American New Wave band Blondie (American bassist Leigh Foxx, American guitarist Paul Carbonara, American guitarist and songwriter Chris Stein, American keyboard player Jimmy Destri, American singer, songwriter and actress Deborah Harry, and American drummer Clem Burke) attend the 26th Annual American Music Awards at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California, 11th January 1999. (Photo by Vinnie Zuffante/Getty Images)
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Up until 1999, Blondie, the popular New Wave act known for such classic hits as “Heart of Glass,” “Rapture,” “The Tide Is High” and “Call Me,” had not released a new record for 17 years when they went on hiatus. For most of the 1980s and early 1990s, the band’s members, most notably singer Debbie Harry, pursued their solo careers and projects.
But co-founding guitarist Chris Stein had long entertained the idea of a Blondie reunion, which finally came to fruition in the mid-1990s. “An industry person, the late Harry Sandler, came up to me and said, ‘You know, if you don’t do it now, you’re never going to do it,’” Stein recently recalls. “So I said, ‘Okay. That should be that.’ And I called up Debbie, and she said, ‘You’re crazy,’ and hung up. But it evolved from there.”
Fortunately for Blondie fans, the reunion came to fruition with the comeback album, 1999’s No Exit, which returned the band to the charts thanks to the hit single “Maria.” Twenty-five years after its original release, No Exit was recently reissued with bonus tracks. It comes ahead of Blondie’s upcoming release of a brand-new studio album, which would be the group’s first since 2017’s Pollinator.
“I think I wasn’t ready to deal with a lot of the issues that we had,” Harry remembers when Stein pitched the idea of a reunion to her nearly 30 years ago. “We had a lot of bad business things. I thought that it would have been so toxic to try to be creative and do that again. I believe that he was right to want to do it, but the actual doing it…”
“It was fraught with anxieties the first time around,” Stein adds. “There was a lot of intra-band tensions. There was always just endless business (expletive), which we are kind of getting straightened out now after 50 years.”
Before the recording of No Exit, the original Blondie lineup of Harry, Stein, drummer Clem Burke, keyboardist Jimmy Destri and bassist Gary Valentine performed a couple of reunion shows. By the time Blondie went into the studio to work on what would become No Exit, Valentine departed, and guitarist Paul Carbonara and bassist Leigh Foxx joined the fold as session players.
In recalling the reunion in her 2019 memoir Face It, Harry noted that it was important for the group to have new material to avoid being an oldies act. “I think that’s to keep interested and to keep it interesting for us,” she further explains. “The only way that you could make something like this happen is to make it a challenge.”
Mike Chapman, the hit producer who had worked on Blondie’s commercially successful albums between the late 1970s and early 1980s (Parallel Lines, Eat to the Beat, Autoamerican), was briefly involved during the early stages of No Exit. “We did a demo with him, “Under the Gun,” which was very cool sonically,” Stein recalls, “but we just kind of never finished it. It just kind of faded out.”
Then Craig Leon, who had worked on Blondie’s first LP from 1976 as well as with the Ramones, produced No Exit. “I don’t know how that happened specifically,” Stein adds. “It seemed like a good idea at the time. The way he worked was very interesting…he was a different animal than he was in the early Ramones days. He just loved compression. That was his main thing: “Put the compression on it.” We worked with a very early digital format. This was before Pro Tools. And we had something called a RADAR, which was a really great-sounding digital recorder.”
Similar to the previous Blondie albums, No Exit showcased the band’s stylistic range in paying homage to their retro influences while also managing to stay modern. The first single, “Maria,” written by keyboardist Jimmy Destri, became the album’s biggest hit. “I don’t think I knew how great it was until we actually started recording it,” Stein remembers. “But we were in the middle of the recording process when I just thought this was really good. I guess he must have brought us a demo.”
“I sort of had a bit of a problem singing the song to Maria,” Harry recalls about visualizing the song’s storyline, “because naturally, for the most part, I would have a male image. It taught me something. So that’s good. It was a challenge. I was imagining Jimmy being a little kid in Brooklyn, going to a Catholic school, having to wear a little tie and a jacket, and falling in love with this girl named Maria, who’s also like the vision of Catholicism. There were a lot of things that I could feel and do and include.”
Other notable tracks graced the record, including “Nothing Is Real But the Girl,” the album’s follow-up single (“We brought that back in the last tour that we did. I put that back in the show because it’s a great song. It’s fun to sing,” says Harry), and “Under the Gun,” about the singer Jeffrey Lee Pierce of the Gun Club. Harry and Stein first met Pierce in Los Angeles.
