Picture This: Blondie’s Parallel Lines at 45
Honoring a glistening jewel of pop rock perfection that hasn’t dimmed since 1978
Having grown in the clubs of Lower Manhattan, Blondie was still looking for a breakout in the rest of the country. And if you’re looking for a hit, you need a hitmaker.
Parallel Lines, released 45 years ago this month, was the result. But it took a little while to get there.
The downtown scene, with CBGB’s at the epicenter, was blooming on the Bowery. There were the wonders of pop culture trash and few chords, The Ramones. Talking Heads were the quintessential art school kids. Suicide’s Alan Vega was the creative avant garde “old man” pushing 40. Television was inventing post-punk at the same time punk exploded.
Then there was Blondie, formed in 1974 and taking on its recognizable form the following year. They had ’60s pop, including the girl groups at their core, but were willing and able to absorb the influences around them. They were (mostly) from New York and New Jersey and carried themselves with a bit of that attitude, particularly lead singer Debbie Harry. She had the combination of talent, charisma and looks, all the while possessing an air of being able to walk in any room like she owned the place, carried off with a hefty amount of insouciance.
Harry was also the member with the most experience, having been a part of hippy folkies Wind in the Willows. Their 1968 Capitol debut, which flopped, suffered from being quickly dated and not making the best of her, both musically and by having her in a supporting, instead of lead, role.
The group’s self-titled debut came out on Private Stock in late 1976. The label’s big success had been taking advantage of a Motown mistake, when that much larger label refused to release a Four Seasons song as a single. Lead singer Frankie Valli bought the song back for $4,000. Private Stock stepped in when other labels passed and that song, released as a Valli solo single, became the No. 1 hit “My Eyes Adored You.”
While Valli had successful follow-ups, the label’s niche in the latter half of the ’70s was one-hit wonders. Songs like “Don’t Give Up On Us”, “Moonlight Feels Right” and “Emotion” were all chart successes, if not omens for their artists’ futures.
Blondie didn’t get a piece of that action. Despite standouts like “X-Offender”, “In the Flesh” and “Rip Her to Shreds”, the album went nowhere here in the States. Private Stock wasn’t eager for a follow-up.
But there was a cult following and a feeling that some bits of success abroad could translate here. Chrysalis picked up Blondie’s contract, releasing Plastic Letters in September, 1977.
Despite the presence of such shoulda-been-hits as “Denis”, the gender-flipped cover of Randy & The Rainbows 1963 hit “Denise”, and the sparkling “(I’m Always Touched by Your) Presence, Dear”, the album stalled at No. 82 here.
Blondie was finding an audience elsewhere. “In the Flesh” reached No. 2 in Australia. “Denis” was No. 2 in the U.K. and topped the charts in Belgium and the Netherlands (where Plastic Letters went gold).
VIDEO: Blondie “Denis”
It should be noted that the producer of those first two albums, Richard Gottehrer, had success in the ’60s and, a few years later, would be at the console for The Go-Gos’ classic debut Beauty and the Beat.
But in 1977, there was a desire for more, certainly on the part of Terry Ellis, the head of Chrysalis, and Perry Leeds, their then-manager.
Enter Mike Chapman. The Australian, the musical half of the songwriting team with Nicky Chinn, had been a big-time hitmaker in the U.K. during the glam rock years for the likes of Sweet, Suzi Quatro, Smokie and Mud.
But, for the most part, those successes hadn’t crossed over to the U.S., aside from Sweet’s “Ballroom Blitz” and “Fox on the Run” and Smokie’s “Living Next Door to Alice.”
Ellis asked Chapman, based in Los Angeles by 1977, to check out Blondie live. He came away suitably impressed by their shows at the Whisky a Go Go on the Plastic Letters tour.
There was some skepticism, particularly from Harry, of going with Chapman as a producer. But he won her over by honestly liking some of the songs they had in waiting.
As much as Chapman found a lot to like about Blondie as songwriters and a live act, he was less impressed when they stepped into the Record Plant to start recording in June of ’78.
“The only great musician among them was Frankie Infante. He’s an amazing guitarist,” Chapman told Sound on Sound in 2008. “The rest of them were all over the bloody place. Jimmy Destri was a pretty good songwriter, but he wasn’t a great keyboard player. What he did, he did well, and I didn’t ever try to push him beyond that because I knew there wasn’t anything beyond that. Chris Stein was always so stoned, and although Clem Burke had all the right ideas, he had no sense of timing. I mean, he had a lot of ability, but I always felt he was trying too hard, and that’s what I used to tell him.”
It was a different role for Chapman, who wasn’t being asked to write the hits. Rather, he was brought in to shape and mold what Blondie brought to the table.
He also knew what he was there to do regardless. He told Rolling Stone in 1979: “If you’re gonna be in the music business, you gotta make hit records. If you can’t make hit records, you should fuck off and go chop meat somewhere.”
