This segment of video is of Kris, Joan Jett and Debbie in a bathroom during a star-studded party that had been thrown for Blondie at a London hotel. It was attended by Mark Hamill, aka Luke Skywalker. In the clip Debbie is applying eye make-up to Joan and Kris. The three of them look fantastic in spite of my sarcastic complaining that his presence is ‘lousing up the best shot in the movie’.

  The final Hammersmith concert on January 22 provided a suitably triumphan
t climax to the tour. After support from Holly And The Italians and The Selecter, Blondie steamrollered through a powerhouse set filled with hits, fan favourites and well-chosen cover versions. As the sweat-soaked throng clambered over seats demanding more, the group returned to the stage without Clem, so Debbie took over on drums. “I just jumped on, but I wasn’t very good,” she laughed. “In Iran, they’d cut off your hands for playing like that.”

  As befitted a band who’d achieved a string of hit singles and developed a huge following capable of bringing city-centre traffic to a halt, the group flew home to New York via Concorde.

  “It’s a thrill,” reported Debbie. “I think now it’s become easier. Since we’ve had our new management everything’s become a lot easier and a lot clearer. Everybody’s becoming a lot more aware of what their responsibilities are. And everybody’s much happier, I think. Much more relaxed.”

  While Blondie had been conquering the UK, Chrysalis tried to build on the American chart success of ‘Heart Of Glass’ by releasing ‘The Hardest Part’ as the second US single from Eat To The Beat. Not the most obvious choice, it made little impression on the Billboard Hot 100, only managing to reach number 84.

  The label’s legal department had also swung into action on behalf of its investment, preventing the release of a cover version of Ronnie And The Daytonas’ 1964 hit ‘Little GTO’, recorded by Blondie under the pseudonym New York Blondes as a favour to KROQ DJ Rodney Bingenheimer.

  “Rodney convinced Clem that we do backing on ‘Little GTO’, so we said, ‘OK,’ and went and did it. I did a guide vocal in one take to show Rodney the song … some of The Beach Boys and their wives were on that single too – the backing vocals are flawless,” explains Debbie.

  “We did it for Rodney so he could make a couple of bucks,” adds Chris. “Needless to say it didn’t come out. They pressed up about 300 with Rodney singing. Between him and Greg Shaw of Bomp! they got the damn thing released on Decca Records, with Debbie’s vocal. When they did Chrysalis proceeded to sue them.”

  A more legitimate release emerged in January in the form of an Eat To The Beat ‘video album’ on Warner. Featuring staged performances of all 12 tracks from the original disc, the project broke new commercial ground. “The importance of the visual side of what we do is an automatic assumption on my part,” asserted Deborah. “I’ve always noticed that the best groups were always very visual groups. That’s a special thing: there’s no place else except in rock’n’roll where that is represented – a 50/50 representation of visuals and sound.”

  Shot over a long weekend, the clips presented what Debbie described as “a very simple representation of a band’s performance”, with only the expansive promo video for ‘Union City Blue’ being in any way cinematic.

  “We eventually went down to Union City and we have an aerial view with a helicopter and the whole bit way down there on the dock. It comes from across the river,” recalled Nigel.

  As an exercise in merchandising, the project was undermined by the prohibitive cost of pre-recorded videotapes at the time, but for Chrysalis – keenly aware of the impact the promotional video to ‘Heart Of Glass’ had made in breaking the band in the USA – it meant that there was a film available for any track on Eat To The Beat they might later choose to release as a single.

  The next of these turned out to be ‘Atomic’ which, backed by ‘Die Young, Stay Pretty’, was issued in both the UK and US on February 7, 1980. The song thundered into the UK chart at number three; back home, its fusion of new wave and disco failed to emulate the success of ‘Heart Of Glass’, barely bruising the Top 40, despite a promo video where Debbie turned a black plastic bin liner into an iconic outfit while the group performed in a hastily constructed post-nuclear dancehall.

  Undaunted, Chris remained committed to transcending musical boundaries. “One of my goals is to try to synthesize different kinds of music that’ll bring people together,” he declared. “I definitely see a return toward R’n’B and soul music. I think the fucking anti-disco movement is a bunch of bullshit with very heavy racist overtones. And if you’ll remember correctly, back in the late sixties, all the great black music that people now accept as the best – The Supremes and The Four Tops and all that stuff – was considered sort of the same way that disco music is considered now.”

  As if to validate Chris’ ethos, Blondie’s next American single would combine elements of rock, disco and the nascent electronica subgenre, breaking new creative ground while providing the group with their biggest hit yet. Recorded at The Power Station back in August 1979, ‘Call Me’ was a collaboration between the group and Italian producer Giorgio Moroder who, along with lyricist Pete Bellotte, had shaped Donna Summer’s sexy synthesized disco hits. “It’s the theme song of a movie called American Gigolo,” explained Chris. “It’s a real hard rock song, not like disco. Giorgio was great. He wrote the song and Debbie wrote the lyrics. He listened to all our albums and put together the ultimate Blondie song.”

