Accidents Never Happen

33 1/3: Parallel Lines
By Kembrew McLeod

The story of New York punk rock has been told so many times now that it has lost a lot of its punch. You can find no better illustration of this dilution than than the fact that the infamously filthy nightclub CBGB's now lends its name to a restaurant at the Newark airport. Still, the popular version of the story tends to gloss over a lot of important details and obscure the contributions of people who don't fit the stereotypes.

In this book from the 33 1/3 series, University of Iowa Professor of Communications Studies Kembrew McLeod explores "Parallel Lines," Blondie's breakthrough third album, with an emphasis on the band's roots in gay culture, disco, bubblegum pop and other influences that often get left on the cutting room floor when the punk rock story is told. Most of the usual suspects turn up in the story: the Velvet Underground, Andy Warhol, the New York Dolls, Patti Smith, etc., but McLeod shows how Blondie had just as much in common with the world of drag queens and the trash aesthetic of their friend John Waters as they did with the Ramones. Maybe more so.

This aspect of Blondie had been a big part of singer Deborah Harry's approach even before the band came to be. After her hippie band Wind in the Willows broke up in the late '60s, Harry started waitressing at Max's Kansas City, a favorite haunt of Warhol's crowd. She also sang in gay clubs, wearing deliberately trashy clothes and garish makeup in the camp style of trans artists like Wayne/Jayne County and Jackie Curtis. (In the mid-70s, she even acted in one of Curtis' musicals, playing a character named -- ahem -- Madonna.) As McLeod shows, once Harry became a big pop star, the humor and irony was lost on the public.

One Way Or Another

Still, pop stardom was always part of the plan, to some extent.

My summer 2016 reading list.

This aspect of Blondie's approach really came to the fore with "Parallel Lines," and especially its breakthrough hit single, "Heart of Glass." After the success of the single in 1979 (it went to No. 1 on the Billboard charts in the U.S. and was a global hit) some fans accused the band of selling out, going pop or trying to get rich off the disco fad, but McLeod shows that guitarist Chris Stein had written the song as early as 1974, and it had appeared on the band's first demo tape under the name "The Disco Song." Producer Mike Chapman convinced the band to re-record it, painstakingly layering drum machines and synths with traditional instrumentation in the days before MIDI and digital recording. For their part, the band said they were inspired by electronic artists of the time such as Kraftwerk and Giorgio Moroder.

The song is considered a classic today, but the record label apparently thought "Heart of Glass" was too much of a departure from the rest of Blondie's material to be a hit. Amazingly, it wasn't the first or second single from the album, but the fourth. It followed "Picture This," "I'm Gonna Love You Too" and "Hangin' on the Telephone," and came out four months after the album had hit the shelves. In all, there were six singles taken from the 12 songs on the album.

Now He Only Eats Guitars

After bringing pop and disco into punk and underground New York queer culture into the mainstream, Blondie's next album, "Autoamerican," helped popularize reggae ("The Tide is High") and hip-hop ("Rapture.") Harry and Stein's friend Fab Five Freddy had introduced them to the burgeoning rap scene, and they were perhaps the first white act to pay tribute to hip-hop when they released "Rapture," which name-checks Fab Five Freddy.

You could put that in a negative light and say they were using their white privilege and exploiting black culture, but McLeod shows it's not quite as simple as that. In a very good passage of the book, he interviews Fab Five Freddy, who says, "It wasn't so much they were appropriating rap music. They were following lessons I was sharing with them."

Fab Five Freddy appears in the video for the song, too. (It's worth noting here that Blondie was one of the few bands of the pre-MTV era to regularly make music videos, allowing them to bring their underground aesthetic into even more homes.)

It may seem strange for a book about "Parallel Lines" to include so much material about the times before and after the album, but McLeod is largely concerned with the ways Blondie bridged several of New York's late-'60s-'70s underground cultures to the 1980s and beyond. McLeod's well-researched book -- one of the best I've read in the 33 1/3 series -- takes the overly familiar tale of the CBGB's scene and connects it to other stories that don't get the attention they deserve. Turns out, the punk story is just a small piece of the puzzle. Blondie connects to many of the other pieces.