Still Radiating

While I haven't written much on Blondie here, the impact they had on me growing up and in my adult life is immeasurable. "The Tide Is High" was the first 45 I ever owned and Debbie Harry's Rockbird was one of the first albums I ever saved up for specifically to buy. The music of Chris Stein, Clem Burke and Jimmy Destri combined with the razor sharp wit and intelligence of Debbie's lyrics formed a big part of the soundtrack to my life.
I just found out that Blondie are hitting the road again to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Parallel Lines and I wish them all the luck in the world with it. While I prefer the early rawness of Plastic Letters and the dark paranoia of The Hunter, there is no denying that Parallel Lines is one of the most perfectly crafted and performed rock albums of the seventies. From the opening blast of "Hangin on the Telephone" to Robert Fripp's astounding guest spot on "Fade Away and Radiate" to the put down finale of "Just Go Away", Parallel Lines is a perfect album that captured the band at their confident best. I have no doubt it will sound awesome live.
I just saw Blondie once, on their No Exit tour, about a decade ago and it was a phenomenal show. While they have all aged, they still put on one of the most exciting shows you can see. I even met Debbie once, after a Jazz Passengers gig, and I must admit it was the only time I have ever been nearly speechless in front of someone.
I hope I get to see the tour and I would like it to be a huge success for them. Many of my happiest moments have been spent in the company of a Blondie record and those moments will never fade away for me.

Blondie Review From The Louisville Courier Journal

I will be posting my thoughts later today on last night's performance by Blondie at the Kentucky Center, a gig that was among the best I have ever seen. In the meantime, here is the rave review by Jeffrey Lee Puckett from the local Louisville paper.

Blondie at the Louisville Kentucky Center

"Blondie were so much more than 70's punk-poppers with a cute singer. Their influence on three decades of sound and vision can still be felt strongly today...musically Blondie went beyond punk to continue New York's classic pop tradition, while introducing underground art and black music forms to the mainstream. Their records might now sound like signals from a lost world but the reception will always be brilliant."
-Kris Needs, Mojo (2008)-

Last night’s Blondie show at Louisville’s Kentucky Center was one of the most powerful and moving I have ever witnessed…the kind of transcendent rock and roll concert that I frankly didn’t think was possible anymore. Playing with the kind of determination and power that only a group truly possessed with greatness could muster, Blondie’s 90 minute set last night was simply stunning and I only wish I could have had some of the remaining naysayer’s with me to show them something that I have always believed…namely that Blondie is one of the great acts in rock history.

For reasons that I am not going to be able to fully explain, their was something overwhelmingly emotional about last nights gig and I don’t think I was the only one in the audience who felt that. The entire room bristled with an excitement that I haven’t felt in a very long time…there was something positively soulful in the air and that feeling never let up through the show from the opening instrumental jam to the final strain of The Rolling Stones “Get Off Of My Cloud” that they closed with.

Last night as Debbie Harry sauntered on stage and the entire crowd stood up screaming like a giant invisible hand lifted us out of our chairs I thought of something John Waters said about ten years ago…about how for many people of my generation Debbie Harry meant the same thing as Elvis did for his, and that really came out last night when she seemed to float onstage by her sheer coolness alone. Dressed in black with a baseball cap on and looking about half of her 63 years, Debbie Harry’s entrance last night was an absolute event and it’s not something I will ever forget. Even after seeing her a handful of times live and getting to meet her once, I still teared up when she came out of the wings last night…like a extraordinary ghost from my past had entered the room and was preparing to sigh that dream that Bruce Springsteen recalled Elvis whispered to him as a young man discovering the power of rock and roll.

Playing in front of a huge Parallel Lines styled banner with the word BLONDIE stretched across it like a call to arms, Debbie Harry without a word launched into “Hangin On The Telephone” with an unnerving intensity that took effortlessly everyone in the room back to a time in our lives when we all perhaps believed in something a little more than we do now.
Throughout the show Debbie never missed a step and she sounded wonderful with the last thirty years seeming to make her voice even more distinctive and richer than the records on which it became famous on. Powering through the entire Parallel Lines album and then a stunning set of classics, covers and new material, Debbie Harry once again showed that she is still one of the most commanding figures in rock history….projecting the kind of strength that only a handful of her peers can even begin to come close to.

