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<p>Blondie recalled their close call with a gun-toting Phil Spector in 1977, reflecting that they were fortunate to avoid working with the notorious producer.</p><p>The rising stars were still a year away from the big time, which arrived with the launch of third album Parallel Lines. On the other hand, Spector – who died in 2021 – had been a celebrated name for nearly two decades. Once known as the “first tycoon of teen” after forming a record label at the age of 21 and developing the “wall of sound” production technique, he’d soon enter semi-retirement and spend the last years of his life in jail for shooting actress Lana Clarkson dead in 2003.</p>

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOMsz-ru2g8

As they reissue their 1981 festive EP Yuletide Throwdown, we rate the best of the New York band who strutted through punk, disco and pop with absolute cool 5. Hanging on the Telephone (1978) Sometimes, a song takes a while to find its ideal singer. The original of Hanging on the Telephone, a 1976 single by LA powerpop band the Nerves, is pretty good, but Harry’s commanding performance owns the song, while Blondie’s arrangement is louder, brasher, tighter and tougher: the stuff of which classics are made.

“The most recent fad to catch on with kids in our big cities and metropolitan areas is rapping,” the Blondie singer explained to the audience on the network variety show “Solid Gold,” in 1981. After mentioning some of the genre’s rising stars from the Bronx — the Sugarhill Gang, Grandmaster Flash, the Funky 4 + 1 — Harry introduced her band’s latest rap-inspired video. “Using our new single, ‘Rapture,’” Harry said, in a professorial tone, “Blondie and some of our friends put together a number to show you what rapping in the street scene is like.”

[Snip] Yes, we've lost some already. On top of the icons who died horribly young decades ago — Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, Elvis Presley, John Lennon — there's the litany of legends felled by illness, drugs, and just plain old age in more recent years: George Harrison, Ray Charles, Michael Jackson, Lou Reed, David Bowie, Glenn Frey, Prince, Leonard Cohen, Tom Petty. Those losses have been painful. But it's nothing compared with the tidal wave of obituaries to come. The grief and nostalgia will wash over us all. Yes, the Boomers left alive will take it...

"I don’t like the idea of promoting fear to gain popularity. It’s so ugly. He’s (President Trump) an idiot!” (“Feminist” rock star Deborah Harry.) “Che Guevara and Fidel Castro are fascinating, enigmatic political heroes and antiheroes in the United States for the most part. It was always very attractive to me…” (“Feminist” rock star Deborah Harry rhapsodizing over the co-founders of the only regime in the history of the Western Hemisphere to criminalize rock music, herd its practitioners and fans into forced-labor caps at Soviet bayonet point while jailing and torturing the most and longest –suffering female political prisoner in...