Original subtitles

They were just a ragtag New York punk band

in a city that was falling apart at the seams.

♪ I know you wouldn't go ♪

♪ you'd watch my heart burst then ♪

Just one of many bands trying to break out

from the niche punk scene into the pop mainstream.

Jimmy Destri: We were considered clowns in the beginning,

we were critically lambasted.

Nigel Harrison: I think people thought we were trashy,

I think people thought we were unmusical.

Roberta Bayley: You know, no one thought they were going anywhere.

Against them they had the punk purists

who wanted to keep the music anti-establishment,

raw and aggressive.

This guy comes up to me, grabs me,

he goes, "your disco album sucks!"

♪ Once I had a love, and it was a gas ♪

But he would be proved wrong.

♪ Soon turned out had a heart of glass ♪

Their breakthrough album would sell 20 million copies,

because what they did have was music in their blood,

a unique sound and steely determination

to make something beautiful in a tough city.

Blondie would prove that they were

more than a garage band with a pretty singer.

Bob Gruen: Debbie was just

one of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen.

Was, is and always will be.

♪ One way or another ♪

♪ I'm gonna lose ya ♪

♪ I'm gonna give you the slip ♪

In 1977 Chrysalis Records spotted the band

and spent $1 million buying out their contract

and putting top pop hit maker Mike Chapman in charge

of producing their new album, "Parallel Lines."

Mike Chapman: I thought, well, it's gonna be a little tough.

But when I heard the songs,

I thought, well, perhaps with their cooperation

we can actually pull this off.

Mike realized that the key

was discipline, innovation and plain hard work.

Rob Sheffield: Blondie, it seems,

were at a point where they had to either give up

or they had to go all the way for this sort of pop perfection

that they'd always really aspired to.

♪ Pretty baby ♪

♪ you look so heavenly ♪

The tough studio recording sessions

coming up with Mike Chapman

would turn Blondie from a greenwich village punk band

into a world class pop band.

♪ Oh, picture this, a sky full of thunder ♪

♪ picture this, my telephone number ♪

Clem Burke: We were all on a high as far as realizing

something really great was happening.

It brought together six stubborn people.

♪ Don't leave me hangin' on the telephone ♪

With the album's release

Blondie would be blasted free of the dregs of '70s New York

on their very own musical skyrocket.

I don't think any of us had any idea

of how big it was gonna be.

Ken Dashow: It's remarkable that 40 years later

we're still listening to Blondie.

I'm still playing it on the radio.

The whole album was a hit single to me.

"Parallel Lines" would make Blondie a world class band,

but Debbie Harry's sound, looks and unpredictable clothes sense

would also have a lasting influence

on New York's fashion industry,

while the stories the band told in their songs

would capture the spirit of New York City.

Now the musicians and the producer

who wrote and recorded this landmark album

tell us how they worked together

to create that musical skyrocket,

which is still flying 40 years later...

a snapshot of a time and a city that was changing forever.

New York in the '70s was a city going through tough times.

Ed Koch: The overriding problem was to save the city of New York

from going into bankruptcy.

It was pretty dangerous,

it was pretty common to get mugged,

especially over on the east side.

It was pretty hard to find jobs.

Roberta Bayley: There were a lot of single occupancy hotels

that you could sleep for $5 a night,

and so transient people

and, you know, a lot of drunks and things like that.

The band thought of themselves as new yorkers

from an early age.

Jimmy destri was brought up in Brooklyn.

Did you ever see those discovery channel shows

with, you know, the deep ocean vents

and there's all kinds of life living in impossible conditions?

That's basically what downtown New York was.

Guitarist Chris Stein also grew up in Brooklyn.

Chris Stein: There was a big "be in" in central park

in the summer of '67 that was very impressive,

and a great event I remember

as part of my, uh, chemical history, you know.

Fellow guitarist frank infante's

early memories of the city are still vivid today.

Frank Infante: I remember going through the Holland tunnel

with my parents in the car, you know...

And it always was that real Gothamy kind of vibe,

gritty kind of tunnel, dirty,

it was like, man, where are we going?

We're going to hell here or something, you know.

But it was cool.

Drummer clem Burke and vocalist Debbie Harry,

both from New Jersey, discovered the west village in their teens.

Debbie Harry: I think my favorite thing

was to walk around the west village

and look at, you know, all the little crafts shops

and just sort of try to catch the vibe.

It was a place we used to go

to look at the hippies in greenwich village.

Kind of walk around and look for freaky-looking people, I guess.

I guess it was the forbidden fruit in a way,

full of naughty things.

Even English newcomer, bassist Nigel Harrison,

soon fell under the city's wayward spell.

I love New York.

I think if I left New York I would decompose,

I'd turn to dust.

