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Recipe
Take the nursery rhyme Three Blind Mice
3 blind mice
Rearrange it in the minor key
Sad 3 blind mice
Brighten it up again with a classic 70s sequencer
Atomic Sequencer
A really excitable drummer
Drums then Atomic 3 blind mice
Add a drum roll And after that there’s only one thing for it: Ennio Morricone
Atomic intro
Blondie’s Atomic:
Third single on the 1979 album Eat To The Beat
Not a difficult second album: it was their 4th
Following Parallel Lines, it seemed like it ought to be.
Parallel Lines
Produced by Anglo-Australian pop “hit single” maestro Mike Chapman – Suzie Quattro, Racey, the Knack, The Sweet, Mud.
Racey: Lay your love on me
Chapman was a perfectionist, brought some real discipline to the band
Clem Burke: “On Parallel Lines, producer Mike Chapman was very much of a taskmaster; he’d be in the studio conducting us to keep the meter, almost like a Phil Spector type of thing. He worked really hard at making that record perfect, and it ended up being Chrysalis Records’ biggest seller ever.”
It worked: Blondie went from punk outsiders to pop monsters with knockout singles like
Sunday Girl
Hanging on the Telephone
One way or another
And, of course, the standout, million-selling single
Heart of Glass
I put a rock into that can and all they played was DISCO man. Heart of Glass featured a drum machine – one of the first to feature on a pop single: the Roland CR 78.
heart of glass drum machine
Suddenly Blondie was not BAD: they were Nationwide. But imagine the pressure to follow up Heart of Glass: JUST DO THAT ONE AGAIN
Heart of Glass vamp.
But the band had other ideas.
It sounds like the band had other ideas from each other
Jimmy Destri got out his CR 78 sequencer again
Atomic Sequencer
But Clem Burke wanted to be back in CBGBs with the Ramones
Ramones
Meanwhile, Chris Stein had been watching Spaghetti Westerns
Man with Harmonica
And Debbie Harry just wanted something magnificent.
What we got was an extraordinary mishmash of
styles
moods
keys
Atomic subverts all the rules of composition:
It doesn’t even have a sensible verse and chorus structure.
Everything the song is DISSONANT. Tension.
Between
- rising and falling,
- fast and slow,
- major and minor,
- human and machine
Synopsis
Three blind mice meet a marching band, they run into Sergio Leone in a New York disco, he takes them on a subterranean rollercoaster with a punk rock drummer
dreaming
at the helm on a quest to see this otherworldly blonde goddess murmuring expectantly about the on-rushing apocalypse.
Drone with major minor pad
All this in an ambiguous spacetime flux, flipping madly between major and minor, switching up tempos, and exploring unseen and inhuman dimensions in between.
If this is nuclear holocaust — an atom-age rapture
Rapture
Then I want some.
Part 1: 3 blind mice
What? Why start there?
A triumphal ascent, set to a martial, marching cadence to signify their — our — steady progress to our certain evisceration. Did you ever see such a thing in your life?
atomic cr 78
The beat is mechanical, like a machine beyond mortal control, a crazy escalating upbeat,
3 atomic blind mice
if we have not deduced what the nice found out, we are in a minor key. We can’t say we weren’t warned, but we are on a treadmill, things are beyond our control.
At the crescendo — are we happy or sad? — a parade ground drumroll — a sure-shot snareshot — stop —
What is coming, and is this it, a firing squad? A premature end? An adolescent spurt? A jolt, un petit mort — sex is death & death is sex, a little cresting wave — ?
About that sequencer
It is 1979. The Roland TR808 powers the 1980s electronic revolutions has not been invented yet:
Sexual healing
Its predecessor, Roland’s CR 78, was a weird, clunky box - hard to programme but some groovy pre-set patterns. Like this:
Heart of glass CR78
But only faster, more metallic, more driving, more machine age:
Atomic CR 78
These days you can create this all on a laptop with standard software. Compare this, looped off the blondie track (during the middle of Nigel Harrison’s weird bass solo - to which we will return) with this, whistled up in Logic pro: Logic CR 78 sequence.
It wasn’t just a drum machine
But even so it is not the CR 78 that propels this song but That we put down to the force of nature which is Blondie’s drummer Clement Anthony Burke.
If Chapman was taking the band in a commercial direction, Burke was like a reluctant passenger.
Everything about his drumming is urgent, insistent, impatient, as we find out as the mice give way to the VAMP
The Vamp
We open on a wide empty dustbowl, a kerrang of spaghetti western guitars
the rollercoaster clunges down into the abyss.
Now Clem Burke sets the pace, hauling frantically at the beat, a brisk four-on-the-floor stomp, dragging the band along at 135 — you know he’d go 150 if they’d only get a leg on — just two measures in and he’s given up on the quarter notes and is impatiently drumming his fingers with sarcastic hi-hat triplets as if to say, NO RUSH GUYS JUST WHEN YOU ARE READY.
Come on, man, we haven’t got all day don’t you know there’s a sweaty cataclysm going down?
But Stein and Infante and their cool-hand Ennio Morricone guitars will not be rushed.
wicked game
Their vibe is dreamy double-tracked twang and you know that this is James Calvin Willsey learnt everything he knew, God rest him.
But underneath it all this tension.
Atomic CR 808 + keyboard swells
Fast against slow. Happy in the face of sad. Lively, but morbid. Descending dark depths but somehow aspiring to the heavens. Is there a mounting, rising angelic keyboard swell?
For all the sombre sombrero guitar, that marching four-beat has got a place to be and Burke is taking us there —
[THREE]
Kaboom! There it is!
cha-cha beat
Suddenly we’re exultant: it’s a breezy major, the disco bass leads, and the drummer, Burke, is back in the pocket like he’s saying I told you so. He’s just doing the cha-cha, cheerleading now, for here is the golden goddess.
The Chords:
In the verse we have E minor – not quite, but nearly the saddest of all keys . An E minor to a melancholy C, to a dolourous D, to a morose A, and then a D, augmenting back to the E.
But at the same time, listen to the progression rise. There is hopeful expectation of something better?
That better something arrives in the shape of the long awaited visitation from heaven:
“Uh-ha, make it all right,” she sings.
After all this cultivated dissonance this seems trite and, on paper, a bit disappointing, but the way she sings it, and how Destri garlands it with pealing church-bell keyboard lines, hosannas like it’s the Eighteen Twelve, you know she’s right — uh-ha, make it magnificent.
Everything is so major and positive, even the chord progression is rising chromatically up some stairway to heaven, and beautiful hair (again: on paper —) so we know we are building to something bigger, and kaboom! there it is! A throbbing arpeggiator explodes onto the soundscape and, mixed in with the blood and ecstasy are some gorgeous minor third harmonies. We are back in the minor. The ride reaches its apex and we are falling: the roller-coaster thunders down into the depths, for you can’t understand joy if you don’t know sorrow tonight — stop.
Atomic.