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IVH: Blondie || Parallel Lines [1]
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Date: 2023-03-30
Debbie Harry & Chris Stein
Tonight’s tunes from Blondie’s massively successful third album, Parallel Lines.
I first heard the sultry pop-punk voice of Debbie Harry on a K-Tel collection on 8-Track tape. To this day I can’t remember the name of the compilation, but I will forever remember playing the song “Heart of Glass” over and over again. I knew nothing of punk, my music knowledge being limited only to top 40 radio, hit collections, the John Denver tapes my mother collected, the Beatles, Eagles, CCR and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack that must have been in every household in the late seventies. So, I was familiar with disco. Even with the disco feel of “Heart of Glass”, I felt that there was much more to it. At the time, I couldn’t piece together in my head what was soon to be the onset of the “New Wave.” Bands like Blondie and Devo were at the forefront, taking the aggressive and rebellious elements of punk, adding an electronic keyboard, and then turning the whole thing on its head by swirling it with elements of disco dance music. This is an extremely loose and naive interpretation of what New Wave music is, which is kind of like post-modernism. I have yet to meet any two people who can describe either the same way. We enter the new wave with the electronic sound of a ringing telephone, as heard from the calling end. Then, like a beautiful but jarring bolt out of the blue, we hear Debbie Harry: “I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall / If you don’t answer I’ll just rip it off the wall.” So begins the opening track of Blondie’s Parallel Lines, “Hanging on the Telephone.” Harry does little to hide, and in fact stresses, a New York accent as she gives the Gotham City twist to words like talk, making it “twalk” as in “Coffee Twalk.” The album was their first with producer Mike Chapman, the beginning of a relationship that was tenuous at best, pulling some of the band members closer together, driving others further apart. It was two years after punk’s roots had begun to grow into the soil, mostly as a reaction to the disco crave, and at this point, with the Clash, the Ramones, and the Sex Pistols taking the underground world by storm, it seemed that the genre was the new direction. — Treblezine
Hanging on the Telephone [1978]
Their first two records-- a switchblade of a self-titled debut and its relatively weak follow-up Plastic Letters-- birthed a pair of top 10 hits in the UK but had been, at best, minor successes in the U.S.; the debut didn't chart, while Plastic scraped the top 75. Despite savvy marketing-- the group filmed videos for each of its singles, that now-iconic duochromatic cover photo-- the group's third and easily best album, Parallel Lines, didn't take off until they group released "Heart of Glass", a single that abandoned their CBGB roots for a turn in the Studio 54 spotlight. Though its subtle charms included a bubbling rhythm, lush motorik synths, and Harry's remarkably controlled and assured vocal, "Heart of Glass" started as a goof, a take-off on the upscale nightlife favored outside of Blondie's LES home turf. The swift move from the fringes to the top of the charts tagged Blondie as a singles group-- no shame, and they did have one of the best runs of singles in pop history-- but it's helped Parallel Lines weirdly qualify as an undiscovered gem, a sparkling record half-full of recognized classics that, nevertheless, is hiding in plain sight. [...] Harry herself was a mannered and complex frontwoman, possessed of a range of vocal tricks and affectations. She was as at home roaming around in the open spaces of "Radiate" or "Heart of Glass" as she was pouting and winking through "Picture This" and "Sunday Girl" or working out front of the group's more hard-charging tracks. That versatility and charm extended to her sexuality as well-- she had the sort of gamine, sophisticated look of a French new wave actress but always seemed supremely grounded and approachable, almost tomboyish. (That approachability was wisely played up in the band's choice of key covers throughout its career-- "Hanging on the Telephone", "Denis", and "The Tide Is High" each position Harry as a romantic pursuer with a depth and range of emotions rather than simply as an unattainable fantasy.) — Pitchfork
One Way or Another [1978]
The single “Sunday Girl” was the second number one in the U.K. and helped make Blondie the first new wave band to have a platinum album. A pop song throwback to the sounds of Brill Building Pop and the uninhibited innocence of rock & roll’s earliest songs, Chris Stein originally wrote the song as a Latin piece but later re-worked it as the more airy pop piece it became. Harry’s soft, sultry voice connects “Sunday Girl” to earlier singles like “Presence, Dear” and “In the Flesh”; at the same time the song is demonstrative of the sharper, tighter sound the band now had. — Consequence
Sunday Girl [1978]
The impact of “Heart of Glass” has been dulled over the years by rampant overexposure, constantly recycled on budget disco compilations and new wave collections, but hearing it on Parallel Lines emphasizes its virtues. The fact that hard-core club-goers of the era might repudiate the song’s viability in favor of, say, anything from the Salsoul label, is beside the point. “Heart of Glass” was the sound of a band with unapologetic pop aspirations and firm underground roots. It bridged two sensibilities that were diametrically opposed to one another. However, the nine tracks that precede “Heart of Glass” and the two that follow it are what make Parallel Lines a great album and not just a showcase for the trans-continental number one hit. — Pop Matters
Heart of Glass [1978]
In Blondie’s third album, Parallel Lines, the band drops the brooding artiness of its previous records and comes on like an ambitious pop-rock group. Or rather, a rock & roll band with an ambitious pop vocalist named Deborah Harry. In the past, Harry has always managed to make a virtue of her stiff, severe crooning, and her vocals complemented Blondie’s clipped, urban-raw playing. But the melodies were frequently lugubrious and much too involved with a Warholian despair that took the form of nonstop deadpan cheekiness. This cool demeanor provided some incredible pounding — Clem Burke’s drumming always carried the band beyond mere art rock — but never gave Blondie’s songs the jolt or hooks that Harry’s blank-slate singing seemed capable of delivering so well. As if to drive home Blondie’s new range, “Sunday Girl” is followed by “Heart of Glass,” a mating of Kraftwerk and Donna Summer that adds humanity to the machine-like pace and steeliness to the imploring female narrator. And it’s this steeliness — this transcendence of all the romantic stereotypes Deborah Harry embraces — that makes Parallel Lines so continuously enjoyable and moving. Harry’s no longer the sexy zombie, and she won’t take any more abuse without showing contempt for her abusers. Her gritty “I’m gonna getcha” (in “One Way or Another”) and the entire sardonic dismissal of “Just Go Away” are witty flourishes that, in the course of this exhilarating LP, come to seem genuinely brave. — Rolling Stone
11:59 [1978]
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Viola Davis, Julius Tennon, Brett Goldstein, Daniel Caesar
Jimmy Fallon: Edward Norton, Ego Nwodim, Parker McCollum
Stephen Colbert: Brooke Shields, Clint Smith, Weyes Blood
Seth Meyers: Taron Egerton, Maude Apatow, Fred Armisen
James Corden: Kevin Bacon, Kyra Sedgwick, Dustin Nickerson
Daily Show: Guest host John Leguizamo
SPOILER WARNING
A late night gathering for non serious palaver that does not speak of that night’s show. Posting a spoiler will get you brollywhacked. You don’t want that to happen to you. It's a fate worse than a fate worse than death.
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