Blondie's New York... and the Making of Parallel Lines

This programme contains some strong language

They were just a ragtag New York punk band in a city that was

falling apart at the seams -

just one of many bands trying to break out from the niche punk scene

into the pop mainstream.

I think people thought we were trashy.

I think people thought we were unmusical.

No-one thought they were going anywhere.

Against them they had the punk purists who wanted to keep

the music anti-establishment, raw and aggressive.

But Blondie would prove that they were more than a garage band

with a pretty singer.

# One way or another

# I'm gonna lose ya

# I'm gonna give you the slip. #

In 1977, Chrysalis Records spotted the band and spent 1m

buying out their contract and putting top pop hit maker

Mike Chapman in charge of producing their new album, Parallel Lines.

# Pretty baby You look so heavenly...

The tough studio recording sessions coming up would turn Blondie

from a Greenwich Village punk band into a world-class pop band.

Their breakthrough album would sell 20 million copies,

but Debbie Harry's sound, looks and unpredictable clothes sense

would also have a lasting influence on New York's fashion industry,

while the stories the band told in their songs

would capture the spirit of New York City -

a snapshot of a time and of a city that was changing for ever.

New York in the '70s was a city going through tough times.

The overriding problem was to save

the city of New York from going into bankruptcy.

It was pretty dangerous, it was

pretty common to get mugged,

especially over on the East Side.

Er, it was pretty hard to find jobs.

There were a lot of single occupancy hotels that you could

sleep for 5 a night, and so transient people and, er...

you know, a lot of drunks and things like that.

The band thought of themselves as New Yorkers from an early age.

Jimmy Destri was brought up in Brooklyn.

Did you ever see those Discovery Channel shows with

the deep ocean vents and there's all kinds of life living in impossible

conditions? That's basically what downtown New York was.

Guitarist Chris Stein also grew up in Brooklyn.

There was the big "be in" in Central Park in the summer of '67

that was very impressive and a great event.

I remember as part of my... chemical history, you know.

Fellow guitarist Frank Infante's early memories

of the city are still vivid today.

I remember going through the Holland Tunnel with my parents

in the car, you know.

And it always was that real Gothamy kind of vibe,

gritty kind of tunnel, dirty, it was like, "Man, where are we going?"

So we're going to hell here or something, you know. But it was cool.

Drummer Clem Burke and vocalist Debbie Harry,

both from New Jersey, discovered the West Village in their teens.

DEBBIE HARRY: I think my favourite thing was to walk around

the West Village and look at, you know,

all the little crafts shops and, er, just sort of try to catch the vibe.

It was a place we used to go to look at the hippies in, er,

Greenwich Village.

Kinda walk around and look for freaky-looking people, I guess.

I guess it was the forbidden fruit in a way,

full of naughty things.

Even English newcomer bassist Nigel Harrison soon fell under

the city's wayward spell.

I love New York.

I think if I left New York, I would decompose, I'd turn to dust.

Since becoming an item in 1973

Debbie and Chris had shared one ambition.

Just to run away and be an artist of some sort.

In the 1970s, many artists were coming to live in the city's

abandoned factories and crowd the East Village sidewalks -

musicians, film-makers, photographers and fashion designers.

New clubs were offering some raw alternative sounds

and films conceived and shot far from Hollywood,

such as Saturday Night Fever, Taxi Driver, The French Connection,

and Serpico, were telling true and often harsh New York stories.

Indeed one of the first songs to be recorded had a feeling of menace

and impending violence.

It was based on Debbie's experience with a boyfriend

who had stalked her.

Track two - One Way Or Another.

This was just a boyfriend, er, and just... I, you know,

I sort of liked the way that that phrase kept coming up,

you know, "One way or another, one way or another."

Nigel played me the track in Japan.

I used to make a lot... a lot of little demos.

I had this fantastic little machine I bought in Japan.

Just the thing that went...

CHORD IS REPEATED

Just two chords going back and forth with a little riff in it.

HE PLAYS THE SAME CHORD

I took that, you know, with the beat...beat thing,

I had some crazy guitar on it.

I said, "I like this!"

Thanks to Jimmy, who I was sharing a room with on tour,

he said, "We should make a song out of that. That's got to be a song."

And it was thanks to Jimmy that I..

I was too shy to sort of show it to anyone.

He came in with it and we just started playing it live.

It was a very automatic, band kind of thing.

Debbie came up with a great lyric.

