music ruined my life: Blondie: Picture This Live (1978/1980)

Monday, November 1, 2010

Blondie: Picture This Live (1978/1980)

Some of the choicer reactions to our first Blondie post:

draftervoi said...
My first contact was when my pal Neil wrote to them and bought a copy of their very first single "X Offender." They signed it! At the time (1976), they must have been surprised to get an order from the suburbs of San Francisco, as they had never played outside of the New York area.

BigScott1962 said...
Blondie was no doubt a band ahead of their time.....First album, Plastic Letters, and to a degree Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat were great albums....Debbie had a voice that could be terrifying...Listen to "fan mail" on Plastic Letters...or just so damn CUTE (the line "Nitro...and accetalyne" from "The Hardest Part").....she also had, other than maybe Lita Ford, the finest ass in rock n roll in the late 70's...a musician friend of mine, now deceased, claims to have slept with her.....if he did, well, more power to ya bro.

Anonymous said...
People magazine's 1977 (or so) article on punk music had a photo of Debbie Harry crawling across broken glass---schwing!

Anonymous II said...
I can't remember the first instance but very early on in 7th grade i went to a party a friend threw. Heart of glass had just come out that week and he had the 45. he must have played a few hundred times during the nite. there was a strobe light on constantly , a long game of spin the bottle, a party crasher with weed who almost got us all in trouble, and a lifelong promise made to bum never to drink lite beer. Still love Blondie but will pass on ever listening to that particular song again.

Just8 said...
First time I heard of Blondie was when an article appeared in our local newspaper that the city council banned a forthcoming gig from 'soft-punk band Blondie' because there were afraid that there was going to be a fight at that gig.
Whether there had actually been fights at Blondie gigs or whether they just thought that everything with 'punk' attached to it was dangerous and should therefore not enter our city I don't recall anymore (I was probably eleven years old at the time).
And yes - they actually called it 'soft-punk' and went on to explain that the Sex Pistols were more 'hard-punk' and therefore a bit different.
Some time later (a couple of months, maybe), Blondie were allowed to perform in our town - and the same newspaper ran an interview with them where they explained that fights did not normally happen at their gigs, and that they were not into fighting at gigs at all (well, duh...)
And not long after that (weeks, perhaps), 'Denise' became a number one hit - and I really liked that song (still do), but at the same time thought: people were afraid of this?!?
Which led me to believe that if this kind of music provoked those kinds of reactions, all music before punk must have been incredibly boring...
It took me a little while to get rid of that prejudice.