“I was a big champion of what we were doing collectively and what they were coming up with,” Burke recalls to Newsweek about first working with Stein and Harry during those early years, “and I didn’t really want to accept the failure at that point in time. So I convinced them to keep going. I think maybe that it has somewhat to do with my work ethic and why the three of us are still together.”
In a few years, Blondie became of the biggest pop bands of the late 1970s and early 1980s, racking up hit songs such as “Heart of Glass,” “The Tide Is High,” “Rapture” and “Call Me.” Nearly 50 years since their formation, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers are still actively touring and recording new music.
On Friday, August 26, Blondie will be releasing their first career box set retrospective, Against the Odds spotlighting the years from 1974 to 1982. In addition to featuring newly-remastered editions of their first six albums (Blondie, Plastic Letters, Parallel Lines, Eat to the Beat, Autoamerican and The Hunter), the box contains a treasure trove of previously unreleased demos, alternate versions of songs, and rarities plus liner notes by Erin Osmon. All of them paint a portrait of a band—whose members included Harry, Stein, Burke, Valentine, keyboardist Jimmy Destri, guitarist Frank Infante and bassist Nigel Harrison—that successfully transitioned from the downtown punk rock scene to international stardom.
“We titled it Against the Odds due to the chances of us having any real success,” Burke says. “That title took on a much bigger relevance with the pandemic [and] the tour being postponed several times, and the box really was due to come out several years ago. We didn’t know where it was going to head, so it seemed very apropos to title the box and the tour Against the Odds. The irony of it is not lost on us, and we are going full speed ahead now.”
Several years in the making, the box set’s genesis can be traced to Blondie’s archival recordings that had been stored in Stein’s upstate New York barn for almost two decades.
“We spent a lot of time on the remastering, making sure everything sounded as good as possible,” says Burke. “So we knew that we needed to remaster the six original albums at some point. It just seemed to evolve to a natural place for us to look back. It’s good to get the demos out, and the things that people haven’t heard before. It was really fun to go through it all.”
The many never-before-released tracks and rarities that are on Against the Odds include early versions of Blondie’s 1978 smash hit “Heart of Glass” (“The Disco Song” and “Once I Had a Love”); “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer,” which later appeared on the 1980 album Autoamerican as “Go Through It”; a French version of “Sunday Girl”; and a home recording titled “Mr. Sightseer” from 1978. Also in the collection are some cover songs the band had recorded over the years, such the Doors’ “Moonlight Drive” and Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire.”
“The songs are like souvenirs that put you at a certain place in time,” Burke says of the archival material. “There’s the original demos that we did with a guy called Alan Betrock, who was the editor of New York Rocker magazine back in the day. He was a big proponent of Blondie very early on, and he put us into a little studio in Queens where we cut, I think, five tracks—one of which is “Platinum Blonde.” Funny enough, [it] was kind of Debbie’s calling card, which we never really recorded for real.”
Burke recalls there was something special when he first joined forces with Stein and Harry almost 50 years ago.
“I was just looking to work with other creative people. We had some common denominators as far as our musical taste that wasn’t really the mainstay at the time, whether it be the Ronettes, the New York Dolls or the Velvets. And then also bubblegum music and the British Invasion.
“So we had a lot in common as our musical mindset, which is really was my impetus to continue to work with Debbie and Chris and make the band happen as much as I could because things really fell apart for a minute there with the departure of Fred Smith. But I knew the creativity was there. Debbie’s charisma and creativity were very obvious to me. It took a while to refine everything. We were all coming from the same place in a lot of ways. We were all New Yorkers fascinated with Warhol and all of that. It was all in the context of what Blondie was about.”
As shown on Against the Odds, Blondie’s sound developed over time and showcased the band’s eclecticism: ’60s girl group pop, art rock, punk, disco, reggae and rap. It all goes back to the first two Blondie albums–Blondie (1976) and Plastic Letters (1977)–both produced by Richard Gottehrer, best known for writing such ’60s hits as “I Want Candy” and “My Boyfriend’s Back.”
“We attempted to do things that maybe we carried off a little bit better later on,” says Burke. “For instance, something from the first album like ‘Man Overboard,’ which is kind of a reggae song, but then obviously by the time we got to ‘The Tide Is High’ [in 1980], we kind of perfected what that was supposed to be. Every song [on the first album] is really cool, really good. [Richard] paid more attention to ‘X Offender’ and ‘In the Flesh.’ Obviously, we had early success with ‘In the Flesh.’ The production is really great on it. We definitely evolved.”
It was when they collaborated with hit producer Mike Chapman (renowned for writing and producing hits for Suzi Quatro, the Sweet, the Knack and others) for 1978’s Parallel Lines that Blondie finally achieved mainstream commercial success.
“Sometimes he would be conducting me in order to keep time in a certain way,” Burke says of Chapman. “He kind of became really, at the time, maybe the seventh member of the band. He was a motivator. He wanted to make a classic album.”
The band earned their first U.S. No. 1 song with the disco-influenced “Heart of Glass,” which ironically was first relegated to side two of Parallel Lines.
“It wasn’t like us thinking that this was gonna be the song that would break Blondie into the U.S. … We thought we were experimenting—the sound of Kraftwerk meets Donna Summer, which is kind of what we did. Talking about Blondie evolving, you can see it right there in the box when you hear ‘Once I Had a Love,’ and then the final result with ‘Heart of Glass,’” he said.
More hit songs and albums followed for Blondie after Parallel Lines, and Harry became a huge media celebrity. The band broke up in 1982; in the late 1990s, Stein, Harry and Burke reformed Blondie and have since recorded five more studio albums. Amid the release of this new box and their current tour, Blondie are also putting the finishing touches on their upcoming new record, the follow-up to 2018’s Pollinator.
“When we went to the studio, it was very efficiently done,” Burke says. “This one has some more songs [written] from the band, and there’s a cover by a very underground ’60s New York group that will become apparent when it’s released. I would say it’s a good follow-up to Pollinator. I think people are going to like it.”
With Blondie looking back at the past with Against the Odds, Burke says the box portrays the band in a really good way. As far as what he hopes that Blondie fans will come away from the box, he says: “One of the things that they’re going to realize is the broad musical palette we had. That was an amazing amount of work in a very short time. So we were pretty prolific at that time, and it all just kind of stopped for a while. But now Debbie, Chris and I have been together longer this time that the first first time around. So it’s pretty interesting.”
