I grew up in the desert. There were no radio stations in the desert in the '80s that played Blondie. The first time I heard this song I was navigating a rally chase truck (Great Race - my uncle won it twice) across southern Utah with two guys, Russell and... Chris(?). Russell was driving for Chris(?)'s dad because the car Russell was supposed to be chasing had been seized by the DEA in Florida. They kept stopping Russell because they thought he'd kidnapped a runaway teenaged girl and they'd search the truck sporadically. We knew they were looking for drugs, they knew we knew, they didn't give a shit. Teenaged runaway. Step away from the car. Anyway. We were in this massive Ford F450 with a 429 V8 hauling a flatbed with nothing on it but a toolchest (so what the hell were they searching? Like, iknorite?) and Russell and... Chris(?) were pretty much perpetual drunk drivers. So there we (they) were, driving drunk as fuck at about 115MPH across the desert and there I was, scared out of my fucking mind... Wait, hang on a sec. Visual aid. Not pictured: seventy million prairie dogs, outnumbered only by the eleventy million prairie dog carcasses baking in the sun. They'd whip by at nearly stroboscopic speeds - you'd lock eyes with them and splat And every time there was a splat Chris would go "WHEEEEP!" And we would laugh uproariously, myself included, and swerve a little, and splat"WHEEP!" and then Heart of Glass came on. Most fucking epic road trip I've ever been on. Six months shy of my sixteenth birthday. Race ended in Seattle, where I spent the summer with my uncle. We stopped in at the Olympia Brewery, back when it still existed, and Russell had so much free shit beer to drink that he took out a dozen orange barrels with the trailer. One at a time. Took the fenders off. It was amazing. Then we got to the hotel and he passed out. ♩oooohhhhhh ♩oooohhhhhh ♫whoaaaah
Bonus points for the visual aid. My parents are so young that I first heard Heart of Glass because my mom was a huge Blondie fan. This tape was on heavy rotation in our kitchen. I would dance around the house listening to it. In fact, when I think of that first house we lived in, it's to the soundtrack of Blondie and J Giels Band. Little 5 year old me used to dance around the house singing this song: My parents thought it was hilarious. PS. Also, Debbie Harry may have been my first crush. Damn she was hot.
Wilma Deering from Buck Rogers for me. My house had nothing but classical playing. all the time. While my father's car had nothing but country. all the time. It wasn't until 4th or 5th grade that I found the Beatles and Ravi Shankar records from another era. My father purchased exactly one tape in my entire childhood. We were driving back from Minnesota and he didn't want to stop, so he also bought a porta-potty. Think it took us 9 days there with my mom; 1 1/2 back.