Biography: Blondie

Contemporary Musicians, May 1995 (Volume 14)
by Simon Glickman


Personal Information
Members included Clem Burke (born November 24, 1955, in New York; joined group c. 1975), drums; Jimmy Destri (born April 13, 1954), keyboards; Nigel Harrison (joined group 1978), bass; Deborah Harry (born July 1, c. 1945, in Miami, FL), vocals; Frank Infante (joined group 1977), guitar, bass; Billy O'Connor (left group 1975), drums; Fred Smith (left group 1975), bass; Chris Stein (born January 5, 1950, in Brooklyn, NY), guitar, vocals; Gary Valentine (bandmember 1975-77), bass.

Career
Group formed c. 1974, in New York City; signed with Private Stock label and released debut Blondie, 1976; signed to Chrysalis Records, 1977, and released Parallel Lines, 1978; contributed to Roadie and American Gigolo film soundtracks, 1980; group disbanded, 1982.

Career
Harry released solo debut Koo Koo, 1981; Stein launched own label, Animal Records, 1982, before being stricken with pemphigus vulgaris; Destri released solo album Heart on the Wall, 1982; Harry and Stein co-authored book Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie, 1982; Harry appeared in films Union City, 1979, Videodrome, 1982, and Hairspray, 1988, in stage production Teaneck Tanzi: The Venus Flytrap, 1983, and in television program Mother Goose Rock 'n' Rhyme, 1989; Stein wrote music for cable television program Fifteen Minutes and material for Harry's 1986 album Rockbird; Harry dueted with Iggy Pop on Red, Hot + Blue anthology, 1990; Burke played drums with Eurythmics, Dramarama, and others; Harry was sued for song-publishing income by former manager Peter Leeds, 1993.

Awards: Platinum awards for albums Parallel Lines, 1979, Eat to the Beat, 1980, and Autoamerican, 1981, and for single "Call Me," 1980.

Blondie formed in New York during the vital transitional period between glitter rock and punk, powered by an eclectic combination of musical styles, tongue-in-cheek attitude, and the frosty, intelligent glamour of frontwoman Deborah Harry. After building a reputation within the "New Wave" rock underground, the band crossed over with their triumphant disco-era single "Heart of Glass" and enjoyed a brief reign on the charts before a variety of factors sabotaged their momentum. They broke up in 1982.

Harry--after nursing partner and bandmate Chris Stein back to health from a devastating illness--pursued a solo recording career and film acting; the group's influence, meanwhile, persisted in much of the indie rock of the 1990s. Andrew Mueller of Melody Maker may have been in a hyperbolic mood when he dubbed them "history's greatest pop band and, let's face it, possibly history's greatest thing," but he no doubt reflected the general sentiment of many who enjoy smart, well-crafted pop.

New York in the early 1970s became something of a hotbed for offbeat rock, thanks in large part to adventurous clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City; Harry had worked as a waitress at the latter. It soon became clear that the old rules of rock were changing. As the glam-rock practiced by groups like the New York Dolls lost its luster, something new began to take shape: a scavenging, garage-band ethic, heavy on attitude and confrontation. It would be a few years before anyone called it "punk." The Ramones had yet to codify their pummelling three-chord formula, and British impresario Malcolm MacLaren had yet to assemble the media-ready supernova known as the Sex Pistols--and subsequently take credit for inventing punk rock. In the interim, there existed no "alternative" formula, so bands like Blondie simply made a musical collage of their disparate passions.

The earliest incarnation of Blondie, a campy girl group known as The Stilettoes, featured Harry--a former Playboy bunny and 1960s scenemaker who had sung with the short-lived folk-rock outfit Wind in the Willows--along with two female backup singers, Fred Smith on bass, drummer Billy O'Connor, and Chris Stein, a guitarist who joined the band after seeing an early show. He and Harry connected immediately, as he told Kurt Loder in a profile published, in Bat Chain Puller: "I was totally taken with her, and did the best I could to win her over." After he joined the group, the pair became romantically involved. The band endured numerous personnel changes, the most important of which involved the replacement of O'Connor and Smith with Clem Burke and his friend Gary Valentine. Burke, who was still in his teens when he joined the group, shared Harry and Stein's adoration of 1960s girl groups like the Shangri-Las; his propulsive drumming was a crucial component of their energetic sound.

