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You're listening ad free on Amazon Music. Hey there Hit Parade listeners. What you're about to hear is Part one of this episode. Part two will arrive in your podcast feed at the end of the month. Would you like to hear this episode all at once the day it drops? Sign up for Slate Plus. It supports not only this show, but all of Slate's acclaimed journalism and podcasts. Just go to slate.com hitparadeplus you'll get to hear every Hit Parade episode in full the day it arrives. Plus Hit Parade the Bridge, our bonus episodes with guest interviews, deeper dives on our episode topics, and pop chart trivia. Once again to join, that's slate.com hitparadeplus thanks and now please enjoy part one of this hit Parade episode. Welcome to Hit Parade, a podcast of pop chart history from Slate Magazine about the hits from coast to coast. I'm Chris Mulanfi, chart analyst, pop critic and writer of Slate's why Is this Song Number One? Series on today's show 44 years ago, in the fall of 1979, a song that mixed funky rhythms with jittery lyrics about life during Wartime made its debut on Billboard's Hot 100. The song claimed that things were too hard in the apocalyptic New York city of the 70s to have any fun. It wasn't a time to party, not a time for disco. And yet the song was totally fun and quite danceable. And it name checked a couple of New York night spots, including the Mud Club and an infamous dive called cbgb. The name of this band was Talking Heads, and they were shouting out the venue that helped birth them, a seedy bar in New York's East Village with a small stage and a foul bathroom. A nightclub now widely regarded as the birthplace of punk rock, which was uncommercial, forbiddingly unapproachable music, right? After all, Life During Wartime only reached number 80 on the pop chart. The rock that originated at CBGB wasn't supposed to be pop music, was it? Eventually it would be, but in the mid-70s, when punk was defining itself, it was meant to give voice to a so called blank generation that eschewed the commerciality of prior waves of rock.
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I belong to the blank generation and I can take it or leave it each time where I belong to the.
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But that commercial avoidance didn't last long. The artists who became legendary from their exposure at CBGB had ambition and catchy songs. They were signed to major label deals. And before the 70s were even over their albums and even their singles were making landfall on The Billboard charts.
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Because the night belongs to love because.
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The night belongs to love More important, these acts proved that punk wasn't just one sound, it contained multitudes. CBGB became a milestone starter gig for many an act's career, including bands who weren't from New York, New Jersey, New England or even America. But for the original class of CBGB bands, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Television, the Ramones, the mainstream had to come around to their sound as much as they flirted with the mainstream. Eventually, what sounded arch or forbiddingly oddball in the 70s, run run, run run.
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Run run run away.
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Became accessible and top 40 friendly by the 80s. And while some of the CBGB bands never quite made the leap to top 40 pop stardom, They influenced generations of multi platinum bands through the 90s and beyond. Today on Hit Parade, we will offer a cockeyed take on cbgb how the scene's influence was felt in the very venue those bands supposedly disdained the Billboard charts. These bands showed that the punk ethos could take many forms as it morphed into and melded with post punk art, pop, new wave, metal, even disco, funk and hip hop.
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Who needs to think when your feet just go?
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And no band better exemplified that approach than a flexible sextet led by singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, who scored four number one hits in four different genres in just two years. And that's where your hit parade marches today. The week ending April 28, 1979, when Blondie scored their first number one hit on the Hot 100, Heart of Glass. It was a milestone for CBGB, even as it was miles removed from Blondie's earlier stripped down sound. Before Blondie's historic run was over, they would score chart toppers with Elektra, rock, rap, even reggae. Were Blondie ever punk? Or were all of these styles really just punk in disguise? If CBGB was all about do it yourself, weren't all of these willfully eclectic hits a form of diy? Join us as we get not too sedated, we burn down that house and we try to answer this question. How did CBGB punk become Billboard pop? Stick around. This is country and bluegrass artist Con Fulham. And while this Con Fulham recording is from the 21st century and we can't be sure he performs performed this specific song in New York city in the 1970s, we do know from several sources, including CBGB founder Hilly Crystal himself, that Fulham was one of the first musicians to perform at the club as early as 1973.
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Good.