The band backing her was equally jaw dropping. Guided by the masterful Chris Stein (a heroic player who has never fully gotten his due as one for the key figures that came out of the punk movement) on guitar and the legendary Clem Burke (a.k.a. GOD) on drums, the band rocked with a loose and ferocious intensity like they had their backs against a wall in an after school street fight while secretly packing switch blades that they could use at any given moment. Watching Stein and Burke work their brutal and seductive magic was awe inspiring and the rest of the band (made up of Leigh Foxx on Bass, Paul Carbonara on guitar and Matt-Katz Bohen on keyboards) matched the two legends every step of the way. The only missing ingredient was the great Jimmy Destri who was at least represented in spirit throughout the evening as some of his best songs filled the hall and weaved the same distinctive spell they have since he first penned them.

The evening did indeed consist of the entire Parallel Lines album, played reverentially in order to an audience of adoring fans from 10 to 70 who all sang along like the songs were a part of their D.N.A. Highlights included the whole damn album, but if I had to choose then “Picture This” was particularly inspired as was “11:59” which saw Debbie defiantly screaming “I Wanna Live” over and over again which probably brought the biggest reaction of the whole night. One track I was particularly keen to hear was “Fade Away and Radiate” since the studio version depended so much on Robert Fripp’s legendary guest turn but the band handled it perfectly and I dare say that it sounded so good that the King Crimson axe-man wasn’t even missed.
The Parallel Lines portion of the evening wound down with a lovely and surprising reworking of the once vicious closing “Just Go Away”, a song which got the biggest makeover of the night. After finishing the album Debbie thanked the crowd over some deafening screams and announced the band were then going to do some newer material and some more not so distant classics which is what they did.

The evening’s second half was made up of a mixture of the expected hits (a gloriously extended “Rapture”, Destri’s “Maria” and the inescapable “The Tide Is High”) along with a couple of stunners off Debbie’s newest solo platter Necessary Evil, which sounded like new classics in the hands of Stein and Burke. While Roxy Music’s “More Than This” was sadly missing from last nights set list, the choice of covers, including a short but powerful “Hey Bo Diddley” and a surprising blues jam where Stein showed off his still undervalued chops, were perfect choices.

Sharing the superstar aura and charisma of Debbie Harry was Clem Burke. Burke, one of the truly great rock drummers, was a force of nature all through the night. Looking just like he did thirty years ago and controlling the skins with the same kind of wild intensity that the likes of Keith Moon did, Burke was a masterful and mesmerizing presence and I was frankly envious of the people who got his drum sticks that he tossed out before the first encore.
The night was filled with so many memorable moments that it is hard to recount them…from Debbie taking off her shoes, throwing them out into the audience and dancing barefoot on stage to the moment at the end of “Call Me” when it sounded like Burke was going to make the walls of the place totally collapse. It was among the most captivating 90 minutes I have ever seen.

Since the botched release of their audacious The Curse Of Blondie five years ago, everything has been golden for Blondie as their stock has considerably rose due to their justified induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the fact that more and more young people have discovered their magical legacy (one of the most astonishing things about last nights show was that there were more young people there than there were nearly ten years ago when I saw them on their No Exit tour). For me though the most exhilarating, surprising and resonate moment came during the weekend CBGB’s closed its doors for the final time when a visibly moved Patti Smith dedicated part of her set to Blondie…a remarkable show of solidarity from the woman who once told Debbie Harry that rock and roll didn’t need her.

Blondie’s legacy will continue to grow and if last night’s performance is anything to go by then the band incredibly have creativity to burn. Debbie Harry recently told Mojo magazine that she still felt “vital” and that was the word that kept going through my head last night…a vital band playing vital music to a crowd that remained on their feet through the whole show..

The biggest musical influences of my early life (Elvis, The Beatles, Rick Nelson) were due to my parents but Blondie was my first discovery. They were MY band and watching and listening to Debbie Harry last night I felt the same way I felt that first time I heard them as a young man nearly three decades ago…and I was very, very moved.

***Pics from this show have already popped up and they can be viewed here and here.***

Artist and Muse #10

Chris Stein snapped this great shots of H.R. Giger preparing Deborah Harry for their video Now I Know You Know. These shots were featured in Blondie's Making Tracks book and they can be found, along with some others, at many Giger and Blondie tribute sites.
Giger would photograph and design the cover and artwork for Debbie's first solo album Koo-Koo, as well as direct two videos for her off it. The cover was banned in several parts of the world and remains controversial to this day. The videos they shot together remain some of the most unique and distinctive in the medium.

The Great Video Store in the Sky: A David Cronenberg Double Feature

Images From My All Time Favorite Films: David Cronenberg's Videodrome (1983)

I am posting this special Friday edition of Images From My All Time Favorite Films to not only salute my favorite David Cronenberg film, but also to alert anyone who might not know that Tim Lucas' long awaited behind the scenes book on Videodrome is out. Signed copies can be ordered directly from Video Watchdog here and Amazon also carries the book. Congratulations to Tim for his new book, I can't wait to give it a read.

