Deep Album Cuts Vol. 271: Blondie
Today Numero Group has released Against The Odds: 1974 - 1982, a box set collecting Blondie's first six albums and a whole lot of previously unreleased material. And a few months ago I read Kembrew McLeod's 33 1/3 book on Parallel Lines, so I have been thinking about Blondie and their place in the world lately.
Blondie deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):
1. Rifle Range
2. In The Sun
3. Platinum Blonde
4. Detroit 442
5. Bermuda Triangle Blues
6. Love At The Pier
7. I Didn't Have The Nerve To Say No
8. Fade Away And Radiate
9. Pretty Baby
10. 11:59
11. Will Anything Happen
12. Accidents Never Happen
13. Shayla
14. Eat To The Beat
15. Living In The Real World
16. Angels On The Balcony
17. Do The Dark
18. Europa
19. Live It Up
20. For Your Eyes Only
21. (Can't I) Find The Right Words (To Say)
22. Rave
23. Fragments
Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Blondie (1976)
Tracks 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Plastic Letters (1977)
Track 22 from Ghosts of Download (2014)Tracks 8, 9, 10 and 11 from Parallel Lines (1978)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from Eat To The Beat (1979)
Tracks 16, 17, 18 and 19 from Autoamerican (1980)
Tracks 20 and 21 from The Hunter (1982)
Track 23 from Pollinator (2017)
In the firmament of bands that launched their careers at CBGB in the mid-'70s, Patti Smith was the first one out of the gate with a major label album, The Ramones became the standard bearers of the punk rock genre, and Talking Heads sold the most albums and were the most reliable critical darlings. For a time, Blondie were the black sheep of that scene, and by critical standards they're not usually considered as important or influential as their peers. But they became pop stars to a far greater degree, hitting #1 on the Hot 100 four times (by comparison, only one other CBGB band, Talking Heads, had one top 10 hit, a year after Blondie's breakup).
Singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, who were a couple throughout Blondie's original run but split up in the '80s a few years after the band, are kind of the braintrust at the center of the band and one or both of them wrote most of Blondie's hits that weren't covers -- "Platinum Blonde" was the first song Harry ever wrote, one of a handful of songs on Blondie's debut that originated in their earlier band The Stilettoes, a retro girl group with three singers.
But a lot of members of Blondie made significant songwriting contributions, including keyboardist Jimmy Destri and bassists Gary Valentine, Nigel Harrison, and Leigh Foxx. Drummer Clem Burke doesn't have any writing credits, but he's absolutely the glue that holds together every era of Blondie -- when people say a drummer can be the difference between a good band and a great band, Clem Burke is a classic example. His energy and creativity drives the fast early stuff and helped them pull off their many genre experiments later on.
The most played deep cuts in Blondie's live repertoire include "Fade Away And Radiate" (which had guitar from Robert Fripp on the studio recording), "Accidents Never Happen," "In The Sun," "Will Anything Happen," "Detroit 442," "Pretty Baby," "11:59," and "Shayla." "For Your Eyes Only" was written for the James Bond film of the same name -- Debbie Harry was hired to sing the theme song eventually performed by Sheena Easton, but quit when she and Blondie weren't allowed to record their own original song, so they put it on The Hunter. I would say Blondie easily had the better song, and the one that sounds more like a Bond theme, so the Eon Productions people made the wrong call there.
Blondie have made 5 studio albums since reuniting, but the first three (1999's No Exit, 2003's The Curse of Blondie, and 2011's Panic Of Girls) are all currently missing from streaming services. 2014's Ghosts of Download was bundled together with a greatest hits collection. The story behind "Fragments" from the band's latest album Pollinator is pretty cool -- Chris Stein found this obscure self-released song by a Canadian band on YouTube, and Blondie decided to cover it.
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