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I'm playing this Con Fulham song to illustrate what CBGB could have been if it had actually aligned with its name. Believe it or not, those four letters stood for Country, Bluegrass, Blues at cbgb. Hilly Crystal never intended to showcase rock and roll, and for a few weeks in late 1973, after converting the venue from Hilly's on the Bowery to cbgb, Hilly Crystal actually tried to live up to that acronym. He programmed what he called country at Sunrise with bluegrass style acts in the morning while serving breakfast. Needless to say, it didn't catch on. Now this episode of Hit Parade cannot possibly offer an in depth history of CBGB which lasted a remarkable 33 years on the block known as the Bowery in New York from 1973 to 2006. We are a chart history show and I am mainly going to focus on how some of these artists evolved into pop stars. For a deeper history on CBGB itself, I recommend Roman Kozak's this Ain't no the Story of cbgb, which is out of print but borrowable from the Internet Archive and the very detailed CBGB chapter in Jesse Rifkin's superb new book this Must Be the Place, which chronicles the history of legendary New York music venues. For our purposes, the main thing to keep in mind about cbgb, whose full name by the way, was CBGB OM fug it stood for Country, Bluegrass, Blues and Other Music for uplifting gormandizers is this CBGB musically, was never just one thing. Early on, Hilly Crystal put on jazz players like flautist Jeremy Steig. He also showcased bluesmith or theatrical acts like Jane county, then Wayne county or the hard to define Magic Tramps. So that whole birthplace of punk thing, that was an accident. Hilly didn't really even want rock, much less hard rock. Moreover, as punk was defining itself, that definition was pretty loose. Television, the angular, improvisatory four piece that finally convinced Hilly Crystal to make CBGB a rock venue, played sprawling, jammy, almost jazzy music that could only be called punk due to its no frills style and DIY attitude. It wasn't punk the way, say, the Ramones were punk.
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I don't.
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And neither of those versions of punk sounded like Talking Head's arty, polyrhythmic version of punk. But these bands did all sound like they belonged at the same punk club. So from its birth, punk was eclectic the way pop music has always been eclectic. Punk was an attitude as much as a genre, and to be sure, not all of it was destined for the charts. As I'll explain momentarily, Television and the Ramones barely touched the charts, but if you accept, as I do, that pop music can be anything catchy or arresting that draws a crowd. CBGB music was simply the future of pop. The rest of the world just had to catch up. What made 1973 the moment when CBGB opened its doors? Such a ripe time for punk to bloom. For one thing, some of the music already bubbling up on the charts pointed the way. The Stooges, the Detroit band led by Iggy Pop, who'd been developing punk style since the end of the 60s, cracked the Billboard album chart in the spring of 73 with Raw Power and.
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Boy.
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Raw Power was produced by David Bowie, who was himself moving away from the glam of his Ziggy Stardust period. His single Rebel Rebel melded anthemic rock to proto punk.
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Rebel rebel, torn your dress Rebel Rebel.
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And toward the end of 73, the New York Dolls, widely considered the progenitors of punk before it had a name, took their self titled Debut LP to number 116 on the Billboard album chart.
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Trash, pick it up Take them lights away Trash won't get it up.
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All of these acts tilled the soil where New York punk grew. The Dolls, in particular, Outrageous and Cross Dressing, were the leading lights of the downtown New York scene, commanding the stage at the Mercer Arts Center. But when that building collapsed, literally in the summer of 73, downtown bands needed to find a new place to play. Most stories about CBGB seem apocryphal, but we know this much. Sometime around the spring of 74, Hilly Crystal was persuaded to allow a scruffy rock foursome who called themselves Television. Guitarist and vocalist Tom Verlaine, rhythm guitarist Richard Lloyd, bassist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Fica to take the CBGB stage. Television's stripped down but intricate sound would finally give the New York downtown scene a center of gravity. Television settled into a Sunday night residency and became central to the scene. Not long after the band made their debut, Richard Hell broke from Television and joined Johnny Thunders, formerly of the New York Dolls, in his new band the Heartbreakers. Not to be confused with the band of the same name that backed up Tom Petty. The Heartbreakers recorded the first version of Hell's composition Blank Generation, which became something of an anthem for cbgb. Hell would later re record Blank Generation with his own band, Richard Hell and the Voidoids. But Television gave an even bigger leg up to a budding rock front woman who'd gotten her start in performance art, made her bones as an artist working alongside her sometime lover Robert Mapplethorpe, and had been gigging all over town as a Beat poet backed up by a band. By the time Television brought her in at cbgb, here the band is backing her up. She was building a reputation as punk's poet laureate. Patricia Ann Smith, better known as Patty Smith. Born in Chicago and raised in New Jersey, Patti Smith arrived at CBGB virtually fully formed after years of poetry readings. Backed by guitarist Lenny Kaye and other sympathetic musicians, Smith offered a unique blend of poetry and spoken word improv with musical backing that was equally spontaneous. On her 1974 debut single, a cover of the rock standard hey Joe, backed by this original song, Piss Factory, lyrics tumbled out of Smith with what seemed like stream of consciousness. You might say the punkness of Patti Smith was, in her words, not just the music floor.