You know, because it was a catch phrase - "one way or another" -

it's such a catch phrase.

The phrasing just fit right, so I just...

And it just sort of happened in a flash, you know.

It was just one of those things that came together really easily.

One of the things that made it is the guitarist is playing

but the keyboard is doing a seventh. It's going...

And it just gives it that edge, you know.

Yeah, that's one of my favourites.

Frank did a great job on that.

So this is Frankie playing Nigel's riff.

GUITAR PLAYS

And Chris with the...the harmonics.

And you can hear... those are Chris's lines...

..a little outta whack.

It has this odd country hillbilly thing going on underneath it all.

TRACK PLAYS

It also reminds me of some kind of a polka.

Yeah.

# I'm gonna meet ya

# I'll meet ya

# I will drive past your house. #

The best part of this was when Debbie spat out those words,

and to see her out there with the sort of facial contortions and...

HE SNARLS

I mean, she really went for this track.

# One way or another I'm gonna find ya

# I'm gonna get ya, get ya, get ya

# One way or another I'm gonna win ya

# I'll get ya! I'll get ya! #

I mean, that really tells you all about her personality,

you know. It's like, "I'll get ya, I'll get ya!"

One minute she's this sort of frantic...

and the next minute she.. you can't even talk to her.

What's really amazing is how many people actually relate to this song.

They point, they go like that.

The lyrics are unusual and people often get them wrong,

as Debbie and Chris discovered in an unlikely place!

We were in..

We were in a Hard Rock Cafe in South America somewhere

and they had a really good forgery of Debbie's lyrics for this.

Yes, that was in Santa Dominco.

And we knew it was a forgery because it didn't say "rat food",

it said something else food.

Yeah.

And, you know, that... The phrase "rat food" is in here somewhere.

# I walk down the mall... #

I think she wrote these words on the spot.

These weren't written yet she said.

# Check out some specials and rat food. #

"Check out some specials and rat food," you know. She's got the...

Even today Debbie is not sure

she gave her performance quite enough menace.

Not menacing enough.

# I'm gonna get ya, get ya, get ya... #

I should be clamped in irons for this.

# I'm gonna meet ya, meet ya, meet ya

# One day, maybe next week I'm gonna meet ya. #

All right, that's enough.

The band had first come together three years earlier at CBGBs,

a run-down venue on The Bowery, which became

the headquarters of the New York punk and new wave scene.

Up-and-comers Blondie had some tough competition.

Other CBGB regulars included Talking Heads,

The Ramones, The Patti Smith Group,

Johnnie Thunders, and Television.

The interesting thing about going to CBGBs -

and I don't think that an 18-19-year-old will have any

sort of parallel to it now, and I think the only parallel would be

the people who went to The Cavern Club in the late '50s, early '60s.

You didn't go to see the Beatles, you went to The Cavern Club.

We were not the, er, you know, the darlings of the scene, you know,

we were sort of the struggling out... you know, outer edges of it.

I think people thought we were trashy.

I think people thought we were unmusical.

# That's how the little girl lies

# He's telling his little girl lies... #

I think people thought the band was a novelty.

Everyone liked them as people a lot but, you know,

no-one thought they were going anywhere.

And especially the competition, which was Television or the Ramones.

We were informed by the music that we were surrounded by, by our peers.

We were changing and doing different things, and our sound was changing.

With the success of Saturday Night Fever came an enthusiasm for disco

and Blondie was the first punk band to incorporate it into their sound.

It was a move that punk purists would regard as treason,

but it would increase the band's chances of hitting the big time.

They'd been playing at CBGBs for a while,

and I just heard this sound,

and it just sounded bigger than any of the bands that had played there.

And Debbie was just one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen.

But it was now becoming clear that Blondie was much more than

a pretty girl with an unformed band behind her.

They were a great band, they could really play.

And let's not lose that in the discussion of her image and

the scene and the punks and all that, this band could play their ass off.

And one night they were doing just that

when they were spotted by Terry Ellis of Chrysalis Records.

He saw Debbie's star quality at once and immediately spent

1m buying the band out of their existing record deal.

To make sure his investment paid off, he put pop record producer

Mike Chapman in charge.

Mike had a string of hits to his name

but he couldn't have been less punk.

How could he turn Blondie into a hit making team?

# Wanted something more

# I know

# You wouldn't go... #

Knowing that this was basically a New York underground sort of

punk influence band,

I thought, well, it's going to be a little tough.