  “We went over to the hotel and he played us the movie on video and I just got my impressions of it and I tried to think of what it would be,” Deborah recalled. “Giorgio’s original idea was to call it ‘Man Machine’ because the man was just like the sex machine, and he had these lyrics he had written but he definitely wanted me to write something better.”

  “Debbie’s lyrics are much more subtle than the ones he wrote,” added Chris. “His thing was very direct like saying, ‘I am a man and I go out and I fuck all the girls.’ Debbie’s lyrics are a lot more subtle and the movie in a way is not that blatant, it is sort of subtle.”

  “American Gigolo has some things that are really nice about it, it has a very great look,” remarked Debbie. “The thing that I was really fascinated by when I saw it was the muted tones and hi-tech look of it, so that was the first verse about colours: ‘Colour me your colour baby/colour me your car.’ It was like teasing too because the thing about the movie was that he was always, ‘Call me! Call me if you want me to come to you.’ You know, ‘Cover me.’ And it was like these little commands had this macho quality through his being a male hooker, you know that kind of demanding business. So it really fell in easy for me. I got real enthusiastic. The first verse came real fast and then the others were just there.”

  “[Moroder] had this basic synth track, Debbie had the vocal thing,” said Frank. “I did the guitar part that goes ‘duddle-a-dah, duddle-a-dah’. All of a sudden, the song took on a whole new thing.”

  “Frankie played some great stuff on it,” added Clem. “‘Call Me’ was something that we really needed; it got us to the next level, and another number one.”

  In late February, ‘Call Me’ was released in different versions by three different US record companies – Polydor’s movie soundtrack version, Chrysalis’ seven- and 12-inch singles and also a Spanish version called ‘Llamame’, aimed at Latin territories but also released on 12-inch by top New York disco label Salsoul. This version exemplifies the way in which Blondie assimilated musical developments from the New York streets, adding them to their ever-changing sound palette. This was a two-way cultural exchange – no other white rock band was feted to the extent of appearing on the city’s coolest disco imprint. “I’ve always equated our work with Bowie who’s always changed his style,” observed Chris. “All the great groups – The Beatles and the Stones – have changed their style. There’s so much brain stuff going on in the band that it’s very difficult to put it all into one outlet.”

  ‘Call Me’ spent six weeks at number one in the States, topped the US dance charts and became Blondie’s fourth British number one in little over a year when released in April. With no firm plans yet in place for a fifth studio album, the success of ‘Call Me’ opened up the possibility of Moroder coming on board as producer. “We wouldn’t mind working with Giorgio,” said Chris. “I don’t know if we’ll do the next one with Chapman anyway. I don’t think we can do a third album in this series, not another album that’s like a string o
f singles. We’ll do something else, some longer songs.”

  Despite his growing interest in production, Chris insisted he had no intention of taking on the dual role. “I never want to produce a Blondie album because it’s too much responsibility. A guy like Chapman or Giorgio Moroder can teach you a lot of things. I don’t yet have the experience.”

  As 1980 progressed it seemed as if Blondie – Debbie in particular – were appearing across all facets of the media. In addition to hit singles, video albums and film soundtracks, Deborah started showing up on television as part of a high-profile advertising campaign for Gloria Vanderbilt branded jeans. “It’s like a non-commercial,” observed Chris. “There’s no mention of jeans in it. It’s just like Debbie walking down the street and her outfits change but that’s about it. There’s another jeans commercial here with a voice just like Ian Dury, heavy rhythm disco new wave bullshit. It’s very funny.”

  “It was something that Shep Gordon did,” Deborah later explained. “At the time, personalities and jeans were a big thing, and all of a sudden I had this ad campaign all over TV and it was for a lot of money, I’m sure it was around $200,000. At that time it was a lot, probably not compared to what people get nowadays. I guess I must’ve owned a pair, but I can’t remember. I wasn’t really into personal names or signature jeans.”

  “Debbie got more money from the jeans deal than both of us have for our record sales,” added Chris. “Now we have good credit. We were so happy to do the commercial, though, we would have done it for nothing.”

  In June, Debbie travelled to England to film a guest-star spot on wildly popular family television programme The Muppet Show. Sandwiched between the Cannes premiere of Union City and the US opening of Roadie, the shoot gave Deborah the opportunity to branch out into mainstream light entertainment. She performed ‘One Way Or Another’ (“I’m gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya”) backed by a Muppet version of Blondie, as the show’s cloth curmudgeons Statler and Waldorf cracked, “Who was she looking for anyway? The guy that booked her on this crummy show?” She also got to help the Frog Scout troop with their punk merit badges, duet with Kermit on ‘Rainbow Connection’, join some Technicolor-haired punk Muppets for a version of ‘Call Me’, and appear in full Frog Scout regalia for the finale.