“Debbie and Chris were always so ahead of everyone else; Blondie had just the best videos. Debbie just made a mistake trying to change too fast. She cut her hair, changed her hair colour – kids can’t even accept that. It’s like it hurts their feelings.” — Andy Warhol, 1986
Celebrating a whole half a century of Blondie – still the most successful American band in the history of the British charts – and 45 years of the latest Fabulous Fourth in our occasional album series.
Join our newest contributor to stevepafford.com in the shape of Gary Douglas Lennon from across the pond – West Coast Washington in fact – as we turn our attention to 1979’s Eat To The Beat. It’s certainly my favourite long-player of the year before the eighties took over, and very probably my favourite Blondie set of songs, period. And not only was ETTB the New Yorkers’ opus numero quattro but in historical terms it is widely regarded as video album number one, by anyone*. They had a plan…
It’s impossible to overestimate the cultural and musical significance of Blondie. Yet I am the first to admit I’m not exactly a purveyor on the technical minutiae of music, but I’ve been around long enough to know a bit about the historical value of mainstream media and how it affected people in a particular era.
And when it comes to arguably New York’s finest, this was a band at the forefront of a new wave of multimedia acts symbolising a unique promise that the oncoming eighties music scene would be as revolutionary as the Beatles-led pop songwriting of the 1960s.
Fifty years ago, Blondie were formed out of the high-heeled ashes of the short-lived Stilettos, a bunch of female-fronted kitsch sixties pastichists that brought guitarist Chris Stein into the orbit of one of the group’s vocalists, Deborah Ann Harry.
Starting out in August 1974 at the legendary CBGBs dive as support act for the equally grungy Ramones, the name Blondie was a few weeks away from use, because, as Stein recalls in his new memoir Under The Rock, the nascent combo performed a pair of gigs “under the somewhat unfortunate name Angel And The Snake”.
After a self titled debut album in 1976 and a solid sophomore effort, Plastic Letters, recorded in 1977, by 1978’s epochal Parallel Lines Blondie were in the ascendent, transitioning from cool punk popsters into major global superstars.
The moon man gave Blondie a prime time spot with the disco-fied pulse of Heart Of Glass, which just freaked everybody out with its Moroder meets Chic sonics, not to mention the video’s shiny Studio 54 glamour that seemingly changed the whole genre overnight.
Me, myself, I, not quite being of completely sound mind and body at this time, had just kicked a two year valium addiction and, honestly, I have to thank Blondie for helping to make it a seamless transition back to ‘reality’ and drug-free living. Ironic, I know, considering how much substance abuse they were going through at the time.
Hearing Blondie’s new wave meld was just what I needed as well as what everybody needed. They were not only multifaceted and musically mature, but upliftingly alive as well.
Because they were inventive and clever, Blondie made music that both my brain and my feet could dance to. I wasn’t surprised to learn the group was influenced by David Bowie, a master musical chameleon himself. And like him, they were visually striking, too.
Matching Blondie’s hybrid genre-hopping was Debbie Harry’s gutter-glamour persona. There had never been anyone quite like her, and in ’79 she was at peak pop anti-heroine hotness, before her well-documented heroin-chic descent. This was one of pop’s great dissenters, mouthing those words with her famous heart-shaped lips. Not to mention that sultry, surety look of pensiveness and provocation that melted the blu-tack of gazillions of posters the world over. And the Warhol homage HAIR! That was brilliantly bold.
Of course, what really revolutionised the era was the advent of the promotional video, which afforded us the opportunity to to watch the music happen before our eyes. The art of videography was being born like filmmaking for the cinema.
Even when the clips were presented primitively like a stage concert, the ideas, the camera angles and the close-ups especially of delectable Debbie in full screen just exemplified this new pixelated artform, so to speak. And by the time Eat To The Beat was issued on 24 September 1979 the perfect timing paid off. Blondie were riding a wave of commercial and critical success. And how.
This band of mothers had everything everybody needed to graduate from the Yale of late ’70s new wave disco and enrol in the Harvard Musical College of visual excitement. Perhaps that should have been “enrolled in the Oxford Musical College”, seeing how Britain had an abiding influence on their success in Europe.
