The biggest American single of 1980 began as a job of work — and not even a job Blondie were first in line for. Call Me, the theme song to the film American Gigolo, spent six consecutive weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and finished the year as Billboard‘s number one single of 1980. Yet the band got the commission only because Stevie Nicks was legally barred from taking it, Debbie Harry wrote the lyrics in a few hours after watching a rough cut of the film, and when the time came to record it, the most powerful producer in disco quietly replaced the band with his own session men.
It remains the great oddity of Blondie’s catalogue: their biggest hit is, in part, not played by Blondie at all. The story of Call Me is the story of a hired assignment that escaped its brief entirely — a film theme that outgrew the film, the soundtrack, and nearly the band itself.
The Theme Song with No Singer
By 1979, Giorgio Moroder was the architect of the disco era’s most futuristic records, the Italian producer behind Donna Summer’s run of hits. He had been hired to score American Gigolo, Paul Schrader’s sleek neo-noir about Julian, a high-priced Los Angeles male escort — played by Richard Gere in his star-making role — who is framed for murder. For the main theme, Moroder composed a driving instrumental built on synthesizers and a relentless guitar pulse. He called it Man Machine, because, as Harry later explained, the character “was just like a sex machine.”
Moroder wanted a singer to turn the instrumental into a song, and his first choice was Stevie Nicks of Fleetwood Mac. In the summer of 1979 he presented the track to her. There was a problem: Nicks had recently signed a contract with Modern Records, and its terms prevented her from working with him. She had to turn the theme down.
Moroder’s second call went to Debbie Harry. Blondie had just conquered America with Heart of Glass and were the rare band equally at home in the punk clubs and on the disco floor — exactly the combination a theme for Schrader’s glossy, dangerous film required. Moroder later admitted that the moment he heard Harry sing a rough version of the song, he knew they had a hit. What he could not have known was how fast she would deliver it.
A Few Hours with ‘Man Machine’
Moroder handed Harry the instrumental tape and screened the film for the band. Harry’s account is consistent across forty years of interviews: she wrote the lyrics in a few hours. She wrote them from inside the main character’s head — the song is the escort’s own sales pitch, an open invitation to call him any day or night, delivered with the cool confidence of a man who treats desire as a business transaction. “I loved doing it,” she said. “It was like being hired to do a jingle or something. You get your assignment.”
The film dictated the details. Harry was struck by the picture’s muted, high-tech colour palette, and the song opens by asking to be coloured in — colour me your colour, colour me your car. She pictured the opening scene: Gere driving along the California coast. At Moroder’s prompting she salted the bridge with the title translated into his own language and one more besides — Amore, chiamami in Italian, Appelle-moi, mon chéri in French. Chris Stein noted that Moroder’s own draft lyric had been blunt to the point of crudity; Harry’s genius was to make the same proposition suggestive instead, all tease and surface. Moroder gave her the title’s raw material; she renamed his machine Call Me.
The Band Insists on Playing — and Loses
The recording, in August 1979, was a three-stage fight for control, later described in detail by keyboardist and composer Harold Faltermeyer. First, Moroder’s own crew cut the instrumental at Westlake Recording Studios in Los Angeles, with the tape locked to SMPTE timecode so it would synchronise precisely with the film. Then the project moved to New York for Blondie’s session — where the band surprised Moroder by insisting they would play their own parts, rather than simply supplying Harry’s voice.
It did not go smoothly. Stein’s guitar and amplifier buzzed noisily and had to be repaired before a clean take was possible, and the band struggled to lock their playing to the film’s timecode. Moroder, watching the clock, stopped the unfinished sessions and took the tapes back to Los Angeles, where he completed the record quickly with his own picked musicians — Keith Forsey on drums, Faltermeyer himself on keyboards, including the synthesizer solo.
The consequence is printed on the American Gigolo soundtrack album itself: Blondie are credited only for vocals. Faltermeyer recalled that the band were angry about being replaced by session players, and keyboardist Jimmy Destri particularly disliked Faltermeyer’s solo, which occupied the space Destri considered his. Success, however, is a powerful sedative: the song turned out so well, Faltermeyer said, that the band took it in stride.
Six Weeks at Number One
The single was released in the United States on February 1, 1980, in an unusually fragmented way — three different labels handled it at once. Polydor issued the eight-minute version on the soundtrack album, Blondie’s own label Chrysalis released the commercial 7-inch and 12-inch, and the disco label Salsoul put out a Spanish-language version, Llámame, prepared for Mexico and South America.
Nothing about the chaos slowed it down. Call Me reached number one on the Billboard Hot 100 and stayed for six consecutive weeks, becoming Blondie’s biggest American single and their second US chart-topper. The RIAA certified it Gold for a million copies sold, and it peaked at number two on the dance chart. Released in Britain two months later, it became Blondie’s fourth UK number one in little over a year; it also topped the chart in Canada. Billboard ranked it the number one single of the entire year 1980, and in the magazine’s all-time Hot 100 rankings it sits at number 57 — above nearly every record the punk era produced.
For a moment, Blondie stood at the exact centre of American pop: a CBGB band with a disco producer’s film theme as the year’s defining hit, proof that the war between rock and disco had ended in a merger, and they had negotiated the terms.
The Song That Outgrew the Film
The honours arrived from both industries at once. In 1981, Call Me was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal, and for a Golden Globe for Best Original Song — a rare double for a rock band’s movie theme. The Village Voice critics’ poll ranked it the third-best song of 1980, and Rolling Stone later placed it at number 289 on its list of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
The song refused to retire. A Ben Liebrand remix returned it to the UK charts as a single in 1988. Blondie themselves returned to it for their fortieth anniversary: in 2014 they re-recorded Call Me for the compilation Greatest Hits Deluxe Redux, part of the two-disc Blondie 4(0) Ever set — Harry, by then nearly seventy, singing the escort’s cool invitation all over again. And in 2023, more than four decades after Harry dashed off the words, U2’s single Atomic City formally credited Harry and Moroder as co-writers, an official acknowledgement of its debt to Call Me — the escort’s pitch still echoing inside new records, still collecting rent.
Stevie Nicks never got to sing it. Moroder’s own band of session men played much of it. The film it was written for is now remembered largely because its theme song will not go away. Harry treated the whole thing as a jingle assignment, finished it in an afternoon, and handed Blondie the biggest record of their lives.
Leave a Reply