Since becoming an item in 1973,

Debbie and Chris had shared one ambition.

Just to run away and be an artist of some sort.

In the 1970s many artists were coming

to live in the city's abandoned factories

and crowd the east village sidewalks.

Musicians, film makers, photographers

and fashion designers.

New clubs were offering some raw alternative sounds

and films conceived and shot far from Hollywood,

such as "Saturday night fever," "taxi driver,"

"the French connection," and "serpico"

were telling true and often harsh New York stories.

Indeed one of the first songs to be recorded

had a feeling of menace and impending violence.

It was based on Debbie's experience

with a boyfriend who had stalked her.

Track 2, "one way or another."

This was just a boyfriend and just...

I, you know, I sort of liked the way that that phrase

kept coming up, you know,

"one way or another, one way or another."

Nigel played me the track in Japan.

I used to make a lot of little demos.

I had this fantastic little machine I bought in Japan.

Just the thing that went...

And just two chords going back and forth

with a little riff in it.

I took that, you know, with the beat, beat thing,

I had some crazy guitar on it.

I said I like this.

Thanks to Jimmy, who I was sharing a room with on tour,

said we should make a song out of that,

that's got to be a song.

And it was thanks to Jimmy that I...

Because I was too shy to sort of show it to anyone.

He came in with it and we just started playing it live,

it was a very automatic band kind of thing.

Debbie came up with a great lyric.

You know, because it was a catch phrase...

one way or another... it's such a catch phrase.

The phrasing just fit right, so I just...

and it just sort of happened in a flash, you know,

it was just one of those things

that came together really easily.

One of the things, I think, that made it

is the guitar is playing,

but the keyboard behind it is doing a seventh.

It's going...

And it just gives it that edge, you know.

Yeah, that's one of my favorites.

Frank did a great job on that.

So this is Frankie playing Nigel's riff,

and Chris with the harmonics thing.

And you can hear, those are Chris's lines.

♪ Da da da da da da ♪

A little out of whack.

It has this sort of odd country hillbilly thing

going on underneath it all.

It also sort of reminds me of some kind of a polka.

Yeah.

♪ I'm gonna meet ya, I'll meet ya ♪

♪ I will drive past your house ♪

The best part of this was when Debbie spat out those words

and then to see her out there

with the sort of facial contortions and...

I mean, she really went for this track.

♪ One way or another ♪

♪ I'm gonna find ya ♪

♪ I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha ♪

♪ one way or another ♪

♪ I'm gonna win ya ♪

♪ I'll getcha, I'll getcha! ♪

And that, I mean, that really tells you

all about her personality,

you know, it's like "I'll get ya, I'll get ya."

One minute she's this sort of frantic,

and the next minute she...

You can't even talk to her.

What's really amazing

is how many people actually relate to this song.

They point and they go like that.

The lyrics are unusual,

and people often get them wrong...

As Debbie and Chris discovered in an unlikely place.

We were in...

A hard rock cafe in South America somewhere.

They had a really good forgery

of Debbie's lyrics for this.

Yes, that was in Santo Domingo.

And we knew it was a forgery

because it didn't say rat food, it said something else food.

Yeah.

And, you know, that...

the phrase rat food is in here somewhere.

♪ I walk down the mall, stand over by the wall ♪

I think she wrote these words on the spot,

these weren't written yet, she said...

♪ ...supermarket check out ♪

♪ some specials and rat food ♪

"Check out some specials and rat food," you know.

She's got the...

♪ Where I see can it all, find out who you call ♪

Even today Debbie is not sure

she gave her performance quite enough menace.

Not menacing enough.

♪ I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha ♪

I should be clamped in irons for this.

♪ I wanna meet ya, meet ya, meet ya, meet ya ♪

♪ one day, maybe next week, I'm gonna meet ya ♪

♪ I'm gonna meet ya, I'll meet ya ♪

Alright, that's enough.

The band had first gotten together

three years earlier at cbgb's, a run-down venue on the bowery

which became the headquarters

of the New York punk and new wave scene.

Up-and-comers Blondie had some tough competition.

Other cbgb regulars included talking heads, the ramones,

the Patti Smith group, Johnny thunders and television.

The interesting thing about going to cbgb's...

and I don't think that an 18, 19-year-old

will have any sort of parallel to it now,

and I think the only parallel would be like the people

who went to the cavern club in the late '50s, early '60s.

You didn't go to see the Beatles,

you went to the cavern club.

We were not the, you know,

the darlings of the scene, you know,

we were sort of the struggling out, you know,

outer edges of it.

I think people thought we were trashy,

I think people thought we were unmusical.

♪ That's how the little girl lies ♪

♪ he's telling his little girl lies ♪

I think people thought the band was a novelty.

