January 31 – Blondie Found High Tides Soon Ebb

What do you get when you put a Big Apple punk group in Hollywood and have them listen to some music of the Islands? Well, in 1981, the answer was a major #1 hit – “The Tide is High” by Blondie. It topped the charts this day 42 years ago. It was their third American #1 in less than two years.

Of course, calling Blondie a “punk” band is misleading even though many, if not most, music writers and radio people of the day did just that. Despite their CBGB origins in New York, they’d become a fairly talented bunch of players who’d scored major success with songs that varied from straight-out disco (“Call Me”, “Heart of Glass”) to pure pop (“Sunday Girl”) to good ol’ fashioned rock & roll (“One Way or Another”). That in mind, “The Tide is High” might not have been so surprising.

The song was a cover of a 1967 song by Jamaican reggae/rocksteady band The Paragons. It hadn’t received a lot of attention, likely even on their own island, since it was a b-side of a single. But somehow it ended up on a Jamaican music compilation cassette that Blondie’s Deborah Harry & Chris Stein found when holidaying in England. They both liked it straight away and decided to record it.

It made its way onto their fifth album (and third since becoming popular at home in North America), Autoamerican. They’d decided to make some changes for that record, including recording it in L.A., something Chris Stein didn’t like but producer Mike Chapman insisted upon. Drummer Clem Burke on the other hand said it “was fun! We got to spend two months in California.”

They also decided to expand their musical horizons, for better or worse, with an old 1920s-style crooner (“Here’s Looking At You”) , a rap-based song (“Rapture”, the follow-up single and their final #1 hit in many places) besides this tropical-sounding effort. Stein liked the band The Specials and asked them to play with Blondie on it, but they declined. So instead they brought in some extra session players including a trio of percussionists and some unfortunately uncredited horn players to add authenticity.

The album did well, but not as well as the previous pair of hits, going platinum in the U.S., UK and Canada. “The Tide is High” led the way being a #1 hit not only in the U.S. but Canada, the UK and New Zealand as well. It came close, top 5, in most other “Western” countries like Ireland and Australia. It earned them their sixth gold single in Britain and third platinum one in Canada.

However, their time in the sun was running out, figuratively and literally. After “Rapture”, they struggled to get noticed for years and Debbie Harry went solo by the end of 1982, leaving the band on a 15-year break.

One curious bit of trivia about “The Tide is High.” It knocked John Lennon out of the #1 slot which his “Starting Over” had been at for five weeks. That seemed fitting because according to Sean Lennon, it was the one modern track his dad really liked just before his death. He said John “played (it) constantly…when I hear that song, I see my father, unshaven, his hair pulled back into a ponytail, dancing to and fro in a worn out pair of denim shorts with me at his feet.”

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January 5 – Stein Was The Mr. Blondie In Debbie’s Background

One of New York’s most enduring and versatile artists was born 73 years ago today. Happy birthday, Chris Stein!

Stein is a New Yorker through and through, born, raised and living his life there. In the early-’70s, he and his then girlfriend Debbie Harry were in one of the early punk acts in the Big Apple, the Stilletoes, and from there went on to form one of new wave’s first real break-through bands – Blondie. Stein added the guitars and much of the songwriting while Harry added the voice and, of course, the sex appeal. They were regulars at CBGB with the likes of The Ramones and Talking Heads, with whom Esquire recently compared them. They noted Blondie “nailed the midpoint between the glorious trashiness of the Ramones and the arch cleverness of the Talking Heads.”

Blondie’s first success was in Australia where the single “In the Flesh” hit #2 in 1977. A couple of years later, they were big everywhere, with Parallel Lines selling around 20 million copies and “Heart of Glass” (inspired by the sounds of Saturday Night Fever and Kraftwerk, remarkably enough for a band which was branded as “punk”) was a worldwide #1 hit. Blondie’s fortunes dropped not long after, the band split by 1983 but even though Stein and Harry were no longer a couple, they reunited in 1997. The single “Maria” from the late-’90s version hit #1 in the UK, making them the only American act to have #1 hits in Britain in three different decades.

Like many other musicians, Stein loves photography and has been avid in documeting the stars he’s known, including The Ramones, Andy Warhol and of course Debbie Harry. While they’ve not done much of late, Blondie are still together, with Stein, Harry and drummer Clem Burke still present from their heyday.

January 5 – Picture This – Stein Overlooked Part Of Blondie

One of New York’s most enduring and versatile artists was born 71 years ago today. Happy birthday, Chris Stein!

Stein is a New Yorker through and through, born, raised and living his life there. In the early-’70s, he and his then girlfriend Debbie Harry were in one of the early punk acts in the Big Apple, the Stilletos, and from there went on to form one of new wave’s first real break-through bands – Blondie. Stein added the guitars and much of the songwriting while Harry added the voice and, of course, the sex appeal.

