Still Golden

05/10/1999 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Lyndsey Parker

With all the current hysteria over the approaching new millennium, it's ironic that the late-'90s pop scene is teeming with so much music of days gone by. From the reunions of Black Sabbath, Culture Club and Fleetwood Mac to the resurrections of Brian Setzer, Cher and various grown-up New Kids On The Block, from the revivals of swing, ska and glam to the samples of INXS, the Police and Annie that wind up in hit rap singles, it seems that everything old is new again. One would assume this nostalgia craze was the impetus behind the reunion of impossibly hip New York new wavers Blondie, who faded away 17 years ago but whose massive influence is only beginning to be recognized now that original members Deborah Harry, Chris Stein, Jimmy Destri and Clem Burke have regrouped on a brand-new Blondie album, No Exit.

But Deborah, who at age 53 is a few pounds heftier than she was in her pinup days but is otherwise still a striking ice-queen beauty, insists that Blondie's decision to give it another go had nothing to do with a desire to recreate or return to the past. "I really wasn't interested in doing a nostalgic reworking of old Blondie," she remarks in her tough-cookie New Yawk accent. "I wanted to represent myself as I am today, in the context of Blondie and working with these musicians. I felt fairly legitimate about the whole thing."

Deborah's bandmate and onetime boyfriend, Blondie guitarist Chris Stein, agrees. "We were approached to do two new songs on another best-of record, that kind of stuff, and it just didn't seem palatable. Everybody was kind of appalled by that," he states matter-of-factly. Instead, the ambitious band wrote and recorded 14 new songs for No Exit. "We're trying to see the album as a continuation--trying to pick up where we left off. I certainly didn't want to hybridize the old stuff and just do a rehash; I wanted to integrate it with a little bit of modernity."

The return of Blondie has met with a surprisingly high level of enthusiasm--surprising not only because the band broke up so long ago, back when MTV was still in its infancy and the public was only beginning to come to the mass-mentality conclusion that disco sucked, but because many similarly hyped reunions by Blondie's peers haven't exactly resulted in stellar sales figures. For instance, Culture Club's VH1 Storytellers album peaked at No. 148 on Billboard's Top 200 before falling off the chart two weeks later, while the Sex Pistols' Filthy Lucre Live "comeback" disc never even charted. Yet No Exit made an impressive debut at No. 18 in March, and has remained in the upper half of the Top 200 ever since; it's already sold 1 million copies worldwide.

Chris and Deborah have their own theory as to why the public was so eager and excited to welcome them back. "Y'know, we did quit while we were ahead," notes Chris, referring to the fact that Blondie pretty much vanished off the face of the Earth while still riding high on the No. 1 success of their groundbreaking Autoamerican album. (This reason behind this disappearing act was Chris's near-fatal bout with a rare and agonizing skin disease called pemphigus, which put Blondie out of commission for months while he recovered and Deborah cared for him.) "It's like the James Dean syndrome: If James Dean had stuck around and done another 15 movies, he would've been some old guy on Johnny Carson. He certainly wouldn't have had the same kind of myth about him that he did by dropping dead as a young man. That sort of happened to Blondie, so there was a lot of expectation."

"I think, in a way, we sort of got cut off at the high point. It wasn't like we had started going downhill or anything; we went out on a high note," muses Deborah. "So I think that everybody still has a lot of music in them."

Of course, Autoamerican wasn't the final Blondie album before the band's split; there was 1982's oft-forgotten The Hunter, a fiasco that sold only a tiny fraction of what mega-hit LPs like Parallel Lines and Eat To The Beat did. But Chris still stands by The Hunter. "Behind The Music said it's my favorite Blondie record, but it wasn't--I don't know where the f--k they got that from. I like Autoamerican much better," he begins. "But it's an okay record; it's the cover that really screwed it up. The cover's miserable; it had nothing to do with what we had thought up. It was long before Cats, and the cover was supposed to be us with really good half-animal/ half-human makeup on, and the record company just couldn't pull it off. [The album's final cover art featured a hideous airbrushed photo of Deborah sporting a sky-high haystack hairdo and Flintstones-style leopard-print sarong.] I've always been convinced that the cover screwed up the record as much as the record screwed up the record!"

The Hunter may not have been the "high note" to which Chris and Deborah refer, but it hardly seemed to tarnish the public's memory of the beloved band. "Every time [Deborah] did a solo album, inevitably the record company would say, 'Why can't we call it Blondie?'" recalls Chris, who produced much of Deborah's post-Blondie solo work. "So that always was there. It's just associative; the Blondie thing was a pretty strong persona. And then it was the radio; there was interest in the music all through the '90s."

Indeed, in some ways it seemed Blondie never really went away. Their songs still got radio play; smash hits like "Heart Of Glass" and "Atomic" could still pack a dance floor (so much so that in 1995, electronic artists like Utah Saints and Armand Van Helden contributed remixes to a Blondie dance-mix compilation, Remixed, Remade, Remodeled); cover versions of Blondie's "One Way Or Another" surfaced on the Rugrats and Sabrina The Teenage Witch soundtracks; and their influence could be felt in the music of female-fronted pop-rock bands like No Doubt, the Cardigans and Garbage. But Chris still has a hard time comprehending how enormously popular and important Blondie really were/ are. "I think we were still always at a cult status when we finished. Even though we had the four No. 1's, I always felt we were still kind of a cult band when we stopped playing," he says modestly. "It's very odd for me to have been out of the picture for so long and then suddenly come back and have everybody saying we're the same as the Doors or whatever."

