South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Blondie coming to Broward Center
‘Heart of Glass’ wasn’t meant to be a hit, explains drummer Burke
Rock & Roll Hall of Famers Blondie will perform at the Broward Center in Fort Lauderdale on March 16, a rare U.S. show on a 2023 schedule that includes a stop at Coachella, performances in Colombia and Mexico, and a summer in Europe.
The band, featuring founding members Debbie Harry, Chris Stein and Clem Burke, is touring in support of the 10-record box set “Against the Odds,” a critically praised, all-encompassing retrospective, from Blondie’s earliest demo songs to remastered versions of hits such as “Denis,” “Hanging on the Telephone,” “One Way or Another,” “Heart of Glass,” “Call Me” and “Rapture.”
A prolific drummer who won a Grammy for the Eurythmics hit “Missionary Man” and has taken side gigs with Iggy Pop, David Bowie, the Ramones, Bob Dylan and Pete Townshend, Burke currently is part of a European tour celebrating the 45th anniversary of Iggy’s classic album “Lust For Life.” Speaking by phone from the English city of Hull, the 68-year-old New Jersey native reminisced about Blondie’s unlikely rise to stardom from New York’s gritty CBGB scene, beginning nearly 50 years ago. The interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Q: The box set is titled “Against the Odds.” What odds are you talking about? A:
The odds of having any kind of success in life, really. Particularly in show business. It’s against the odds to have any kind of success in any kind of artistic endeavor. And [the title] just seemed to suit the band Blondie, in particular. Because we were pretty rough when we used to play in the bars. Kids aren’t able to do that anymore. You can’t make your mistakes in public any longer — everybody’s recording everything that you do.
We used to play on bills at CBGB with all the other bands of note, the Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, bands like that. A lot of the time we were the opening band. Obviously we had Debbie, she opened all the doors. Her image was always great.
CBGB was literally rock ’n’ roll high school if you actually got left back a few times, like most people did. I was a kid, 17 or 18 years old, when I first started hanging out there, and I’d be there almost every night.
The owner of CBGB, Hilly Kristal, was integral to the whole thing. If he had not had that bar, I’m not really sure how that all would have evolved. He gave us that workshop to make our mistakes in public. If you walked into a venue now and mucked up a few songs and started an argument onstage, the owner would probably throw you out. But Hilly would say, “Oh, I see something there. You guys can play on Monday night.” I don’t think that really exists any longer.
We progressed, but we had a lot of songs that weren’t necessarily completely together, i.e., in the box set, you see that “Heart of Glass” went through numerous transitions before it became what it became.
Q: Like the distinctive sounds that came out of the Brill Building, Motown and Laurel Canyon, that CBGB punk scene on New York’s Lower East Side in the 1970s changed the course of popular music. Did you know that was
happening at the time? A: There were no punks at CBGB. There were no CBGB T-shirts. Punk was something that was invented along the way. Of course, punk music to my mind existed prior to 1977, with bands like Iggy and the Stooges, for instance.
It was very bohemian. You had Allen Ginsberg living around the corner, you had William Burroughs living on the Bowery, a couple doors down from the Blondie loft. That was very influential, obviously, on people like Patti Smith, members of Television. It was a very artistic movement. Chris and Debbie, for lack of a better word, are beatniks, you know? That’s basically what they were. And I appreciate that very much.
The Blondie loft was one block south of Houston Street, two blocks south of CBGB, on the
Bowery. Debbie and Chris lived there with our bass player, Gary Valentine. We rehearsed there, we would crash there.
There was a restaurant-supply store on the first floor, with three loft spaces on top. We lived on the second floor, and the landlord lived on the next floor. There also was a guy named Stephen Sprouse, who went on to become a really well-known fashion designer, who was friends with Debbie. CBGB was like a block away. We could wheel our amps down the street and go there and play. But that was New York then, you know?
It evolved, of course, and everything that happened with the Ramones and what happened in the U.K., it all assimilated into what’s commonly called punk rock. The Ramones were more like the Bay City Rollers to me than punk rock.
“Blitzkrieg Bop” sounds like “Saturday Night” by the Bay City Rollers to me. [Laughs]
It’s funny, they were not really thought of as being much of anything when they first came out, and it’s really amazing to see, in retrospect, in 2023, how they’re looked upon in the evolution of popular music, you know? To me, the Ramones were the Beatles of my generation. They’re probably the second most-influential band that’s ever existed in pop music, after the Beatles.
There was a lot more to the Ramones than meets the eye. It was very conceptual, it was very artistic, and their influences go back to the great pop songs, like Brill Building songs. Joey Ramone kind of emulated Ronnie Spector in his vocal approach.