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Boss slides up to me and he says, hey sister, you're just moving too fast, you're screwing up the quota. You're doing your piece work too fast. Now you get off your Mustang Sally, you ain't going nowhere. You ain't going nowhere.
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Another band that opened for television in 1974 were then called the Stilettos, fronted by a former waitress and playboy bunny from New Jersey named Deborah Harry and a Brooklyn born guitarist named Chris Stein. Eventually, after some lineup changes and several name changes, the Stilettos rechristened themselves Blondie. Here they are at an early CBGB gig trying out one of their originals, A Girl Should Know Better. As important as all these CBGB acts were, denizens of the scene agree that even if they were not first, the band that made the greatest impression at their 1974 debut was a foursome from Forest Hills, Queens, who all pretended to have the same last name. A former pseudonym of Paul McCartney, Ramon Leggs McNeil, who would soon co found Punk magazine, described the Ramones this way. They were all wearing these black leather jackets and they counted off this song and it was just this wall of noise. They looked so striking. These guys were not hippies. This was something completely new, unquote. Perhaps this explains why the Ramones, more than Television or Patti Smith, defined punk in the Zeitgeist. Jeff Hyman, AKA Joey Ramone, sang with a marble mouth sneer. John Cummings, AKA Johnny Ramone, aggressively played only downstrokes on his guitar. Douglas Colvin or DD Ramone played bass lines that were deceptively simple but at breakneck speed. And Thomas Ertily or Tommy Ramone switched from being the band's manager to its drummer because he was the only player who could keep up with the band's relentless tempo. If there is such a thing as pure punk, Punk that needs no adjective, compound word or qualifier. The Ramones were it. One more band became CBGB regulars by 1975. After they opened for the Ramones and clad in normcore polo shirts, they could not have looked less like the leather clad Ramones. Talking Heads didn't sound much like the Ramones either. At the time, they were a trio who'd met at the Rhode Island School of Design and decided to move to New York to focus on music. The romantic couple of drummer Chris France and bassist Tina Weymouth and a twitchy frontman named David Byrne. Here's Talking Heads performing an early version of Psycho Killer at CBGB in 1975. Even more than Patti Smith, Talking Heads expanded the definition of what punk could be. Their 1976 debut single, Love Goes to Building on Fire, had the stripped down minimalism of punk structurally and lyrically, but with a winsome arty melodicism. Talking Heads gave punk its quirk. By 19 1976, all of the first wave of bands that would make CBGB famous, plus other punk legends like the Dead Boys, Mink Deville and the Shirts, were established at the venue. Richard Hell commemorated the moment in his single with the Void Oids down at the Rock and Roll Club. It didn't take long for record label executives to not only make the scene, but sign several of the CBGB bands. Their commercial trajectories from there would be as varied as their punk derived sounds. The Patti Smith Group had actually already been signed in 1975, improbably by Clive Davis, the legendary impresario who had just launched his label Arista Records, which would later make Barry Manilow, Whitney Houston and Kenny G famous. Smith's seminal debut on Arista Records, Horses, featuring an iconic androgynous photo by Robert Mapplethorpe of Patty on the COVID landed in the fall of 75 and reached an impressive number 47 on the Billboard album chart by February 1976.
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Horses, horses, horses, horses coming in in all directions White shining silver studs with their nose in.