The second of four Blondie LPs helmed by Aussie bloke Mike Chapman of the infamous Chinnichap production line, it might be sandwiched between a pair of projects that can boast more chart-topping 45s, (that’ll be Parallel Lines and the one-two punch of 1980’s Autoamerican then), but there is a concerted claim that Eat To The Beat is Blondie’s most consistent LP. Each of the twelve tracks showcase a band at the peak of their powers, with a veritable vernacular that only this formidable fivesome could pull off.
Boasting a tasty triumvirate of transatlantic singles that culminated in my personal favourite, the coiffure classic Atomic, arguably some of the best songcraft of the day is contained in these formidable 44 minutes. And, unusually, Eat To The Beat is the only album in Blondie’s catalogue other than their debut where the band wrote every song (Debbie has eight author credits here, with guitarist and then-partner Chris Stein on five).
Lead single Dreaming kicks off proceedings and it’s a scorcher. Driven like an unstoppable locomotive by one of rock’s greatest-ever drummers Clem Burke, Harry’s lyrics were direct and funny while maintaining that inscrutable air of mystery. The most pertinent line is arguably best exemplified by the promo video: “Reel to reel is living rarity. People stop and stare at me,” shows Debbie sneering defiantly at the camera, surely and sassy as ever.
Incidentally, a quick bit of trivia before track two: Blondie achieved a hat trick of UK No. 1 singles in 1980 with Atomic, Call Me and The Tide Is High, but the song that prevented them from doing the triple first in 1979? Only Message In A Bottle by their biggest chart rivals that year, The Police. Fade away (woo), radiate indeed.
The Hardest Part is a faux-funk firecracker featuring Debbie’s filthiest vocal performance. Not only is is not impossible that it gave David Bowie ideas for his Fashion the following year, but I was captivated by her vocal range which ran the gamut between a sexy growl and an ethereal whisper. This woman could sing anything from rock, folk, jazz, and the classics, and with the aid of brilliantly sexy street art video, this US-only 45 should have been massive, yet flopped badly as ETTB’s second single. Meanwhile in Europe, they opted for this next little beauty.
Rooted in a vast industrial Wall Of Sound, the muscular epic Union City Blue (Harry-Harrison) starts out like a supreme serving of Springsteen meets Pretenders, with widescreen clangy guitars and Clem Burke’s thunderous drums… and expectations that Bruce or Chrissie might step out and sing at any moment. Yet it’s Debbie who delivers a melancholic cry of love to her Union City man as she gazes wistfully out at the Manhattan skyline from the vantage point of working-class New Jersey. Keeping on-point, the attendant video saw the peroxided popster in a Guantanamo boiler suit strumming a guitar almost as big as herself, at a shipping pier at the appropriately named Union Dry Dock in nearby Weehawken.
Slowing the pace right down, a wistful, synth-laden Shayla makes Blondie’s debt to girl groups explicit once more, in dreamy ballad mode. It’s an atmospheric, timeless tune you can imagine being swathed in reverb by Phil Spector circa ’65.
The title track, while never anyone’s favourite Blondie song, is an energetic slice of ’50s-ish rock and roll meets pop punk that you can eat to the beat with. And side from Harrison’s propulsive bass hook, that harmonica solo is pure sass.
One of a quartet of tracks from the stable of keyboard supremo Jimmy Destri, Accidents Never Happen is a curious contradiction. There is a religious Jesus-like subtext with lyrics that ponder the existential, “Like a Magi on the hill”, yet delivered with an army of foreboding punkish paranoia. The music is a nervy flood of razor-sharp guitar in a tempo of erratic excitement. Again, I hear a slight Pretenders undertone, but that’s just something a lot of bands did to reflect the post-punk era.
With its brief dip into the waters of Caribbean calypso and cod-reggae, the deceptively dark Die Young Stay Pretty portends The Tide is High, with plenty of fills and rolls from clever Clem Burke who dances all around the song on his kit, no doubt revelling in the radical change of pace as Blondie began to really show us just how wildly eclectic they could be. The sardonic lyrics, about the pressures and expectations of maintaining her looks as a public figure (“It’s just the weirdness of human nature,” Debbie conceded to MOJO), showed that a penchant for irony had not withered completely under the platinum sales that were now the band’s stock-in-trade.
Once set to be the LP’s final single (American Gigolo’s Call Me hogging the charts put paid to that), Slow Motion was penned by Destri with input from his then girlfriend, drummer Laura Chanin. It’s an enticing and hypnotic instance of the ’60s girl-group overtones that Blondie alone made their own as Debbie quickly takes the helm and sails away with a jaunty Motown-esque stomper sweetened by Liza Minnelli’s sister, Lorna Luft, doubling with Debbie on the period backing vocals that simply sparkle.
