Deborah Harry is the eternal urban surf queen riding the concrete curl smack into the eternal skyscraper wall with an eternal smile and a casual shrug of her eternally pale shoulders. She hangs ten and surprises the teendegeneracy with the bamboozle of beauty. Just like Annette Funicello reflected the passions of the 60s and the passions of all those Jr. Aldo Ray beach bum-types, Debbie reflects the passionless morality of the 70s and the passionless nonchalance of all those Jr. Johnny Rotten city bumtypes who’ve been so busy peeking around the corners of tomorrow they’ve lost sight of themselves and the true potentials of the here and now. I mean they call it the new wave don’t they, so why not have a punk surf band?
Besides, Ms. Harry ain’t exactly the Potato Bug. As a matter of fact, she’s the big league blonde every era needs. As a matter of fact, she’s just plain HOT. With an awkward femoral flash and the ever-present painted pout on her lips (which are by far the best in the biz, even better than Freddie Mercury’s!), she’s managed to become the inevitable in suburban femininity while maintaining a slick pose as the streetcorner chanteuse supreme.
On her first LP she was the sonic bitch everyone wanted and needed, playing the dumb blonde role to the hilt, playing the anti-intellectual with a sensual “huh!” and proclaiming that she was gonna be the sex symbol for a generation out of touch with its own sexuality. On Plastic Letters she made many hanker for those heydays of heydays (when heyday meant HEYDAY and not just heyday), causing people to wonder about what had really happened to the girl groups and retranslating the need for a Ronnie Spector, albeit in the context of a safety pin aesthetic.
Parallel Lines proves once and for all that Bubble Gum music was, is, and always will be the fountainhead for most other musical forms, whether it be heavy metal, or even New Wave. Her link up with Mike Chapman of the infamous Chinn/Chap team is a stroke of genius, not because Chapman can produce a record and make it sound big league, but because the garage sound of Richard Gotterher was annoying in that you knew it wasn’t really recorded in a garage. Besides, Chapman lends that aura of Saturday morning cartoon insanity to Blondie’s music, thereby transporting it into another context, one that is based on the sexual myths of Isis and Kristy McNichols which are, after all, the real sexual myths of the 70s.
Parallel Lines has its moments, but somehow they never really seem to meet and create that overall magic that’d make this a truly exceptional record. The magic is there on songs like “Just Go Away,” which sports a classic lyric of sorts: “Ya got a big mouth and I’m happy to see/Your foot is firmly entrenched where a molar should be...”; when was the last time you actually heard “entrenched” used as a lyric in a song, eh? “Fade Away And Radiate,” with ace oddite Robert Fripp on guitar, is a song which, if given the right kinds of cultural exposure, could create a new way to say goodbye--instead of “later,” we just might end up saying “say, fade away and radiate man!!!”
But along with those magic moments are the fecal moments: “11:59” is as conceptually old as the New Testament; and “Pretty Baby” unfortunately has nothing to do with Brooke Shields and a lot to do with being a silly song. So when those parallel lines do converge and Blondie becomes the caretaker of the concrete we’ll meet at the house of the rising sun, play ritual games of mutual destruction, and sing to the glee of the city.
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