by Dick Porter
Twenty-first century Blondie (L-R): Kevin Patrick, Debbie, Chris, Clem, Leigh Foxx and Matt Katz-Bohen in Culver City, California 2010. ALBERTO E. RODRIGUEZ/GETTY IMAGES
Still rocking – Chris and Debbie at London’s Lovebox Festival, July 2011. SAMIR HUSSEIN/GETTY IMAGES
Chapter 12
No One Can Say We Didn’t Hold Out For 15 Minutes
“We definitely didn’t come from showbiz families where we were counselled or tutored for our entire adolescent lives. We weren’t groomed for success, that’s for sure. “
Debbie Harry
When Blondie went into The Hit Factory to record their sixth studio album in late 1981, there was little in the way of unity or enthusiasm. Although Clem was happy enough to be back in action and Nigel returned to the studio in businesslike fashion, Jimmy was disappointed by the poor critical reception and minimal sales that greeted Heart On A Wall, his recent new-wave/power-pop long-player. “It was a real horrible record, for a lot of reasons – because Jimmy can’t sing for starters,” Burke observed. “I don’t think the timing was right for any of that stuff.”
Having spent much of the last two years seeking to expand their boundaries, both Debbie and Chris had reached a point where the band’s next album seemed little more than a contractual obligation. Chris’ focus was on getting his new record label, Animal, up and running, while Debbie remained engaged by the possibility of a career as an actress. Neither was bursting with fervour at the prospect of climbing back on the album/tour merry-go-round.
“I never have any difficulty making my own decisions about what thing to do next, but in the group it’s hard,” stated Deborah. “I think I really have a strong sense of what’s right. But it just seems like your mind is travelling at one rate and the physical world is travelling at another rate. The record business, God knows what rate that’s travelling at. So by the time a record comes out it’s like you’re not even there any more. The record comes out and it’s like, ‘God, I have to promote this for the next six months?’ I feel like hiring a bunch of clones to go out and do it.”
Aware that they were obliged to produce several more albums for Chrysalis, Chris quipped, “We could just improvise it … Play for 10 hours and then put it together. I’m not sure at all what it’s going to be like.”
Frankie, who’d been a peripheral figure during the making of Autoamerican, was now so far out of the loop that the sessions got under way before he realised Blondie were back in the studio. “All I know is, the record was going down without me being involved in the basic tracks, and I got the lawyer involved,” he explained afterwards. A settlement was reached before the matter got to court and Infante permitted to overdub his guitar alone, after the rest of the group had laid down their parts. While this latest development in what he saw as a campaign to marginalise him may have lodged in the guitarist’s mind, his contributions certainly didn’t. “You could play me stuff, and I could say, ‘What is that?’ I don’t even remember where I did it!”
In addition to internal rancour and lack of interest, cocaine consumption by certain members was approaching heroic levels. And, while Blondie operated within a culture where record labels were happy to lay on generous amounts of blow to aid creativity, there was plenty of self-indulgent evidence on vinyl to prove it did precisely the opposite. In any event, it was hardly likely to calm already stormy waters.
Returning for his fourth time, Mike Chapman sensed an air of finality. “I knew that we were in a different and far less accessible artistic space. And that worried me. I could tell that things were different now, and I knew that this would be the last Blondie album.”
So far as Stein was concerned, his recent experience behind the mixing desk had enhanced his appreciation of Mike’s talents. “I’ve never walked away from a record thinking it was finished, but one thing I’ve learned from producing all these other people is to let Chapman do it.”
Chrysalis was also worried about its investment’s ability to extend its run of hits. “They said, ‘Well, we hope this isn’t another album like Autoamerican,’” recalled Clem, who shot back with, “What do you mean, you hope there’s not gonna be two number one singles on the album?”
“Both Debbie and Chris came to this latest project full of doubts and fears,” said Chapman. “They seemed almost disinterested, although they put on a brave face.”
Irrespective of any misgivings, the one thing that Blondie – Chris in particular – was never short of was ideas. “This was the first album done pretty much in the studio, with very little pre-production,” he remembered. “We wanted to experiment, to stretch the limits a little. The record evolved during the session. Nigel had lots of idea tapes. ‘Orchid Club’ was a simple riff that we structured; ‘War Child’ was the same thing. I had the theme and title of ‘English Boys’.”
