"Dreaming" (Blondie)

Two things before we get started.
1. Clem Burke is one of the best drummers of all time.
2. I really need to start paying attention to the speakers/lecturers schedule at the 92nd Street Y.  
I just found out yesterday that I missed a candid chat with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein at the Y a few months ago.  I'm totally kicking myself right now.  For a measly couple of bucks and a 4-block walk from my apartment, I could have listened to two of my favorite people in rock yak about everything from CBGB to Fab 5 Freddy for an evening, and I frigging missed it.  (No doubt I was sitting at home, doing something stupid that evening, like watching Chopped while playing "Name That Toupée" on Sporcle.  **sigh**)
Anyway, if you need an explanation for item #1 above, just take a listen to the drums on "Dreaming" from Blondie's 1979 album Eat to the Beat.  They sound like rolling thunder throughout the entire track, and Burke just never lets up.  His energy level is as intense at the start as it is by the time the song fades out 3 glorious minutes later.  (His closest counterpart for sheer rhythmic intensity is the late Keith Moon.)
But props also have to go to Harry for her heartfelt lyrics and Stein for his tasty pop-punk melody.  (Seriously, why isn't anyone writing pop music with brains and muscle like this anymore?)  According to the Interwebs, Stein came up with the basic chord progression and the line Dreaming / Dreaming is free, and then he handed it off to Harry, who ran with the theme.
And based on a transcript of their conversation at the Y (did I mention that I missed it?), the song was inspired by a very unlikely muse.
Said Stein, "'Dreaming' is basically (ABBA's) 'Dancing Queen.'  It's a direct cop.  There's not enough (similar) notes to get sued, though."
I'm a pretty astute listener when it comes spotting the influence of one song on another.  (That's generally why things are sequenced the way they are on my list of favorites.)  But never in a million years would I have picked up on the influence of "Dancing Queen" on "Dreaming" had I not read that quote.  Consider me floored.

"Rapture" (Blondie)

Back in the late 70s/early 80s, Bronx-based graffiti artist Fred Brathwaite (aka Fab 5 Freddy) was making a name for himself among the SoHo/lower Manhattan gallery crowd, where he also was rubbing elbows with New Wavers and punks.  During one of his early exhibitions, he met Debbie Harry and Chris Stein of Blondie, who ended up buying and commissioning pieces of his art.  The three became fast friends and started hanging out, which is when Harry and Stein began learning about the city's fledgling hip-hop scene and its most prominent figures, like DJ Joseph Saddler (aka Grandmaster Flash). 
Blondie’s 1981 single “Rapture” from the album Autoamerican was inspired in part by Brathwaite taking Harry, Stein, and a number of other New Wavers/punks on a field trip to a 1980 show at the Police Athletic League in The Bronx, where Harry was floored by Saddler's turntable skills.
The other spark that ignited the track was Brathwaite telling Harry that he wanted to make it big, as he recounted in the 1999 documentary The Hip Hop Years by Great Britain’s Channel 4.
“I said, ‘You know, Debbie, I want you to make a record about me.  Or, just mention me on a record.  Because I want to be like a star’.”
He figured she’d never actually drop his name in a song, until he heard the finished single at Harry and Stein’s apartment.  Even then, he was skeptical that they weren’t just playing a joke on him.  After all, Harry wasn't a rapper.  And what New Wave band was going to put out a single with a rap in the middle of it?
It wasn’t until a few months later while hanging out in Paris with Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads that Brathwaite heard “Rapture” on the radio (with Harry's rap intact), and he realized Harry and Stein weren’t pulling his leg after all.
As he listened, he also realized that Harry’s odd little rap was chock-full of references to graffiti culture (paint a train), hip-hop (Flash is fast, Flash is cool), and Brathwaite himself--in particular, the lines about the man from Mars, which were a direct reference to him and a rap that he often performed at parties in the early 80s:
I was born and raised on the planet Mars
I used to chill and rock with the stars
Till one day I got bored and decided to split
And I came to earth on a rocket ship
Some sources erroneously cite “Rapture” as the first charting rap song; in actuality, “Rapper’s Delight” (1979) by the Sugar Hill Gang was the first charting rap song (#36 on the Billboard chart).  “Rapture” was, however, the first song containing a rap to go to #1 on the Billboard chart.
(As a side note: Harry had asked Joseph "Grandmaster Flash" Saddler to appear in the video for "Rapture."  When he didn't show for the shoot, she quickly hired rising-star graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat to play the DJ.  You can see Basquiat in the video below, looking kind of lost behind the turntables.)

"Call Me" (Blondie)

No one embodies late 70s/early 80s New Wave better than Debbie Harry.  
Actually, scratch that.
No one embodies late 70s/early 80s New York City better than Debbie Harry.  Part East Village punk.  Part silver screen starlet.  Part Studio 54 disco chick.  Part Great White Way darling.  Part globe trekking Bohemian.  
A tough angel.  A street smart scholar.  A bombshell with brains...
And the song that wraps all of that up in one, tidy package is Blondie's "Call Me (Theme from American Gigolo)" (1980)--a song that Harry co-wrote with Italian producer Giorgio Moroder, who's probably best known for co-writing Donna Summer's disco moan-fest, "Love to Love You, Baby."  
Story is, Moroder was tapped to score the film American Gigolo, and he'd asked Fleetwood Mac's Stevie Nicks to collaborate on a theme song.  However, because of contractual conflicts, Nicks was unable to participate, so Moroder contacted Harry instead.
(I'd say that worked out pretty well.)
The song walks a fine line between punk crunch and disco gloss.  There are Chris Stein's revved up, grungy guitars pitted against Moroder's sizzling synths, and Clem Burke's driving, bottom-heavy beat, which seems as readymade for slam dancing as it is for doing "The Bump."
And then there's Harry's vocal: channeling Peggy Lee at her smokiest one moment, and then yelling like Iggy Pop at a methadone clinic the next.
It's a perfect song in every conceivable way.