“What dya expect, the guy’s a gigolo, man!”
American Gigolo is that achingly ’80s tale about an upmarket male escort oozing with flash and cool. Yet despite a solid performance from Richard Gere in the coke-tooting, Armani clad title role, the most stylish thing about the whole shebang is arguably its theme tune, a coruscating collaboration with Giorgio Moroder that’s been outshining the movie in relevance and memorability for over four decades and counting.
With Blondie’s pop-punk-glam amalgams firmly intact, the single was a million-selling shredder that confirmed New York’s new wave wonders of the late ’70s were more than capable of holding their own in a brand new decade.
Sitting pretty on both sides of the Atlantic forty-five year ago this week, this is Call Me.
Co-written and produced by the legendary godfather of disco Giorgio Moroder, Call Me is one of Blondie’s most memorable hits. Yet the theme song to neo-noir picture American Gigolo could have been a collaboration with Stevie Nicks if the Fleetwood Mac witchettygrub hadn’t turned the veteran composer down.
Hitching a ride on Moroder’s designer demo track — then titled Man Machine after the film’s mechanical protagonist — Debbie Harry took the commission instead, fashioning Call Me as a turbo-charged musical contact ad from Richard Gere’s blatantly materialistic, narcissistic escort in less time than it takes most ‘dinner’ dates.
“Debbie came up with the title,” Giorgio recalls. “And she wrote the lyrics and top-line melody, which fitted the movie so well.”
“When I was writing it, I pictured the opening scene, driving on the coast of California,” the peroxide popster remembers.
“After we saw the rough cut, we were walking across 59th Street at the bottom of Central Park and the visuals were fresh in my mind. I wrote the lyrics really quickly. The colours had a really strong effect on me, and that’s the first line of the song. [“Colour me your colour baby / Colour me your car.”]
”Later I found out from Giorgio that the film was fashion designer Armani’s big break as well. You know that palette of colour throughout the film, those beautiful greys, blues and browns, it was so beautifully done.”
With its narrator coolly purring, “roll me in designer sheets/ I’ll never get enough”, Call Me distills the story’s sleazy LA glamour: an illicit spin taking turns through delectable and dangerous drive-times in an open-top Porsche.
“It’s quite a difficult song, actually — especially the high note — but she was ready,” Moroder maintains. Celebrated and now sadly departed sticksmith Clem Burke took a little longer to get it ‘right’, as the Tyrolean techmeister recounts.
“He was a great drummer but too vital. We would start the song, but every two, three seconds he would do a fill. The whole song was one big drum fill! I said, ‘We have to slow down. Let’s make a deal: You can have a fill every eight bars.’ He was miserable, but finally he did it.”
The rest of Blondie, who’d famously incorporated Kraftwerkian disco on Heart Of Glass and covered Donna Summer’s I Feel Love live, provided tacit instrumentation — although much of the heavy lifting was completed by Giorgio’s close-knit coterie of studio musicians.
With the Moroder Music Machine’s high-powered motorik rhythm overlaid with insistent, driving guitars and fierce flashy synths, the swaggering production elevated Harry’s evocative vocals into sex trade heaven and also created one of the greatest electronic middle eights ever, largely credited to Giorgio’s right-hand man Harold Faltermeyer, who is largely credited as performing the keyboard solo over the band’s equally brilliant Jimmy Destri.
Moreover, perhaps mindful of lost royalties, Call Me would be one of the few songs outside of Blondie’s cornucopia of classic covers (Denis, I’m Gonna Love You Too, Hanging On The Telephone, The Tide Is High), that didn’t give a publishing credit to one of the male members in Blondie.
Tellingly, it’s this very reason — not wanting to be hired guns singing someone else’s tune — why they ultimately lost out to Sheena Easton for the title tune of the James Bond caper For Your Eyes Only the following year.