Everyone liked them as people a lot,

but, you know, no one thought they were going anywhere,

and especially the competition,

which was television or the ramones.

We were informed by the music

that we were surrounded by, by our peers.

And we were changing and doing different things,

and our sound was changing.

With the success of "Saturday night fever"

came an enthusiasm for disco,

and Blondie was the first punk band

to incorporate it into their sound.

It was a move that punk purists would regard as treason,

but it would increase the band's chances of hitting the big time.

They'd been playing at cbgb's for a while,

and I just heard this sound, and it just sounded bigger

than any of the bands that had played there...

And Debbie was just one

of the most beautiful girls I've ever seen.

But it was now becoming clear

that Blondie was much more than a pretty girl

with an unformed band behind her.

They were a great band, they could really play.

And let's not lose that in the discussion of her image

and the scene and the punks and all that...

this band could play their ass off.

And one night they were doing just that

when they were spotted by Terry Ellis

of Chrysalis Records.

He saw Debbie's star quality at once

and immediately spent $1 million

buying the band out of their existing record deal.

To make sure his investment paid off,

he decided to put pop record producer Mike Chapman in charge.

Mike had a string of hits to his name,

but he couldn't have been less punk.

How could he turn Blondie into a hit-making team?

♪ I wanted nothing more ♪

♪ I know you wouldn't go ♪

♪ you'd watch my heart burst... ♪

Knowing that this was basically

a New York underground, sort of punk influence band,

I thought, well, it's gonna be a little tough.

But when I heard the songs,

I realized that, that they were songwriters.

Since 1971 Mike had had an impressive 20 hit singles

in the charts.

I told them, I said, you know,

these songs are absolutely amazing.

And they said, oh, do you think so?

I said, yeah, I know so.

So let's...

Should we give it a try?

"Yeah, okay. Let's give it a try."

He was good humored and, you know,

he had all these funny sort of Australian sayings

like "oh, she bangs

like a [bleep] house door in a cyclone."

And you know, it's like working with Billy the kid or something.

Yeah, yeah, or a pirate or something.

He was funny, and he was very cute, you know.

He was wily and a good spirit, you know.

Mike would go on to record

three other albums with the band,

although during the "Parallel Lines" session

his technique of building a hit bar by bar

would be at odds with the band's usual technique.

On their previous two albums

they had recorded a song a few times

and then chosen the best take.

Later tempers would fray,

but at the outset it was all sweetness and light.

Blondie's New York, track one,

"hanging on the telephone."

Of the 12 tracks on the album,

Mike agreed with the band that they would write 9 of them,

but there would be three covers, too.

The first track was written by west coast musician Jack Lee.

Hustler Jack just couldn't believe his luck.

We met Jack, Jack was gone, out of his mind...

he was staying at the y, you know,

and he was pushing his songs to people,

and he would come in and show us the song.

And he would be so enthusiastic,

and we'd have to go, "Jack, calm down,

we're gonna do the song, we're gonna do the song."

I can still hear clem's unsteady foot here.

Now clem would kill me if he...

well, he will kill me when he hears it.

But I can hear his...

If you listen to his kick drum, he's not...

like there... he's not right on.

Let's hear the bass in there now, and...

So this was Nigel's thing,

just his pedaling these bass notes.

And it's all a little out of sync, it's not perfect.

Now that was the secret, I think, to, to, to the...

Keeping the element of Blondie in the record.

Then you put in some guitar...

And...

Suddenly it starts to pull it together.

To me, the genius of Chapman

is that this sounds so spontaneous,

and it wasn't at all.

After doing it for an hour

and playing the same parts for two hours,

it didn't feel very free-flowing at all.

It was very mechanical and rigid feeling.

And now when I hear it,

it sounds so spontaneous and effortless, which is great,

that's the way Mike was a [bleep] genius.

Mike would walk around in circles,

and sometimes he'd have a stopwatch,

and then he'd say, why is that ending so long?

Why is the intro so long?

Why does it take so long for the vocals to come in?

♪ I heard your mother, now she's going out the door ♪

♪ did she go to work or just go to the store? ♪

♪ All those things she said I told you to ignore ♪

And when the vocals did come in,

it was Debbie's aggressive and unladylike delivery

that made people wake up and listen.

You have to really drive

for some kind of forceful emotional content, you know.

Because, I mean, you can just actually just sing technically

and just be a technical singer, and it would be fine.

But he was always saying,

"oh, you've got to put something in it,"

you know, put something in it.

Emotional content.

Bruce Lee.

Emotional content.

Thank you, Bruce.

♪ If I don't get your calls then everything goes wrong ♪

♪ I want to tell you something you've known all along ♪

♪ don't leave me hangin' on the telephone ♪

That's the emotional part.

Mike wasn't happy with the way the end of the song sounded

and added his own voice.

