Autoamerican (Original Recording Reissued, Original Recording Remastered)

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Blondie

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Released in 1980, "Autoamerican" should be considered as great an album as, say, Dylan's 'Blonde on Blonde", the Rolling Stones' "Sticky Fingers", or Sprngsteen's "Born to Run". It's not, of course, at least not by any critics you will read in such places as Wenner's Rolling Stone. But as an album that would virtually define and predict the course of popular music during a decade at that decade's cusp, I think 'Autoamerican' is flatly without peer, as well as being a great sounding, well recorded, well produced, and well played collection of songs that belong together-all sharing a sound, an ambience, a common flavor, even as they cover an amount of ground-from rap, reggae, and Europop to a recital of Lerner and Lowe's "Follow Me" that holds its own with any I've heard-beyond rock bands, for the most part, even today, and much more so in 1980.

(And if you read my reviews you know I've heard "Follow Me" by the greatest of all popular singers. I wouldn't put Debbie in quite that class-although she can sing his daughter under the table, and did at the recent Peggy Lee tribute-she had more sense than her erstwhile rival Chrissie Hynde in not getting into that particular gator pit (a/k/a Duets II).)

There isn't a real stinker anywhere on this album. 'Suzy and Jeffery', a rare B side, is more a novelty, and I'm glad it didn't quite make the original album, but it's not a stinker. You also get the long mix of "Call Me", which is not on any Blondie album except compilations. I'm slightly disappointed we don't get the Christmas version of 'Rapture" , which as I recall featured Fab 5 Freddy and was a Flexidisc in a UK magazine.

'Autoamerican' also features great cover art, best enjoyed from the original vinyl due to size alone, as well as the original printed dust jacket. Sonically, I think this CD beats the early-eighties US Chrysalis vinyl, but not some of the imports, if you have a first rate turntable and cartridge. I've always wanted to build a replica of one of the mutant guitars on the back: they are no actual instrument ever built as far as I can determine but an artist's conglomeration of design features from assorted bizarre Euro guitars.

The only sad part of 'Autoamerican'-admittedly much less tragic than 'Double Fantasy' (Lennon's swan song) or of course "The Misfits" (the movie, finis for Gable and Monroe, not the punk band!)-is that it's the end as we know it for Blondie as a working front line pop band. There was one more album then,' The Hunter'-Frank Infante had to sue to be on it, he wasn't wanted, and Chris was developing what would turn out to be a life-threatening and debilitating disease. 'Hunter' doesn't exactly suck, but it's not up to the previous Blondie standard, and the band effectively disintegrated after that. Of course they reformed in '98 and recorded 'No Exit', which was a fine album, and last year 'The Curse' (not about what you'd think, despite the red cover, fortunately!), but despite Number One singles in most markets no one seriously considered Blondie or Debbie as major league players anymore. (More people in America right now probably know that Gwen Stefani is in a movie, than that Deborah Harry is or was-despite Gwen having debuted two days ago and Debbie 25 years ago, with over thirty films,and having played against everyone from James Woods to Shelley Winters, not to mention Alec Baldwin, Liam Neeson, Adrian Brody and Norman Reedus.)

No one from Blondie is dead yet, although a few of their careers are, and Chris, Debbie, and Clem Burke are still on the job and doing other things as well. But 'Autoamerican', and the four Blondie albums that preceded it, are likely their career high points, and while 'Parallel Lines" might be a better all-around pop-rock album and 'Eat to the Beat' their closest brush with American rock (read: AOR) success, 'Autoamerican' is not only a realy good album but an uncanny pathfinder for the rest of the music industry for the ten years that followed it-everything from rap to showtunes proved prescient-that has quietly lived under the radar for two and a half decades now.

Back in 1980, BLONDIE was the most famous band in the world. Debbie Harry's "Drugged-up Marilyn Monroe Does Rock and Roll" persona had taken the planet by storm and a hungry public anxiously awaited the most anticipated album of the new decade. For many, who had previously only bought the 7-inch single hits, this would be their first taste of a BLONDIE album. What bad timing, then, to take the band in the completely different, artsy, genre-hopping direction that AutoAmerican took. It was like being in the mood for a burger, going to McDonalds to get one and finding that they only serve salads now.

Beginning with the cinematic closing-credits style orchestration (you know, when people LEAVE the theaters) "Europa" it's clear that this is not going to be the fun catchy craft that bottled up an amusement park ride and poured it out of your speakers, like before. Debbie Harry's voice is completely different than just one year earlier - always icy and cool, it now sounds sort of muffled and drab. There is a depressing air about this album. It feels very cold, very distant. Knowing now that the band members were at each others' throats, its clear to see why.

The fact that this album produced two number-one singles is not representative of the album's greatness. BLONDIE were so famous at this point in their career, they could have released a cut of Debbie Harry sleeping and it probably would still have gone straight to the top of the charts. Those two genre-hopping singles (the island/reggae-ish "The Tide Is High" and one of the first rap songs most anyone had heard at this point, "Rapture") would have sounded much better sandwiched in between the bottled lightning power pop rock tracks the public wanted, rather than the even stranger sounding, further-reaching styles that filled this album. The exceptions to the rule had now become the rule.

"Live It Up" and "Do The Dark" are interchangeable down-tempo museum-meets-disco tracks. On the interesting but weird, "Angels On The Balcony", Debbie sings with a British accent. Elsewhere we have the 1920's flapper sounding "Here's Looking At You", the weary and desolate jazz ballad, "Faces", an ethereal cover of a Broadway torch song ("Follow Me") and a couple of hit-the-next-button uninterested songs whose studio musician hired brass players drown out the band, and backup singers drown out Debbie. Only the gritty, raw, and ass-kicking "Walk Like Me" would have felt at home on one of BLONDIE's previous 4 awesome albums. The fact that it is delegated to the second-to-last song on Side B here, cements the fact that Debbie and Chris were growing bored with creating the power-pop masterpieces that seemed to come so easy to them.

After this album, fan interest dwindled fast, as Debbie released an excellent solo urban album whose creepy cover featuring nails driven through Harry's head, scared away many fans who were just starting to realize that Debbie Harry had much darker, more sinister, and underground interests than her platinum blonde locks suggested. One more contractually obligated album later, BLONDIE disapeared from public site before making a triumphant return almost 2 decades later.

AutoAmerican sounds more like the soundtrack to a film-noir thriller than a rock and roll album. It is of course a must-have for any BLONDIE enthusiast but of not much interest to most others, unless you enjoy dark, moody music. Buy yourself a pack of cigarettes, sit on the fire-escape of an impoverished inner-city apartment building in the middle of the night and AutoAmerican should sound perfect as a backdrop.