But when I heard the songs, I realised that, er, that they

were songwriters.

Since 1971, Mike had had an impressive 20 hit singles

in the charts.

I told them, I said,

"You know, these songs are... are absolutely amazing."

And they said, "Oh, do you think so?"

I said, "Yeah, I know so. So shall we give it a try?"

"Yeah, OK. Let's give it a try."

He was good-humoured and, you know,

he had all these funny sort of Australian sayings like,

"Gosh, she bangs like a shit house door in a cyclone."

And, you know, it's like working with Billy the Kid or something.

-Yeah. Or a pirate or something.

-He was funny

and cute, you know. He was wily and a good spirit, you know.

Mike would go on to record three other albums with the band,

although during the Parallel Lines sessions his technique of building

a hit bar-by-bar would be at odds with the band's usual technique.

On their previous two albums they had recorded a song a few times

and then chosen the best take.

Later, tempers would fray,

but at the outset it was all sweetness and light.

Blondie's New York, track one, Hanging On The Telephone.

Of the 12 tracks on the album,

Mike agreed with the band that they

would write nine of them, but there would be three covers, too.

The first track was written by West Coast musician Jack Lee.

Hustler Jack just couldn't believe his luck.

We met Jack. Jack was gone, out of his mind.

He was staying at the Y, you know, and he was pushing his songs

to people, and he would come in and show us the song.

And he would be so enthusiastic, and we'd have to go "Jack,

"calm down, we're going to do the song."

I can still hear Clem's unsteady foot here.

Now Clem would kill me if he...

well, he will kill me when he hears it.

-But I can hear his...

-DRUM PLAYS

If you listen to his kick-drum, he's not...

-DRUMMING SPEEDS UP

-..like there - he's not right on.

-Let's hear the bass in there now.

-BASS PLAYS

This was Nigel's thing, was...

just his pedalling these bass notes.

BASS PLAYS

And it's all a little out of sync.

It's not perfect.

Now that was the secret, I think, to, er, to...

to the, um...

keeping the element of Blondie in the record,

then you put in some guitar...

GUITAR PLAYS

..and...

..suddenly it starts to pull it together.

To me, the genius of Chapman is that this sounds so spontaneous,

and it wasn't at all. After doing it for an hour and playing

the same parts for two hours,

it didn't feel very free-flowing at all.

It was very mechanical and rigid feeling.

And now when I hear it, it sounds so spontaneous and effortless,

-which is great, that's the way Mike was a

-BLEEP

-genius.

Mike would walk around in circles, and sometimes he'd have

a stopwatch and then he'd say, "Why is that ending so long?

"Why is the intro so long?

"Why does it take so long for the vocals to come in?"

# I heard your mother now she's going out the door

# Did she go to work or just go to the store?

# All those things she said I told you to ignore... #

And when the vocals did come in, it was Debbie's aggressive

and unladylike delivery that made people wake up and listen.

You have to really drive for some kind of forceful

emotional content, you know.

Because you can just actually

just sing technically

and just be a technical singer and it would be fine.

But he was always saying, "Oh, you've got to put something in it.

-"Put something in it."

-Emotional content. Bruce Lee.

Emotional content.

Thank you, Bruce.

VOCAL TRACK: # If I don't get your calls, then everything goes wrong

# I want to tell you something you've known all along

# Don't leave me hanging on the telephone... #

That's the emotional part.

Mike wasn't happy with the way the end of the song sounded

and added his own voice.

-SINGS ALONG TO TRACK

-# Oh, woh woh. #

So, and they're all looking at me going, "Are you sure, Mike?"

And I said, "It'll work."

# Woh, hang up and run to me

# Oh, woh woh woh, run to me. #

The song needed to come to a climax...

# Oh, woh woh! #

..and suddenly it was like, "That's it."

Mike was beginning to get the band working to his methodical style,

but he still had a way to go.

He was very hands-on in arrangements.

He was a guitar player. He helped with the total creative process.

He wasn't just in the control room ordering pizza.

Mike would be completely do it over and over and over

until it gets exactly right,

so we'd be like, "Man, wasn't that good enough?"

It was more based on our musicianship and Mike took

it to a whole other level of meticulousness, where we were

doing stuff over and over again to make it really precise and perfect.

In Blondie, everyone's so stubborn, everyone's headstrong

and stubborn, no-one takes orders.

And it was the first time we... anyone ever remotely had the nerve

to question anything we'd done.

