Blondie, Parallel Lives

by Dick Porter

  The reformed quintet reconvened in May, making their first live appearance since 1982 at a private showcase in a midtown studio. “When word got out about the show, the place was packed with a couple of hundred people, and the queue ran down the stairs,” recounted Gary. “It was exciting to play again, and with a full band. The crowd loved us and the next day we headed to Washington for our first real gig.”

  This was the HFStival, which took place on May 31 at the RFK Memorial sports stadium, where Blondie shared a bill headlined by The Prodigy and including another reformed outfit, Echo And The Bunnymen. This was followed by two further festival appearances in Texas and Connecticut. “Those went well,” remarked Valentine. “Everyone liked it, we were getting along fine, and the word was, ‘OK, work on some songs, and we’ll bring you back in a couple of months.’”

  As Debbie was in Europe with The Jazz Passengers during the summer, it was December by the time Gary returned to New York to resume working with Blondie. However, when he arrived he was informed by Chris that he didn’t think he was right for the live shows. “We tried plugging him in, we did like three shows with him and we tried working with him but he’s not a full-time musician, he’s a writer,” Stein explained. (In addition to penning his rock’n’roll memoir, New York Rocker, in 2002, as an author Gary Lachman would write a string of books on the occult, consciousness and assorted esoterica.)

  “I left disgusted, but later thought better of it,” revealed Valentine. “It was fun doing those shows, but after hanging out with Debbie, Chris and Jimmy again I soon felt that touring wasn’t something I wanted to do. Later, I spoke to Chris and said it was fine.”

  Work on the album that would become No Exit began in the summer of 1998. Earlier in the year, Debbie had wrapped up her touring and acting commitments, including a pair of UK shows in late May and her reprisal of the role of Delores for James Mangold’s Copland – although the bulk of her performance failed to make the final cut. She also had a small part in the TV movie LA Johns and a leading role as an overprotective mother in the comedy-crime drama Six Ways To Sunday, which also featured Isaac Hayes.

  To begin with, work on No Exit proved difficult – initial sessions with Mike Chapman were scrapped and a further obstacle was placed in the group’s way by Frank Infante and Nigel Harrison, who sued the band in an attempt to prevent use of the name ‘Blondie’ unless the duo received remuneration. Their lawsuit proved unsuccessful and the group turned to Craig Leon to produce the disc.

  “No Exit was something that was discussed for a long time in the Nineties as Chris was recovering and, I guess, his personal situation with Debbie was resolved in one way or another and all of that,” recalls Craig. “I was always in touch, mostly with Jimmy and Clem. Whenever I went to New York, to the New Music Seminar or those kind of things, we’d go to the bar and say, ‘Yeah, we’re going to do it, we’re going to make a record,’ not thinking that it was a comeback record or anything.

  “I was going through things with Nigel and even Gary Valentine was in there, going, ‘How can it be Blondie without the people from Blondie in it?’ I said, ‘These guys just hired me to make a record; I don’t say who’s on it!’ Nigel and Frank were secondary musicians as I remember them. They were never full members of the group. Eventually, Clem came over to play on [pocket-sized Take That cutie] Mark Owen’s album, which I co-produced with John Leckie at Abbey Road in 1996. I think Simon Cowell was the A&R guy on it. I put the band together for that album, including Dave Gregory from XTC and Louis Jardin. He wanted it to be credible, with a real band with good players. Clem came over to play drums on it, then we started putting the wheels in motion to see if we could get something together. Eventually, Chris was ready to do something by 1998 and they were writing songs. So we made an arrangement with the band to do it, everything was fine and everybody agreed on it. But it was Clem who actually pushed it all through. These days, he’s usually the one who gets anything going with the outside world. He was basically the champion of the project.

  “They were originally going to make an album with everybody who’s ever worked with them as a retrospective reintroduction. Mike was going to do something. I was going to do something. Richie [Gottehrer] was in the doghouse for some unknown reason! This is another thing with Blondie: somebody is always the enemy! As it turned out, the stuff with Mike didn’t work so the stuff with me became the whole album. That’s how it actually happened.”