A Moon in the Gutter Q&A with Author Ryan Clark

Today I am very pleased to present this new Q&A with author, film-historian and all-around great person Ryan Clark.  Ryan, the author of the terrific Thrill Me blog, is currently working on a sure to be awesome book, with the noted film scribe Lee Gambin, on the making of Brian De Palma's Carrie and I am very happy to have him drop by and give us a sneak peak. 

Hi Ryan,

Thanks so much for stopping by Moon in the Gutter to participate in my Q&A series. I am extremely excited about your upcoming book BLOOD AMONG THE STARS: THE MAKING OF CARRIE, that you are working on with Lee Gambin, and I really appreciate you doing this. To start off with, can you tell us a bit about your background?

 

Thank you for having me, Jeremy.  I'm a big fan of your site.

 

I have been a horror fan my entire life, ever since I first saw The Ghost of Frankenstein when I was five or six years old.  That's really the first horror film I remember seeing.  I've always been a writer, too – I used to sit at the table and draw and write brief picture books based on the films I had seen.  I later graduated to writing short stories, though I never got any of them published and they were actually pretty terrible, but I guess they were impressive for someone my age.  So it's only natural that I would eventually want to combine the two – horror movies and writing!  I am also passionately interested in filmmaking, and I'm working on several screenplays.

 

My co-writer, Lee Gambin, is actually much more accomplished than I am.  He writes many popular articles for Fangoria magazine, and he has a book out now called Massacred By Mother Nature: Exploring the Natural Horror Film, which you should all go out and buy.

 

 

 

I typically ask folks here about the films that provided the earliest influence but I also wanted to include music in the mix as I know you are equally passionate about both. Tell me some of your early film and music favorites.

 

As I said, the first horror film I ever saw was The Ghost of Frankenstein, so the Universal horror films were really my first love.  Aside from that, my mother used to record many horror films from TV in the 80s, and she had a bunch of them that I ended up watching, like Carrie, Halloween, Friday the 13th, Psycho and Psycho II, The Amityville Horror – a lot of the classics.

 

For music, I listened to a lot of the stuff my parents were into, like Madonna, Tina Turner, Blondie, and Michael Jackson.  It wasn't until I was in high school and I had regular access to the Internet that I formed my own musical taste.  I began to explore a lot of artists' discographies and fell in love with Nina Simone, Millie Jackson, Kate Bush, Dusty Springfield, Curtis Mayfield, Robyn Hitchcock, and Patti Smith.  My musical interests run the gamut.

 

So, we’ll have to do a chat sometime about how much Debbie Harry means to both of us. I am still grateful you told me about that reissue of KooKoo a year or so ago. Debbie has been one of my great influences since I was a kid and I was hoping you could chat her up a bit here before we delve into the book?

 

Debbie Harry is quite simply one of the coolest and most beautiful people in the world!  Madonna has admitted she was an influence, but no one can compete with Debbie.  When I first heard Blondie, I only knew their greatest hits, but when I began to delve into their albums, I discovered that they had explored quite a range of musical styles on their album tracks – particularly on AutoAmerican – and that intrigued me.  But, as I am wont to do, I usually end up championing the underdog albums that few people like or know about, so my favorite Blondie album is actually The Hunter, the last one they did before their reunion in the late 90s. I am also extremely fond of Debbie's solo career, in particular the Koo Koo and Rockbird albums.

 

 

 

Awesome, okay so the obvious question…why CARRIE?

 

 

 

Carrie is one of the earliest horror films I saw, and it always stayed with me, mostly because the ending terrified me, the shower scene baffled me (I was probably about five, remember), and I just really loved that 70s high school atmosphere.  But it didn't become my all-time favorite movie until I was in middle school.  I think the reason is obvious:  middle school is pretty much the worst time in the lives of most children, so I really connected with Carrie in a big way.  I've been an obsessed fan ever since, and in 2011, I decided to put my obsession to work and actually do something with all of my passion for this movie.

 

CARRIE is indeed one of the great books and films of the seventies and one of those pop-culture cornerstones that continues to resonate to this day. How did the idea for the book first come about and how did you and Lee Gambin initially hook up to write it?