Surprisingly, although regulars at CBGB with the likes of The Ramones and Talking Heads, Blondie’s first success was in Australia where the single “In the Flesh” hit #2 in 1977. A couple of years later, they were big everywhere, with Parallel Lines selling around 20 million copies and “Heart of Glass” (inspired by the sounds of Saturday Night Fever and Kraftwerk, remarkably enough for a band which was branded as “punk”) was a worldwide #1 hit. Blondie’s fortunes dropped not long after, the band split by 1983 but even though Stein and Harry were no longer a couple, (although even then some insiders suggested they were the only two members of the band who could stand each other) they reunited in 1997. The single “Maria” from the late-’90s version hit #1 in the UK, making them the only American act to have #1 hits in Britain in three different decades.

Like many other musicians, Stein loves photography and has been avid in documenting the stars he’s known, including The Ramones, Andy Warhol and of course Debbie Harry. While they’ve not done much of late, Blondie are still together, with Stein, Harry and drummer Clem Burke still present from their heyday.

May 30 – Blondie’s Sunday Best

Although New York City had a major, burgeoning new music scene in the late-’70s, arguably nowhere was more amenable to the various new sounds emerging at the time than Britain. Another example of that was 40 years ago, when on this day in 1979, Blondie hit #1 on the UK singles chart with “Sunday Girl.” It was their second chart-topper of the year there and third top 5 single off the most popular album of the year there, Parallel Lines.

Blondie were New York to the bone, being regulars at the legendary CBGB club which The Ramones made famous, and like the Ramones, they were initially labeled as a “punk” act. Blondie’s core has always been photogenic singer Deborah Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, a romantic couple at the time who’d been in the band The Stilletoes together. They left that band in 1974 and formed Blondie. Their 1976 debut didn’t make much of an impact, but their second, Plastic Letters had caught on over the sea in the UK, where it sold to platinum levels and generated 2 top 10 singles, “Denis” and “I’m Always Touched By Your Presence Dear”.

For their third album, Chrysalis Records wanted a slightly more radio-friendly sound and they brought in a new producer, Mike Chapman. Chapman had been an influential hit-maker in Britain, most notably working with The Sweet and Suzi Quatro. Outside of drummer Clem Burke, no one in the band was excited about the change at first. Chapman didn’t adore the band and said “musically, Blondie were hopelessly horrible when we first began rehearsing.” He said Burke had no timing on the drums, Stein was too stoned to play guitar well much of the time and Jimmy Destri wrote better than he played keyboards. Chapman ranted and railed and drove them to play better because “you are going to make a great record.”

That they did. Parallel Lines mixed new wave, disco, rock riffs and blended it up into an exciting new sound that appealed to all sorts of listeners. Allmusic would later grade it a perfect 5-stars, clearly their “best album”, which they considered a “pure pop” one. “Heart of Glass” was a worldwide smash (and their first #1 hit in the UK and North America) and when all was said and done, the album was Britain’s biggest-seller of ’79, spending 4 weeks atop the charts, hit #6 in their native States and went 4X platinum in Canada. (And made Converse running shoes fashionable again to boot!)  It was full of strong tracks, and the singles released were slightly different in some countries, besides “Heart of Glass” which was a hit everywhere. In Britain, “Sunday Girl” was the fourth single, after “Picture This”, “Heart of Glass” and “Hanging on the Telephone.”

The song with Debbie displaying a good chunk of her vocal range was written by Chris Stein, apparently originally inspired not by a couple of girls gossipping about boys but by Harry’s cat, called Sunday. Although it wasn’t put out as a single in the U.S., it made #5 in Australia and New Zealand and #6 in Canada. Interestingly, Harry also did a French-language version for release in parts of Europe and Chapman remixed the song later to incorporate a French verse in an otherwise English song.

January 5 – If Debbie Was The Face, Chris Was The Brains And Eyes For Blondie

One of New York’s most enduring and versatile artists was born 69 years ago today. Happy birthday, Chris Stein!

Stein and his then girlfriend Debbie Harry were in one of the early punk acts in the Big Apple, the Stilletoes, and from there went on to form one of new wave’s first real break-through bands- Blondie. Stein added the guitars and much of the songwriting while Harry added the voice and, of course, the sex appeal. Surprisingly, although regulars at CBGB with the likes of The Ramones and Talking Heads, Blondie’s first success was in Australia where the single “In the Flesh” hit #2 in 1977. A couple of years later, they were big everywhere, with Parallel Lines selling around 20 million copies and “Heart of Glass” (inspired by the sounds of Saturday Night Fever and Kraftwerk, remarkably enough for a band which was branded as “punk”) was a worldwide #1 hit. Blondie’s fortunes dropped not long after, the band split by 1983 but even though Stein and Harry were no longer a couple, they reunited in 1997. Stein, Harry and drummer Clem Burke are the only constants in the band which has been around for a good percentage of the last 45 years.  The single “Maria” from the late-’90s version hit #1 in the UK, making them the only American act to have #1 hits in Britain in three different decades.

Like many other musicians, Stein loves photography and has been avid in documenting the stars he’s known, including The Ramones, Andy Warhol and of course Debbie Harry.