Blondie opens vaults for a hefty box set celebrating cool
NEW YORK
For decades, a New Wave treasure trove sat in a converted barn. For fans of the band Blondie, it was the equivalent of the Ark of the Covenant tucked away in a rickety storage space.
Inside the building just outside Woodstock, New York, were 100 reel-to-reel tapes, half a dozen cassettes, a few storage tubs crammed with records, flyers and even a stray Andy Warhol print.
The haul chronicled the rise of Debbie Harry and Co. as they tried on many styles, from reggae and rap to rock, adding in punk, 1960s girl group pop and disco. The cache was in bad shape, but promising.
“When we first walked in, I knew that something was going to come out of it,” said Ken Shipley, a producer who specializes in unearthing precious lost sounds as part of the Numero Group. “It just seemed to me that there was going to be no shortage of materials for us to sort through.”
What has emerged is the comprehensive, 17-pound box set “Blondie: Against the Odds, 1974-1982,” with 124 tracks and 36 previously unissued recordings, demos, outtakes and remixed versions of Blondie’s initial six studio albums. There’s also an illustrated discography and a 144-page commentary by all seven original band members.
Listeners can hear early versions of what would become the hit “Heart of Glass” — it was initially just called “The Disco Song” — and “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer,” an original demo for the song that became the country-inflected “Go Through It.”
There are snazzy covers of
The Doors’ “Moonlight Drive” and Ike and Tina Turner’s “Sexy Ida,” as well as “Out in the Streets” by The Shangri-Las. There’s also a one-of-a-kind home recording of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire” — originally recorded at a slow speed to save money — and the neverreleased-until-now song, “Mr. Sightseer.”
The collection is the red-hot center of a band that during the late 1970s and early ‘80s had eight Top 40 hits, including four No. 1s: “Heart of Glass,” “Call Me,” “The Tide Is High” and “Rapture,” which is regarded as the first No. 1 hit to feature rap. There’s also a five-track 1975 album demo that includes “Platinum Blonde,” a sort of band mission statement.
The tapes and tubs were stored in guitarist Chris Stein’s converted barn but locating them was only part of the journey. They were waterlogged from a flood and were infested with mold. They’d endured years of blazing heat and freezing cold. And then there were the unauthorized fans — rats and mice who had made the material their homes.
But Shipley and co-producer Steve Rosenthal didn’t panic: They knew analog audio tapes are actually hardy things and so donned masks, vacuumed and baked the cache. Then they got to work mastering and mixing.
“Ken and I work with analog tapes a lot, and it’s a very resilient format,” said Rosenthal. “If you flooded a hard drive, it’s toast. That’s not the way it is with analog tapes.”
In addition to the Woodstock cache, Shipley and Rosenthal combed through the vast Universal archives, looking in New York, Los Angeles and London for lost Blondie assets. The final set, coming via The Numero Group and UMe, represents six years of work.