 

The project started when I began chatting with Terry Bolo on Facebook.  Terry had been an extra in the movie, and she convinced me to go ahead with this book.  I now realize that I probably couldn't have finished the book if it had been up to me to locate all of the cast and crew and persuade them to do interviews, but at the time I was determined to make this work.  I started up a Facebook page to raise awareness of the book and make people excited about it, and I noticed Lee joining in on the discussion.  He sent me a private message asking if he could help out, and I was aware that he had interviewed Sissy Spacek for the then-recent issue of Fangoria.  I figured he would be a great help if I brought him on to help me write it, so I asked him if he would be interested, and he said yes.  It's really been a wonderful experience.  Lee is a great guy, and he's been invaluable to this project.  We have become really good friends even though we have never met!  It's a beautiful thing.

 

You’ve managed to interview some truly remarkable artists for this book. Tell us about some of them.

 

The first person I interviewed was Terry Bolo.  She was a background player in many well-known movies like Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and Little Miss Sunshine, and she was really helpful with stories from the Carrie set.  It was a great jumping off point for me.  She put me in touch with Edie McClurg and Doug Cox.  The three of them were all original members of The Groundlings improv troupe, and they have remained friends since the 70s.  Several people from that group appear in Carrie in small roles.

 

Lee was able to get P.J. Soles involved, and she was instrumental in helping us get Nancy Allen and Piper Laurie.  Lee and I worked together to get Stephen King.  Mick Garris and Steve's lovely assistant, Marsha, had a lot to do with that.  I was able to contact Brian De Palma through a friend and spoke to him at length about the film.  That's a fantastic interview.  These are just a few of the many generous and talented people we've been in touch with.  They have all aided us in making this book the absolute best it can be.

 

Was there anyone in particular you have chatted with for the book that particularly blew your mind and is there anyone in particular you haven’t been able to interview that you had hoped to?

 

De Palma and King definitely made me sit back and go, "Whoa!"  It's really shocking to me that we have been in touch with our heroes.

 

I am not at liberty to say exactly which of the major players declined to be involved, but it's a little obvious if you look at the contributor list on our website.  We hope that these people will come around eventually, but if not, we understand.

 

After immersing yourself in CARRIE was there something surprising that came out of your research that really caught you off guard about the making of the film or the film itself?

 

Well, for one thing, I was really surprised by the number of critics and viewers who thought that Sue Snell was in on the joke.  It's pretty clear when you watch Carrie that Chris does not have Sue's allegiance anymore, yet there are people getting paid a lot of money to write about movies who are mixed up when it comes to Sue's motivations!  It's mind-boggling.

 

The other thing that surprised me most about the making of Carrie was that Brian De Palma allowed the entire cast to watch the dailies almost all the way through the shoot.  This is not at all common.  Most directors don't let the cast see the dailies, because they don't want the actors to adjust their performances.  I think De Palma sensed that allowing the cast to see the dailies every night would add to the camaraderie.  You're around the same people all the time when you're in high school, and he had to quickly bring that familiar feeling to those scenes with the students in Carrie.  Obviously, it worked!

 

 

 

I’ve never made any secret of my love for Brian De Palma. In fact if I was forced to name a favorite American director he would be my choice. What are your thoughts on his other films and what are a few favorites along with CARRIE?

 

Oh, I totally agree.  Brian De Palma is my favorite director, if only for his brilliant run of films from 1970-1984.  No one can match his stunning visual and musical sense – not even Hitchcock.  Yes, I said it.  I love Hitchcock, but I prefer De Palma's eroticism, his warmth, his humor, and his propensity for sleaze.  He's always willing to go much further than Hitchcock ever did.  Aside from Carrie, I absolutely adore Sisters, Blow Out, The Fury, Dressed to Kill, Body Double, and Phantom of the Paradise.  Of course, he has also made some great films outside of his peak period, like Casualties of War and Carlito's Way.

 

When can we expect the book and is there an official page or two fans can follow regarding its progress?

 

We aren't sure of the release date yet.  It will be out at least sometime next year, but we may have to put it out to coincide with the remake in October.  We are keeping everyone updated on our website and our Facebook and Twitter pages.

 

Okay, we’ve all got one…favorite CARRIE moment???

 

Do I have to pick one?  I guess if you held a gun to my head, I would pick the ending.  I have never seen a more convincing portrayal of hysteria than Amy Irving in that scene.  But I also love the famous prom sequence, as well as the volleyball scene, opening titles, and shower scene in the locker room.  Pino Donaggio's music fits so beautifully with all of these sequences.  I hope De Palma never stops working with him.

 

Thanks so much Ryan. This has been a pleasure and I really do wish you a lot of success with the book. I know it is going to be amazing and a big success!