After experimenting with various name changes, Harry came up with Blondie, and it stuck. "I would walk down Houston Street and all these truck drivers were always yelling out, 'Hey, Blondie!'" she told Loder. "So I said, shit, that's great, you know Poi-fect!" It was 1975, and the punk scene was still in an embryonic stage of development; Blondie continued playing tiny clubs for virtually nothing. Yet 1960s enthusiast and record-collector magazine editor Alan Betrock took the group under his wing and set them up in a low-budget studio to record some demos.

Blondie soldiered on and added keyboardist Jimmy Destri, who played the very retro-sounding Farfisa organ. The group lived together in a loft across from CBGB and spent most of their time refining their unusual approach. Surfy guitars, British-Invasion pop melodies, girl-group vocals, and monster-movie camp meshed into a sensibility that borrowed punk's tough attitude but preserved the romanticism of classic pop. According to most critics, though, even this distinctive brew might have vanished into cultdom had it not been for Harry. Her profoundly glamorous appearance aside, she sang with a rough-hewn authority and radiated a charisma at once steely, ironic, sexy, sentimental, and playful.

After meeting producer Richard Gottehrer--a veteran of 1960s rock who had produced the Ramones' debut--Blondie found themselves recording a single, originally called "Sex Offender" but changed to "X Offender" to avoid controversy. The band recorded their self-titled debut album in 1976 for the Private Stock label but later signed with Chrysalis, which reissued the record. They then embarked on a national tour with proto-punk rocker Iggy Pop.

Blondie followed up with 1977's Plastic Letters, dubbed "half-great" by Loder, featuring Frank Infante on bass (for the exiting Valentine) as well as on rhythm guitar. It was an especially tumultuous time for the band. "It seemed like I spent half my time either trying to keep certain people in the group or trying to convince Debbie and Chris to get other ones in," Burke told Loder. "Somebody was always on the outs with somebody else." Nigel Harrison took over the bassist position in 1978, and Infante moved to full-time guitar. Two singles from the album reached the U.K. Top Ten, but the group had already begun working with then-hot producer Mike Chapman on their next album, Parallel Lines. Released in 1978, this third outing featured a revised version of a song on the early demos--first known as "The Disco Song," then "Once I_Had a_Love," and finally "Heart of Glass."

In his list of the Top Ten albums of 1978, New York Times critic John Rockwell lauded Parallel Lines as Blondie's best so far. "Deborah Harry's singing continues to improve, and the band's blend of progressive experimentation and popsy appeal works better here than ever before," he wrote. "A really delightful disk, and it's surprising that it didn't do a bit better commercially." Of course, it did later: "Heart of Glass" became an international smash, and Parallel Lines went platinum. The album later yielded another hit, "One Way or Another." After toiling in obscurity for years, the members of Blondie were rock stars, and Harry's near-ubiquity in jeans ads and elsewhere necessitated the promotional slogan "Blondie Is a Group."

Eat to the Beat, the group's 1979 release, yielded the hit "Dreaming." But even as they highlighted their power-pop leanings, Blondie continued to dabble in dance music, scoring another smash with "Call Me," a song from the American Gigolo film soundtrack that paired Harry's lyrics with music by disco svengali Giorgio Moroder. Next came Autoamerican, which sported "Rapture," an exercise in rap when the genre was in its infancy. It is a tribute to the musical instincts of Harry and Stein that they so cannily pursued a form that few in the music world took seriously; the song sat atop the charts for two weeks and--along with the sprightly calypso-reggae cover "The Tide Is High"--helped the album go platinum.

