Talk:Atomic
Take a nursery rhyme
- 3 blind mice
Put it into the minor key
- sad 3 blind mice
Brighten it up again
- Classis 70s sequencer
- A really excitable drummer
Add a drum roll
And after that there's onlyone thing for it: Ennio Moricone
- Atomic intro
Intro to atomic makes no sense and is the better for it
Third single on the album Eat To The Beat 1979
Not a difficult second album - it was 4th - but had on the heels of the crossover smash Parallel Lines, it was meant to be.
Parallel Lines: - Produced by Mike Chapman - Much more commercial, disciplined sound - thousands of takes - It worked: knockout singles like
- Sunday Girl
- Picture this
- Hanging on the Telephone
- One way or another
Barely rock and roll, let alone punk. and of course the standout, million-selling single
- Heart of Glass
which was disco and featured of all things a rudimentary drum machine.
- heart of glass drum machine
UNTHINKABLE for a band from CBGBs
- Ramonies
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
The band had other ideas from each other
Jimmy Destri got out his sequencer again But Clem Burke wanted to be back in CBGBs with the Ramones Chris Stein had been watching Sergio Leone movies
Atomic is an incredible mishmash of conflicting styles, moods, recording keys.
Subverts all the rules of composition It doesn't even have a verse and chorus structure.
Everything about the album, and everything about the song, is DISSONANCE.
- sequencer
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 world’s end.
- 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 more.
[ PART 1]
- 3 blind mice
What? Why start there?
It plays a trick. 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
but in case we have not deduced what the nice found out, we are in a minor key? We can’t say we weren’t warned, warned, but things are beyond our reasonable power to change. At the crescendo — are we happy or sad? — a parade ground drumroll
- drumroll — what is coming, and is this it, or a premature end? An adolescent spurt? A jolt, un petit mort — sex is death & death is sex, a little cresting wave, a sure-shot snareshot — stop —
- atomic
ABOUT THATSEQUENCER
It is 1979 the Roland TR808 poswers the 1980s electronic revolitionshas not been invented yet:
- Sexual healing
CR 78 was its predecessor. A clunky Box - hard to programme but some groovy pre-set patterns. Like this:
- Atomic CR 78
Sounds a bit like heart of glass
- heart of glass CR78
but faster and deeper and punchier. more insistent and driving These days you can create this all on a laptop with standard software. Compare this, looped off the blondie track (during themiddle of nigel harrison's weird bass solo) with this, whistled up in Logic pro:
- Logic sequence.
However insistent it is, the CR 78 is not what propels this song, or the rest of the album. That we put down to the force of nature which is Blondie's drummer Clem Burke. He's a big fan of Keith Moon, and it shows:
If Chapman was taking the band in a commercial direction, Burke seems 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.
“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.
Destri’s keyboard is reaching up, augmenting, yearning for something beautiful as if he can see it just above the grate
off on the rollercoaster
Tempo and that drum beat
Bass solo
A flanging denuded perfect fifth, neither major nor minor, a sequenced beat, and Nigel Robinson
The bass
The arps
The Ennio Morricone guitar
This sounds like a band having an intense argument. Is it major or minor? Is it disco, punk or spaghetti western?
It underscores an important point: GREAT ART COMES FROM CONFLICT.
What do we know about Eat to the Beat?
- Blondie were under pressure to follow the massive crossover success of Parallel Lines. Pop producer Mike Chapman worked with the band for the first time and
- Now, crossovers bring conflict: Blondie started life as a punk band in CBGB, with the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads and Television. Parallel Lines was a much more pop-oriented record, with knockout singles like Sunday Girl, Picture This, One Way Or Another and Hanging on the Telephone barely having so much as a rock edge let alone a punk one. And, of course, the breakout single was Heart of Glass, which was out-and-out disco.
- You get the sense that Clem Burke wasn’t wildly happy about this