Blondie was the last of the famous first wave of punk/new wave acts to spill out of the legendary NYC dive CBGB’s to get signed to a label, and they were the ones who eventually traveled farther than any of their bunkmates. The Ramones, Television, and Talking Heads may have ultimately influenced more other musicians, but Blondie was by far the most publicly popular.

Blondie started when art school student Chris Stein caught a set by The Stillettos, a three-girl-singer group doing ironic updates/send-ups (send-updates?) of classic 1960s girl group songs. Singer Deborah Harry caught his eye and it wasn’t long before she had caught the rest of him too. He joined the band and then pealed her away to form Blondie (so named because Deborah’s good looks (she was once a Playboy Bunny) caught more eyes than Stein’s, and she couldn’t walk down the street without some cabbie or truck driver leering at her and slurping, “Hey, Blondie!”). In a field of defiantly ugly punks, she shone like a beacon, and, shallow as it may be, I think that played no small part in the group’s popularity. In addition to her model looks, she also had a wonderful, down-to-earth personality, a relative rarity among the chronically beautiful. Joey Ramone, of the Ramones, the band that really invented punk (never mind the Sex Pistols), said of her once, “she was cool – she was hot, but she was cool,” and that about sums her up.

Their first two albums puttered along, and then, on the verge of being dumped by their label, they got veteran producer Mike Chapman to mold and caress their sound for the monster Parallel Lines album. Many early fans hated that album for its smooth production and commercial appeal, but the rest of the world lapped it up. Blondie had been kicking around a reggae-influenced tune called Heart of Glass for years but had never been able to record it satisfactorily. Chapman listened to it, and suggested putting it to a disco beat, and it went on to become their biggest hit and the centerpiece of the album. It’s easy to see why early punks hated this song (disco was one of the soulless demons they were trying to exorcise), but to write Blondie off as sell-outs is too easy. The album displays a wide range of influences and ideas, from the pure pop of Pretty Baby to a particularly peppy version of Buddy Holly’s I’m Gonna Love You Too to the satisfying head-nodding, hard-rocking of One Way or Another, the jail-bait incense and peppermint of Sunday Girl and the spaced out extremes of Fade Away and Radiate. Fade Away and Radiate is a schizophrenic track if ever there was one, from the Twilight Zone beginning and Deborah Harry’s creepily authentic little girl’s voice, to the almost nostalgically straight ahead structure of the majority of the song, to the sudden ominous breaks covered in angular guitar frosting courtesy of every disciplined avant-gardist’s favorite guitar guru, Robert Fripp. The lyrics are nonsensical and the tune lurches and sputters, but the production and playing and singing are so assured that the whole experience is both comforting and alienating, like feeling homesick for a childhood on Venus. Although this song doesn’t make a lick of sense (or I don’t have the patience (or drugs) to decode it), I still find the title image irresistible.

Blondie’s next two albums, Eat to the Beat and Autoamerican, continued their creative exploration of the boundaries between rock and other music (funk, dance, reggae, etc.), and, although they never captured the public’s fancy like they did on Parallel Lines, they were a reliable presence on the charts for several years.

My personal favorite album of theirs is 1980’s ambitious and eclectic Autoamerican, which features the straight ahead feel-good reggae of The Tide is High and most of America’s introduction to rap (myself included), the sublimely nonsensical Rapture (which, along with Digital Underground’s Humpty Dance (and, perhaps, the throwaway World’s Famous from Malcolm McLaren’s Duck Rock) album) is the only rap I can still recite all the way through). Autoamerican is a remarkable album, and a remarkably overlooked album – available for years only as an expensive import from Japan. Although tensions in the band were at an all time high, and many of the tracks on the album are played by hired guns, Autoamerican shows Blondie at their most experimental. Always ready to tackle new style, Autoamerican finds them wandering way out on some precarious branches. The opening track, Europa, is a beautiful, epic, spy guitar and orchestra instrumental that sets the scene for an appropriately cinematic album. Grand and sweeping, the piece twists from a traditional finale to a deconstructed series of blips and bleeps and the twitching noises of technology while Harry recites, in her patented deadpan style, a provocative bit of mumbo jumbo.

Based on the desire for total mobility and the serious physical pursuit of religious freedom, the auto drove mankind further than the wheel and, in remote areas even today, is forbidden as a device too suspect for human conveyance. This articulate conception has only brought us all more of the same, thoughtlessly locked into phase two gridlock, keyed up, on its rims and abandoned on the expressway.

In the past, Blondie had experimented with augmenting their basic sound with stylistic flourishes, but on Autoamerican, they dive fully into those flourishes. You would be hard pressed to even call Autoamerican the work of a band, so polished are the admittedly eclectic offerings and so varied are the arrangements. There’s a pretty straight-up reading of the Lerner & Lowe classic Follow Me, as well as the wonderful 20-30’s style jazz band dead-ringer Here’s Looking at You. Glossy new wave pop (Angels on the Balcony), faux reggae, muscly dance rap. They push themselves hard on the album and not all of their experiments work, but it is a brave and worthwhile undiscovered gem.

Tensions in the band finally boiled over after their next album, the poorly received The Hunter, and Harry and her partner Chris Stein retired from the biz to help him through a long battle with a rare disease (pemphigus – in which the body’s immune system attacks the skin as if it were a foreign body, dissolving the bonds that hold skin cells together and creating legions and blisters that don’t heal). Deborah Harry released a couple of lukewarm solo albums, and tried her hand at acting (including David Cronenberg’s notorious Videodrome). She has gracefully aged into the grand dame of punk, singing a hysterical version of Cole Porter’s Did You Evah with Iggy Pop on the first Red, Hot & Blue AIDS relief album and showing up as one of the guest vocalists in ex-Talking Heads project, The Heads, which featured a lot of underground luminaries (like Andy Partridge and Richard Hell). Recently, Blondie has reformed and has earned respectable reviews for their new album. Through their long and varied career, Blondie was able to straddle that precarious fence between artistic integrity, popular idolatry, and musical experimentalism. And Deborah Harry is still as hot – and cool – as ever, still turning heads as punk rock’s once and future Marilyn Monroe. Hey, Blondie!