♪ Oh, whoa, whoa whoa ♪

So, and they're all looking at me going,

"are you sure, Mike?"

And I said, it'll work.

♪ Oh, hang up and run to me ♪

♪ oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, run to me ♪

The song needed to come to a climax...

♪ Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa ♪

And suddenly it was like... that's it.

Mike was beginning to get the band

working to his methodical style,

but he still had a long way to go.

He was very hands-on in arrangements,

he was a guitar player,

he helped with the total creative process,

he wasn't just in the control room ordering pizza.

Mike would be completely

"do it over and over and over until it gets exactly right,"

so we'd be like, man, wasn't that good enough?

It was more based on our musicianship...

and Mike took it to a whole other level of meticulousness,

where we were doing stuff over and over again

to make it really precise and perfect.

In Blondie everyone's so stubborn,

everyone's headstrong and stubborn,

no one takes orders.

And it was the first time we...

Anyone even remotely had the nerve

to question anything we'd done.

Not that we were right, but we were convinced we were right.

Here he is coming in and telling us, you know,

you have to go to school,

you really have to go to school, you know.

And I'm glad he did.

I'm really glad he did.

I learned so much.

Blondie, it seems, were at a point

where they had to either give up or they had to go all the way

for this sort of pop perfection

that they'd always really aspired to.

And again, every band in that little world,

regardless of what they'll say, wanted a big hit.

We all dreamed of it.

The band was living and rehearsing

in a loft on the bowery in a derelict district of the city,

and Debbie and Chris had now been together as a couple

for over four years.

So this was their loft.

Debbie, Chris, Jimmy, I think Gary Valentine

lived in the building.

You know, it probably wasn't palatial,

but I think the fact of living in a communal setting

was probably very helpful to a band, you know,

coming together and making music together.

And they were making New York music.

The New York grime ingredient,

there was enough of that in each of the tracks,

through the playing.

I think clem and Frankie

and certainly Chris with his guitar parts...

Added New York into those tracks,

and Debbie sounds like Debbie, you know,

she doesn't sound like any other singer,

which was such a blessing because, you know,

how often do you get to record a singer

who is instantly identifiable?

And she represented New York.

And a New York which was then often a dangerous place to be.

Ed Koch: Crime was escalating, not in the village,

in the whole city, not just especially the village.

It was escalating, and people were afraid.

It looked like dresden after the bombing

or something like that.

I guess in retrospect

it's very romantic to people now, too, and it was.

There was a kind of freedom involved

with living on the fringes of this decaying society, too.

There was kind of no future.

In New York in the '70s, a lot of stores were closed up,

there was a lot of empty storefronts.

You could see lines of people lined up

to buy their drug of choice.

There was a lot of street crime.

We were frequently getting held up and stuff.

Yeah. I got held up several times.

1970s New York could be violent,

but that didn't deter the celebrity pack

from exploring the mean streets of the city...

people such as Andy warhol and Mick Jagger,

Tom waits and Allen Ginsberg...

who went in search of the thrill of danger

and other like-minded revelers.

I am the night life.

It all started with one discotheque,

then more and more and more.

I live everywhere. I live within you.

People have more energy to have a good time.

I come to the discos to absorb an energy,

to emit a positive energy that is happening in New York

and in the world.

Andy warhol was not decadent.

Was it a racy time?

It depends on what you mean by racy time.

It was a fun time.

I thought Allen Ginsberg and warhol and all the others

who gave greenwich village a wonderful ambience and name,

so to speak, so that people were drawn here.

I happened to live in the village.

Glenn O'Brien: You would see the most famous artists,

the most famous New York musicians

and the best fashion designers

all hanging around with other assorted characters.

So things were more unified.

It wasn't... Now the...

it's very "industry," you know,

music industry, fashion industry.

But then it was more of a creative community.

But it was a creative community

that found it hard to accept a band fronted by a woman,

and a woman who also wrote explicit lyrics.

I think it annoyed me when I was...

When I was growing up that, you know,

that I was expected to, you know, do...

Raise a family and be... and be the woman, be the wife.

And it didn't particularly appeal to me,

that I might not be particularly good at it.

All they talk about is her looks and how...

You know, how's she aging and how beautiful she was,

but the fact is she's an incredible lyricist,

and it's very rare that people go out of their way

to even talk about the lyrics, and it's insane.

On the first album was "look good in blue,"

"I could give you some head and shoulders to lie on,"

you know.

It's like she never shied away from saying anything risque.

She was gonna follow you downtown,

see who's hanging around,

if she doesn't like this hanging around you,

bad things are going to happen.

Or you'll rip her to shreds like, you know,

if you're really jealous

and you're gonna actually rip the other girl to shreds,

that's quite a statement, you know.

