Skip to main content

Watch Blondie Perform a Classic Concert During The Breakout Year: “Dreamin,” “One Way Or Another,” “Heart of Glass” & More (1979)

When Blondie took the stage at Convention Hall in Asbury Park, NJ in 1979, the audience knew the band as a vehicle for former Playboy bunny-turned-punk-singer Debbie Harry. “Debbie put on that sexy persona with kind of a wink, saying ‘This is what you want from me, I’ll kind of give it to you, but I’m also going to give you what I want to give you,’’” says biographer Cathay Che. “The Blondie character,” as Harry called her onstage persona, “embodied female sexuality as part threat, part unattainable goal, part parody,” as Ann Powers writes at The New York Times.

Cast in the role of sexualized object since her early teen years, she had also performed in bands since the late 60s, and had survived sexual assault and a near abduction in New York City in the 70s. She was a world-weary performer in control of her image, but the character drew so much focus from Blondie the band that other members got a bit defensive. “I remember the tour Blondie was doing in April 1978,” punk photographer Theresa Kereakes writes:

All the posters, t-shirts, and buttons you saw were black with hot pink writing that proclaimed: BLONDIE IS A GROUP! Exclamation point. No one knew during that tour in April 1978 — not the band, not their fans, and probably not their hopeful record company — that the record Blondie would release in just six months would be the one to break them into the stratosphere. They went from Plastic Letters to Parallel Lines and from the DIY scene to the big time.

Blondie was most definitely a group. By 1979, they had grown into a formidable six-piece, adding guitarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Harrison to the original lineup of Harry, Chris Stein, Jimmy Destri, and Clem Burke. On the cusp of major mainstream success, they had also hit a peak in terms of musicianship and songwriting — powerhouse drummer Burke holding the machinery together while each member played a vital part.

The focus on Harry didn’t only detract from her male band members. “Ms. Harry must have felt a bit like… the object of someone else’s profitable fantasy” at times,” writes Powers, trapped in the role of punk-rock Marilyn Monroe. As keyboard player Destri put it, “no one really paid attention to Debbie’s singing style and how great a writer she was, because they couldn’t get past the image,”

They would pay attention after Parallel Lines and follow-ups Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican. Songs like “Dreaming,” revamped disco hit “Heart of Glass,” and dancefloor classics “Call Me” and “Rapture” made Harry an international superstar and left the rest of the band disenchanted. Before lawsuits and longstanding resentments broke them up, Blondie was an incredible live band. See them prove it in the full show at the top, the first set of the night. They played a second, duplicate set later, adding Marc Bolan’s “Bang a Gong” at the end of the night. See them tear through it just above and see a full setlist with timestamps on YouTube.

Related Content:

How Blondie’s Debbie Harry Learned to Deal With Superficial, Demeaning Interviewers

Watch Blondie’s Debbie Harry Perform “Rainbow Connection” with Kermit the Frog on The Muppet Show (1981)

Blondie Plays CBGB in the Mid-70s in Two Vintage Clips

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Watch Blondie Perform a Classic Concert During The Breakout Year: “Dreamin,” “One Way Or Another,” “Heart of Glass” & More (1979) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.



from Open Culture https://ift.tt/2UGRSL1
via Ilumina

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music: An Interactive, Encyclopedic Data Visualization of 120 Years of Electronic Music

In a very short span of time, the descriptor “electronic music” has come to sound as overly broad as “classical.” But where what we (often incorrectly) call classical developed over hundreds of years, electronic music proliferated into hundreds of fractal forms in only decades. A far steeper quality curve may have to do with the ease of its creation, but it’s also a factor of this accelerated evolution. Music made by machines has transformed since its early 20th-century beginnings from obscure avant-garde experiments to massively popular genres of global dance and pop. This proliferation, notes Ishkur—designer of Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music —hasn't always been to the good. Take what he calls “trendwhoring,” a phenomenon that spawns dozens of new works and subgenera in short order, though it’s arguable whether many of them should exist. Ishkur, describes this process below in an excerpt from his erudite, sardonic “Frequently Unasked Questions”: If fart noises were sudde...
Post a Comment
Read more

A 10 Billion Pixel Scan of Vermeer’s Masterpiece Girl with a Pearl Earring: Explore It Online

We admire Johannes Vermeer’s  Girl with a Pearl Earring   for many reasons , not least that it looks exactly like a girl with a pearl earring. Or at least it does from a distance, as the master of light himself no doubt stepped back to confirm countless times during the painting process, at any moment of which he would have been more concerned with the brushstrokes constituting only a small part of the image. But even Vermeer himself could have perceived only so much detail of the painting that would become his masterpiece. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKaZYTwmjwU Now, more than 350 years after its completion, we can get a closer view of Girl with a Pearl Earring  than anyone has before through a newly released  10 billion-pixel panorama . At this resolution, writes Petapixel’s Jason Schneider , we can “see the painting down to the level of 4.4-microns per pixel.” Undertaken by Emilien Leonhardt and Vincent Sabatier of 3D microscope maker Hirox Europe ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Drunk History Takes on the Father of Prohibition: The Ban on Alcohol in the U.S. Started 100 Years Ago This Month

There may be plenty of good reasons to restrict sales and limit promotion of alcohol. You can search the stats on traffic fatalities, liver disease, alcohol-related violence, etc. and you’ll find the term “epidemic” come up more than once. Yet even with all the dangers alcohol poses to public health and safety, its total prohibition has seemed “so hostile to Americans’ contemporary sensibilities of personal freedom,” writes Mark Lawrence Schrad at The New York Times , “that we struggle to comprehend how our ancestors could have possibly supported it.” Prohibition in the United States began 1oo years ago-- on January 17, 1920--and lasted through 1933. How did this happen? Demand, of course, persisted, but public support seemed widespread. Despite stories of thousands rushing bars and liquor stores on the evening of January 16, 1920 before the 18th Amendment banning alcohol nationwide went into effect, “the final triumph of prohibition was met with shrugs…. The United States had...
Post a Comment
Read more