  Chris declared that he was pleased to be working with Leon again. “Clem and Jimmy had both done a little work with him and we didn’t have to establish a relationship, we already knew him and he’s a very crazy guy and when I finally talked to him, he was very excited and everything he said … seemed like totally the right thing,” he enthused. “This is the first record we did digitally and he’s a techno guy.”

  Despite it being more than 30 years since he played a key role in Blondie’s eponymous debut album, Craig found the group pretty much as he had left them. “There’s always this melting pot of ideas on the same song,” he observed. “It can still get pretty violent with everybody fighting for their ideas: Chris wanting it one way, Jimmy wanting something here, Clem wanting something there, and Debbie kind of serenely sitting back and saying, ‘When you guys get it together, I’m going to give you the hit melody and vocal.’ It’s all just because they all have a fabulous sense of pop history.”

  “They always quarrel, but now they have more informed and amusing quarrels than they used to,” said Glenn O’Brien. “During the recording sessions they were having a lot of fun kind of goofing on each other. I think there’s a real appreciation that’s even been enhanced because of the years where they didn’t see each other. It’s almost like they never broke up.”

  “We get on great, but it’s like brothers or sisters, or any bunch of people – there’s always some conflict,” confirmed Chris. “And the doors are always open all of the time, but they never tried to get out. I like that aspect of it, too, because everybody feels like they’re stuck together without ever testing the exit sign.”

  “It was different and it was the same in a way,” adds Craig. “As opposed to the loft in The Bowery, it was Chris’ basement in this dishevelled place on Greenwich Street in TriBeCa, which had a huge basement and the ground floor up to first floor level filled to the brim with Chris-type memorabilia, like a chair made by Giger that went up almost to the ceiling, which may have been the Captain’s seat in Alien, skeletons, all this paraphernalia scattered around the floor, dogs and cats and ghosts and whatever, masters for William Burroughs albums that he’d done there and never issued, all this kind of insane stuff. You’d be stepping over original Warhols and the dog would be pissing on them! Basically, on an economy level and because the process of making a Blondie record is quite slow, we started off working in his basement in the Addams Family house!

  “We started the same way that we would work in the past; everybody would just sit around and get little bits of ideas, then we’d build them a riff or a verse at a time, or whatever. Jimmy came in with songs that were much more intact, like ‘Maria’. The original of ‘Maria’ was basically a sampled acoustic guitar, him singing in a falsetto voice. It’s pretty much the melody line of what it ended up being, with nothing filled in. Most of their songs start in a very rudimentary way like that, and you build them up. Chris’ ones usually start out as drum patterns and bass loops. Jimmy’s were more pop songs that actually had chords and stuff on them. There was a long, long period of preproduction down there, then we went over to Electric Lady, which again is a place they know from over the years so there’s a lot of nostalgia there, and cut the drum tracks and basic tracks there, then went back to his place and finished it and [then took it] up to Chung King Studios. As it came together, it became much faster – by their standards. It still took about a year! They brought in a couple of outside players, who were very good. You could chart it out and they could just play it, once we actually had a song that Chris was happy
with. The long part, of course, was getting Chris’ guitar solos, which took quite a while.”

  One of the biggest challenges facing Leon was returning Debbie’s now jazz-orientated focus to pop music. “Getting herself comfortable with even singing in a pop style again was hard,” he admitted. “She’s having fun doing it, it’s not like she doesn’t enjoy it. It’s just totally different to what she’s been doing for the past few years, and it’s probably musically a little less interesting than the avant-garde things she’s recorded.”