Chapman had a reputation as a taskmaster. The Sweet had stopped working with him. He demanded multiple takes to get the sounds he wanted, which frustrated everyone in Blondie at various times. Most notably, bassist Nigel Harrison threw a keyboard in frustration at Chapman one day.
Chapman remained steadfast, even in the face of anger. “The Blondies all basically knew I would get it right,” Chapman said. “They sometimes didn’t like the procedure, they didn’t like the amount of time they had to spend doing it, but after we’d finished Parallel Lines they understood why I did what I did and they were all very proud of the record.”
“It was diametrically opposite from working with Richard Gottehrer,” Harry said in The Billboard Book of Number One Hits. “He’s very laid back and Mike is a real hot chili pepper and very energetic and enthusiastic. Mike would strive for the technically impeccable take so we would do take after take whereas Richard always went for the inspired take.”
The album was recorded over six weeks, the final week in a lesser backup studio in the building because they’d only booked five weeks.
Destri had finished his parts when he came to the studio. Chapman motioned him over. “While everybody was still asleep he puts on the record and he cranks it up full and everybody jumps up screaming,” Destri told The Big Takeover in 2003. “Mike goes “Ok guys, your record is done.’ (laughs) And we sat there and listened to it all and we went ‘This is a fuckin’ great record”. And it was the first time ever that I said ‘This career is really going to work.’ Because after hearing that album I was like ‘My God…’ From that moment on, Mike Chapman was our man.”
For his part, Chapman was also pleased with the result, saying in 2008, “It’s hard to find a flaw in it, and there aren’t many records during your career that you can say that about.”
Each Blondie member had a hand in writing at least one of the album’s nine originals. Two songs were covers — of Buddy Holly’s “I’m Gonna Love You Too” and the Nerves’ lost power-pop classic “Hanging on the Telephone”. A second song written by the Nerves’ Jack Lee, “Will Anything Happen”, rounded out the record.
The big breakout hit, indeed the one most associated with them to this day, was the one that had been in existence the longest.
Written by Harry and Stein in their apartment in 1974, the song was unofficially called “Once Had a Love” and “The Disco Song.” When Chapman met with the band in advance of recording, he asked to hear what songs they had. “At the end, he said, ‘Have you got anything else?’ We sheepishly said: ‘Well, there is this old one.’ He liked it – he thought it was very pretty and started to pull it into focus,” Harry told the Guardian in 2013.
Even in the Parallel Lines sessions, Blondie didn’t have a handle on the song right away. Chapman told them to ditch the reggae version. Doing it as a straightforward rock song didn’t work, either.
VIDEO: Blondie “Heart of Glass”
Harry and Stein both had an appreciation for disco, particularly Giorgio Moroder’s productions for Donna Summer. The unplanned ingredient turned out to be a new Roland CR-78 drum machine that Destri had. It produced that recognizable syncopated rhythm and the newly christened “Heart of Glass” took off.
Given late ’70s technology, it took a little work to marry the new sounds with the band.
“Synchronizing them was a big deal at the time. It all had to be done manually, with every note and beat played in real time rather than looped over,” Stein told the Guardian. “And on old disco tracks, the bass drum was always recorded separately, so Clem had to pound away on a foot-pedal for three hours until they got a take they were happy with.”
While its new beat helped take it to the top of the pop and disco charts, there was also a little tart bite from guitar and, above all, Harry’s vocals, which alternate between heartbroken and more than a little annoyed at finding out the relationship had turned out to be a pain in the ass more than a gas.
And, it should be noted, the original version, with the “La, da, da, la, la, la, la, la, la, la,la” vocals playing off the organ is the superior one to the disco remixes.
As sweet as her vocals were on “Heart of Glass”, they delivered a snarl on “One Way or Another”, a song she co-wrote with Harrison. Inspired by an ex who stalked her to the point where she had to move out of New Jersey, its lyrical content wasn’t unfamiliar on the airwaves in that time period.
The Ray Parker Jr.-led Raydio packaged stalker vibes about how the woman changing her phone number and address and disguising herself wouldn’t keep him away into a bubbly R&B song that kept “One Way or Another” company in the Top 40 in the summer of ’79.
VIDEO: Blondie performs “One Way Or Another” on Top Pop
In Harry’s case, she opted to lighten the tone (as a defense mechanism, she said later). The result trades creepiness for a sort of comic book menace, a flipping of the script to take ownership of the situation back. All the while, the song itself is insistently catchy (the way she sings “getcha, getcha, getcha getcha”) and full of new wave greatness (like the closing breakdown and more chaotic ending).
The goal was to have every song on the album be a potential single, and six of them were. But some of its highlights were in the album tracks. Stein’s ballad “Fade Away and Radiate” is full of atmosphere and images that one could easily picture either Roxy Music or any number of goth bands tackling it, complete with the memorable line “Dusty frames that still arrive/Die in 1955.”
