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IVH: Blondie / Parallel Lines [1]
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Date: 2025-04-17
Tonight’s tunes from Blondie’s massively successful third album, Parallel Lines. Originally published in March, 2023. With drummer Clem Burke’s passing last week I felt a repost was appropriate.
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
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