In June 1978, Blondie walked into the Record Plant in New York City with a song they had been carrying around since 1974. They called it "The Disco Song." They had tried it as a ballad, tried it as reggae, and kept shelving it because it never quite fit the band's downtown identity. Debbie Harry and Chris Stein had written an early version, called "Once I Had a Love," back in 1974 and 1975, and that first demo had a slower, funkier sound with a basic disco beat, which is exactly why the band gave it that working nickname. Four years later, with producer Mike Chapman pushing them toward something bigger and shinier, that song became "Heart of Glass," and nothing in the conversation between punk and disco was ever quite the same.
The tension in the room at the Record Plant was real. Lead vocalist Debbie Harry was initially wary of Chapman's involvement, and according to Chapman, her animosity came down to geography: "they were New York. [He] was L.A." According to everyone involved, Blondie and Chapman had a hell of a time recording "Heart of Glass." Chapman had a vision for the song, and he would not let the band go until he had achieved it. On top of the CR-78, Burke laid down the drums track by track, eight individual tracks for each piece of the kit, with any small errors cut from the tape. "What I was asking Clem to do was close to enslavement, and he was ready to kill me," Chapman later recalled. But what came out the other side was something neither side of that argument could have made alone.
Keyboardist Jimmy Destri, who initially brought the CR-78 to the sessions, also utilized a Roland SH-5 in creating the rich atmosphere of "Heart of Glass." Another important feature of the CR-78 was that it could send a trigger pulse to the early polyphonic synthesizers, and that trigger pulse feature was used on "Heart of Glass," becoming a distinctive electronic element of the song. The final version opened with the Roland CR-78 drum machine layered with Clem Burke's live drums, a tricky analog blend that took hours to nail. Jimmy Destri's keyboard shimmer went on top of that, and the whole thing locked into a groove that sounded like nothing the New York scene had produced before.
What makes this more than a great production story is how honest the conversion was. Blondie were not tourists in disco. In an interview published in the February 4, 1978, edition of NME, Debbie Harry expressed her affinity for the Euro disco music of Giorgio Moroder, stating that "It's commercial, but it's good, it says something... that's the kind of stuff that I want to do." A notable example of this musical commitment came when Blondie covered Donna Summer's "I Feel Love" at the Blitz Benefit on May 7, 1978. In his history of CBGB, music writer Roman Kozak described the moment: "When Blondie played for the Johnny Blitz benefit in May 1978, they surprised everyone with a rendition of Donna Summer's 'I Feel Love'." It was arguably the first time in New York, in the middle of the great rock versus disco split, that a rock band had played a disco song. Bassist Gary Valentine noted that the set list for early Blondie shows often included disco hits such as "Honey Bee" or "My Imagination." Chris Stein was unrepentant about the song's disco sound, saying, "As far as I was concerned, disco was part of R&B, which I'd always liked." The punk crowd's hostility to disco was always more ideological than musical, and Blondie knew it. They had been living in the overlap the whole time.
Still, the backlash came. The band was accused of selling out for releasing a disco song, and according to Harry, "Heart of Glass" made the band pariahs in the eyes of many of their fellow musicians in the New York music scene, accused of pandering to the mainstream that many punk and new wave bands were actively rebelling against. Harry recalled that Clem Burke, their drummer, refused to play the song live at first. When it became a hit, he said: "I guess I'll have to." The song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame as a recording of "qualitative or historical significance" in 2015. But in early 1979, the street verdict was still out. Burke's lockstep drums and Nigel Harrison's funky bass pops sound genuinely disco. Other parts sound like a rock band figuring out, in real time, how the Giorgio Moroder magic was made. That tension is exactly the thing. The seam shows, and the seam is the point.
Parallel Lines was released on September 8, 1978, by Chrysalis Records, and reached No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart in February 1979, proving to be the band's commercial breakthrough in the United States, where it reached No. 6 on the Billboard 200 in April 1979. "Heart of Glass" was the third single from the album, released in January 1979 by Chrysalis Records, reaching number one on the charts in several countries, including the US Billboard Hot 100 and the UK Singles Chart. The Ramones' biggest hit had peaked at number 66. Television never charted at all. Blondie got there by doing the one thing the scene's gatekeepers told them not to do.
The downstream life of "Heart of Glass" keeps making the argument. Missy Elliott's 2002 hit "Work It" sampled the famous Roland CR-78 drum machine intro from the track. Its cool, chilly aesthetic can be heard in the electroclash movement of the early 2000s, in the synth-pop revival, and in indie dance acts who borrow from its particular brand of detached glamour. Blondie would go on to record "Rapture," the first of four number-one songs for the group, and a track that brought hip-hop elements to the top of the US charts for the first time. The band that covered Donna Summer at the Johnny Blitz Benefit kept moving, kept crossing, kept treating genre as a suggestion. For the disco faithful, "Heart of Glass" is a useful reminder: the people who supposedly hated your music were, in at least one important case, playing it in their sets all along.