It's not like, oh, I feel so bad.

It's like, I'm gonna get you, you know.

And yeah, she was very aggressive.

♪ Ha! Stand tall for the beast of america ♪

Even nearly 40 years later

a younger generation of performers

feel that Debbie broke down doors

by being candid about her feelings.

Aja volkman sings with L.A. band Nico vega.

Aja Volkman: That predatorial thing is totally inspiring,

you know, for a woman to be able to go out

and get what she wants

and not be afraid of her sexuality and her beauty,

and not... not be intimidated by it and, also,

not to feel like she's threatening people.

Debbie and Chris were newly in love,

and so there probably was a lot of sexy thoughts

going around and all of that.

And you know, it was cool to be raunchy in punk rock.

Everybody liked that.

I think that's what men love about women, you know,

is that they can create life

and they're, you know, seductive and beautiful, and...

and it's like, you know, our species is...

it's designed that way.

You know, women are supposed to attract you and pull you in

and make you want to stay.

Debbie got a lot of flak for her overt sexuality,

which is...

Ridiculous.

Ridiculous, because she was so tame by modern standards.

That sexuality was very evident on "picture this."

Track three, "picture this."

When Debbie showed me the lyrics, I thought "whoa!"

This was something she'd obviously lived through,

you know, that she was singing about an event in her life,

and I guess she was watching Chris shower.

I wouldn't have wanted to watch Chris shower,

but obviously Debbie enjoyed it.

♪ Picture this, a day in December ♪

♪ picture this, freezing cold weather ♪

♪ you've got clouds on your lids and you'd be on the skids ♪

♪ if it weren't for your job at the garage ♪

♪ if you could only... ♪

You could come in with a song

and just go, you know, here's "picture this."

Which are the chords.

But if you come in, if you put this on those chords...

It sounds different.

It was Mike's experience as a guitarist

that helped him get the very best

out of the band's guitarists, frank and Chris...

However long it took.

As we built on this thing,

the sensitivity of the song came into focus.

And then we add some guitars to it.

God.

That must have taken so damn long to do.

I mean, it sounds very precise and refined,

and, you know, I just play a lot more casually than that.

But I do like the guitar break.

And this beautiful solo, like a waterfall effect here.

♪ All I want is 20/20 vision ♪

♪ a total portrait with no omissions ♪

♪ all I want ♪

♪ is a vision of you ♪

And then she's back to it.

♪ If you can, picture this ♪

♪ a day in December ♪

♪ picture this ♪

♪ freezing cold weather ♪

♪ you got clouds on your lids... ♪

The lyric to this day, to me,

is elusive and, and beautiful,

and it's such an important part

of the "Parallel Lines" experience,

and it all came from this, this amazing girl, who...

Who could, you know, sell ice to the eskimos.

♪ Yeah ♪

But now the band had to concentrate more

on selling their new sound to a world audience

who thought of them... if at all...

as a punk band with attitude.

But their then manager had other ideas,

as they discovered at a photo session.

We had the concept

of being in front of these black and white stripes.

Nobody wanted to smile. It was punk rock.

And then our erstwhile manager said,

"why don't you all take a picture smiling?"

So everybody took one shot smiling and that...

And then he, you know, unbeknownst to us,

used those on the cover.

I just hated that posed album cover.

It looked like it was designed by management

and put together by marketing.

It was just awful.

I don't think you'll ever hear a boy

complain about that album cover,

except maybe the boys who were on the album cover.

But part of it was

that it presented the personality of the band

in such an appealing way,

because they're wearing their matching suits,

it's very beatlesque,

and the idea of Debbie Harry in the middle of it preening,

as if to say, yeah, look what I've got,

look at my harem around me.

That was an image that pretty much everybody loved.

It's an eye-catching record,

it's a classic cover that can be a piece of...

like an Andy warhol, piece of art by itself...

it could be like a Campbell's soup can, you know,

but it's "Parallel Lines."

As a result of her artistic and unpredictable

but always confident and individual style,

Debbie was now fast becoming a fashion icon.

Debbie's wearing a tiger dress,

which she actually made herself.

I think it's some kind of seat-cover fabric

that she found cheaply and...

and she made a dress out of it, which was very dramatic.

Debbie just came walking across the street from me...

towards me, and I took a couple of pictures,

and she looks absolutely stunning,

as a lot of people really think

it's one of their favorite pictures,

because she just looks so good

and she's kind of got this wet tee-shirt on,

you know, which is very sexy.

Photographer Roberta bayley was also at coney island that day

shooting with Debbie

for one of the film-like cartoons the band made

for "punk" magazine,

telling fantasy stories of life in New York City.

That day Debbie was cast as "beach bunny"

in "mutant monster beach party!"