Q: As Blondie evolved in the CBGB petri dish, early songs like “In the Flesh” and “Denis” also borrowed that classic girl-group pop sound, right? A:
That Brill Building, Ronnie Spector vibe is exactly what we were going for. But as it evolved, that was only one dimension of the band. I mean, you put “Denis” up against “Rapture,” they’re like two different animals.
Richard Gottehrer produced [“Denis”] that way. He was a product of the Brill Building. I love that song. Some people are actually reticent to play it live nowadays, but I really like that song a lot. It’s interesting that when it breaks down, a lot of the handclaps and foot stomps are a bit out of time, and you wouldn’t get that today. It would be all perfect. It’s a great sound.
Q: You will soon be in South Florida, where Iggy Pop lives. Do you have any vivid memories to share about Iggy? Also David Bowie, whom you’ve worked with. A:
Oh, I have many memories of Iggy. [Laughs] One, in particular, when we
opened in his hometown in Detroit, at the Silverdome, in 1981. The bill was Iggy Pop, Santana and The Rolling Stones. No sound check, we just went on without any preparation, and it was total madness. It was before metal detectors, and people were throwing knives and bottles at us. It was very exciting.
And one time we were playing a club in Austin, Texas, and there was a bomb scare. We were told to announce that there was a bomb scare and to clear the building. But Iggy announced it in such a way that it sounded like it was part of the act, because he did it in the context of the song. So, yeah, things like that. [Laughs]
I recorded something with David, but I wouldn’t really put that on my resume. Blondie’s first national tour [in 1977] was in support of Iggy Pop, along with David on keyboards, for the album “The Idiot.” I have many, many positive memories of David and his helping hand in the success of Blondie in the early days of the band, to tell you the truth. They took us on the tour and immediately it was a leg up for us.
During the tour, he would watch our sound checks and be very encouraging. He was particularly interested in our keyboard player, Jimmy Destri, who had just gotten a polyphonic synthesizer called a Synclavier, which was kind of a rare thing at the time. David was playing keyboards on the tour, but he was, like, taking analog keyboards and putting them through different devices to treat the sound. He had not seen a Synclavier at that point, so he and Jimmy commiserated on that. David was always ahead of the game technologically speaking. He was just very encouraging. There are a lot of great photos of Debbie and David from that time.
Q: One of the strengths of the box set is that it pulls back the curtain on the Blondie process. As you mentioned, it features multiple versions of“Heart of Glass,” including a demo from 1975 called “Once I Had a Love,” subtitled “The Disco Song.” Was this career-changing song really a last-minute addition to the “Parallel Lines” album? A:
We had gotten a new producer on that album, Mike Chapman, who had many hits in the U.K. and was a songwriter and arranger. I don’t recall off the top of my head, but I have read that Mike said to us, after we had done pre-production on the record, “Do you have anything else?” And that’s when somebody said, “Oh, yeah, we have this song we call ‘The Disco Song.’ ”
Chris Stein, who
co-wrote that song with Debbie, was always very interested in R&B, and he took that a lot further with us doing something like “Rapture” later on.
We were influenced by Kraftwerk, and [“Heart of Glass”] was actually, kind of, Kraftwerk and Donna Summer put together. And there was a [1975] song called “Shame Shame Shame,” a disco song [by Shirley & Company], and it has that … classic rhythm of what you would think of as a dance song.
Our keyboard player at the time, Jimmy [Destri], had just gotten a basic Roland monophonic synthesizer. It was before digital and all that kind of stuff, and so we just kind of put it together piecemeal.
I’m more of a rock ’n’ roll guy. I like bubblegum music. But you have to have open ears, especially as a drummer. You have to be open. You have to be a team player. I knew I was surrounded by a lot of great songwriters and interesting people. And that’s kind of the evolution of the band.
We never thought about it being a big hit. In the good old days of only vinyl, the most commercial songs you would put at the beginning of the record. That song is definitely buried on track 8 or 9 on the other side of the album. We just thought it was very experimental, and we didn’t really foresee it being the big international hit that it became. It was the dooropener for the U.S.
When we were working on the box set, we were also working on a brand-new album, which will probably come out in the fall. It was working both ways. We were actually inspired by the box set — we were kind of influencing ourselves, listening to the old stuff and making new songs.
We’re still in the process of completing the mixing, but it’s more or less finished. It’s the classic [sound] in as much as we have such an eclectic source of influences. What is the classic Blondie song? Is it “Denis” or is it “Heart of Glass” or is it “Rapture” or is it “Call Me”? They’re all very different songs, completely different styles. I think that was one of our strongest points.
IF YOU GO
What: Blondie in concert
When: 8 p.m. Thursday, March 16
Where: Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale
Cost: Tickets start at $49.50.
Information: