Blondie’s Timeless Album ‘Parallel Lines’ Explored In New Documentary

New York City, “The Big Apple,” or as I – a native New Yorker – prefer to call it, THE CENTER OF THE F***ING WORLD, has always been many things to many people. Now one of the most expensive places to live in the world, the city still likes to trade on its reputation as 1970s Hell on Earth, with graffiti-filled subway cars full of criminals, artists, and criminal/artists. The idea that ‘Old New York,’ as it’s often referred to, was somehow a better, cooler, more vibrant place than the pricey, well-mannered city of today has inspired websites, photo exhibits, television series and is sort of the crux of the 2015 Smithsonian Channel mini-documentary Blondie’s New York, now available for streaming on Netflix.

I say “sort of” because they never really make a compelling argument that it really is the source and inspiration for the material which made up Blondie’s 1978 breakthrough album, Parallel Lines. In fact, the hour long feature is far more about the making of the album itself than about the infamously mythologized metropolis of yore. Which is fine. The album is a classic slice of American new wave that has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and is well deserving of dissection and analysis.

Blondie were one of a handful of rock bands that sprouted up like weeds in the sidewalk cracks of downtown Manhattan in the afterglow of the hippie and glam rock boom years. Along with Television and the Ramones, they were among the first bands to play the then little known music venue CBGB’s and were a vital part of the early New York punk scene. Like Television and the Patti Smith Group, however, Blondie’s punk bonafides are more about time and place than actual music, and as singer Debbie Harry says early on, “We were not the darlings of the scene.” Their blatant love of ’60s pop and rock, from the British Invasion to Phil Spector girl groups, played with an updated, more aggressive energy was New Wave before anyone had used the term. In time, the style they helped create would define the sound of late ’70s and early ’80s rock.

Equally adapt at singing seductively sweet melodies and delivering lyrics with tough chick attitude, the center of the band was always its stunningly beautiful, bottle-blonde singer Debbie Harry. However, as a late ’70s button rightfully said, Blondie is a group. The classic lineup of Harry, guitarist (and boyfriend) Chris Stein, drummer Clem Burke, and keyboardist Jimmy Destri had coalesced on countless club stages and the band’s first two albums. Big things were expected after Chrysalis Records bought out their previous recording contract for $1 million. Enter second guitarist Frank Infante, English born bassist Nigel Harrison and Australian-born ’70s super producer Mike Chapman, known for his work with glam rockers The Sweet and Suzi Quatro.

With Chapman at the helm, the group began work on their third album. The band buckled but eventually bent to the will of their exuberant but disciplined musical director Chapman, endlessly layering instruments with an emphasis on the radio perfect precision needed to craft the requisite hit singles their recording advance demanded. Like the British series Classic Albums, Blondie’s New York… breaks down the record’s stand out tracks, and examines their creation and recording. Though Blondie has their own interesting insights, producer Chapman is the show’s secret star. He is simply funnier, smarter and more interesting in his discussion of the recording process than the band members themselves.

Parallel Lines was anchored around the definitive new wave singles “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another” and the disco-rock crossover smash “Heart of Glass.” It’s fun to hear the back-stories on each and see the musicians isolate different tracks from the final mix so you can hear all the work that went into each individual song. As a musician myself from a slightly older generation (I was a kid when the album was released), I wonder how archaic the recording process must look to young musicians of today. The basic rhythm track for “Heart of Glass,” for instance, took days to record, being built from the ground up, drum by individual drum, and stacked on top of a drum machine beat emanating from a funny looking black box with green knobs that looks more like something the kids in Stranger Things would play with than the cutting edge piece of music gear it was at the time.

The demands of narrative make the filmmakers play a little fast and loose with the facts. In the documentary, Blondie release the album and are overnight superstars, no longer able to play their home base of CBGB’s, and alienating their “true punk fans.” In truth, the album came out in mid-summer 1978 but the mega-hit “Heart Of Glass,” the record’s fourth single, wasn’t released until about 6 months later.  And though they came up via the same scene as the Ramones and Johnny Thunders’ Heartbreakers, Blondie were never part of punk’s hardcore. Due to the hit singles and Debbie Harry’s good looks, the album was as ubiquitous in the record collections of young boys of that era (alongside other classics like KISS Destroyer). Which is all fine and good. As drummer Burke says, all the punk and new wave bands wanted to have a hit record. Unlike most of their contemporaries, Blondie actually had one. Several, in fact.

Watching Blondie’s New York…and the making of Parallel Lines is a fine way for any music fan to spend an hour. But the meat of the matter is the album itself, not the litany of Old New York clichés about getting robbed at gun point and bums and drugs and how that inspired a city on the edge to create a new style of music and blah blah blah. As a lifetime New Yorker who grew up during the bad old days of the ’70s and ’80s, I like to tell people Old New York wasn’t that cool when my house got robbed.

[Watch Blondie’s New York on Netflix]

Benjamin H. Smith is a New York based writer, producer and musician who thinks the Ramones are the most important American rock band of all time. Follow him on Twitter:@BHSmithNYC.