Blondie by Lester Bangs

Author:Lester Bangs
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-06-02T15:38:56+00:00

It would seem that Blondie have always wanted to consider themselves at least capable of dipping into the avant-garde, Chris has expressed his admiration of Andy Warhol on more than one occasion. They were never all that far from Soho in temperament whatever the geography; and despite the fact that you may think some of these manifestations a little pretentious, they received what probably amounted to certified seal of approval and welcome to The Club when, one night in the summer of 1978, Robert Fripp, guitar experimentalist, sat in on a Blondie gig at CBGB's and they did Donna Summer's "I Feel Love."

It got a lot of press, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if it was this which finally led them to cut "Heart of Glass," though given the aforestated closeness to the arty/ fashion/ conceptualist sphere that Chris and Debbie (if no one else in the band) maintained from the beginning, it was no surprise. And it certainty should not have been misconstrued as some "sellout to disco," since disco's what they play, as everybody knows, at all them places like Studio 54, where after "Glass'" success The Warhol itself threw a party for Debbie. According to the New York Times, she was recognized by few of the patrons over 25 even though she had known Warhol for years and her face was gracing the cover of his Interview rag that very month. She ended up trying to escape from her own party and almost not being able to, picked clean as the cousin in Suddenly, Last Summer by a whirring swarm of paparazzi.

It's so hard to tell the avant-garde from Bloomingdale's anymore that maybe it's best just not to even ask. Fripp, not long after their jam-nite, did ask Debbie to sing the Summer song on Exposure, the solo album he was then preparing for Polydor. But, in a move that one supposes is typical of record company theories on How To Build Promising Artists Into Hot Property Superstars, Chrysalis replied with a flat No, explaining, according to Fripp, that "Deborah Harry has a voice in a million." Well, so does Jody Maxwell of Screw, so what? Fortunately for Blondie and their fans, Fripp was a gentleman and adult enough not to retaliate, and contributed some rippling guitar figures to Parallel Lines' "Fade Away and Radiate."

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