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Produced by founding Velvet Underground member John Cale, Horses emphasized not only the poetic freedom of Smith's lyrics, but also the musical eclecticism of her band. Led by her guitarist and frequent co writer Lenny K. Redondo beach, which is seriously a punk reggae song, tells a story of a tragic drowning on a lesbian beach, yet has an oddly perky bounce. The LP also reinforced reinforced a frequent theme of early punk cover songs and the recontextualizing of old R B and rock and roll chestnuts as punk anthems. For the leadoff track On Horses, Patti Smith took Gloria, an early hit by the Irish band Them, fronted by a young Van Morri, And she transformed it into a galloping epic. This was punk's easy ethos, rejecting the density and instrumental wizardry of late 60s and early 70s classic rock and returning rock to its primitive roots as hard driving R and B and rock and roll. No one took this mission more seriously than Joey Ramone, who was an unabashed fan of 50s and 60s R&B and girl group pop. After the Ramones were themselves signed to Sire Records, their self titled debut Ramones sported several tunes calling back to early rock and roll. For example, the 1962 number four hit by Chris Montes, Let's D. Was covered by the Ramones at their typical hard driving tempo. For Another track on 1976's Ramones album, Drummer and songwriter Tommy Ramone adapted the sound of the Shangri Las Vegas, one of Joey's favorite girl groups.
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They told me he was mad but I knew he was dead that's why I fell for the leader of the.
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Pack into the lovelorn Ramones song I wanna be your boyfriend.
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I am little girl I wanna be a boy.
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Blondie too was going for a retro pop sound from the jump. In one of their earliest CBGB performances captured in 1975, Debbie Harry was doing her best. Martha Reeves on Blondie's cover of the Vandella's Motown classic Heat Wave. Then on Blondie's self titled 1976 debut album, they like the Ramones, called back to the rock and roll of their youth. To be sure, Blondie could do snarling straight up punk like Rip her to shreds.
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Come on, rip her to shred.
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But on the album's major pop single in the Flesh, Debbie Harry and Chris Stein, who co wrote the song, emulated the slow dances of their high school years.
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I can't wait to touch you in the flesh Foreign.
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In a moment. All of these catchy ditties and allusions to the pop of yesteryear were bound to have an effect on the CBGB band's chart performance sooner or later. The Ramones in particular were not shy about reaching for a pop sound. Not only did they include the word bop in the title of their very first single, 1976's Blitzkrieg Bop, They modeled the song's memorable chant, hey ho, let's go, which graces baseball stadiums to this day, on the chant that leads off the Bay City Rollers punkish single Saturday Night, which topped the Hot 100 in early 76 just weeks before the Ramones released Blitzkrieg Bop. Unlike Saturday Night, Blitzkrieg Bop went nowhere near the Hot 100. Hmm, maybe it was the references to German war strategy and the line about shooting enemies in the back. Now. In any case, the first country to give the Ramones A top 40 hit was England, where punk in the wake of the Sex Pistols caught on as a pop force sooner than it had in America. Swallow My Pride, a single from the band's second LP, Leave Home, reached number 36 on the UK chart in 1977. The Ramones continued to build infectious chants into their singles. The B side to Swallow My Pride, the deliberately demented pinhead led off with a gabba gabba we accept you one of us mantra that the band borrowed from the classic 1930s horror exploitation film Freaks. It wasn't until the summer of 77 and a single from their third album, Rocket to Russia, that the Ramones finally cracked the American pop chart. The surf meets bubblegum Sheena Is a Punk Rocker broke onto the Hot 100, peaking at number 81. For the Rocket to Russia lp. The band was given a bigger production budget by Sire Records, whose president, Seymour Stein, was looking to capitalize on the punk hype of 77, the year when acts from the Sex Pistols to the Clash to Richard Hell all scored recording contracts. In some ways, the hype helped the the Ramones two previous albums could get no higher on the Billboard album chart than number 111, but rocket to Russia climbed all the way to number 47 and rode the chart for nearly half a year. Even if Sheena Is a punk Rocker wasn't destined to be counted down on American top 40, the Ramones reputation as the archetype of punk was starting to make waves, Also benefiting from punk's Class of 77 hype. We're Talking Heads, who also signed to Seymour Stein's Sire Records and actually titled their debut LP Talking Heads 77. It was their first recording as a quartet after adding multi instrumentalist Jerry Harrison, formerly of Boston band the Modern Lovers. The first single from talking heads 77 was the slap happy strutting oh, Love Comes to Town, which did not chart. However, it was a second single, the aforementioned song about a psycho killer that the Heads were playing as a trio at CBGB as far back as 1975 that they had now formally recorded in the studio that finally began to get Talking Heads some radio and retail attention. Released in December 77, Psycho Killer, still with its incongruous French lyrics and nonsense fa fa f refrain, debuted on the Hot 100 in February 1978. In its five week run, it only got as high as number 92. Still, that was good enough to make Talking Heads the second CBGB band to crack the big pop chart after the Ramones, who by the way, had moved on to a second hit by early 78. Rockaway beach, the band's homage to the Beach Boys, but in a punk idiom, reached number 66.
