The phone rings twice. Pause. Then Debbie Harry launches into “I’m in the phone booth, it’s the one across the hall…” the driving power pop and immediacy of Hanging on the Telephone hits you right between the ears. It’s the perfect entrée to one of the great summer soundtracks that is Parallel Lines, an album I recall with great fondness as a substantial part of my summer of 78/79. This album was all over the radio and it seemed to be playing at just about every party I went to around that time. It’s just one of those records that leapt off the turntable with an incredible energy and vibrancy – something it maintains almost 40 years later.
One Way Or Another kicks in where Hanging on the Telephone left off with a crunching guitar intro from Chris Stein and a thumping beat from Clem Burke. Debbie Harry’s sassy, badass vocal is all attitude – a rare nod to Blondie’s punk beginnings on Parallel Lines and one of the killer tracks on the album.
Picture This has a straight forward pop arrangement and runs at a sedate pace compared to many of the other dynamic songs on Parallel Lines, so it seems like an odd choice for a single off the album, but Debbie Harry’s impassioned lyric with a vocal to match ensure this is a most memorable post punk ode to love:
All I want is a room with a view
A sight worth seeing, a vision of you
And:
I will give you my finest hour
The one I spent watching you shower.
If the lyric wasn’t enough to capture your attention, then certainly the backlit angelic vision of Ms. Harry performing the song on the vid surely would be.
Fade Away and Radiate features the sonic majesty of guest guitarist Robert Fripp (King Crimson). The song has a wonderful arrangement based largely around Fripp’s axe work and with Harry’s dreamy vocal of falling in love with dead movie stars “Dusty frames that still arrive, Die in 1955, Fade away and radiate” make this one of the standout album cuts.
Pretty Baby is a fab late 50’s /early 60’s pop pastiche, complete with La Dolce Vita references and spoken vocal segments ala the Shangri La’s Leader of the Pack (and many others of that era). A gorgeous piece of pop.
The first side closes out with guitarist Frank Infante’s I Know But I Don’t Know with its apathetic indifference, a song that could have been the anthem for the slacker generation a dozen years later – if only they’d bothered to listen.
Side two kicks in with the same kind of combustible energy as the album’s first side with the restless, youthful futility of 11:59 and the questioning ambition of Will Anything Happen? The fabulous Sunday Girl follows, a UK #1 that strangely was never released as a single in America despite its delightful charms as a pop song. Who could ever resist lines like these?
I know a girl from a lonely street
Cold as ice cream but still as sweet
Dry your eyes Sunday Girl.
Then it’s Heart of Glass, a disco song that really sounds out of place on Parallel Lines because it’s so different to everything else on the album and yet somehow it still seems to fit. The lyric created some controversy at the time:
Once I had a love and it was a gas
Soon turned out to be a pain in the ass
Really? How prudish were we in the 70’s? A lot of radio stations refused to play the song until an edited version was released, but the real pain in the ass for Blondie was the flak they copped for recording a disco song. As one of the frontrunners in the U.S. of the punk and then new wave movements they were branded as sellouts because those genres had emerged as a rebellion in response to disco. Blondie’s Chris Stein defended their stance, as far as he was concerned disco was part of R & B so he had no qualms with it. Neither did the public, the song became a monster hit globally with a gazillion male eyes glued to this unattainable goddess – it’s Marilyn Monroe for MTV.
Buddy Holly’s forgotten 50’s number I’m Gonna Love You Too in the hands of Blondie comes across like amphetamine ice cream – a supercharged 2 minutes of adult candy with a revved up rhythm section and high speed guitar solo, while Just Go Away (with Debbie Harry as the sole song writer) closes out the album with some blunt advice as a kiss off with a dose of spite – those punk roots still showing through.
With the exception of a couple of tracks on Parallel Lines there’s barely anything that clocks much over 3 minutes. Thanks to the smarts of Australian producer Mike Chapman, who had an incredible string of successes as both a producer and songwriter (partnering with Nicky Chinn) with acts like Suzi Quatro, The Sweet and Smokie, Parallel Lines became Blondie’s most successful album. Their previous 2 albums had sold moderately well, but Parallel Lines saw Blondie transition from New York’s punk scene to spearhead America’s New Wave along with bands like the Cars, Talking Heads and the B-52’s.
By all accounts Chapman was a tough disciplinarian, which didn’t sit easily with Blondie during the recording of the album, but according to keyboardist Jimmy Destri they learnt more about making records with Mike Chapman than anyone else and he became such an integral part of the creation of Blondie’s music that he effectively became a member of the band. On Parallel Lines Mike Chapman reinvented the band and then went on to produce their following 3 albums with a musical legacy that included gems like Atomic, Union City Blue, Dreaming, Rapture and The Tide Is High.
Leave a Reply