She's sort of wearing

these really ripped-off, cut-off jeans,

and I think a one-shoulder tank top.

She had an idea of the character and the look.

Debbie's punk style continues to inspire fashion designers

nearly 40 years later.

Ktystyna Kozhoma: I think it's this bad-ass attitude to everything.

You know, everybody wants to make a statement,

and I think it's an amazing feeling

when you know that you are limitless,

so that's what is so attractive in punk movement.

Andrew Bolton: I think punks were incredibly brave, heroic individuals

who didn't really care what people thought about them.

It was highlighting the idea of creativity,

highlighting the idea of individuality,

and also was very critical of the status quo,

so it was both a political and an aesthetic movement.

So many designers have been using it...

reusing it all the time...

recycling punk in their collections.

I hope that my dresses

are talking for themselves about punk.

The track "pretty baby" reflects Debbie's interest in movies,

though it's not about her

but about another rising superstar of the day.

Track five, "pretty baby."

♪ Eyes that tell me ♪

♪ incense and peppermints ♪

♪ your looks are larger than life ♪

That song was written for Brooke shields.

I think Debbie wrote that

inspired by Brooke and her beauty and, you know,

the fact that she was a girl coming of age in stardom,

you know, and all of that.

"Pretty baby" was

child star Brooke shield's breakout performance.

To this date she has made nearly 40 films.

We met her when she was what, 12 or something or 13.

Yeah, she was a baby.

She was very sweet.

She had this complete...

You know, she was portrayed as having sexuality, you know.

Well, she's in practically every shot of the film.

That song is just so pop to me.

It's just that feel, it's that...

All that stuff, you know.

It's very abba.

♪ Pretty baby ♪

I just thought what... what an amazing melody.

Absolutely breath-taking melody.

I remember I put that bass line in.

♪ Bum bum bum bum bum bum ba da ♪

♪ I fell in love with you ♪

♪ pretty baby ♪

♪ I fell in love with you ♪

♪ oh-oh, oh oh oh ♪

It's just so pop, I get goose bumps, I get chills.

I do.

"Pretty baby" was an out-and-out pop song.

With Mike's help,

the band had broken away from their punk roots,

and in doing so alienated many of their fans.

But was the new album going to find a new audience?

"Parallel Lines" was the most foolish album

anybody ever made.

You're trying to build your sound,

you're trying to build an image for yourself.

This band is this sound.

And what do you do for your breakthrough album?

You just disperse it and do a little jazz

and a little reggae and a little disco.

You added disco to it?

Even though we were very diverse,

there were certain threads that connected people up, you know,

and so Nigel was there with his, you know, brit pop sensibilities

that clem was very attuned to.

I'm an English guy who grew up

on the greatest bands in the world.

Right after the Beatles came.

The next day, which I got a guitar and a beatle wig.

Frankie was... loved the stones...

I loved the stones.

In high school in particular,

I would like to really chill out with jazz,

and so I listened to a lot of jazz.

It's funny that to those of us in the rest of the country

"Parallel Lines" seemed like such a New York record,

because there were so many

different kinds of pop music in it,

and that all these songs could thrive together on one album

was really innovative and really mind-blowing.

One of the most unashamedly pop songs on the album

was "Sunday girl."

Its peaches and cream lyrics and romantic inspiration

would have been seen as an act of pure treason

by the cbgb's punk faithful.

Track nine, "Sunday girl."

The Phil spector "be my baby" is...

hal Blaine riff is the beginning of "Sunday girl,"

which is like...

I remember Chris wrote the lyric,

and I was really impressed when I read it,

you know, and Chris, "hey, what do you think of this?"

I said Jesus, "cold as ice cream and still as sweet,"

that's beautiful.

Chris and his then-girlfriend Debbie

maintain that the song is about their pet cat.

It was about the cat whose name was Sunday man,

and he ran away when we were on tour,

and it was very tragic. And...

Yeah.

He was a nice cat.

He was a great character.

He was, you know, a funny little...

A funny little man.

But keyboardist Jimmy destri says it's really a love song

and not about a cat at all.

It's not about the cat. It's not about the cat.

That's a cool, you know, brush-off by them saying...

They wrote that.

Chris wrote it to Debbie, of course, you know, yeah.

It was really a beautiful song.

♪ When I saw you again in the summertime ♪

♪ if your love was as sweet as mine ♪

♪ I could be Sunday girl ♪

Overall the band was now accepting

producer Mike Chapman's working methods,

but when it came to the song "11:59,"

guitarist Nigel Harrison had had enough.

Track seven, "11:59."

Mike was suddenly "don't go up here, stay down there."

"Clem, don't do this, watch it on that part."

There was all these instructions coming at us.

And that to me was like an act of war,

because it's like this guy is nuts,

'cause by this time it's like take 22.

