13 August 2012

Vinyl Therapy: Debbie Harry (1981)


This 1981 12" single for Debbie Harry's "The Jam Was Moving" is one that I shopped around for.
I wanted to be able to have the glossy paper sleeve in the best condition possible and as I often do with rarities like this one, I waited until I found a clean copy at a reasonable price.  Some things are worth the wait and this one definitely was (in every way).  I also find this one striking because it came at a time when Debbie was doing everything in her power to separate herself from the peroxide queen image she had cultivated with Blondie.  While this was not her most successful era of musical output, it certainly holds a lot of interest for me and I've learned to look at the songs she created in this period with great fondness. Jumping the Blondie ship like she did after having had such global success took a lot of balls.  The experimental nature of the songs and the urban production qualities built on the Blondie sound to some degree, but showed that she was yearning to take things farther into uncharted territory.  In that vein, she and her cohorts were successful for a time, but these forays only served to sharpen the skills that she would eventually take back to her home base among the Blondie fold in the 1990s and beyond.