BLONDIE: (I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear
Written by Gary Valentine
Produced by Richard Gottehrer
Single from the album Plastic Letters, Chrysalis Records, 1978
A love letter from Lois Lane, sent by Marilyn Monroe, delivered by the Dave Clark Five.
Blondie's lead singer Debbie Harry was sexy without any appearance of trying to be sexy. She didn't even seem to be conscious of her everyday allure, her natural beauty and glamour, her God-given possession of It. She just was.
My first awareness of Blondie came via Phonograph Record Magazine in 1977. I've never forgotten writer Mark Shipper's description of the band's look as "like Marilyn Monroe backed by the Dave Clark Five," a blurb which (even more than Debbie Harry's attractive image) sold me on Blondie well before I ever heard a note of their music. When I got to college that fall, I immediately started carpet-bombing the school radio station with requests for all of the acts I'd read about in PRM, from Television to the Dictators, and certainly including constant (and urgent) petitions to hear Blondie's "X Offender." I loved the track on first spin, and I have never stopped loving it since. And they called it puppy love!
My first Blondie record purchase was the "Rip Her To Shreds" 12" single, acquired specifically as a budget approach to owning "X Offender" without springing for the cost of the whole LP. Efficient! When I finally did buy a copy of Blondie's first album in the summer of '79, I was staying at my girlfriend's apartment and gave my newly-acquired record a spin on her turntable. One of the other girls living there heard the track "Little Girl Lies," and declared it the worst excuse for music she had ever experienced.
Heh. And you thought Blondie wasn't punk?
And Blondie was a group. Debbie Harry was always the focal point--how could she not be?--but don't underestimate the boys in the band: The guitar and arty vision of Chris Stein, the evocative keyboard stylings of Jimmy Destri, and the powerhouse pummeling of the late, great Clem Burke on drums. As the line-up of other players shifted over time, Debbie, Chris, and our Clem were the constants, and Jimmy Destri was still involved until 2004.
"X Offender" was written by Blondie bassist Gary Valentine. Valentine had ambitions of his own, and had already exited this group called Blondie by the time of their second album, 1978's Plastic Letters. He left even before that record's release, and I don't think he plays on the album. But he gave Blondie one sublime parting Valentine gift: A gorgeous Plastic Letters confection called "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear."
Like their Bowery contemporaries the Ramones, the players in Blondie had some degree of fascination with what others might dismiss as junk culture. Their work was informed in part by pulp fiction, bubblegum, girl groups, sci-fi monsters, B-movies like Attack Of The Kung Fu Girls and Them!, cheesecake art, trashy chic, and comic books, all viewed with an aesthetic drawn impartially from both Andy Warhol and sheer fannish enthusiasm alike.
The lyrics of "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear" bear a superficial resemblance to superhero comics, suggesting a girl who loves a boy with something extra, and our super boy feels the same way about her. The something extra? He can fly! He can read minds! He has conversations with his Super Friends! The girl and her boy with something extra are levitating lovers in the secret stratosphere!
In real life, Valentine has said the song was written for his girlfriend at the time, with whom he felt he had a psychic connection. Close enough to the Justice League for me! The music itself is an explosion of pure pop brilliance, a sensation both pristine and orgasmic at the same time.
Gary Valentine's role in Blondie's history is too often overlooked, forgotten. That's a shame. One gets the sense that Debbie and Chris have basically tossed the group's first two albums into the dustbin, pretending that the success of 1978's Parallel Lines is the band's Ground Zero. In the 21st century, a Blondie concert setlist isn't going to include "X Offender" or "In The Flesh," no "In The Sun" nor even the European hit "Denis," and certainly not "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear." Bands play the hits. I get that.
But as much as I love those hits, from the power-pop validation of their cover of the Nerves' "Hanging On The Telephone" and the audacious disco moves of "Heart Of Glass" through the pop reggae of the cover of the Paragons' "The Tide Is High" and the incongruity of Blondie supplying the first-ever rap song ("Rapture") to top the Billboard Hot 100, and especially the pounding spectacle of Clem Burke being Clem Burke on "Dreaming," there isn't any of 'em that I would put above "(I'm Always Touched By Your) Presence, Dear."
So look! Up in the sky! And listen while you're at it. Let's hear it for levitating lovers. And let's raise a glass to Debbie, Chris, Jimmy, dear Clem, and Gary. Here's to a group called Blondie. A super group, for sure.
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Another fine essay, Carl! ☝️
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