Not that we were right, but we were convinced we were right.

Here he is coming in and telling us, you know,

"You have to go to school.

"You really have to go to school, you know."

And I'm glad he did. I'm really glad he did.

I learnt so much.

Blondie, it seems, were at a point where

they had to either give up or they had to go all the way for this

sort of pop perfection that they'd always really aspired to.

And again, every band in that little world,

regardless of what they'll say, wanted a big hit.

We all dreamed of it.

The band was living and rehearsing in a loft on the Bowery

in a derelict district of the city

and Debbie and Chris had now been together as a couple

for over four years.

So this was their loft.

Debbie, Chris, Jimmy, I think Gary Valentine lived in the building.

You know, it probably wasn't palatial,

but I think the fact of living in a communal setting was probably

very helpful to a band, you know,

coming together and making music together.

And they were making New York music.

The New York grime ingredient, er...

There was enough of that in each of the tracks through the playing.

I think Clem and, er, and Frankie and certainly Chris

with his guitar parts,

added New York into those tracks,

and Debbie sounds like Debbie, you know,

she doesn't sound like any other singer,

which was such a blessing because, you know,

how often do you get to record a singer

who is instantly identifiable?

Er, and she represented, er, New York.

And a New York which was then often a dangerous place to be.

Crime was escalating, not in the Village, in the whole city,

not just especially the Village.

It was, er, escalating and people were afraid.

It looked like Dresden after the bombing or something like that.

I guess, in retrospect, it's very romantic to people now, too,

and there is a kind of freedom involved with living

on the fringes of this decaying society, too.

There was kind of no future in New York in the '70s -

a lot of stores were closed up, there were lots of empty store fronts.

You could see lines of people

lined up to buy their, er...

..drug of choice.

There was a lot of street crime.

We were frequently getting held up and stuff, you know.

Yeah. I got held up several times.

1970s New York could be violent, but that didn't deter the celebrity pack

from exploring the mean streets of the City -

people such as Andy Warhol and Mick Jagger,

Tom Waits and Allen Ginsberg,

who went in search of the thrill of danger

and other like-minded revellers.

I am the night life.

It all started with one discotheque, then more and more and more.

I live everywhere. I live within you.

People have more energy to have a good time.

I come to the discos to absorb an energy -

to...emit a positive energy

that is happening in New York and the world.

Andy Warhol was not decadent.

Was it a racy time?

Depends on what you mean by racy time.

It was a fun time.

I thought Allen Ginsberg and Warhol

and all the others who gave Greenwich Village a wonderful

ambience and name, so to speak,

so that people were drawn here.

I happened to live in the Village.

You would see the most famous artists,

the most famous New York musicians and the best fashion designers

all hanging around with other assorted characters.

So things were more unified.

Now it's very industry, you know -

music industry, fashion industry,

but...then it was a more creative community.

But it was a creative community that found it hard to accept a band

fronted by a woman, and a woman who also wrote explicit lyrics.

I think it annoyed me

when I was...when I was growing up

that, you know, that I was expected

to, you know, raise a family and be the woman, be the wife.

And it didn't particularly appeal to me,

and that I might not be particularly good at it.

All they talk about is her looks and how she's ageing

and how beautiful she was, but the fact is

she's an incredible lyricist, and it's very rare that people go

out of their way to even talk about the lyrics and it's insane.

Oh, the first album was Look Good In Blue.

"I could give you some head and shoulders to lie on," you know.

It's like, she never shied away from saying anything risque.

She was going to follow you downtown.

If she doesn't hang around you, bad things are going to happen.

Or you'll rip her to shreds, like,

if you're jealous you're going to rip the other girl to shreds.

That's quite a statement, you know.

It's not like, "Oh, I feel so bad." It's like, "I'm going to get you!"

And, yeah, she was very aggressive.

# Stand tough for the beast of America! #

Even nearly 40 years later, a younger generation of performers

feel that Debbie broke down doors by being candid about her feelings.

Aja Volkman sings with LA band Nico Vega.

That predatorial thing is totally inspiring, you know,

for a woman to be able to go out and get what she wants

and not be afraid of her sexuality and her beauty, and not be

intimidated by it and, also, not to feel like she's threatening people.

Debbie and Chris were newly in love

so there was probably a lot of sexy thoughts going around.

You know it was cool to be raunchy in punk rock.

Everybody liked that.

I think that's what men love about women, you know, is that they

can create life and they're, you know, seductive and beautiful,

and it's like, you know, our species is...it's designed that way.