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Rock, rock, rock away. Beach. Rock Rock, Rock. Rockaway Beats. Rock Rock, Rockaway Beats.
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In fact, for three weeks in the winter of 78, the Ramones and Talking Heads were sharing space on the bottom rungs of the Hot 100. Under the radar, CBGB punk was going.
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I hate people when they're not polite.
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Psycho Killer As I said earlier, the commercial fates of the CBGB bands were on a spectrum. Some acts were an easier sell in a pop context than others. Television, the band that had essentially birthed the scene, produced sprawling jams that resisted label interest at first. The band even recorded a demo for Island Records with producer Brian Eno in 1975. Yet the label decided not to sign television. Tom Verlaine's quartet eventually signed with Elektra Records and in 1977 put out an LP still considered a punk era masterpiece even if it is not exactly punk. Marquee Moon, anchored by its nearly 10 minute title track, still engenders debate over what genre it belongs to. Post punk, progressive rock, art punk, new wave. What It Definitely Is is universally acclaimed. Critics praised the intricate guitar interplay of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, and The album ranked third in 1977's Paz and Jopp critics poll, behind only the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello. That was a better chart performance than Television managed in Billboard, where Mar Kimoon failed to appear on the top LPs chart entirely. Television did considerably better in the UK, where Marquee Moon reached number 28 on the album chart. The title track was a number 30 single, and a second track, the catchier and more radio friendly Prove it got as high as number 25.
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Prove it.
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To the facts in America. Television only appeared in billboard on their second LP, 1978's adventure, and even then the album bubbled under the top LPs chart, just missing at number 201. As for Blondie, at first they were not doing much better. Their 1976 self titled LP, distributed by the smaller label Private Stock, missed the charts entirely. And even after signing to the larger label, Chrysalis Records, their 1977 follow up, Plastic Letters, took several months to climb to number 72. Blondie's singles, including the Francophone love song Dennis or Denis, as Debbie Harry sang it, went nowhere near the Hot 100. In the uk. However, Denis was a number two hit, and the follow up, I'm always touched by your presence, dear, also cracked the British Top ten. Patti Smith was starting to make an impression with rock audiences, if not yet pop audiences. A deep cut from her Horses LP called Free Money. Gained wider attention in 1977 when it was covered by no kidding, Sammy Hagar, who'd just gone solo from the hard rock band Montrose and and was years away from fronting Van Halen. But it was a collaboration with a much bigger rock star that finally got Patti Smith onto the singles charts and gave the CBGB generation its first actual top 40 hit. As I discussed in our Bruce Springsteen episode of Hit Parade, because the Night started as a song fragment, the Boss recorded as a demo in 1977, but he was having trouble completing it. His engineer, Jimmy Iovine, was also producing a new album by Patti Smith Easter, and he was looking for a song that could sound credibly like Smith but also play on the radio. Springsteen agreed to let Iovine have Because the Night, which only had a title, some mumbled lyrics, and, most important, the bones of its melodramatic romantic melody. Though both Springsteen and Smith are credited as songwriters on because the Night, the finished song was not a direct collaboration. Patti Smith wrote most of the lyrics and recorded it with her typically fiery vocals. It blended Patty's punk poetry with Bruce's homespun romance. In December 1977, Patti Smith debuted Because the Night at CBGB's Theater Annex Space, accompanied by Springsteen himself on guitar and harmony vocals. Four months later, in April 1978, because the night cracked the Hot 100, Patti Smith's first first ever pop hit. Then it kept climbing. A month later, it broke into the top 40, the first single by any CBGB act to do so. It finally peaked at number 13 in June 1978, far higher than any Ramones or Talking Head single ever had. This pop success didn't seem to tarnish CBGB's reputation. If anything, it enhanced it. What had been a punk scene by 1978 had become a rock mecca, even though the stage was still small and the bathroom still foul. For bands on the come up, a gig at CBGB became a rite of passage. When the Police, for example, the British trio of Stuart Copeland, Andy Summers and Sting, arrived in New York City in October 1978, their first stop was CBGB. They played an acclaimed set that was the closest the Police would ever come to straight up punk. And as we discussed in our B52's episode of Hit Parade, the campy band from Athens, Georgia, was especially well received at the venue that had already welcomed Blondies and the Ramones own retro kitsch. By 1978, the Ramones were still casting a wide net for unlikely pop material they could turn into punk. For their follow up to Rockaway beach, the Ramones took Bobby Freeman's 1958 top five hit, do you want to Dance? Which had already been remade in the early 70s by Bette Midler. Her version was a number 17 hit.
