Blondie
(Capitol/EMI)
With Blondie having just wrapped their triumphant “Parallel Lines 30th Anniversary Tour” — fittingly, it took them across the U.S., the U.K. and Europe and even dipping down to Israel and over to Russia, since one of the group’s hallmarks back in the day was a steady stream of international singles — it’s time to sit down with the original artifact and offer a reassessment.
Since its release in 1978, the twenty-times-platinum Parallel Lines, which spawned the massive #1 hit (with a bullet!) “Heart of Glass” along with subsequent smashes “One Way or Another,” “Hanging On the Telephone” and “Sunday Girl,” has inevitably grown to iconic status. This is partly due to those hits, of course, which resurface on classic rock radio stations, punk/new wave retrospectives and television commercials (“One Way or Another” is the hit that keeps on giving for co-composers Debbie Harry and Nigel Harrison, as it’s been used in ads for Bailey’s, Swiffer Sweeper, Dannon Fruision and probably others). During the album’s chart ascent and aftermath, Harry’s Marilyn Monroe-esque visage was indelibly burned into the public’s mind, too, effectively putting the final nail in the coffin of the group’s early “Blondie Is A Band” marketing campaign but providing the perfect image-hook for Harry & Co. too — Blondie Is A Brand.
I was a big Blondie fan back in the day. We’d have house parties where, inevitably, a stack of Blondie singles would be key parts of the evening’s playlist. I still have my original picture disc edition of Parallel Lines, in fact; lingering proof, I suppose, of my then-dedication to the band. Revisiting that record now, however, I hear: dated production, barely-there arrangements and frequently lackluster musical performances, half-formed lyrical sketches and lazy song delivery — and one or two (or maybe two and a half) really classic songs.
Let’s look at the good news first. The album kicks off with what’s perhaps one of the greatest powerpop tunes — and powerpop performances — ever, “Hanging On the Telephone,” originally penned by Jack Lee (whose version with the Nerves, the L.A. band he and Peter Case had in the late ‘70s wasn’t too shabby either). It’s 2:20 minutes of pop perfection, commencing with the sound of a phone buzzing, followed by a twinned Harry voice and Clem Burke drumbeat intro, and then catapulting full tilt into the song proper: a killer slashing/repetitive guitar riff, thrumming bassline underscored by churning keyboards, and Harry’s alternately sassy, sexy, pleading, anxious, lustful and, yes, pissed vocal. The tune’s anthemic to a fault, the kind of pulse-quickening track you never tire of hearing, and during the final buildup, when Harry goes wordless with that ecstatic “whoa-woah-ahh” tag, it’s a pump-your-fist-in-the-air moment impossible to resist.
I noted there was at least one more (possibly one and a half) great song. It’s not “One Way Or Another.” As spitfire punk-pop swaggering as that initially comes across — and there’s also a terrific bridge featuring a psychotic guitar solo — Harry’s snarled vocals grow tiresome after repeated listens, and there’s an annoying siren-like keyboard sound at the end. (It’s likely that “One Way”’s TV commercial-fueled familiarity has further bred my contempt, although I do remember my reaction when I first heard that Swiffer ad: change the channel, please. By comparison, when I hear yet another Who song used in an ad I focus my attention on it, so I’d reckon that the Blondie song had simply passed its shelf-life.)
No, the good ‘un is “Will Anything Happen” — not so coincidentally, another Jack Lee composition — that passes the proverbial pulse-quickening test again. Powered by a kind of surf-staccato motif where the guitars and drums surge with a restless glee, it also offers another flawless Harry vocal descended straight from ‘60s girl groups (whose inspiration Blondie overtly tapped on their early records, natch) in a glorious mixture of snappy speak-sing and croon-swoon. And at 2:58, it’s not only radio-ready in the most classic sense, it works perfectly as a punk-pogo anthem too.
And of the half-great number I alluded to? That would be “Pretty Baby,” a Harry-Chris Stein number boasting a striking chorus melody (e.g., “pretty baby — you look so heavenly… pretty baby — I fell in love with you” etc.) that sticks in your mind long after the song is done. On one level, that’s all a good number requires: something to make the listener remember it and want to come back for more. But “Pretty Baby” is basically all chorus and no verse, or more accurately, by flipping the order of the chorus and a very nominal “verse” (a couple of dumb spoken passages), Harry and Stein try to create a sonic illusion where the chorus is simultaneously the verse. They don’t succeed, however, because after a few repeated listens you realize how insubstantial the song really is. Hence my “one half” designation.
On to the bad news. The dated production I mentioned is courtesy disco/glam producer Mike Chapman, who wisely (in terms of knowing what the record label needed to sell the band) puts Harry’s vocals way up front in almost every song, additionally doubling (and sometimes tripling) the tracks to beef up what could be at times a pretty thin singing voice. Problem was, he forgot that, uh, Blondie Is A Band: Clem Burke, arguably the group’s primary asset, is nearly inaudible on several numbers, and on others his Keith Moon-like drum flourishes poke in and out of the mix like he’s navigating a chunk of Swiss cheese; Stein and Frank Infante’s guitar passages, though cleverly inventive at points (Stein favors classic surf riffs; Infante, intricate psychedelic motifs), all too often take a back seat to Jimmy Destri’s MOR keyboards, effectively smoothing out any jagged edges. In steering Blondie away from their CBGB background and towards the big leagues, Chapman succeeded in emasculating them.