You know, women are supposed to attract you

and pull you in and make you want to stay.

Debbie got a lot of flack for her overt sexuality, which is...

Ridiculous.

..ridiculous, because she was so tame by modern standards.

That sexuality was very evident on Picture This.

Track three - Picture This.

When Debbie showed me the lyrics, I thought, "Whoa!"

This was something she'd obviously lived through, you know,

that she was singing about an event in her life,

and I guess she was watching Chris shower.

I wouldn't have wanted to watch Chris shower but, er,

obviously Debbie enjoyed it.

# Picture this, a day in December

# Picture this, freezing cold weather

# You got clouds on your lids and you'd be on the skids

# If it weren't for your job at the garage

# If you could only oh-oh... #

You could come in with a song and just go, you know,

here's Picture This...

..which are the chords, but if you come in,

if you put this on those chords...

HEAVY REVERB

..it sounds different.

It was Mike's experience as a guitarist that helped him

get the very best out of the band's guitarists Frank and Chris,

however long it took!

As we built on this thing,

the sensitivity of the song came into focus,

and then we add some guitars to it.

God! That must have taken so damn long to do.

I mean, it sounds very precise and refined.

And, you know, I just play a lot more casually than that.

But I do like the guitar break.

And this beautiful solo like a waterfall effect here.

# All I want is 20-20 vision

# A total portrait with no omissions

# All I want is a vision of you... #

And then she's back to it.

# If you can picture this

# A day in December

# Picture this, freezing cold weather

# You've got clouds on your lids... #

The lyric to this day, to me, is elusive and beautiful,

and it's such an important part of the Parallel Lines experience,

and it all came from this,

this amazing girl who could, you know,

sell ice to the Eskimos.

But now the band had to concentrate more on selling their new sound

to a world audience who thought of them, if at all,

as a punk band with attitude.

But their then-manager had other ideas,

as they discovered at a photo session.

We had the concept of being in front of these black and white stripes.

Nobody wanted to smile. It was punk rock.

And then our erstwhile manager said,

"Why don't you all take a picture smiling?"

So everybody took one shot smiling,

and then he, you know, unbeknownst to us, used those on the cover.

I just hated that posed album cover.

It looked like it was designed by management

and put together by marketing, and it was just awful.

I don't think you'll ever hear a boy complain about that album cover,

except maybe the boys who were on the album cover.

But part of it was that it presented the personality of the band

in such an appealing way,

because they're wearing their matching suits,

it's very Beatlesque, and the idea of Debbie Harry in the middle of it

preening, as if to say, "Yeah, look what I've got,

"look at my harem around me."

That was an image that pretty much everybody loved.

It's an eye-catching record, it's a classic cover

that could be an Andy Warhol piece of art by itself.

It could be a Campbell soup can,

but it's Parallel Lines.

As a result of her artistic and unpredictable

but always confident and individual style,

Debbie was now fast becoming a fashion icon.

Debbie's wearing a tiger dress which she actually made herself.

I think it's some kind of seat-cover fabric that she found cheaply,

and she made a dress out of it, which was very dramatic.

Debbie just came walking across the street from me, towards me,

and I took a couple of pictures and she looks absolutely stunning.

A lot of people really think it's one of their favourite pictures.

because she just looks so good and she's kinda got this wet T-shirt on,

you know, which is very sexy.

Photographer Roberta Bayley was also at Coney Island that day

shooting with Debbie for one of the film-like cartoons the band made

for PUNK Magazine, telling fantasy stories of life in New York City.

That day, Debbie was cast as Beach Bunny

in Mutant Monster Beach Party!

She's sort of wearing these really ripped-off cut-off jeans,

and I think a one-shoulder tank top.

She had an idea of the character and the look.

Debbie's punk style continues to inspire fashion designers

nearly 40 years later.

I think it's this bad-ass attitude to everything.

Everybody wants to make a statement,

and I think it's an amazing feeling when you know that

you are limitless, so that's what is so attractive in the punk movement.

I think punks were incredibly brave heroic individuals,

who didn't really care what people thought about them.

It was highlighting the idea of creativity, highlighting the idea

of individuality, and also was very critical of the status quo,

so it was both a political and an aesthetic movement.

So many designers have been using it, reusing it all the time,

recycling punk in their collections.

I hope my dresses are talking for themselves about punk.