“I brought in a tape of ‘War Child’, and the band really jumped for that one. Chris thought it was like The Jackson Five. My other song on the album, ‘Orchid Club’, was kind of a Marvin Gaye cop,” added Nigel.
“‘Danceway’ is my little story about my band,” continued Jimmy. “Debbie said, ‘Write a song about us.’”
With sufficient ideas germinating in the studio, it was decided that only one track would be a cover version – a radical reworking of girl group The Marvelettes’ 1967 hit, ‘The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game’. The Smokey Robinson-penned song also provided the album with its name: The Hunter.
“I thought we were gonna do ‘The Hunter Gets Captured By The Game’ like The Marvelettes’ original,” Harrison observed, “but I think Chris and Mike decided they wanted it real primitive-sounding. When I hear it I keep waiting for the whole drum kit to come in.”
“I don’t think that song’s ever been covered the way we did it. We tried to get a King Kong feeling,” said Debbie. “We identified with both hunter and hunted, but obviously we were more of the hunted at that point. We were really marked for slaughter and decimated by a bunch of different people right around then.”
The Hunter continues the musical diversity of Blondie’s previous two albums, presenting an extensive range of styles. The opening track, ‘Orchid Club’, has a distinct Latin vibe that rolls into the horn-driven mariachi/calypso whimsy of ‘Island Of Lost Souls’. “The horn section that they brought in to play on ‘Island Of Lost Souls’, and whatever other tracks we used them on, they were all a bunch of junkies – Puerto Ricans that they’d come across,” Chapman recounted. “Great players – and they were all junked out of their minds. The whole session they were sweating profusely and disappearing to the bathroom and coming back. I was like, ‘Even my horn section are junkies.’”
“The difference with this album is that before we used session players for the horns, while here it’s guys off the street,” confirmed Chris.
Reflecting the eclecticism, ‘Dragonfly’ splices Debbie’s sci-fi infused lyrics to Chris’ diaphanous funk, while another Harry/Stein composition, ‘The Beast’, is a kind of ‘Rapture’ sequel that features another Debbie rap underpinned by a melange of wailing guitars and pounding drums. “That’s just a rap song about the devil,” she explains. “Going out for the night like he was just a regular guy.”
Originally recorded for that year’s James Bond movie of the same name, but passed over in favour of Sheena Easton’s theme, ‘For Your Eyes Only’ strikes a suitably expansive tone, with Deborah’s lyrics imparting an appropriate air of mystery and adventure.
Chris’ ‘English Boys’ is a gentle, synth-infused ballad topped by Debbie’s lyrics which vaguely hint at an antiwar message. ‘War Child’ likewise sees Blondie exploring the field of human conflict, its lyrics citing both the PLO and Khmer Rouge as the track lurches in a direction that Giorgio Moroder might have propelled Blondie in. ‘Little Caesar’ brings back the horns for a sultry shuffle, while ‘Danceaway’ – one of only two Jimmy Destri-credited tracks on the disc – showcases the keyboardist’s sixties chops across an upbeat slice of Motown-infused
pop. His other song, on an album dominated by Chris and Debbie’s material, ‘(Can I) Find The Right Words (To Say)’, is less engaging as its slightly disjointed arrangement is made jarring by Deborah’s strident delivery of her lyric.
While The Hunter fulfilled its brief of encompassing a wide range of musical styles, it lacked the sense of new ground being broken that energised Blondie’s previous albums. Despite this, Nigel remained upbeat. “The challenge now is just to keep growing,” he observed. “This last album we definitely grew, and I know we’re capable of more. There’s no way we can ever backtrack.”
“The Hunter is the composite album. Every phase that Blondie’s been through manifests itself on this disc,” insisted Clem. “It was the first time I’d ever felt confident, I really thought I was at the top of my game, playing well. We made a good record, in a lot of ways.”
“The entire project was a struggle,” countered Chapman. “Nothing went well. Chris was not well. Debbie was not happy. Jimmy had some really bad problems. Clem was complaining about everything. Nigel seemed worried about everything. Frankie, of course, was gone … The wonderful world of clever and intensely catchy pop songs had turned to hell.”
