$2.99 Wax Necessities
A Column By Tim Midgett

BLONDIE
PARALLEL LINES
CHRYSALIS 1978

By 1978, Blondie had knocked off a couple of likeable, slightly goofy records. Good as they are, they must've seemed a little lightweight when set next to some of the mammoth offerings that accompanied them out of New York's Lower East Side. Those other records were breaking new ground; they contained kinds of music that no one had ever heard before. Could one say the same for anything Blondie was doing then? Or was likely to do?

Somehow, their third time out, things changed. Blondie's tongue-in-cheek melange of girl group and Sixties garage rock morphed into something altogether more desperate and focused. Producer Mike Chapman's sleek tweakings worked wonders almost in spite of themselves, and the drummer, the untamable Clem Burke, somehow managed to crank it up another notch.

But it's the songs that really did it: myriad lost love epics, including the ubiquitous and unapologetic disco sellout that is one of the record's highlights and a clutch of amazing, cannily chosen covers--Jack Lee's "Hanging on the Telephone" and "Will Anything Happen?" chief among them.

All I really know is, Parallel Lines started me off on my crooked path. Ten years old, in Skaggs Drug (the name wouldn't have gone over in NYC). With five bucks in my hand. Buying my first album. I got it home. I played it until it wore out. I bought another one. The one I'm listening to right now is my third copy. Since I no longer have a turntable with a nine-gram tonearm, it is probably my last.

As much as I love Ramones, Television's Marquee Moon, Patti Smith's Horses: it's THIS record to which I keep coming back. Debbie Harry ruined me for any other blonde, and now she can do the same for you. You'll find it, three dollars someplace.

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