Wednesday, November 12, 2008



All good things inevitably come to an end, and even though these posts will be up on the “world wide interweb” as long as Goggle is up and running, I’m still “making changes babe,” that is, I’ve decided that this is the last “New Wave Wednesday.” Why? Well, the best reason of all: I personally got bored with it. But fear not, gentle (I’m assuming a lot about you there aren’t I?) reader, it is going to be replaced with “Punk Rock History Lesson” which, for the time being (and because you’re so used to exciting new weekly content) I’ll be posting on Wednesdays. So, having said all that, New Wave Wednesday is going out with a bang, with the band that the term was practically invented for: Blondie. Of all the so called new wave records in the world, I’ve heard Blondie’s discs more than almost any other bands, for this one simple reason: I owned their classic releases Parallel Lines and Eat to the Beat on 8-track tape. I probably don’t have to remind the over-40 crowd out there what I mean by that, but for you youngsters it went like this – you would pop a tape in and kind of forget about it, which meant that it played over and over and over, until someone finally pulled it out. So inevitably, you ended up hearing anything you had on 8-track way more than your vinyl, and depending on what it was, that was either a good or (sometimes very) bad thing. In the case of Blondie (and the first three Elvis Costello releases) it was indeed good. “Union City Blue” has always been my favorite Blondie track, but I never saw this video until 2002, when the sadly now out of print Blondie - Greatest Video Hits DVD came out. I love how happy they all look, just goofin’ around on the pier towards the end. We now know they were dealing with all sorts of personal and professional problems pretty much throughout their entire career, but on this day at least, they had fun. Everyone deserves that once and awhile.

0 comments:

Post a Comment