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Do you wanna dance with my baby?
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And the band Ramonesified it, pumping up the tempo and giving it a thrashy rhythm. The Ramones, do you wanna dance? Reached number 86 in the spring of 1978.
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Do you wanna dance?
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Though they couldn't have known it at the time, this would be the Ramones last dance with the Hot 100. But for talking Heads, the pop crossover was just beginning. In 1978, talking heads returned with a spirit sophomore album produced by iconoclastic producer Brian Eno, More songs about buildings and food balanced the trademark David Byrne quirk with increasingly accessible rhythms. On tracks like thank you for Sending me an angel and the Girls Want to be with the Girls, More songs about buildings and food got Talking Heads into the album charts top 40 for the first time, where it peaked at number 29. What ultimately pushed the album up the charts was the group's first ever cover song and their first ever top 40 hit. While the Ramones and Patti Smith had shown how covers could be fully reinvented, reportedly David Byrne had to be talked into trying a cover by Brian Eno, who thought that the Heads could give this Al Green deep cut a unique spin.
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Take me to the River.
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In its original 1974 version, take me to the river fused Al Green's secular R and B and lusty lyrics with gospel and spiritual imagery. It had a strutting tempo, but Talking Heads slowed it down to a lurch, which oddly made the song into a kind of soul punk. Take me to the River. Talking Head's Take Me to the river broke into the top 40 the week before Christmas 1978. Casey Kasem counted it down.
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Back in 1975, David Byrne, Chris Franz and Martina Weymouth were all students at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. According to David, we were all artists working in the visual and conceptual arts, but we were disenchanted. So David, Chris and Martina decided that they just might be able to express their artistic ideas better as musicians. They formed a rock band. Within two years, they added a keyboard player, recorded their first album and changed their name. Currently, these former art students have their first top 40 hit at number 28, the former artist who are now called the Talking Heads. Their first hit is Take Me to the River.
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A few weeks later, Take Me to the river topped out at number 26. By the start of 1979, while talking heads and Patti Smith had scored American top 40 hits, Blondie still hadn't. For their first half decade, Blondie's eclecticism seemed to work against them. In Europe and Australia, they had become reliable hitmakers, helped by Chris Stein and Debbie Harry's good ear for covers. For example, they took a power pop song that was first recorded by California band the Nerves called Hanging on the Telephone, And they turned it into bracing New York punk pop. Blondies. Hanging on the Telephone, an early single from their acclaimed new wave album Parallel Lines, hit the UK top five. It did nothing in America, however. But buried deep on side two of the Parallel Lines album was a song that would change everything for Blondie and arguably the whole post punk scene. Once I had A Love was a song Blondie had been demoing since 1974 and it never worked. They had tried it as a ballad, as reggae, and nothing sounded right because it had a rudimentary version of a disco beat. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein nicknamed it the Disco Song, playing it in 1978 for parallel lines producer Mike Chapman. The band were persuaded by Chapman to give it one more try. As it happened, rock bands trying disco were having a moment. The Rolling stones hit number one in the summer of 78 with the disco adjacent Ms. You. Six months later, Rod Stewart went to number one with his gleefully sleazy disco song do you think I'm sexy? Unlike some punks or guitar rock bands of the time, Blondie were not opposed to disco. They'd even covered songs by Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor Live. So encouraged by Mike Chapman, they rethought Once I had a Love as Heart of Glass, giving it a synth driven Eurodisco beat that was meant to sound like Kraftwerk, only it wound up sounding like glittering disco and massively hooky pop. Released as the third single from Parallel Lines in in the winter of 1979, Heart of Glass was Blondie's first ever single to crack the Hot 100. Remember that. To this date, the Ramones had cracked the chart three times, albeit below the top 40. Talking heads had scored one top 30 hit Patti Smith had briefly broached the top 20.
