Blondie, Parallel Lives Read online

  “That was a real good experience, working with those people. You can’t make a fool of yourself. They’re very clever, the way they write things. [Jim] Henson is a genius,” insisted Debbie. “I didn’t suggest anything in particular that I wanted to do on the show – I left the choice of sketches and songs to the experts. After all, they know the show better than I ever could, even though I am a devoted fan. My only regret is that I don’t have a scene with Miss Piggy. I thought it would be nice if we could fight over a feather boa or something but I’m told that she doesn’t really like working with the lady guests. She saves herself for guests like Roger Moore – not that I blame her. She’s a very astute lady!”

  Shortly after the Muppet Show shoot, the first biography of the band was published. Written by gonzo music journalist Lester Bangs, Blondie combined an idiosyncratic account of the group’s history to date with the author’s own critical observations – much of which centred around a kind of faux-distaste for the way in which he perceived the band were using sex to sell records. “I was surprised by that book,” stated Debbie. “We had known Lester for a long time; I was shocked that he was so hostile. What I do is, in a sense, nothing new. Yet I combine two, more or less, opposites. On the one hand I entertain in a very traditional way with the image of the beautiful female singer, though that can be very bland. But then I put a lot of feeling and information into the lyrics. Maybe that is scary. A lot of people don’t want to look at, or confront that.”

  “Lester’s point was to make money. But he didn’t because the book didn’t sell. Because our fans were, all in all, pretty disgusted with it,” added Chris. “I just don’t believe that in order to be true men and women, we have to become sexless creatures that gradually grow together. Yet a lot of people feel that’s the true sexuality; this sort of Big Brotherland where everybody wears coveralls and has shaved heads … maybe that’s the kind of world Lester Bangs gets excited by. In his book one of his main theses was that every little boy really wants to beat up his favourite poster girl to prove that she’s a piece of meat like everyone else. So maybe he would be happier in a world where everybody was the same.”

  Bangs subsequently insisted, “I would like to see a world where men and women begin to see each other as they truly are and not as icons of frustration and contempt. But I can see Debbie being bugged because I also said in the book that she wasn’t my type.” (Hardly likely, given Bangs’ slobbish, unappealing appearance and penchant for overbearing sexism.)

  Despite Blondie being highly visible in the media, 1980 was the group’s least active year. Since returning from Europe they had taken a break from touring and the continuing uncertainty about the next album only served to extend this hiatus. Giorgio Moroder was eliminated from the list of possible producers when it became apparent that his Eurodisco orientation didn’t mesh with any direction the group wished to take.

  “I don’t think we could have done a whole album with Giorgio – he just didn’t have any rock’n’roll roots,” explained Clem, who expressed a preference for recording at Abba’s studios in Sweden, before suggesting sessions at Abbey Road with Paul McCartney. Phil Spector presented another option, but reports of his obsessive, gun-toting behaviour during the making of The Ramones’ End Of The Century scared Blondie off. Chris was becoming increasingly besotted with the idea of hiring Chic to handle production, but that would keep. As the summer reached its end, it was decided the group would stick with what they knew best, travelling to Los Angeles to record the album that would become Autoamerican with Mike Chapman.

  “With Autoamerican, there was no rehearsal done at all, we just walked into the studio blind with a sketch of a few songs, and how that album came out, I really don’t know,” Chapman recalled.

  It was to be recorded at United/Western Studios on Sunset Strip, established in the late fifties with financial backing from Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. “It was our turn to go out there for Mike,” explained Debbie.

  “I knew this was the right thing to do and felt sure that a dose of LA would bend the music,” Chapman asserted. “They all loved LA anyway. They just didn’t like to admit it. It’s a New York thing.”

  Chris was not so sure. “I’m not used to it out there – it’s difficult for me. It’s a pretty strange place – probably one of the weirdest places in the world. It’s like a big Ripley’s Believe It Or Not … The whole state is like a giant Disneyland. No, I shouldn’t say that; Frisco seems like a normal European sort of town … except for the fact that half the population is homosexual, there’s nothing unusual about it. In LA though, everything seems big and plastic.”

