Blondie gained enormous popularity in the late 70s and early 80s with three masterful albums: “Parallel Lines“, „Eat To The Beat“ i „Autoamerican“, recorded in a period of two years between 1978-80. Their success can be described as a combination of a lot of drugs, a lot of fights, flying keyboards and a producer who tried to keep everything under control.
As the band members told a famous writer Simon Goddard in an interview with Q Magazine, the drug use was a little out of control. “We took it too much drugs,” said the guitarist and songwriter Chris Stein. “Everyone was snorting tons of cocaine, which was accepted. But if you got hooked on heroin, it was like ‘I can’t talk to you anymore!’ The line was drawn and everything got weird.”
Despite the chaotic atmosphere, some of their most significant hits came from this period. Mike Chapman, the producer, considered that chaos the secret ingredient. “Chaos was responsible for a lot of the magic,” he said, comparing it to his work with British glam-rock band The Sweet earlier in the decade. “They kept saying, ‘Fuck you Chapman!’, but out of that anger came ‘The Ballroom Blitz.’ It was the same with Blondie on ‘Parallel Lines’. Every song was an event.”
That album yielded the first UK and US No. 1 single with the hit “Heart Of Glass”, and the album also went to No. 1 and became the UK’s best-selling album of 1979. The next album “Eat To The Beat”, released in the same year, also contributed to the success. But Chapman realized he had to get the group away from the wild party in New York.
“The more money they had, the more drugs they took,” Chapman said. “After the success of ‘Parallel Lines’, everything started to fall apart. Then Jimmy (Destri, keyboardist) picked up the synthesizer and threw it at me. It crashed on the floor – $35,000 worth of equipment shattered! Every night after work we went to Studio 54, which was disgusting, a real atmosphere of debauchery. We were all on the wrong drugs, we were screwed. It was destroying us.”
Chapman convinced the band to go to LA to record the 1980 album “Autoamerican”, saving them temporarily. New York attracted them again, but according to Debbie Harry, drugs were not the real problem.
“I don’t think drugs were really the problem with Blondie,” Debbie said of Goddard. “We worked for years without a break, they expected a large number of songs from us, we had no real managerial support and we had a bad contract with the record company. How long can one last?”
Harry and her collaborators soon found out – a few years later, Blondie ceased to exist, until they reunited in the 90s. But they left behind three classics from a period full of chaos.
Source: balkanrock.com