The track Pretty Baby reflects Debbie's interest in the movies,

though it is not about her but about another rising superstar of the day.

Track Five - Pretty Baby

MUSIC: "Pretty Baby" by Blondie

# Eyes that tell me

# Incense and peppermints

# Your looks are larger than life... #

That song was written for Brooke Shields.

I think Debbie wrote that inspired by Brooke and her beauty

and, you know, the fact that she was a girl coming of age

and stardom, you know, and all of that.

Pretty Baby was child star Brooke Shield's break-out performance.

To date, she has made nearly 40 films.

We met her when she was, what, 12 or something...13?

-Yeah, she was a baby...

-She was very sweet.

..but she had this complete, you know,

she was portrayed as having the sexuality, you know.

Well, she's in practically every shot of the film.

That song is just so pop to me.

It's just that feel, it's...it's that...

HE PLAYS "PRETTY BABY" BASS LINE

All that stuff, you know.

It's very ABBA.

# Pretty baby... #

I just thought what an amazing melody.

An absolutely breathtaking melody.

I remember I put that bass line in.

HE HUMS "PRETTY BABY" BASS LINE

# I fell in love with you

# Pretty baby

# I fell in love with you

# Hey, oh, oh, oh. #

It's just so pop, I get goose bumps, I get chills.

I do.

Pretty Baby was an out-and-out pop song.

With Mike's help, the band had broken away from their punk roots

and, in doing so, alienated many of their fans.

But was the new album going to find a new audience?

Parallel Lines was the most foolish album anybody ever made.

You're trying to build your sound,

you're trying to build an image for yourself.

This band is this sound.

And what do you do for your breakthrough album?

You just disperse it and do a little jazz and a little reggae

and a little disco.

"You added disco to it?"

Even though we were very diverse, there were certain threads

that connected people up, you know, and so Nigel was there with his,

you know, Brit pop sensibilities that Clem was very attuned to.

I'm an English guy who grew up on the greatest bands in the world.

Right after the Beatles came,

the next day, I got a guitar and a Beatle wig.

Frankie was, er...loved The Stones, I loved the Stones.

In high school, in particular, I would like to really chill out

with jazz, and so I listened to a lot of jazz.

It's funny that to those of us in the rest of the country,

Parallel Lines seemed like such a New York record,

because there were so many different kinds of pop music in it,

and that all these songs could thrive together on one album

was really innovative and really mind-blowing.

One of the most unashamedly pop songs on the album was Sunday Girl.

Its peaches-and-cream lyrics and Romantic inspiration would

have been seen as an act of pure treason by the CBGB's punk faithful.

Track Nine - Sunday Girl.

HE PLAYS "SUNDAY GIRL" RIFF

The Phil Spector Be My Baby Hal Blaine riff

is the beginning of Sunday Girl, which is like...

HE PLAYS "SUNDAY GIRL" DRUM PATTERN

MUSIC: "Sunday Girl" by Blondie

I remember Chris wrote the lyric and I was really impressed

when I read it, you know,

and Chris, "Hey, the handwriting, what do you think of this?"

I said, "Jesus, 'cold as ice cream and still as sweet',

"that's beautiful."

Chris and his then-girlfriend Debbie maintain

the song is about their pet cat.

It was about the cat, whose name was Sunday Man,

and he ran away when we were on tour, and it was very tragic.

-And...

-Yeah.

He was a nice cat.

He was a great character. He was, you know, a funny little...

a funny little man.

But keyboardist Jimmy Destri says it's really a love song

and not about a cat at all.

It's not about the cat. It's not about the cat.

That's a cool, you know, brush-off by them saying...

Chris wrote it to Debbie, of course, you know, yeah.

It was really a beautiful song.

# When I saw you again in the summertime

# If your love was as sweet as mine

# I could be Sunday's girl... #

Overall, the band was now accepting Producer Mike Chapman's

working methods, but when it came to the song 11:59,

guitarist Nigel Harrison had had enough.

Track seven - 11:59.

MUSIC: "11:59" by Blondie

Mike was suddenly, "Don't go up here, stay down there.

"Clem, don't do this, watch it on that part."

There was all these instructions coming at us.

And that to me was like an act of war,

because it's like, "This guy is nuts,"

cos by this time it's, like, take 22.

-And I had my meltdown and I said, "Are you

-BLEEP

-crazy?"

I just... I just...I lost it.

But the rebellious Nigel was about to be won over.

I do remember the turning point was when Mike sat us down

and said, "Look, what we're doing here is we're making records.