Harry’s album closer, “Just Go Away” feels like one of the hits with its chorus hook. She rips into a hapless would-be scenester and/or suitor with lip-smacking joy, batting him around like a cat with its long-gone prey.
“Hanging on the Telephone”, one of the songs released as a single before “Heart of Glass”, wound up on the album thanks to a young man who’d headed up the Blondie Fan Club after meeting them at one of those Whisky shows. The fan? Future Gun Club leader Jeffrey Lee Pierce, who sent mixtapes to the band, which made their way to Japan where they were touring.
“So, we were on the road, checking this tape out, and we heard that song, and right then and there, we decided we would cover it. It would never have happened if not for Jeffrey, you know, him making sure we heard it,” Burke told Vinyl Writer in 2022.
VIDEO: Blondie “Hanging On The Telephone”
There was a certain level of consternation in the band, including from Harry herself, that they thought she was Blondie and the guys were just the backing band. They had buttons made to hand out that said, “Blondie is a group.”
“Hanging on the Telephone” is a good case for the defense. Harrison and Burke anchor the song with heft and precision. And Harry sells the song like the radio classic it should have been here (it did reach No. 5 in the U.K), turning Lee’s plea into a demand for respect.
The song was also a timely boost for its writer, who got a call from Harry asking for permission to cover it. “I remember the day vividly. It was a Friday. They were going to cut off our electricity at six o’clock, the phone too,” Lee told Mojo Music.
Perhaps Chapman wanted more Hal Blaine than Keith Moon out of Burke, because it’s clear the guy could play. He propels “Will Anything Happen” with an energy the rest of the band maintains like the seasoned vets of the scene below 14th Street they were.
“Picture This”, which charted elsewhere while not being released as a single here, was a testament to collaboration. Destri had the verse music. Stein had the chorus (which certainly echoed classic pop). Harry came up with the lyrics, turning it into a song about love with an uncertain future (“All I want is a photo in my wallet/A small remembrance of something more solid”). The way she sings is it is a reminder that the girl took herself out of New Jersey, but New Jersey remained in the girl, especially how she delivers that future-looking final line, “Get a pocket computer/Try to do what you used to do yeah.”
Taken as a whole, the album feels like the collection of hits they were aiming for. As unified as it is, it also plays like an alternate-universe compilation with the way different styles get put through the Blondie filter.
“I’m Gonna Love You, Too” doesn’t xerox Holly’s original or its hiccupy lead vocal, but instead gives its joy a shot (or several shots) of caffeine. The most evocative of pop’s past, “Sunday Girl”, a No. 1 hit in the U,K., showed Harry could just as easily be engagingly sweet as tartly spiked.
Infante shared lead vocals on his “I Know But I Don’t Know”, giving the punk that surrounded them a deadpan spin through rock and new wave. Destri’s keyboards, a crucial accompaniment throughout, get to take center stage on his “11:59”, a straightforward slice of happiness. While Harry’s lyrics were often put together in the studio (even at times when Chapman said, they were asking her “Are you ready to sing?”), “Pretty Baby” came in more fully formed.
Co-written with Stein, it marries imagery from the cinematic new wave with music that brings up their ’60s musical influences in a modern way that avoided pastiche.
Parallel Lines became the hit everyone was aiming for, going platinum. The follow-up would do the same, due in no small part to the group achieving 100-percent pure pop perfection on “Dreaming” and diving deeper into dance music on “Atomic.”
In short, nobody involved was going to be required to start learning as a butcher’s shop assistant any time soon.
Blondie would be reliable hitmakers for a few more years, hitting the top of the U.S. charts with “Call Me” (which was basically Harry solo in all but name only thanks to producer Giorgio Moroder), “The Tide Is High” (a cover of a rocksteady song from 1967 by the Paragons) and “Rapture” (a marriage of rap Harry and Stein were exposed to in the Bronx by Fab Five Freddy, very chic disco and Stein’s interest in sci-fi).
That came to a quick halt in 1982 with The Hunter, in which the songwriting mojo mostly went into hiding and things collapsed with differences centered around egos and music. The band broke up by that November, not to return until the latter part of the ’90s.
If Chapman got Blondie to be more precise by putting up guardrails, his exacting methods didn’t put any “Road closed” blockades on the avenues the group was exploring, either.
If anyone was thinking of accusing Blondie of being sellouts, they were never merchants of two-chord, upper-fueled fuzz and spitting on the audience to begin with.
Parallel Lines may be tighter, but it’s still as unmistakably Blondie as its two predecessors.The perfect vehicle to let listeners into the group’s New York world, it’s a smart, glistening jewel of pop rock perfection that hasn’t dimmed since.
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