By 1981 the group had lost cohesion. Harry had already recorded a solo album when Blondie reunited to record The Hunter, which Donald Clarke, in his Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, deemed "a sad parody of former glories." It did yield a moderately successful single, "Island of Lost Souls," and thus necessitated a tour; this venture proved disastrous as Chris Stein had by then come down with a rare and debilitating illness called pemphigus vulgaris. "We'd see Chris come offstage and go directly to oxygen," Destri related in the interview with Loder; this undignified spectacle convinced the group to pack it in, and much of Stein and Harry's money went to pay his substantial medical bills.

Harry pursued acting and periodic music projects but spent the bulk of the mid-1980s nursing Stein back to health; she has also had to deal with substantial litigation over profits generated by the group. Although she released a number of solo albums in ensuing years, critics have generally dismissed them as pale when compared to her best work with the band. Only "French Kissin' in the USA," a collaboration with Stein from her 1986 effort Rockbird, generated any chart action. Destri, meanwhile, moved into record production after releasing a 1982 solo album; Burke played drums for Eurythmics and, later, for indie rockers Dramarama.

Yet the intervening years have also seen a number of compilations and the spilling of considerable ink regarding Blondie's sainted place in power pop history. As producer Dan Loggins put it in the notes to the collection he compiled entitled Blonde and Beyond, the band "crafted three minute pop gems; timeless and contradictory symbols of their own era." Paul Mathur of Melody Maker proclaimed, "For more of us than would perhaps care to admit, Deborah Harry's music has been a mark against which all other pop is judged."

Harry herself, according to Rolling Stone, was at her peak "the ultimate urban babe: streetwise, glamorous, tough, very cool." Her influence on the scores of woman-led and all-female indie rock bands--notably the celebrated "Riot Grrrl" groups--became a favorite topic for her champions in the rock press. But regardless of Harry's status as an icon, Blondie's place in posterity is assured, thanks to a solid--and strikingly versatile--body of work.

Selected Discography
On Chrysalis, except where noted Blondie (includes "X Offender"), Private Stock, 1976, reissued, Chrysalis, 1977. Plastic Letters, Private Stock, 1977, reissued, Chrysalis, 1977. Parallel Lines (includes "Heart of Glass" and "One Way or Another"), 1978. Eat to the Beat (includes "Dreaming"), 1979. (Contributors) Roadie (film soundtrack; featured on "Ring of Fire"), 1980. Autoamerican (includes "Rapture" and "The Tide Is High"), 1980. (Contributors) American Gigolo (film soundtrack; featured on "Call Me"), 1980. The Best of Blondie, 1981. The Hunter (includes "Island of Lost Souls"), 1982. Once More into the Bleach, 1988. The Complete Picture: The Very Best of Deborah Harry and Blondie, 1991. Blonde and Beyond, 1993. The Ultimate Collection, 1994. Atomic (12-inch dance remix), 1995. Solo recordings by Deborah Harry Koo Koo, 1981. Rockbird (includes "French Kissin' in the USA"), Geffen, 1986. Def, Dumb and Blonde, Geffen, 1989. (With Iggy Pop) "Well Did You Evah," Red, Hot + Blue, Chrysalis, 1990. Debravation, Sire/Reprise, 1993. Solo recordings by Jimmy Destri Heart on the Wall, 1982.

Sources
Books Clarke, Donald, Penguin Encyclopedia of Popular Music, Viking, 1989. Encyclopedia of Rock, edited by Phil Hardy and Dave Laing, Schirmer Books, 1988. Harry, Deborah, and Chris Stein, Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie, 1982. Loder, Kurt, Bat Chain Puller: Rock & Roll in the Age of Celebrity, St. Martin's, 1990. Rees, Dafydd, and Luke Crampton, Rock Movers & Shakers, ABC-CLIO, 1991. Stambler, Irwin, Encyclopedia of Pop, Rock & Soul, St. Martin's, 1989. Periodicals Melody Maker, March 9, 1991; July 10, 1993. New York Times, December 22, 1978. Rolling Stone, April 15, 1993; October 14, 1993.

Sources
Additional information for this profile was obtained from the liner notes to Blonde and Beyond, Chrysalis, 1993.

~~ Simon Glickman