It's taken me a awhile to get to this one -- I think I finished my listening a good month and a half ago. But that was just me being lazy, nothing to do with my love for this band. In fact, I think I'd go so far as to say that Blondie is probably my favorite '80s band. (Even if they did actually release their first four LPs at the end of the '70s, I always associate them with the '80s and the whole new-wave movement.) And they're probably tied with The Good Rats for being my favorite American band. (And ironically enough, I bought by first-ever Blondie album, Plastic Letters, on the same day I bought my first Good Rats album, Tasty. Of course, that's about all those two bands have in common.)
So why do I rank them so highly? It's not because they were all virtuoso musicians, although they certainly weren't bad. (Well depending on who you asked. I've heard some people trash them over the years. Haters gotta hate.) But I guess I love them for two reasons, neither of which will probably surprise you.
The first is songwriting. These guys have had so many great songs over the years, and I'm not talking about just the singles. And they've had great songs written in so many different styles -- this is a very playful, and prolific band. Some of that might be because it's not like just one, or even two of the band members wrote all of the songs. Deborah Harry has the songwriting credit, or partial credit, for many of their best songs. But both Chris Stein and Jimmy Destri were also full or partial writers for a lot of their songs. And they've never been afraid to throw in a sprinkling of well-done covers of other people's songs, or, in latter years, to out-and-out just invite outside songwriters to write for them.
The second reason is obviously Deborah Harry. She's been the face of the band right from the start, as much because of her personality as her vocals. Harry has also been a decent vocalist, although I'd say that her voice (especially when she was younger) was more cute than particularly beautiful or powerful. But she's also a huge personality, sometimes sexy, sometimes mischievous, often flirtatious, and generally just fun. Let's face it -- Harry has style.
Blondie, of course, was originally known as part of the Manhattan music scene in the mid-to-late '70s. They were part of the same scene that boasted bands like Television, the Ramones, the Talking Heads and Patti Smith, with frequent performances at clubs like CBGB and Max's Kansas City. They were not the band that most of their contemporaries would have predicted would have made it big. But after making a little bit of noise with their first two LP's, the self titled Blondie (1976) and their follow-up Plastic Letters (1978), they broke huge with their late-1978 release, Parallel Lines.
Parallel Lines is as close to being a perfect album as you can get. The 2,000 lb. gorilla was their hit single "Heart of Glass", which producer Mark Chapman helped them rework in an atypical (for them) disco style. The song hit #1 in both the U.S. and the UK, and made Blondie and Deborah Harry into full-blown stars. In all, though, "Heart of Glass" was simply the most successful of six different singles released from the LP, along with such classics as "Hanging on the Telephone" (a Nerves cover), "One Way or Another" and "Sunday Girl". And this LP has deep cuts as well -- there's truly not a bad song on the album.
Blondie followed this up with 1979's Eat to the Beat, which went Platinum in both the U.S. and the UK, the non-album single "Call Me" from the soundtrack of the film American Gigolo, (a #1 single in much of the world, including the UK and the U.S.), and the 1980 album Autoamerican, which also went platinum in both the U.S. and UK.
After this, tensions within the band and a crumbling health situation for guitarist Chris Stein caused them to come crashing back to Earth, and their 1982 album The Hunter was both a critical and commercial failure. The band then went their separate ways, with Harry engaging in a somewhat successful solo career, and an acting career as well, after spending a few years helping to nurse Stein back to health.
If this had been the end of the story, it would have been a damned good run, and a pretty nice career. Happily, though, after a 17-year hiatus, the band got to play a whole second act, beginning with their 1999 LP No Exit (named after the existentialist playwright Jean-Paul Sartre's masterpiece), which was powered by the single "Maria" (a #1 song in the UK.) Unfortunately, their next album, The Curse of Blondie (2003) was probably their worst, which effectively ended their commercial comeback.
Nevertheless, Blondie has released three albums since then, all of which were pretty good (and one of which might be their second best overall, after Parallel Lines.) These were 2011's Panic of Girls (a decent LP), 2014's Ghost's of Download (a friggin' great LP!) and 2017's Pollinator (a creditable effort).
Will there be any new Blondie music? Unclear. Deborah Harry is 75 years old now, and you can definitely hear some ... maturity ... in her voice. (Although I saw her in 2017, and drunken guys in their 20's were still finding her pretty damned sexy.) As of last word, depending on the state of the COVID virus, though, Blondie is still scheduled for a 10-date UK arena tour in late 2021 with Shirley Manson's Garbage as the opening act (a pretty great show. I saw these two bands play together at Bethel Woods in 2017, and it was a amazing.) So anything is possible.
Anyway, with eleven studio albums released between 1976 and 2017, these guys have already had a rock-solid career, to say the least. I don't know how much more we can expect out them at this point, but anything more would be welcome. Blondie is a terrific band.
Next up in this series: Another female-fronted band who might have played my favorite live show I ever saw - Eurythmics!
