BTC-Issue-No29

WRITTEN BY: Debbie Harry, Chris Stein

RECORDED: RECORD PLANT, NEW YORK

PRODUCED BY: MIKE CHAPMAN

DEBBIE HARRY: VOCALS

NIGEL HARRISON: BASS

CLEM BURKE: DRUMS, DRUM MACHINE

CHRIS STEIN: ELECTRIC GUITAR

JIMMY DESTRI: KEYBOARDS

FRANK INFANTE: GUITAR

FROM THE ALBUM: PARALLEL LINES (1978)

 

“Heart of Glass”  

BLONDIE 

“Everyone was like, ‘Blondie’s gone disco!’” drummer Clem Burke recalled of the group’s first No. 1 hit.

It was spring 1979, when the rallying cry among rockers everywhere was “Disco sucks!” Even new wave and punk bands joined the growing united front against what they heard as mechanized, soulless music. In one infamous incident, thousands of hard-line rock fans burned piles of dance records at Chicago’s Comiskey Park in a “Disco Demolition Night.”

So for Blondie, whose previous hits had been mod-flavored rockers like “Hanging on the Telephone,” to suddenly be in league with the Brothers Gibb was seen as high treason. But then the quintet was never fully embraced by the doctrinaire crowd at CBGB—ground zero for America’s punk movement. Too poppy and too pretty, they carved out their own niche, mashing Carnaby Street, Phil Spector, burlesque and art-school cool into a sexy package.

“Heart of Glass”—originally entitled “Once I Had a Love (The Disco Song)”—had been lurking in their set for five years. And the band’s affection for disco music was no big secret. Burke recalled, “We all used to hang out at Club 82 in New York, which was essentially a gay disco. And in the early days, we used to cover songs like ‘Lady Marmalade’ and ‘I Feel Love.’”

Bent on establishing a rougher-edged identity on their first two albums, Blondie kept “The Disco Song” in reserve for a future session. In early 1978, as they entered the Record Plant for album number three, the time was right. “Everyone has a different theory about ‘Heart of Glass,’” Burke said. “If you talk to our producer Mike Chapman, he’ll say he revamped the song. I know two of the big influences behind revamping the song were Kraftwerk, and for me, ‘Stayin’ Alive.’ I was trying to get that groove that J.R. Robinson did for the Bee Gees.” Burke shared the drumming duties with the Roland CompuRhythm CR-78. “It was one of the early drum machines, and it took forever to program it,” Debbie Harry said. “We had to practically record each beat by hand.”

Still, a little punk attitude seeped through to subvert the dance rhythm. “The instrumental bridge skips a beat,” said Burke. “That’s the anti-disco part—to screw people up when they’re on the dance floor. Burke also added some decidedly un-disco fills in the fadeout.” Though the band thought “Heart of Glass” was catchy, Chapman convinced them to place it deep in the running order of the album, Parallel Lines. Said Chapman, “I didn’t want their fans to hear it too early on the record and think, ‘Oh, Jesus, they’ve become a disco band.’”

Chrysalis Records hated “Heart of Glass,” along with all of Parallel Lines, delivering the old deathblow line: “We don’t hear a single.” There turned out to be four global hits, including the smash “One Way or Another.”

Though MTV was still two years away, the video for “Heart of Glass,” with its jump-cut editing and enraptured close-ups of Harry’s kewpie-doll face, helped propel the song up the charts. When it went No. 1 in March 1979, Andy Warhol threw a party for the band at famed Studio 54. There was a Blondie backlash in the music press, and among some former CBGB compadres. Even Blondie bassist Nigel Harrison sheepishly called the song “a compromise with commerciality.”

But Harry saw it differently. “‘Heart of Glass’ wasn’t really a disco song anyway. It had disco elements, and I think that was repulsive to some. But we always wanted to experiment and try different things.”

–Bill DeMain

 

comment closed

Copyright © 2013 M Music & Musicians Magazine ·