  With only the bare outlines of their new material prepared, Chris saw the opportunity to take Blondie’s sound into uncharted realms. “I’m determined not to stagnate in the music we produce. It’s always easy to accept the unsuccessful artist and say, ‘Well, he’s more pure because he’s not successful and has nothing to lose.’ But we’re still trying to turn things over and make a change.”

  “We wanted to get away from a mould,” he would retrospectively explain. “I was really angry at the time; a lot of that stuff was a slap in the face to critics and people with preconceptions about what we were and what new wave music was supposed to be. I was appalled by the way new wave was being absorbed into the mainstream. By the time we did Autoamerican, new wave had been totally absorbed, the same way hippies were absorbed.”

  Although he admitted to surprise when Blondie arrived in LA without Frank, who would “come when he was needed”, Mike Chapman was immediately impressed. “They all came with ideas. Great ideas,” he recalled. “We would have an orchestra, a jazz great or two, some horn sections, a cover of a great reggae song, and – as Chris put it – ‘a rap’. I wasn’t too sure what he meant, but it sounded good and it was his idea, so it must be good.”

  “Autoamerican solidified our relationship with Chapman. After that we felt a lot more committed to each other,” said Chris. “He agreed that we should get away from standard rock. We didn’t want to do what everybody expected us to do, which would have been ‘Call Me’-type stuff.”

  The album’s basic tracks took over a month to work out and lay down. “The feel of the songs was closely examined,” recalled Debbie. “There were plenty of differences of opinion. Lots of time was spent discussing, hacking it out, trying to satisfy everyone.”

  Studio A was situated on a particularly sleazy stretch of the Strip, where darkness brought out all manner of winos, hookers and ne’er-do-wells. At one point Chapman was called home to Australia, due to his father’s death, leaving Blondie to get up to no good in LA. Debbie would later confess to having no recollection at all of what transpired. On Chapman’s return, they relocated a block down the Strip to Studio B for vocals, overdubs, orchestra and horns. This was the facility that had hosted the likes of Elvis, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones and The Righteous Brothers.

  Chris and Debbie’s determination to transcend musical boundaries defined Autoamerican, as the couple seized the creative reins. Only Jimmy Destri’s ‘Angels On The Balcony’ and ‘Walk Like Me’, along with the Harry/Harrison composition ‘T-Birds’, conformed to the sonic lineage of the group’s previous releases.

  “Chris took the most interest in the whole album,” remarked Jimmy.

  “It’s being in the right frame of mind,” Chris explained. “Sometimes you have spurts like at the moment – six or seven songs, but another time there’s nothing at all. I always write music, I’m not too good at lyrics. I never wrote prose or poetry, but Debbie always has and I think she’s getting better and better at lyrics. She’s responsible for all the stuff that really gives it its character. All our stuff is taken for granted now, and that’s why it’s our duty now to find some new avenues.”

  “I like to sing freestyle into a tape recorder,” added Deborah. “I improvise and listen to it back. Sometimes I get an idea, I just try to make up embellishments and it’s easier with a cassette machine. Nowadays I seem to
come up with attitudes and feelings first and just go with that. I just try to ad lib it.”

  To fully realise their vision, Debbie, Chris and Mike Chapman – who found himself standing in for the absent Frank on second guitar – enlisted a wide range of additional singers and players. Experienced arranger Jimmie Haskell worked tirelessly with a 30-piece orchestra brought in to enhance the two tracks bookending Autoamerican – Stein’s cinematic instrumental opener, ‘Europa’, and a cover version of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s ‘Follow Me’, from the 1960 musical Camelot.

  In many ways the most controversial song on the album, ‘Follow Me’ was viewed by Chris as a perverse form of radicalism. “I went to see Camelot and ‘Follow Me’ stuck in my head. By doing something corny like that I was trying to wake people up to the validity of that type of music. I felt new wave fans were getting as stuffy as opera lovers: ‘I can’t listen to that – it’s about teenage suicide and doesn’t have raging guitars in it.’ The band thought I was insane,” he explained. “People have these preconceived ideas about what it’s cool to listen to and we wanted to expose our fans to different types of music, to open up their brains a little. I believe punks are just as stuffy as opera lovers. If you force a punk to listen to Wagner or Camelot by Lerner and Loewe, he will reject the image of the music rather than listen and hear the melody.”