"We're making records. We're not documenting a live performance."

11:59 was written by the band's keyboardist Jimmy Destri.

One of Jimmy's best songs too.

Jimmy had a particular style of writing.

A lyric about alienation, I guess, you know.

Looking back on my, you know, little alienated bits of life, you know.

It's about late-night club life and the sort of, you know,

isolation, being in the crowd and being isolated

and, you know, posing and all that,

very, you know, very New Yorkish.

# Today could be the end of me

# It's 11:59

# And I want to stay alive. #

I can even smell the air in New York at the time, you know,

taste the food we were eating and the drugs we were doing.

By 1978, disco was on the rise

with the Bee Gees' Saturday Night Fever dominating the charts

and the New York underground scene was shifting from punk to new wave -

"punk lite".

This is how New York sounded.

You're frustrated because you've got to take the subway,

it's crowded, it's dirty, it's dangerous,

so that's got to come through your pen and your guitar,

and that's what you hear in all this music.

Everybody in Blondie was a real New York character.

Chris was somebody that you could imagine

being in Tin Pan Alley in 1939, you know.

And the same with Debbie, she was like

a broad-cracking wise.

So, yeah, they were like real New York characters.

And these New York characters were about to deal

a game-changing blow to the punk-versus-disco battle.

It was called Heart Of Glass.

We played him everything we'd got, and then he said, "Anything more?"

And then, you know, I think Chris said, "Well, we have this old song,

"you know, that we don't use because we've never been able

"to really finish it the way we wanted it to be,"

and that was Heart Of Glass.

Bob Gruen had heard Blondie perform the fledgling hit at CBGBs

the previous year.

And I remember clearly having a feeling,

this is bigger than this club, this is going to go out into theatres,

it's going to go around the world.

And I never had that feeling for anybody else down there.

MUSIC: "Once I Had A Love (The Disco Song)" by Blondie

It was now up to Mike to make this half-formed song into a hit,

and he and Clem Burke were already thinking "disco".

Track Ten - Heart Of Glass.

# Once I had a love and it was a gas

# Soon turned out had a heart of glass

# Seemed like the real thing only to find

# Mucho mistrust

# Love's gone behind... #

The way the song was recorded was a click track,

just a little beat from a little tiny Rowland rhythm box.

We thought we were kind of doing a sort of take off

on Kraftwerk, dance music, experimenting.

Heart Of Glass was a nightmare to record,

because it was an idea beyond the technology at the time.

My influence, once again, I think is felt on that record with

my sort of homage to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack.

I started playing the disco dance beat from Night Fever,

the Bee Gees record, which I loved.

To help Clem lay down the drum tracks, Mike brought in

a piece of then cutting-edge technology - a drum machine.

So I brought this thing in once we had decided

that we were going to disco this song up a little.

They got the click track going and they did Clem -

it was like a Meccano set, they put bits and pieces in it,

so Clem did the bass drum.

The kick drum and the drum machine together.

All the way through the track. then the snare drum, then the hi-hat.

Then we built the whole thing up.

Then we did the tom breaks, the tom-toms,

all the different tom breaks.

And then we added the cymbals.

And it literally took days.

Put the bass.

And this is where I had a major run-in with Nigel.

He wasn't playing...stiff enough.

He wasn't like...

That was the disco link. The octave thing.

And he said, "I have to play that?"

And I said, "Well, you don't have to, but it would be nice,

"if you don't mind!"

So after our run-in, he agreed to do it.

And suddenly the whole thing was starting to feel good,

so then we added some guitars.

35 years later, Debbie and Chris

are reunited with the original multi-track recording.

That's the Space. This is probably... I know what that is.

All those weird sounds are the Roland space echo or chorus echo.

I can't remember. It's an old box. They are still out there!

All those jungle noises were Chris doing his "waaah" with his e-bow,

I guess, and then...

HE PLAYS "HEART OF GLASS" GUITAR RIFF

Now that was the hook in the song.

Frank was insanely good on that song.

Once they had the drums and guitars in place, Jimmy and Mike

then had to make sure the keyboard tracks fit precisely too.

We didn't have Midi in those days.

So all of these keyboard parts, we had to do these in sections.

Mike and I had to do on the one - one, two, three, four.

KEYBOARD PART PLAYS

Through the whole song.

We were all fighting, constantly.

But I said, "No, keep going, guys, cos we're getting there,

"we're getting there."