  “If anything, I was impressed with the difference working with Debbie,” adds Craig. “She’d become really professional. Her writing was really fast. You’d give her the track and there’d be a little la-la melody line with maybe a couple of hook words. Then she would come back and have all her stuff written and do a couple of takes. If she’d ever want to redo anything after you’d cobbled it together from two or three takes, she might rewrite a couple of words or sing a couple of lines, but that was it. Her things were basically a couple of passes. They’re not laboured vocals. The reason that happened was because she got back to what she really loved, which was jazz, so she was now used to singing with pro players and having to come up with things that had shifting tonalities. As a result, I was really interested in developing her solo, helping her branch out; not as opposed to Blondie, but in addition to what she does with Blondie. After we did No Exit, I was trying to help her get a jazz thing together. We did get her an offer of a deal, which the management turned down. She did appear on a couple of jazz classical things that I did for Decca on an Italian film project. She was really good, really solid, no nonsense – very helpful in helping other people develop their parts and everything.”

  In keeping with the ethos that had always underpinned his creativity, Chris was determined that the album was going to be more than just a recreation of the band’s signature tropes. “We wanted to make something that picked up where we left off, doing what we think should be done now. If anything makes it sound like the old stuff it’s just that it’s the same people, the personal styles involved. We didn’t try to repeat ourselves. There’s always the approach of taking a lot of the old styles and putting it through a filter to make something new. But we’re interested in the new music not the old days,” he explained. “It’s a lot more minimal than the older stuff. The old records had that Wall of Sound/Phil Spector approach. If there’s one major difference about music in the nineties it’s the minimalism. Bands like Chic and Talking Heads were ahead of their time.” “The thing about No Exit that people missed and part of [if anyone had a negative reaction to] it is they went too far afield in their influences … stuff like the little Cajun song,” Leon observes. “Having said that, that’s what they always do. But this time they had more resources and knew them better, it’s a little less hybrid. Some of their forays into other genres are actually much closer to those genres and therefore less Blondie. That might be the only fault with their maturity, but they had some darn good songs on that album.”

  Although individually no strangers to the studio, collectively the group found that developments in production technology over the 17 years since they recorded The Hunter added a new aspect. “It’s totally different,” asserted Chris. We did a real lot of shit in the basement of my house, in my fucking grungy basement. We brought in equipment, I have a little fucked-up recording studio and we brought in extra shit and we did it. It’s a big difference. Digital versus tape was a tremendous difference. We did this thing on an Atari Radar, which is a big dedicated 24-track hard drive, basically. The difference with that is, it’s very good for capturing inspiration and not having to do something over and over again.”

  It enabled the band to be more spontaneous in the studio while also allowing them to review recordings with greater flexibility. “It’s the difference between not having to repeat yourself because you can cut and paste,” Stein explains. “You can do a guitar part and if it came out the right way, I wouldn’t have to kill myself trying to play it the same each part of the song, you just move it around and make it in each part of the song. It’s kind of like sampling, I mean, it is the same fucking concept. We got to sketch out the whole album beforehand, we demoed the whole record, we got to see the flow of the thing. Even though the record is so eclectic, I think it still has a flow from one thing to the other. We’ve never been able to do that in the past. We’ve never been able to hear what the record was going to sound like up front. And then we sort of re-recorded it all.”

  Thanks in the main to the diverse set of material assembled for the album, No Exit fulfilled its brief. Opener ‘Screaming Skin’ resembled The Specials’ ‘Gangsters’ reworked as a thriller theme. An assertive slice of neon-lit ska, the song has sufficient impact to avoid being derailed by Deborah’s not-entirely-successful attempt at a West Indian accent. The group also delved into the box marked ‘reggae’ for the low-key lovers rock lullaby ‘Divine’, one of three songs on the album co-written by Go-Go’s bassist Kathy Valentine. Blondie also took their relationship with rap into new and exciting territory with the album’s title track. Featuring a contribution from Coolio, ‘No Exit’ is a visit to the Hammer House of Gangsta, as Bach’s ‘Toccata And Fugue In D Minor’ is consumed beneath fierce beats and savage organ stabs. “Initially it was like [Coolio’s 1995 smash] ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’, then it became a gothic thing about vampires,” explained Chris.