Whether they were a cult band or a No. 1 sensation, Blondie's legacy definitely outshined the fledgling post-Blondie solo careers of the group's individual members. Even Deborah, whose glamour-goddess looks and sex-kitten vocals were always at the center of the band's appeal, was unable to recreate Blondie's success on her own; with the exception of a couple minor hits and a critically acclaimed stint with the Jazz Passengers, her solo efforts were all but ignored by the American public. Deborah is plainspoken when discussing her solo slump. "I think it's a combination of the fact that the band had a certain sound, and also we hooked in on an identity that became a real marketable thing," she simply shrugs.

Though Chris says Deborah's record company desperately wanted to slap the "Blondie" moniker on her solo albums, ironically, Blondie's late-'70s record label, Chrysalis, once believed Blondie's music would be much more successful if marketed under the "Debbie Harry" name. "The climate was so different, though. The record companies, the business end, at that time didn't see any advantage to pushing something that was edgy and dangerous," explains Chris. "Now look at WWF! They're trying desperately to be as screwed-up and weird as possible, because they know that's what sells. That's very much against what was going on when we were out there for the first time; everything was still very safe and people were still very cautious. The whole climate is different now. Maybe it's this rush to the millennium, all this crazy energy happening now. Everything's about exponentiality, everything builds up in wild numbers. Like amoebas f--king amoebas, it just keeps getting bigger and bigger."

Chris says this evolution in public tastes is the best thing about Blondie getting a second chance. "The main thing is we don't have to convince everybody or explain ourselves. That's the big difference. Everybody's got the picture, everybody knows what the equation is at this point. All those years ago, the climate was different. I constantly felt like we were trying to explain ourselves. Which is odd, because in retrospect it's a pretty f--kin' simple idea what's going on: Debbie brought a sort of movie-star femininity to the rock 'n' roll world, taking it away from the boys' club mentality. It's something that would've have happened regardless of whether or not it was her who did it."

Chris also boasts that Blondie circa '99 "is the best incarnation of the band, for sure." Deborah agrees: "It's just a better chemistry now," she says confidently, cheekily adding, "One would hope that one would get better with experience!"

Of course, it took a little while to get the old chemistry back. "We sort of went at it in stages, so it wasn't like jumping headfirst into a bath of hot oil or something!" laughs Deborah. "We went at it in a nice way, and got to know each other again. We didn't bite off too much, we just worked together and played a little bit and tested the waters here and there. It took about two-and-a-half years to put it all together. It wasn't like we said, 'Hey! Let's have reunion!' We went about it in a very sane way."

"It's always a very organic process," adds Chris, explaining that "there was no one real moment" when it all clicked. "But there was this vague familiarity to the sound when we first started playing. There was a point, when everybody got in the room--we tried to play with Gary [Valentine]--that was the first time everybody got together and actually played. And it did sound a little familiar."

Oh yes, Gary Valentine, Blondie's original bassist and composer of such Blondie gems as "X-Offender" and "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear"--he's not involved in the current reunion, though he did consider participating at one time. Even more notable are the absences of guitarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Harrison, who played with the most popular and recognizable 1977-82 Blondie lineup and have now been replaced by Paul Carbonara and Leigh Foxx, respectively. While Gary doesn't seem to have a problem with sitting out the Blondie reunion, Frank and Nigel are actually suing their former bandmates over this alleged snub. ("They've got some f--king lawyer that says he can make them a lot of money, same old sh-t," grumbles Chris.) Seems that while some things are better the second time around, others simply never change; during their first run Blondie developed quite a rep for "difficult and crazy" ("which we probably were, but not any more so than anybody else," reasons Chris), and by the time they officially broke up, the infighting band members were barely speaking to one another. In light of this pending lawsuit, it seems that not all the Blondie alumni are living up to the No Exit song title, "Forgive And Forget."

However, despite Frank and Nigel's non-involvement, there's no denying that the new lineup is 100% Blondie. Deborah's unmistakable voice is stronger and smoother than ever before, and while No Exit hardly reaches the pure pop-heaven heights of Parallel Lines or Plastic Letters, the uptempo ditties "Maria" and "Nothing Is Real But The Girl" are as frothy and effervescent as such classic radio-ready Blondie singles as "Pretty Baby" and "Dreaming"; the luscious, creamy ballads "Double Take" and "Night Wind Sent" convey the same sultriness as 1976's "In The Flesh"; "Under The Gun," a tribute to the Gun Club's late Jeffrey Lee Pierce, has a Giorgio Moroder groove that seems lifted straight from "Call Me"; and the title track, a bizarre Gothic-rap collaboration with Coolio, proves that Blondie are still willing to experiment in the ways that led to their huge 1980 urban crossover hit, "Rapture." All in all, No Exit sounds surprisingly fresh for a band that made its first exit nearly two decades ago...yet at the same time, it does indeed sound like Blondie never went away.

The biggest test of the current Blondie, of course--even more so than record sales--is how audiences will react to the new material when Blondie go on tour this summer playing major venues, including the Tibetan Freedom Fest. The wryly witty Deborah is tentatively optimistic. "We started playing shows before No Exit was out, including the new material, which was--as you probably know--very difficult. Especially with a band that is well-known, the obvious reaction would be for the old stuff. But I think it's going over really well. It's sort of hard to say--of course, all audiences are different, and they were coming to see 'BLONDIE,' the Blondie that they knew--but we weren't booed off the stage! That's all I can say!"