“As soon as I heard Deborah singing Call Me, I knew we had a hit,” Giorgio later commented. Indeed, the track was nominated for a Grammy and spent six consecutive weeks at the top of the Billboard charts, having displaced Pink Floyd’s Another Brick In The Wall.
The collaboration wound up, in US terms, as not only Blondie’s biggest ever 45 but 1980’s highest selling song of the year, staying in the charts for six whole months. Across the pond in Britain, Call Me helped smash further records when it topped the UK charts by making Debbie Harry the first female ever to sing solo lead* on four No. 1 singles since records began, which would extend to five before the year was out with The Tide Is High.
For the record, Blondie were also the only act to score a hat-trick of number one songs in 1980, starting with Atomic in February. Not ABBA, not The Jam, nor The Police managed it. In fact, no one had pulled off such a feat in a calendar year since tinfoil rockers Slade back in 1973.
Attention paid to Call Me temporarily paused promotion of the fourth Blondie LP, Eat To The Beat, in the US. Its first two 45s, Dreaming and the non-UK The Hardest Part had been fair to middling successes on the Billboard Hot 100, but as the soundtrack song made its ascent, a third ETTB single was put on hold until May – in the middle of Call Me’s month and a half run at the top.
Reflecting on its success in her 2019 memoir Face It, Debbie Harry recounted the buzz in the air when the commercial juggernaut began its chart-slaying journey.
“When Call Me hit No. 1 in April 1980, we were on the road. I was doing a lot of promo, going out to radio stations, and we did a lot of appearances and performances of that song, which was really exciting and fabulous. They were giving out a lot of gold 45s and LPs at that time, and I remember speaking with Giorgio who was very enthusiastic and jumping for joy. He had so many hits by then, but this one was important for him, being in the film industry as well.
“To spend six weeks at No. 1 was a complete amplification of everything we had achieved outside of the United States. We didn’t expect it, but it legitimised us in this country and made people realise that we were adventurous and had a vision that could transcend the styles of the day.
“We embraced the punk attitude — we were happy but belligerent at the same time. I hear bits and pieces of Call Me in other people’s songs even today [Yoo-hoo U2’s Atomic City! – Ed.], not direct copies of it, but similarities. Music either works or it doesn’t work. It was the right place, right time, right sound. It all just sort of fell into place. What could be better? What more could you ask for, really?”
Buoyed by the springtime success, Moroder was slated to take over Mike Chapman’s long-running role by producing a full album with Blondie, yet he cited his experience working with the volatile interpersonal relationships of all five members as one of the reasons he’s reticent about producing bands: too much conflict, baby.
“There were always fights. I was supposed to do an album with them after that. We went to the studio, and the guitarist was fighting with the keyboard player. I called their manager and quit.”
These pertinent quotes from the Blondie Platinum Collection album booklet seem to back up the chaos theory:
Clem Burke (drums): “We recorded this song very piecemeal. Giorgio Moroder had this synth track to a song called Man Machine. He gave Debbie a tape of it and she wrote some lyrics. Then we went to do a tour of Japan. When we came back we were in a limo and heard this song on the radio. We looked at each other when Debbie’s vocal came in and realised this was the song we did with Giorgio. Call Me has the definite Clem Burke drum lick. I was at the top of my game.”
Frank Infante (guitar): “Harold Faltermeyer did the actual hands-on recording. All I remember of Giorgio was him eating chicken in the studio lobby.’”
Nigel Harrison (bass): “We went to do an album with Giorgio. He kept talking about Sparks and how they were working out. We tried to do the Autoamerican album with him but it was a disaster.”
Steve Pafford is the official essayist for Blondie’s 2002 Greatest Hits album here
Book buzz: 2019’s key sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll memoirs is here
Perfect 10: Produced by Giorgio Moroder is here
*By the end of 1980, the ABBA girls – Frida and Agnetha – managed to share vocals on nine UK No. 1 hits but never managed a solo on more than three. Debbie gets the gold then.