With The Hunter recorded but without a firm release date, Chris refocused his energies on Animal Records, the label he initiated at the urging of Walter Steding which had secured distribution through Chrysalis. Initially, Animal had been devised as a means of representing the post-punk scene on vinyl, providing an outlet for downtown friends and artists and Chris’ own productions, pledging to restore “loudness and craziness” to the “staid and conservative” music scene.
Another key factor in convincing Stein to helm his own label dated back to the winter of 1980, when he produced a demo for The Lounge Lizards and had to deal with the ignorance of record company A&R departments before the group were finally signed by EG Records. It took two years for Chris, helped by Jeff Aldrich, Chrysalis’Vice President of A&R in LA, to get the right deal for Animal, demanding that its artists sign one-off deals and keep their own publishing.
Originally, Chris was going to call his label ‘Skull’, but Chrysalis was less than keen. “The Chrysalis people thought ‘Skull Records’ was kinda down, and I could see it was a little limited,” he conceded. ‘Animal’ came from the notion that all record companies are corporate beasts. Although approved by Chrysalis as a kind of vanity project to keep one of its stars happy, the label’s subsequent success would prove its merit – although Chris financed many activities himself and deals were often done on the basis of a handshake.
“Chrysalis were really resistant to the concept at first,” said Stein. “They really wanted to have options on the artists and I wanted to do something more modern. But at least they were open to an alternative label approach, because they’d had the 2-Tone thing and also Takoma, the obscure little folk label they picked up.”
Operating out of Shep Gordon’s Alive Enterprises suite, Animal’s office was run by former head of EG management Ed Strait (as suggested by Robert Fripp). “There are still all the same problems in any big sort of corporate monstrosity,” stated Chris. “But for an outfit like them to cater to The Gun Club when they aren’t signed to them and could go to another label in a second, that’s a plus. They really have been open.”
Animal’s first high-profile release was Iggy Pop’s Zombie Birdhouse album. Iggy’s recording contract with Arista had come to an end after his main champion at the label, Charles Levison, took a new post at WEA. Chris agreed to release the next album, advancing $50,000 to Iggy, who spent six weeks writing material with guitarist Rob Duprey at the latter’s home studio on Sixth Avenue. At this time, the former Stooge was living in an approximation of domesticity in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn with his girlfriend, Esther. With Chris producing and playing bass and Clem providing drums for the sessions at Blank Tapes – Bob Blank’s studio lifeline for the downtown scene, particularly ZE artists – the album came in under budget before May 1982 was out.
After having to bow to commercial demands on his Arista albums, Iggy seemed to view the sessions as a creative catharsis, eschewing any energised rock’n’roll in favour of the dark experimentation that suffused The Idiot. Taking further cues from his Bowie period, Iggy’s lyrics are evidently influenced by the Burroughs/Bowie cut-up technique and often slip into a form of free association. It’s an album of bold gambles, some of which work and others don’t, but Chris could have done a lot worse than to launch his new record label with ‘the Mighty Pop’, who described the album as “a solid piece of work”.
“I think Ig really got pushed into this American mainstream rock’n’roll thing the last couple of albums; I just wanted to see him be really free to go crazy,” Stein explained. “When we did his vocal sessions, he really was just totally crazy … the line about ‘zombie birdhouse’ was just completely improvised … when you listen to the record you can hear some hesitation after ‘zombie’ and suddenly it’s ‘birdhouse!’ – like, ‘There it is, figure it out! … I didn’t even know what Zombie Birdhouse was until he came back from Haiti with a photo of the club … When Debbie and I saw that we thought maybe Zombie Birdhouse was this little club of lggy’s brain where he goes to!”
Summing up his Iggy experience now, Chris says, “It was really ironic that, at the time, Iggy couldn’t get a decent deal, so he did a record for my very casual company; there were no contracts. Then the very next record that he did was the one with ‘Real Wild Child’ on it, and that one really elevated him.”
Former Punk artist/editor John Holmstrom, who designed the Animal logo, commented, “Chris isn’t stupid! I think he’s the only guy from Blondie that will land on his feet. If some bigger company picks up, say, Iggy, he’d love it … Chris is open to that. I just hope he can afford to continue like this. I mean, it’s brave of Chrysalis with Blondie going out the window [in terms of declining sales] and Pat Benatar on the way out the window – what else do they have? Jethro Tull?”
