The Blondie song that was a “total homage” to The Velvet Underground
In the late 1960s, soon-to-be Blondie co-founders Chris Stein and Debbie Harry both discovered the brilliance of The Velvet Underground. Residing in New York, Harry was living in the Lower East Side and marvelled at the balance between light and dark that Lou Reed and the band would merge, a style which would later go on to shape her own material as it fused new-wave with disco.
In a literal sense, Andy Warhol was in charge of running the lights at the show she witnessed. Harry remembered the way the light bounced off of Nico’s chartreuse outfit, the stage being bright, but the music carrying something sinister in it that she loved. Stein’s introduction to the experimental outfit, meanwhile, came earlier, a time when he and his teenaged garage band heard their debut, The Velvet Underground & Nico.
By some miracle, Stein and his band wound up opening for the Velvet Underground at the Gymnasium in 1967. His friend was working for Warhol and learned the group set to perform had cancelled. Not quite serious enough to dedicate themselves to one name, the group went by First Crow on the Moon, and they had the life-changing task of warming up the crowd for Nico and Co.
Years after Blondie’s formation, these interactions with the Velvet Underground resulted in 1976’s ‘Rip Her to Shreds’, a song written seemingly in awe of their sound. “It’s a total homage to ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ by the Velvet Underground,” Stein explained to Guitar Player.
“It was kind of funny how [The Velvet Underground] came out with their first album in 1967, right in the middle of all the hippie stuff. Everybody was peace and love, and here’s this dark record with songs about heroin and murder and stuff,” he mused. “The people in my crowd thought it was great.”
He and Harry wrote ‘Rip Her to Shreds’ for Blondie together, and it had the kind of lyrical grit a typical Velvet Underground track might carry. Harry described it as “dirty” and “menacing”, likening it to the toughness and bravado of the New York scene at the time.
Stein said it was an easy kind of collaboration, always back and forth between the two, where he would play something on guitar and suggest a melody, and Harry would go on to embellish it. Richard Gottehrer, whom Stein called “sensational”, produced their first two albums and helped develop the sound we recognise today. The first was recorded on top of Radio City Music Hall, in the Plaza Sound Studio.
“We pretty much tracked everything like we were doing a live show,” he recalled. “There were some overdubs, but not many – things moved fast. We started getting into more production on later albums. I didn’t mess around with my guitar sound too much. I used my Strat and a Marshall amp, sometimes a Fender amp. We didn’t have too much gear back then.”
