You could forgive Blondie for soaking in the incredible run of success they were enjoying in 1980.
They’d certainly paid their dues – spending years slogging it out in New York City’s dingy punk spawn point CBGB’s and throwing spunky guitar-pop darts at a wall to no avail, before they hit it (really) big in 1979 with the irresistible Heart of Glass.
Disco-tinged as that song was, Blondie were and are still a guitar band first and foremost, and six-stringers Chris Stein and (at that time) Frank Infante were heartily enjoying their much-expanded tools-of-the-trade budget.
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“By the time I got to CBGB’s. I didn’t have any money or resources,” Stein recalled to Guitar World in a 1980 interview. “I used this old Supro Ozark guitar. I played it for a long time but it was only on loan; I had borrowed it from this guy who later had a sex change operation and decided he wanted his guitar back.”
By the end of 1980, though, those trying days were three chart-topping hits behind Blondie, and the sort of kid in a candy (guitar) shop stories we all dream of were now well within reach for them. And, when asked by GW during that peak-era interview where the Burns Ampeg guitar sitting on his living room couch came from, Stein had a story to tell…
“We’re in Indianapolis and we’re staying in this hotel across from a huge, gigantic pawn shop,” Stein recounted to GW. “So Frankie [Infante] or somebody went over there and came back with this really weird story. He said, ‘This guy in the pawn shop says he has a roomful of Les Pauls upstairs, but he won’t let me see them.’
“So we went over to the store and there were lots of guitars all over the place, and the guy said, ‘Yes, there is a room upstairs filled with guitars, but you can’t see them because we’re only selling them all at once.
“So we finally came back and we waved hundred dollar bills in his face and said, ‘Let us in and we’ll buy the guitars individually.’ We were on tour with Rockpile. We had two bands and roadies there ready to spring for them. Finally he let us into the room which was filled with guitars.
“It was sort of like a dream, you know,” Stein continued. “We spent the whole day opening up these dusty guitar cases. They had been saving them up for years. A lot of them were brand new. I got six guitars all together. They weren’t all Les Pauls. There were some really old Epiphones, in great condition. I got a Gibson Trini Lopez custom model. And I also got that Burns Ampeg.”
Offbeat in design and origin story, the Burns guitar in question appealed to Stein’s punk roots.
“I mostly used to use Strats before this, and I still use Strats,” Stein explained. “But I like Burns [company founder James Ormston Burns] and I like what he is about.
“I was immediately attracted to it because it looked like a Telecaster I once carved up with two sets of horns and painted black. I had to sell it because we were out of money. Burns has been fucked over by the system so much that he says this guitar is against the system. He says it’s the devil’s guitar.”