And I had my meltdown and I said "are you [bleep] crazy?"

And I just, I just... I lost it.

But the rebellious Nigel was about to be won over.

I do remember the turning point

was when Mike sat us down and said look,

what we're doing here is we're making records,

we're making records,

we're not documenting a live performance.

"11:59" was written

by the band's keyboardist Jimmy destri.

One of Jimmy's best songs, too.

Jimmy had a particular style of writing.

A lyric about alienation, I guess, you know,

looking back on my, you know,

little alienated bits of life, you know.

It's about late night club life

and the sort of, you know, isolation,

being in a crowd and being isolated

and, you know, posing and all that,

very, you know, very new yorkish.

♪ Today could be the end of me ♪

♪ it's 11:59 ♪

♪ and I want to stay alive ♪

I can even smell the air in New York at the time,

you know, taste the food we were eating

and the drugs we were doing.

By 1978 disco was on the rise

with the Bee Gees' "Saturday night fever"

dominating the charts

and the New York underground scene

was shifting from punk to new wave...

punk lite.

This is how New York sounded.

You're frustrated because you've got to take the subway,

it's crowded, it's dirty, it's dangerous,

so that's got to come through your pen and your guitar,

and that's what you hear in all this music.

Everybody in Blondie

was a real New York character, you know.

I mean, Chris was somebody that you could imagine being

like in tin pan alley in 1939, you know,

and the same with Debbie.

She was like a, you know, a broad cracking wise, you know.

So, yeah, they were like real New York characters.

And these New York characters

were about to deal a game-changing blow

to the punk versus disco battle.

It was called "heart of glass."

We played him everything we'd got,

and, and then he said "anything more?"

And then, you know, I think Chris said, well,

we have this old song, you know, that we don't use

because we've never been able to really finish it

the way we wanted it to be, and that was "heart of glass."

Bob gruen had heard Blondie perform the fledging hit

at cbgb's the previous year.

And I remember clearly having a feeling

this is bigger than this club,

this is gonna go out into theatres,

it's gonna go around the world.

And I never had that feeling for anybody else down there.

It was now up to Mike

to make this half-formed song into a hit,

and he and clem Burke were already thinking "disco."

Track ten, "heart of glass."

♪ Once I had a love, and it was a gas ♪

♪ soon turned out had a heart of glass ♪

♪ seemed like the real thing, only to find ♪

♪ mucho mistrust, love's gone behind ♪

The way the song was recorded was a click track...

just a little beat from a little tiny Roland rhythm box.

We thought we were kind of doing a sort of takeoff

on kraftwerk, dance music, experimenting.

"Heart of glass" was a nightmare to record

because it was an idea beyond the technology at the time.

My influence, once again, I think is felt on that record

with my sort of homage

to the "Saturday night fever" soundtrack.

I started playing the disco dance beat

from "night fever," the Bee Gees record,

which I loved.

To help clem lay down the drum tracks,

Mike brought in a piece of then cutting-edge technology...

a drum machine.

So I brought this thing in once we had decided

that we were going to disco this song up a little.

They got the click track going and they did clem...

it was like a meccano set, they put bits and pieces in it,

so clem did the bass drum.

Kick drum and the drum machine together.

All the way through the track,

then the snare drum, then the high hat.

Then we built the whole thing up.

Then we did the Tom breaks, the Tom Toms...

all the different Tom breaks... and then we added the cymbals.

And it literally took days.

Put the bass.

And this is where I had a major run-in with, with Nigel.

He wasn't playing stiff enough, he wasn't like...

That was the disco link, the octave thing.

And he said, "I have to play that?"

And I said, well, you don't have to,

but it would be nice, if you don't mind.

So after our run-in, he agreed to do it.

And suddenly the whole thing was starting to feel good,

so then we added some guitars.

35 years later, Debbie and Chris are reunited

with the original multi-track recording.

That's the space.

This is probably... I know what that is.

All those weird sounds

are the Roland space echo or chorus echo.

I can't remember.

It's an old box.

These are still out there.

All those jungle noises

were Chris doing his "waaa" with his e-bow, I guess,

and then...

♪ ded de de de ♪

Now that was the hook in the song.

Frank was insanely good on that song.

Once they had the drums and guitars in place,

Jimmy and Mike then had to make sure

the keyboard tracks fit precisely, too.

We didn't have midi in those days,

so all of these keyboard parts, we had to do these in sections.

Mike and I had to do on the one, 1, 2, 3, 4.

Through the whole song.

We were all fighting... constantly.

But I said no, just keep going, guys,

because we're getting there, we're getting there.

So finally we had all the track pieces in place.

And we had this wonderful...

let's hear it now with the drums in there...

suddenly...

The guitar gave it the swing.