“He was a kid,” Stein says. And then we’d go to LA, and he would always be in the fan entourage, and he kind of took care of the fan club for a while. I suddenly saw that he was doing music. I had this little label for a while. I produced one of the records, which people still really liked called Miami [from 1982].”
“I wish that he had been able to carry on,” Harry says about Pierce, who died in 1996. “He had a great through-and-through kind of personality. He was totally himself. His songs were beautiful. “
The album’s haunting title song, a duet with the late rapper Coolio, was the group’s nod to the hip-hop/rock hybrid that they pioneered on 1981’s “Rapture.” Stein doesn’t recall how the connection with Coolio occurred. “I don’t remember seeing him record it. He must have done it remotely. The guitar solo is “Hall of the Mountain King” by Grieg. When we were doing the video, and it came up to the solo moment, Coolio comes over to me and he goes, ‘Lay on the ground and kick your feet like a baby,’ which I didn’t really do, but it was funny.”
Other fine moments on No Exit include the jazzy “Boom Boom in the Zoom Zoom Room, the lovely “Double Take,” and a then-new cover of the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets,” written by Ellie Greenwich and Jeff Barry. Blondie previously recorded the latter track in 1975, but it wasn’t released until about two decades later.
“It kind of puts a period at the end of the sentence of our relationship with that song,” Stein says about revisiting the track. “And it’s a terrific song. It’s just a great historical piece.”
“It’s a tribute to Ellie Greenwich and her fabulous career as a songwriter,” Harry says. “She came in and sang [“In The Flesh” and “Atomic” for Blondie in the 1970s]. And she brought her girls and they were so wonderful. It was such an honor to have her part of our little thing. She was a sweetheart.”
Among the bonus tracks on the newly expanded No Exit is the track “Hot Shot,” a cover of the 1978 disco classic by Karen Young. “The original is fantastic as well,” Stein says. “It’s a great song. It reminds me of all the old Loft period downtown, where everybody was dancing in the lofts to disco music. People always ask me about disco music, but to me, it was just an extension of R&B. I never saw it as something at all objectionable. I always liked disco music.”
Asked if they felt any pressure about how No Exit would be received at the time by the public after the long hiatus between albums, Stein replies: “Well, I’m very optimistic. “I just always thought, ‘It’s going to be great.’ And then when we started working on “Maria,” even as we were recording it, I thought that this is great. This could actually do something.”
“I’m basically on the same page as Chris,” says Harry. “Once we got going, I just automatically think it’s going to work. I think that’s essential. You sort of have to go sort of blindly ahead.”
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JUNE 15: (L-R) Christopher Stein, Debbie Harry and Clem Burke attend Storytellers: Blondie during the 2021 Tribeca Festival at Spring Studios on June 15, 2021 in New York City. (Photo by Dominik Bindl/Getty Images)
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Going forward artistically has always been Blondie’s modus operandi throughout their career, and on the subsequent albums following the release of No Exit, such as Panic of Girls and Pollinator. The band is slated to release their 12th studio album, titled High Noon, sometime next year, which fittingly coincides with the 50th anniversary of Blondie’s self-titled debut album.
“It’s been finished for a while,” Stein says of High Noon. “Clem has played on it. It was before he was having problems, so it’s his last record. There’s a Johnny Marr song. There’s a Glen Matlock song. And there are a couple of old covers that I’ve wanted to get done for many years that we finally did.”
The occasion of the No Exit reissue and the imminent release of High Noon is bittersweet following the passing of Burke, Blondie’s drumming stalwart, this past April at the age of 70. Says Stein: “He was like a real pain in the ass, but he was like my brother also, for fucking 50 years. We met him when he was 19.”
“I’m really going to miss him and his energy,” Harry says. “We had a very nice remembrance party for him recently. I was thinking about when we did the auditions for drummers [back in the early days]. We had been together for a little while and had gotten a small amount of publicity. But then we really needed to get a drummer. And he sparked us up. He kept saying, ‘Well, come on. Are we going to play? Are we going to play?’ Because Chris and I were sort of beaten down a little bit at that point.”
“He was a very positive guy,” says Stein. “He was always about moving forward. You’ve got to admit that.”
“He kept that spark going,” Harry adds. “That’s who he was. He put his energy. It wasn’t just talk for him. It was all. It was everything.”