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I find it pleasing and I feel it fine Love is so confusing there's no peace of mind if I fear I'm losing you it's just no good.
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Blondie did a whole lot better than that. The Parallel Lines album soared into the top 10, a first for any CBGB band, and peaked at number six and went platinum. And in its 11th week on the Hot 100, Heart of Glass went all the way. Casey Kasem counted it down.
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Blondie got its start three years ago in New York City playing punk rock clubs like CBGB's and Max's Kansas City. But Blondie's albums just weren't selling in America. European audiences have a reputation for being more receptive to new trends and styles. Within a year, Blondie was striking gold and platinum in Germany, England, France, Holland and Belgium. Well, in time, word trickled back to the US and Blondie's first single to make the top 40 is now the most popular song in America, moving up from number three last week to number one. The biggest selling song in the usa, Blondie and Heart of Glass.
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If there was any downside to Heart of Glass hitting number one. Well, besides the punk true believers who sneered that Blondie had sold out, but never mind them, it was that Heart of Glass appeared to be an unrepeatable phenomenon. It offered no road map to the other CBGB bands. The Ramones, for example, around the same time offered their catchiest ever punk pop song, a pogoing ditty about being lonely on the road called I Wanna Be Sedated. I Want To Be Sedated, released only as a UK B side and a deep cut on the Ramones album Road to Ruin. I Wanna Be Sedated didn't chart anywhere. Or what about Patti Smith? She tried to follow up her 1978 hit because the Night with the Springsteen esque 1979 single Frederick Frederick Name.
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Somewhere.
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Frederick did crack the Hot 100, but it peaked at number 90. Talking Heads tried to become more danceable in 1979 in their own unique fashion with their Brian Eno produced album Fear of Music. It featured the aforementioned Life During Wartime, which proclaimed this ain't no disco, but was the closest thing to a banger the Talking Heads had produced. It reached number 80, Another deep cut on Fear of Music. The Afrobeat flavored Izimbra was even closer to club music, and it brought Talking Heads to Billboard's disco chart where it reached number 28. Not even Blondie themselves knew how to follow up their number one hit at first in the uk, where Heart of Glass also reached the top. Blondie went right back to number one immediately with the frothy continental Sunday Girl.
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Hurry up, hurry up and wait I stay away all weekend Still I wait I got the news Please come see.
- [61:51]
A
What you love is in America. However, Blondie tried reasserting their punk cred with the snarling One Way or Another. Though it is considered a power pop classic, one way got only as high as number 24 on the Hot 100. Looking to maintain their momentum, Blondie went right back into the studio with Mike Chapman to record a quick follow up album, 1979's Eat to the Beat. Though it only reached number 17 and is less well remembered than Parallel Lines, Eat to the Beat rode Billboard's top LPs chart for about a year and spun off several medium sized hits including the Abba esque dreaming, a number 27 hit, And the funk rocker the Hardest Part, which only reached number 84.
- [63:09]
B
The hardest part.
- [63:18]
A
For Blondie to truly replicate their massive success with Heart of Glass, they were going to have to turn further away from the CBGB sound, getting more synthetic, more glossy, more electronic. As the 80s dawned, they became shape shifters and briefly, the biggest pop band in America. When we come back, Blondie becomes a hit making jukebox. The Ramones fully commit to selling out and Talking Heads stop making sense and start scoring hits. Non Slate plus listeners will hear the rest of this episode in two weeks. For now, I hope you've been enjoying this episode of Hit Parade. Our show was written, edited and narrated by Chris Melanfy. That's me. My producer is Kevin Bendis. Derek John is Executive Producer of Narrative Podcasts and we had help from Joel Meyer. Alicia Montgomery is VP of Audio for Slate Podcasts. Check out their roster of shows@slate.com podcasts. You can subscribe to Hit Parade wherever you get your podcasts, in addition to finding it in the Slate Culture feed. If you're subscribing on Apple Podcasts, please rate and review us while you're there. It helps other listeners find the show. Thanks for listening and I look forward to leading the hip parade back your way. We'll see you for part two in a couple of weeks. Until then, keep on marching on the one. I'm Chris Melanvy.