  Given the group’s history of assimilating elements of reggae and hip hop, it was logical that those forms would be represented. The inclusion of laconic Wild West-style saloon song ‘The Dream’s Lost On Me’ was more unexpected – especially given that fiddles had previously played little part in Blondie compositions. “It’s a really great, pretty song,” Stein declared. “We had been jamming on ‘Tennessee Waltz’ and Clem had been wanting to do a song in the 3/4 thing and I had had that together. So it was just more meeting of the minds. Then Romy Ashby, who is a writer and a friend of ours, this is the first bunch of lyrics she’d ever done.”

  The disc also included a spot of badlands boogie in the shape of the rolling, widescreen ‘Under The Gun’. Specifically dedicated to Jeffrey Lee Pierce, the song also pays tribute to the friends Chris has lost along the way. “I probably know close to 200 people, literally, who are dead and out of all of ‘em that was the one who particularly shook me up,” he revealed. “I think there’s going to be a resurgence … I’m hearing talk of Nick Cave and a bunch of people doing a record of his material. He’s way overdue, in a way. We have him on there, posthumously. He’s singing in the end there and ironically he’s singing, ‘fixin’ to die, fixin’ to die.’”

  A pair of reflective ballads, ‘Double Take’ and ‘Night Wind Sent’, highlight Deborah’s vocal mastery – although not to the remarkable extent evident on ‘Boom Boom In The Zoom Zoom Room’. Employing a higher vocal register than usual, she delivers the song with precise control, handling tricky time signatures with aplomb to produce one of the album’s stand-out moments. The closing ‘Dig Up The Conjo’ also provides a radical backdrop for Debbie’s ever-widening range, as her multi-layered vocals combine with a chanted backing and futuristic blasts from some half-dreamed technological jungle to create a unique miasmic effect.

  Amid all this variety, there remain elements that conform to the perceived Blondie archetype – ‘Maria’ and ‘Nothing Is Real But The Girl’ sweetly detonate twin blasts of the driving pop with which the band enjoyed huge commercial success, while a new version of ‘Out In The Streets’ straddles the gulf between the band’s past and its present. Originally recorded as a demo more than 20 years earlier, the Ellie Greenwich/Jeff Barry number is given a radical reworking. Orchestral yet minimal, the track gradually gains intensity and would divide opinion among Blondie fans as to whether this, or the 1975 cut, was the better take on the song. “Way back around the first album I didn’t want to do ‘Out In The Streets,’ so maybe they decided to torture me again,” says Craig. “I always thought
there were better Shangri-Las songs, actually.”

  Alongside the core quartet, bassist Leigh Foxx and guitarist Paul Carbonara were drafted in to assist with the recording of the album. Chris was appreciative of their contributions to No Exit and the duo would subsequently replace Nigel Harrison and Frank Infante when the group took to the road. “We just couldn’t have done this without Paul and Leigh,” asserted Stein. “It wouldn’t have happened with Nigel and Frankie. It wouldn’t have happened – it’s as simple as that. Leigh, and Paul particularly, is like a brilliant guitar player and really a great guy to work with. A consummate professional and he’s like 10 years younger than the rest of us and great. Leigh has been with Debbie and me for like 10 years on all our solo shit.”

  “It’s a miracle that we even got together to do it,” insisted Deborah. “It’s been difficult to convince people. And the rumour mill is so outrageous in the record industry. People actually pay attention to it. It’s like reading the Enquirer and deciding who to sign, it’s madness. But we had a good break with this manager that we got.”

  “It was F Scott Fitzgerald who said there were no second acts in American life,” mused Chris. “But we’ve kind of proved him wrong about that. And there wouldn’t have been any point in just doing the old songs. We didn’t want to get stuck in that way. We had to keep on moving forward in the way that Blondie have always been out front. More and more musicians were referencing Blondie, so it seemed the right time to reform.”

  “It was unfinished business in a way,” summarised Debbie. “It felt like we had just gone up in a puff of smoke without a decent conclusion. We left a question mark. It was never really an explosive ending – it just sort of went ‘poof’.“