  Saxophonist Tom Scott – best known for composing theme tunes to such TV cop shows as Starsky And Hutch and The Streets Of San Francisco – was hired, along with pianist Steve Goldstein and bassist Ray Brown, to provide Debbie with a suitably jazzy backing for her slow-burning ‘Faces’. Written entirely by the singer, the haunting ballad has her trading vocal lines with Scott’s sax as the realisation of an idea she had developed over an extended period. “I was working on it for five years. I’m lying. Six years,” she revealed.

  Jimmy, who admitted that the track’s keyboards were beyond his technical capabilities, observed, ‘“Faces’ is totally Debbie. I can tell she’s been holding it in for a while, with all those Bowery references.”

  “We tried to consciously make it a depression era song, for the eighties depression,” stated Stein. “It’s about bums on the Bowery. I think that’s really the key song on the album.”

  Elsewhere, vocal duo Howard Kayman and Mark Volman (aka former Turtles members Flo and Eddie) provided backing vocals for ‘T-Birds’, while percussion trio Ollie Brown, Emil Richards and Alex Acuña were brought aboard for Autoamerican’s other cover, a reworking of The Paragons’ 1967 Jamaican rocksteady single, ‘The Tide Is High’. “The song gave me the chills,” recounted Chapman. “That’s the number one record,” he told Deborah. “The track felt perfect. The percussion players added the next dimension. Debbie’s vocal was magic, and the strings and horns put it over the top. I asked them to play it without reading or running through their parts. They thought I had lost it, but they did it. The result was loose and added a wonderful atmosphere to the overall picture.”

  Blondie had actually debuted a gloriously ramshackle version of ‘The Tide Is High’ on TV Party some weeks earlier, with Walter Steding adding some uniquely discordant violin. “I wish I could have strangled Walter and dragged him off the stage because he was so unbearably out of tune in that,” asserted Glenn O’ Brien.

  In terms of innovation, ‘Rapture’ was the album’s standout track. Like ‘Heart Of Glass’ and ‘Atomic’, it demonstrated how Blondie’s penchant for experimentation was most effective when the group incorporated elements of dance music. Once again Debbie and Chris returned to the New York streets for inspiration, referencing the emergent rap scene that had ripened throughout the previous decade.

  The initial development of rapping, turntabling and break-dancing had run parallel with the downtown punk scene, gestating in the housing projects of the South Bronx since 1974. This slow street-level evolution continued unrecorded for another five years, before The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ propelled the medium to mainstream attention. Just as Television and The Ramones represented what had been going on at CBGB’s before Blondie became its first hit-makers, ‘Rapper’s Delight’ echoed the scene amid the urban ruins, presenting hip hop as a major new cultural force. On the streets it represented primal expression for kids with nothing to lose, many initially just looking for escape and a few minutes of self-earned glory, rather than the big dollars that came later. By the 21st century, the music would become the biggest-selling musical genre in the world (albeit often in watered-down or horribly mutated forms).

  The genesis of hip hop can be attributed to three prime movers: DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa. Although all were ostensibly DJs, each brought a different crucial element to the movement, with Herc widely credited for originating the form in its rawest state. Born Clive Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica, Herc had arrived in New York in 1967 and set about applying elements drawn from his native sound-system culture (such as the verbally dextrous practice of ‘toasting’ over records) to the funkier offerings of artists such as James Brown and Jimmy Castor. The foundations of hip hop were laid in 1973 at a Sedgwick Avenue housing-project recreation room, where Herc started extending the percussion breaks in records, whipping up the dancers who unleashed their break moves with party cries like, “This is the joint!”

