“For me, it was about dancing,” Harry added. “When I was a kid, my heroes were 60-year-old Black men - Bukka White, Howlin’ Wolf. “The whole anti-disco movement smacked of class war to me,” Stein said. Not for the first time, Blondie was accused of “selling out” (that was once a thing) by embracing trendy dance music. 1, “Heart of Glass,” a thumping, synthesized, drum-machined disco track in which Harry finds herself “lost inside adorable illusion” and “riding high on love’s true bluish light,” a poetic summary of romantic ambivalence. I guess I felt it was a compliment.”Ĭhapman produced the band’s first No. “The first time Mike saw us play live,” Harry recalled, “he said afterward that he’d never laughed so much in his life. That creative relationship, however, was not without drama. “It was like the Beatles getting together with George Martin,” Stein said. The songwriting took a leap, with key contributions from Destri, Harrison and Infante, right as Blondie paired with Mike Chapman, a sharp Aussie producer who’d had glam rock hits with the Sweet and Nick Gilder.
#The ramones lirycs mod#
The guys in the band - the keyboardist Jimmy Destri, the bassist Nigel Harrison, the drummer Clem Burke, the guitarist Frank Infante and Stein - perfected a look: dark suits, skinny ties, mod hair. But the material improved in subsequent years, especially with “Dreaming,” one of the best songs ever written about being young, broke and fabulous in the big city. When they released their first album in 1976, Harry was 31 and Stein was almost 27, which was ancient per punk standards. Naysayers at CBGB who were unimpressed with the band used the derisive nickname Blandie, and they were relegated to a perpetual opening act. Much of this narrative becomes clear in “Against the Odds.” The first of the eight discs features early home recordings and demos of the band from 1974, all of them tentative and uncertain of style. So about those missteps Harry alluded to: Blondie’s backstage distractions included fights with the band’s manager and accountant, exploitative contracts, internal band squabbles that evolved into lawsuits, and for Harry and Stein, drug addiction. So it has a lot to offer,” she added with a laugh. It can knock you down, or it can make you want to fight harder. But Harry admits that at first, criticism “really floored me. The two share many qualities, including hard-shelled cynicism and a capacity for not giving two figs about criticism. Theo Kogan, the singer of the punk band Lunachicks, said she saw Harry as part of a triumvirate of 1970s tough girls that also included Olivia Newton-John’s leather-encased transformation at the end of “Grease” and Pinky Tuscadero, the motorcycle-riding, butch-but-femme character on the hit show “Happy Days.” “They showed that you can be a glamorpuss and also be tough,” Kogan said in a phone interview.Ī clever and stylish couple, Stein and Harry became the Nick and Nora Charles of CBGB, ground zero for New York’s rock underground. “And I painted a bathroom once,” he added, deadpan. “I was on welfare,” he said from his Lower Manhattan loft. When he was 17 and a self-described hippie weirdo, his band opened for the Velvet Underground, and he resolved to never get a job.
Stein, like Harry, had graduated with an art degree, and he had the advantage of growing up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, as the only child of intellectual immigrant parents who met as members of the Communist Party. Her next band, the Stilletos, was an almost vaudevillian girl group whose set included a song called “Wednesday Panties,” and when the Warhol associate Eric Emerson brought his roommate Chris Stein to see the band, he was entranced by Harry. Harry sang in a short-lived, bucolic hippie band called Wind in the Willows, and was “sort of a hippie” herself, she said. “Music was always a huge, haunting influence,” she said. She worked as a model, a secretary for the BBC, a Playboy bunny and a clerk at a head shop.
Harry was raised by adoptive parents in Hawthorne, N.J., but frequently wandered off to Manhattan, and moved into a $64-a-month apartment on St.
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