Zombie Birdhouse was followed by a stream of idiosyncratic releases on Animal from friends such as Walter Steding, Snuky Tate, Tav Falco’s Panther Burns and James Chance, representing the original No Wave. The next landmark Animal release saw Chris producing Jeffrey Lee Pierce and his Gun Club, emerging with the hauntingly atmospheric Miami. It was both fitting and touchingly loyal that Pierce should get his big break courtesy of Chris. He had been a fervent Blondie devotee since witnessing the first West Coast gigs in early 1977, concealing himself in a shopping trolley to sneak into their hotel and earning an appointment as their fan club president. For years he dyed his hair blond in a dishevelled imitation of Debbie’s, even down to the hard-to-reach dark part at the back.
The Gun Club were a band out of their time and out of their minds. They never got full credit for fearlessly creating a template which others later capitalised upon, diluting the original concept. Jeffrey plugged into the dark main artery of the blues itself, a demonic mess of paradoxes belching out disarming beauty or apocalyptic rage. While much of LA’s punk scene took inspiration from the usual three-chord sources, Pierce gouged much deeper into America’s roots music: blues, folk, jazz and country, tossed in a blender full of drugs and liquor then taken to hell and back.
Jeffrey was born in El Monte, near downtown LA – one of the few parts of the city to bear a resemblance to New York’s funkier neighbourhoods. He was a natural born rebel, dressing glam-punk-pimp-cowboy style. His creative passions were ignited by Blondie, who became a fixation for the rest of his life, Pierce often going dewy-eyed at the mention of Debbie’s name. He combined and conflated the bad side of Jim Morrison without the sex, the unpredictability of Iggy Pop without the self-mutilating gymnastics and, sometimes, the drugged ruin of Elvis without the rhinestones. Despite (or maybe because of) his personal dissolution, Jeff’s voice could send shivers down the spine.
Also featuring drummer Terry Graham, guitarist Ward Dobson and bassist Rob Ritter, The Gun Club thrashed around LA’s club circuit until
they made an album for Bob Biggs’ Slash Records in 1981. They speed-recorded The Fire Of Love in two days, emerging with an awesome distillation of raw blues, rockabilly and punk, topped by Jeffrey’s evangelical screams and harangues. Its impact and Jeffrey’s established Blondie connection secured a deal with Animal Records, an association that would lead to The Gun Club releasing more records than anyone else on Chris’ roster.
“In LA, there’s like this real hierarchy of coolness that’s supposed to be real important and they were always in and out of it,” Stein observed. “Jeff sort of went through all this stuff fast that we also went through in Blondie. I was just intrigued that there was this bunch of young kids in LA who were into this stuff I was into in the sixties – fuckin’ old blues.”
Miami was recorded at Blank Tapes during June 1982, with Chris turning in a powerfully atmosphere-drenched production. Determined not to allow contractual restraints to prevent her involvement, Debbie provided backing vocals credited to ‘D. H. Laurence Jr.’ on the contagious ‘Watermelon Man’, which also featured Chris on bongos and a Walter Steding violin contribution.
“I’ve known Jeffrey a long time, since Blondie first went to LA,” Chris explained. “When we met he was a very sad person; he’s a little happier now that he’s found what he wants to do. He was like this lost kid hanging around us seeking this thing, but he didn’t know what it was. He used to send me tapes; the only reason we did ‘Hanging On The Telephone’ was because Jeff sent me a tape of it.”
Chris’ production drew criticism from those who were hoping for a re-creation of the abrasive punk attack of the band’s live shows. Today he remains justifiably proud of the album, saying, “The Jeffrey saga is seemingly a long one. I have gotten flak from Gun Club members who played on Miami for not having a ‘hard rock’ enough approach to the production. I don’t recall any of them voicing concerns at the time. Jeffrey and I spent a lot of time thinking about what the record should ultimately sound like. He really wanted to get away from a standard punk rock approach and reach into the world of so-called ‘normal’ music by making more references to country, et cetera. Jeff was the one who brought in a pedal steel guitar player. I know for sure he liked the record.”