For those who came of age listening to Top 40 radio at the end of the 1970s, the sounds of Blondie offered a singular glimpse into New York’s glittery underground during one of its most artistically fecund eras. Classic tracks like “Rapture,” “Heart of Glass,” and “Call Me” were a potpourri of glam, punk, power pop, disco, rap, and experimental noise that sounded different from anything that had come before. Because of the band’s fluid musicianship, visual reinvention, and extraordinary front woman in singer Debbie Harry, Blondie proved to be the most successful NYC-based band of the decade—and one rivaled only by The Velvet Underground and Suicide as the most influential of any era.
The new 10-LP box set Blondie: Against the Odds 1974-1982 presents the most comprehensive recounting yet of the band’s classic releases, and offers a compelling argument for Blondie’s premier status. Among the panoply of demos, outtakes, and remixes from Blondie (1976), Plastic Letters (1977), Parallel Lines (1978), Eat to the Beat (1979), Autoamerican (1980), and The Hunter (1982) are also early, unreleased recordings (including a garage-rock incarnation of “Heart of Glass” referred to as “The Disco Song”) and a series of home tapes and synthesizer mixes. Presented in its entirety, the box set chronicles the warp speed by which Blondie transformed from a fledgling punk band into a global phenomenon.
“[Blondie] wasn’t really solidly formed,” Harry explains over the phone about those initial years of the band’s run. “We had a lot of changes in the membership. We were always changing, and still discovering who we were.”
Yet the vast collection—with its accompanying liner notes, interviews, detailed timeline and discography, and hundreds of photos—suggests a group that, from the beginning, was more than a shambling garage band that had stumbled out of CBGBs. Harry and guitarist Chris Stein began playing at Hilly Kristal’s infamous Bowery club in the spring of 1974 as the Stilettos (later Stilletto Fads), a cabaret-inspired act founded by Elda Gentile, a singer and actress at the experimental La MaMa Theater, with the help of Off-Off Broadway director Tony Ingrassia. By that fall, Harry and Stein had left to form the more musically focused Blondie, which for a time opened for the likes of the Ramones and Television. “[Those bands] came in fully formed,” Harry says. “And it was much easier to understand who they were.”
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