The drums were sort of...

There was a little bit of Keith moon in there for clem,

and then all we needed was Debbie to come in and sing.

Now, when Debbie put a voice on it...

She sang it in that little, sweet sing-song voice,

and the whole thing just came together.

♪ Once I had a love and it was a gas ♪

I didn't realize that Debbie

was actually gonna sing this in this head voice, this...

♪ La la la ♪

And there she is out there, like lullabying to us...

And I thought, "wow, that's so cool,"

'cause up till then she'd probably been going

"once I had a love," you know, in full voice.

♪ Once I had a love and it was devine ♪

I said, oh, that's great, this is beautiful,

it's so dreamlike.

♪ I was losing my mind ♪

♪ seemed like the real thing, but I was so blind ♪

"Heart of glass" was... At the time

there was dance music around and disco music,

even though we did that song as sort of a, you know,

it was a tongue-in-cheek version,

it wasn't really supposed to be, you know,

straight-ahead disco for real,

it was like fake disco,

and that sort of seemed like it had possibilities.

But the pure punk fans clearly didn't get

the tongue-in-cheek subtleties.

Right after "Parallel Lines" was released

and before it really blew up,

we played this, like, farewell gig at cbgb's,

because we knew we couldn't come back.

There were lines around the block.

And I was walking up to the stage,

because that's what you had to do at cbgb's,

and this guy comes up to me, grabs me,

he goes, "your disco album sucks!"

And I was like I guess it's gonna be a hit,

because we've finally broken out of the little world.

I don't think any of us had any idea

of how big it was gonna be.

♪ Once I had a love, and it was a gas ♪

♪ soon turned out to be a pain in the ass ♪

The album was released in 1978

and has to date sold around 20 million copies.

"Heart of glass" was number one in 16 countries

and became one of "rolling stone's"

500 greatest songs of all time.

The band is still touring today

and has recorded seven more albums since "Parallel Lines."

Except for drummer clem Burke,

they all still live in New York City

and still feel that city's energy.

Just walking around, you know,

I like that it's still here, the energy is still here.

I mean, you know, the money thing is...

it's a bit of a drag, you know.

New York City went from "don't go there"

to "you can't afford it," like that, in a heartbeat.

I think it was the early '80s

when I realized that corporations were moving in,

they were seeing something that, you know,

they could make money from.

There's still bits and pieces

that some people just think are grimy

and I see as beauty, as a masterpiece.

The streets are not the same.

The streets are not full of colorful characters,

you know, it's pretty... it could be anywhere.

One place where music can still be heard

is oddly enough the original cbgb's on the bowery,

which was turned into a fashion outlet

by the entrepreneur John Varvatos in 2008.

John Varvatos: There's a history here,

and there was a history with this space

that talked to people,

and it was a very important part of people's life.

I'm not trying to recreate that by any means,

I'm just trying to preserve it to some degree

and keep that energy alive

that's been here on the bowery for many, many years.

John keeps the music alive with regular concerts at the shop.

Vintage trouble is one of the bands that has played for him.

♪ Have mercy on my soul ♪

There's something about the space

and something about the history

and something about those walls that speaks to them.

And I can't put my hand on it

and I can't get my arms around it,

but I feel it every time.

I have goose bumps every time we do a show here.

Much of the bowery neighborhood has been redeveloped

and its spirit and passion tamed,

but "Parallel Lines" remains to tell the story

of a band held together by their love affair with the music

and the city that inspired it.

♪ One way or another ♪

♪ I'm gonna find ya ♪

♪ I'm gonna getcha, getcha, getcha, getcha ♪

♪ one way... ♪

It does sum up a time, but it's not just that,

it's that people like the music,

they like the sentiment, they like what it says.

They had really smart lyrics,

in the same way that, you know,

the great American songbook writers did,

like, you know, Cole Porter and Gershwin, you know.

I guess, you know, we tried to make it

about real experience,

incorporating my little world, my own personal experiences.

The best thing is when I hear...

I hear from kids who say, you know,

it helped me get through my teenage years, you know,

I was having such a hard time

and I used to listen to the music,

and that's very moving, you know.

As a record producer you've got to say,

well, thank god I had something to do with this,

because opportunities like that don't come along every day.

"Man doth not live on bread alone,"

and that's a reference to the arts.

It stimulates you, it enhances your creativity.

I mean, without the arts

we might as well go back to the caves.

♪ I'm in the phone booth, it's the one across the hall ♪

♪ if you don't answer, I'll just ring it off the wall ♪

♪ I know he's there, but I just had to call ♪

♪ don't leave me hanging on the telephone ♪

♪ don't leave me hanging on the telephone ♪

♪ I heard your mother, now she's going out the door ♪

♪ did she go to work or just go to the store? ♪