So finally, we had all the track pieces in place.

And we had this wonderful, let's hear it now

with the drums in there...

DRUM TRACK JOINS MUSIC

Suddenly, the guitar gave it the swing.

The drums were sort of...

There was a little bit of Keith Moon in there for Clem,

and then all we needed was Debbie to come in and sing.

And when Debbie put her voice on it,

she sang it in that little sweet singsong voice,

and the whole thing just... came together.

# Once I had a love and it was a gas... #

I didn't realise that Debbie was actually going to sing this

in this head voice, this..

And there she is out there, like lullabying to us,

and I thought, "Wow, that's so cool." Cos up till then,

she'd probably been going, "Once I had a love," in full voice.

I said, "Oh, that's great, this is beautiful, it's so dreamlike."

# Seemed like the real thing but I was so blind... #

Heart Of Glass was, at the time, there was dance music around

and disco music. Even though we did that song as a, you know,

it was a tongue-in-cheek version, it wasn't really supposed to be

straight-ahead disco for real. It was like fake disco,

and that sort of seemed like it had possibilities.

But the pure punk fans clearly didn't get the tongue-in-cheek subtleties.

Right after Parallel Lines was released,

and before it really blew up, we played this, like, farewell gig

at CGBGs, because we knew we couldn't come back.

There were lines around the block. And I was walking up to the stage,

because that's what you had to do at CBGBs, and this guy comes up to me,

grabs me, he goes, "Your disco album sucks!"

And I was like, I guess it's going to be a hit,

because we've finally broken out of the little world.

I don't think any of us had any idea of how big it was going to be.

# Once I had a love and it was a gas

# Soon turned out

# Big pain in the ass

The album was released in 1978

and has to date sold around 20 million copies.

Heart Of Glass was number one in 16 countries

and became one of Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

The band is still touring today and has recorded seven more albums

since Parallel Lines.

Except for drummer Clem Burke, they all still live

in New York City, and still feel that city's energy.

Just walking around, you know, I like it.

It's still here, the energy is still here.

I mean, you know, the money thing is...

It's a bit of a drag, you know.

New York City went from "don't go there" to "you can't afford it,"

like that, in a heartbeat.

I think it was the early '80s when I realised that corporations

were moving in. They were seeing something that, you know,

they could make money from.

There's still bits and pieces that some people just think are grimy

and I see as beauty, as a masterpiece.

The streets are not the same.

The streets are not full of colourful characters,

you know, like it's pretty... It could be anywhere.

One place where music can still be heard is oddly enough

the original CBGBs on the Bowery, which was turned

into a fashion outlet by the entrepreneur John Varvatos in 2008.

There's a history here,

and there was a history with this space that talked to people.

And it was a very important part of people's life.

I'm not trying to recreate that by any means,

I'm just trying to preserve it to some degree and keep that

energy alive that's been here on the Bowery for many, many years.

John keeps the music alive with regular concerts at the shop.

Vintage Trouble is one of the bands that have played for him.

There something about the space and something about the history

and something about those walls that speaks to them.

And I can't put my hand on it

and I can't get my arms around it, but I feel it every time.

I have goose bumps every time we do a show here.

Much of the Bowery neighbourhood has been redeveloped,

and its spirit and passion tamed,

but Parallel Lines remains to tell the story of a band held together

by their love affair with the music and the city that inspired it.

# One way or another

# I'm gonna find you

# I'm gonna get ya, get ya, get ya, get ya... #

It does sum up the time, but it's not just that.

It's that people like the music, they like the sentiment,

they like what it says.

They had really smart lyrics, in the same way that,

you know, the Great American Songbook writers did.

Cole Porter and Gershwin, you know.

I guess, you know, we tried to make it about real experience,

incorporating my little world, my own personal experiences.

The best thing is when I hear from kids who say,

you know, it helped me get through my teenage years, you know.

I was having such a hard time and I used to listen to the music,

and that's very moving, you know.

As a record producer, you've got to say, well,

thank God I had something to do with this,

because opportunities like that don't come along every day.

"Man doth not live on bread alone,"

and that's a reference to the arts.

It stimulates you.

It enhances your creativity.

I mean, without the arts, we might as well go back to the caves.

# I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall

# If you don't answer I'll just ring it off the wall

# I know he's there, but I just had to call

# Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

# Don't leave me hanging on the telephone

# I heard your mother now, she's going out the door

# Did she go to work or just go to the store... #