Blondie - Cover This: Live Covers, 1977-1982

Some bands pretty much never play cover versions in concerts while others play a lot. I hadn't realized it until a few days ago, but it turns out Blondie in their first era together played a lot of fun covers. I was listening to a bootleg concert that had a few covers I really liked, and I went to the website setlist.fm to see if there were many others. It turned out that not only were there a bunch, but most of them were in excellent sound quality. So I'm very happy to say I was able to put this album together.

The vast majority of Blondie songs were originals, but they did some covers on records, including a few of their hits (for instance "Denis" and "Hanging on the Telephone"). I'm not including any such covers that were recorded for any of their albums.

The band had an impressive variety of sources for their covers. They did some classics from the 1960s, but also some songs that were very current at the time. For instance, "I Love Playing with Fire" was released by the Runaways on an album earlier that same year. I like Blondie's version better, and I think they could have had a hit with it. Other songs like "Sister Midnight," "Heroes," "Funtime," "I Feel Love," and even "Start Me Up" were only originally released about a year or less when Blondie covered them.

01 Heart Full of Soul - Yardbirds
02 I Love Playing with Fire - Runaways
03 My Obsession - Rolling Stones
04 Moonlight Drive - Doors
05 Goldfinger - Shirley Bassey
06 Bang a Gong [Get It On] - T. Rex
07 Sister Midnight - Iggy Pop
08 Little G.T.O. - Ronny & the Dakotas
09 Ring of Fire - Johnny Cash
10 Funtime - Iggy Pop
11 Seven Rooms of Gloom - Four Tops
12 Heroes - David Bowie
13 I Feel Love - Donna Summer
14 I Got You [I Feel Good] - James Brown
15 Start Me Up - Rolling Stones

I made some edits to a couple of the songs. "Heart Full of Soul" was the first part of a medley, and I thought the way it ended sounded incomplete. So I cut it abruptly after two repetitions of the opening riff and then used some sound editing tricks to make the third repeat of that riff sound like a final chord instead. For the song "Goldfinger," the final seconds, with a crucial last scream, faded out. I tried my best to undo the fade by carefully boosting the sound bit by bit for those last seconds. I think I mostly succeeded, but the song still ends somewhat abruptly.

I've only included one studio track, and that's "Little G.T.O." For some reason, Blondie backed up the obscure group Rodney and the Brunettes for this song. Blondie's lead singer Deborah Harry did a guide vocal to show them how it was sung. But the other band's unscrupulous record company released the guide vocal version as a single under the band name "The New York Blondes with Madame X." A legal injunction quickly put an end to the sale of that version, but of course some copies were saved for posterity. So I figure this is fair game for this compilation, since most Blondie fans won't have it. Also, Blondie did play the song sometimes in concert in 1977, so this is just like having the best recorded version of one of those performances.

Oddly, there was very little audience noise at the end of most songs. Perhaps this is due to some of the recordings coming from soundboard bootlegs where little to none of the audience was recorded. If the audience cheering was very quiet, I tended to remove it altogether. There are only a few songs near the end where you can hear a lot of cheering.

I was very picky in terms of crowd noise when it came to deciding which songs to include. There were a few more I left out due to sound quality issues, such as covers of "(Love Is Like A) Heat Wave," "Bilbao Song," "Palisades Park," "Little Red Rooster," "Oh Oh I Love Her So," "Femme Fatale," "Louie, Louie," Jet Boy," and more. And that was only with limiting myself to the band's first era together, ending in 1982. They've done many more intriguing covers exclusively in concert since reuniting in 1997.

I didn't make any bonus track out of some of the songs that were on the bubble because I also felt those versions weren't particularly good. For instance, "Little Red Rooster." Blondie just didn't perform that song very impressively. In almost all cases, it worked out nicely that the best performed songs also happened to be the ones with the best sound quality.

Unfortunately, because I was so strict on the sound quality standard, I was left with almost exactly one hour of music. That's long for a single album but too short for two. Oh well, this will just be a single album unless enough quality versions of songs later emerge so I can split this in two.

All but five of these versions are officially unreleased. "Little G.T.O." was released as a single, as discussed above. Four more were released as B-sides, bonus tracks, or both.

01 Heart Full of Soul (Blondie)
02 I Love Playing with Fire (Blondie)
03 My Obsession (Blondie)
04 Moonlight Drive (Blondie)
05 Goldfinger (Blondie)
06 Bang a Gong [Get It On] (Blondie)
07 Sister Midnight (Blondie with Robert Fripp)
08 Little G.T.O. (Blondie)
09 Ring of Fire (Blondie)
10 Funtime (Blondie)
11 Seven Rooms of Gloom (Blondie)
12 Heroes (Blondie with Robert Fripp)
13 I Feel Love (Blondie)
14 I Got You [I Feel Good] (Blondie)
15 Start Me Up (Blondie)

https://www.upload.ee/files/15902711/Blondi_1977-1982_CoverThisLiveCovrs_atse.zip.html

In my opinion, Blondie lead singer Deborah Harry achieved peak gorgeousness in the video for the song "Heart of Glass." So I chose a still from that video for the cover art photo.