With its thunderous Three Blind Mice introducing what could pass as a beach bum anthem from The Ventures, Atomic takes us into a slightly psychedelic whirlwind of scat vocals and spaghetti western soundscapes. It’s low on lyrics but has an insistent hypnotic quality that is a series of dislocated disco-funk fragments held together by an anthemic four-note surf guitar riff that is the track’s anchor.
In other words, no traditional verse/chorus structure, just one mesmeric melody and key-change after another. It’s also a playful exploration of neon permafrost pop interlarded with the fracturing of society, but, in reality, the only direct association with nuclear war is the metaphor of a sudden release of energy. Atomic is more accurately described as a song about seduction and orgasm, which would describe the lack of structured lyrics.
Vocally, the much imitated moment when Debbie lowers her voice to something like a cross between Margaret Thatcher and a zombie and declares deadpan, “atomic!” is still wondrous. While the always thrilling line “your hair is beautiful” perhaps carries a narcissistic overtone to the whole song. Maybe it was all about her?
Then beauty amid the rubble, as the video shows Blondie performing a concert for a post-nuclear society. As we enter the scene of decay and dissolution, there’s a cameo from Jean Michel Basquiat (predating his turn as a DJ in Rapture by some margin), before the dystopian vision of Debbie wearing a garbage bag while dancing like a robot. This was all the rage in the late seventies, I kid you not.
Of course, the fade to European grey is nothing new. It’s essentially Bowie’s Diamond Dogs meets Ultravox’s Hiroshima Mon Amour (which itself would be cheekily rewritten on Bryan Ferry’s Frantic) but here Blondie’s collagist sensibilities make it magnificent.
A lullaby of lush vignettes and subtle choral motifs, Sound-A-Sleep is a perfect example of Harry’s underrated skill as a wordsmith and song stylist: Debbie’s sweet, enticing vocal is divine, and the music perfectly matches the lyric’s sense of yearning and melancholy. Nothing else here approaches its heart-tugging mastery.
On to Victor then. What’s it all about, Debbie?
Though Harry conjured up its doomy lyrics, the penultimate track on the album turned out to be guitarist Frank Infante’s final writing credit on a Blondie record, though amid lawsuits and a very frosty reception in the Rapture video somehow he soldiered on until 1982’s The Hunter. Either way, Victor is a driving cartoonish rocker with frantic guitars, keyboards and percussion, though like its forebear, Parallel Lines’ I Know But I Don’t Know, it’s fun but far from essential.
Nicely symmetric, Jimmy Destri gets to close out side two in the same way as he had done with Accidents Never Happen on the flip. Living In The Real World concludes the album’s themes of otherworldy stories and nonsensical phrases. A busy, neurotic jaunt, it’s also a distinctive milestone on how far Blondie had come. It’s enough to make you forget that the old three chord punks ever existed.
Blondie were a unique collective of creative people: quiet visionaries, blending intelligent lyrics, global sensibilities, and a new wave of attitudinal rock and pop to create a wholly unique and unforgettable listening experience. And in Eat To The Beat an album that ranks as one of the era’s most unique. That they produced an even more rock-based record than Parallel Lines to capture the American market is one of music’s great ironies, an album that only managed to climb to the 17th spot in the US, sandwiched between two behemoth top tenners.
And the best-selling album of 1979 across the pond in Britain? Something called Parallel Lines.
Bon Appétit to the Beat. Bye bye!
Gary Douglas Lennon
BONUS EATS from Steve:
Although the Electric Light Orchestra (aka Jeff Lynne’s ELO) shot a video for every track on their Discovery album released in June 1979, I can find no record that the results was actually commercially released as a video album at the time. Blondie’s equivalent was filmed over a long weekend that October, with the twelve clips issued on VHS and Betamax promotional cassettes for the media at the time, and boasting cameos from Robert Fripp (Dreaming) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (Atomic).
The Eat To The Beat programme was eventually made available to the public a year later in October of 1980, coinciding with the audio release of Autoamerican, though by then it wasn‘t the first music home video as The Kinks‘ live One For The Road reached consumers first.
Blondie, Bowie, Basquiat: The Clem Burke interview (part one) is here