  Herc’s reputation rapidly became as immense as the scale of his parties, sometimes held in parks with equipment powered by hotwired street lights, inspiring others to take to the decks. Teenage electronics boffin Joseph Sadler, of blitzed-out Fox Street, witnessed Herc around this time but, rather than copying his sometimes clumsy method of switching from break to break, became convinced that the seamless beat-mixing techniques being pioneered by Manhattan DJs such as Pete DJ Jones and Grandmaster Flowers could be applied to Herc’s break-isolating methods. The young boffin went off and constructed his own primitive double-deck set-up, while developing the ‘quick mix’ technique which would ultimately lead to the turntablist’s arsenal of cutting, back-spins and scratching. By the following September of 1978 he had renamed himself Grandmaster Flash and could fill Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom with break-dancing party fiends, many hatching their own takes on the emerging new style.

  Former Black Spades warlord Afrika Bambaataa came from a broader social angle, having rejected and then confronted the violent gang life dominating the South Bronx to establish his Zulu Nation, which brought together previously warring factions under one banner. Bam was also known as the ‘Master Of Records’, on account of the wildly eclectic musical menus at his parties in the South East Bronx. By 1977, hip hop had replaced (although it still sometimes accompanied) the thug life as the main obsession of disaffected Bronx youth, as Disco Fever – a rampant hothouse which showcased new names – provided the movement’s sometimes highly dangerous epicentre.

  Until the release of ‘Rapper’s Delight’ in late 1979, the South Bronx and parts of Harlem had kept this new movement to themselves, many DJs and MCs even turning down offers to appear on vinyl (although there had already been low-key rap outings such as ‘Vicious Rap’ on Winley Records). It was finally down to New Jersey-based music business veterans Sylvia and Joe Robinson (the former once a successful solo artist in her own right) to corral some musicians into replicating Chic’s ‘Good Times’ groove for nearly 15 minutes, driven by ubiquitous session drummer Pumpkin. After being turned down by several MCs, Sylvia roped in a motley crew including Big Bank Hank (a bouncer who also worked in a pizza joint), Master Gee and Wonder Mike, using rhymes built on quotes from Bronx MC Grandmaster Caz’s notebook.

  Chic’s Nile Rodgers first heard ‘Rapper’s Delight’ at a club and – although he initially claimed publishing rights for himself and partner Bernard Edwards, on account of how the whole track was based on the ‘Good Times’ groove – later cited the track among his all-time favourites, as important and innovative as his original ‘Good Times’ had been to the disco genre. ‘Rapper’s Delight’ made number 35 on the US charts and w
ent Top Five in the UK, resulting in an eye-opening Top Of The Pops appearance. However, The Sugarhill Gang were roundly decried by the close-knit Bronx community, who felt they’d been beaten to the big prize (while forced to admit it was their own obstinate fault in most cases). But the floodgates were now open. Flash was soon appearing on record with the Furious Five, accompanied by a welter of MCs and crews, initially on Bobby Robinson’s Enjoy and Sugarhill before the major labels started their inevitable bandwagon rolling.

  Hip hop was still an underground uptown movement when it came to the attention of Debbie and Chris, largely through the uptown/downtown character Fred Braithwaite, who actually hailed from Bedford-Stuyvesant in central Brooklyn. Better known as Fab Five Freddy, whose name would soon be immortalised in ‘Rapture’, Braithwaite initially showed up on TV Party as a graffiti artist, making a carriage-long replication of Warhol’s Campbell’s soup cans painting on the city’s subway system – an early example of uptown hip hop culture in graphic form. Freddy’s grandfather had been an associate of civil rights activist Marcus Garvey, while his father was in the audience at the Audubon Ballroom when Malcolm X was shot. This instilled a sense of self-awareness in Freddy who, along with being a regular at Brooklyn appearances by Grandmaster Flowers and Pete DJ Jones, also drew upon a wide range of influences that encompassed Caravaggio, impressionism and Warhol, assimilating them all into his own nascent graffiti style. He became part of Brooklyn’s Fabulous Five graffiti crew after befriending legendary artist Lee Quinones – hence the ‘Fab Five’ tag.