Songwise… whew. There are some so-so but passable songs present — hey, all hit albums have some filler — including “Picture This” (rich in melody, it’s unfortunately undermined by a rushed, almost mush-mouthed Harry vocal), and “Sunday Girl” (semi-compelling with its surf-y rhythmic throb and swipes of tremolo guitar, Harry sings too timidly, almost as if she’s having trouble making out the words on the lyric sheet in front of her, and the bass, which should thump lustily, sounds curiously reined in, too).
There are also some genuine dogs that not even the Humane Society would take in during a storm. An astonishingly hamfisted cover of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” is a transparent attempt on the band’s part to reclaim elements of their early-rock roots previously showcased on their first two albums. “11:59,” penned by Destri, is a twisty little tune that winds up in cul-de-sac of half-hearted guitar riffs, a pompous organ solo, and an unusually shrill vocal turn from Harry. “Fade Away and Radiate,” all gothic gloom in search of a crimson-curtained room is atmospheric nonsense that not even Robert Fripp’s signature guitar can salvage (and folks, friends don’t let friends inexplicably veer off into reggae territory at the end of a song either). Worst of all, Infante’s “I Know But I Don’t Know” is an utterly bizarre bit of spoken word/chanted dribbling that tries to be “punk” but comes off like a comedy troupe sending up some metal band; clearly, Stein and Harry were throwing Infante a bone here so he, like Destri, would have a shot at a royalty check one day.
This of course leaves the elephant in the room that is “Heart Of Glass.” Personally speaking, I was never a disco hater, although in 1978, at the height of punk in America, it was certainly fashionable to be one (and as an editor for a punk zine, I probably expressed anti-disco sentiments myself), so Blondie lost a lot of old fans at the hands of the “HOG” ubiquity. In today’s parlance, though — the song is what it is. Simple, effective, danceable, and hookish, nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t really hold up 30 years later: the lyrics, platitudes rather than a description of a genuine emotional state, go nowhere, and the melody, while of the stick-in-your-head type, is also of the cotton candy sort easily supplanted when the next song comes on over the radio or stereo. But then, you could say the same about most any disco song. Inoffensive fluff by any other name, the fact that the band wound up laughing all the way to the bank with “HOG,” which they’d written years earlier as an actual sendup of disco, is pretty delicious irony.
A word on this new expanded deluxe edition of Parallel Lines, which after all the foregoing you may or may not be wondering if you still need to bother with it, even considering that it now comes with four bonus audio tracks plus a DVD.
Of those extra songs: The 7” single version of “Heart of Glass” is strictly novelty appeal; in order to get radio airplay, the “pain in the ass” line was changed. A French language version of “Sunday Girl,” curiously enough, is punchier than the tepid LP version, but it’s more or less also a novelty. DJ Mick Shiner’s “nosebleed handbag remix” of “Hanging On the Telephone” (originally on the ’95 release Beautiful: The Remix Album) is the dumbest reconfiguring ever put to hard drive, retaining absolutely none of the powerpop appeal of the original song; all it does is drop some of Harry’s vocal hooks into a house arrangement and let da beats take over. And the Black Dog’s “108 BPM Remix” of “Fade Away and Radiate” (from Remixed Remade Remodeled, also ’95), while faring somewhat better and sounding like one of Saint Etienne’s spookier techno excursions, fails to understand how weak the original song was in the first place; like my grandaddy used to say, you can’t put lipstick on a pig.
Over on the DVD you get the original promo videos for “HOG,” “HOTT” and “Picture This,” and like hundreds of vids from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the results are pretty laughable — but still oddly compelling, especially for anyone who’s ever caught themselves staring glassy-eyed at a 20-minute block of eighties videos on VH1 Classic. Fire up the bong and have at ‘em.
The performance of “HOG,” in fact, which went a long way to cementing that aforementioned Harry image for MTV watchers and late night video program buffs, has a certain naïve charm, the band dutifully bouncing around a club stage while a disco ball rotates above them. Elsewhere, watching Harry apply eyeliner and then lip-synch poutily (if poorly) in the “HOTT” clip is easy enough on the eyes; ditto the sultry backlit close-ups of Harry in the performance clip for “Picture This.” The fourth video, a BBC-TV “Top of the Pops” appearance from December ’79, featuring the band playing lip-synching “Sunday Girl” (note the black/white striped dress Harry wears: “parallel lines,” get it?), is a semi-find for American fans since it was never available in the U.S. except on grainy VHS bootleg tapes.
All this side commentary aside, it’s a funny thing about “iconic” records. Sometimes they live on by virtue of common wisdom but not any real enduring quality. As we all know, “common wisdom” sometimes becomes “urban myth” with the passage of time. Can a zillion Blondie fans who made Parallel Lines twenty-times platinum really be wrong? You betcha. If you really want some Blondie in your life, given how spotty Parallel Lines actually is (and likewise, all their studio albums), pick up a greatest hits collection and steer clear of this reissue.
Standout Tracks: “Hanging On the Telephone,” “Will Anything Happen” FRED MILLS
