It's a golden age for Blondie

June 25, 2015 at 12:05a.m.

If Blondie performed at the old Youngstown Agora in the late ’70s, band guitarist Chris Stein has no memory of the show. Then again, he admitted, unless he took a photo of the venue, he can’t remember most of the group’s gigs.

“Oh yeah, I don’t remember anything,” said Stein, calling from New York City. “I mean, vaguely, sometimes when I get back to places, it comes back. I remember Swingos [in Cleveland]; I remember that, totally. That I have photos of, so it comes back easy.”

Coming back to Northeast Ohio is what Stein and Blondie will be doing with a Monday show at the Packard Music Hall in Warren. The decidedly New York City band, which started out in the mid-’70s as regulars at Max’s Kansas City and CBGB, experienced a unique chameleonic existence channeling both a punk ethos and disco sensibility at a time the two tags couldn’t have been further from each other.

“In retrospect, we think it was kind of good in making everybody crazy,” Stein said. “Everyone talked about being punk, but in a way maybe it was more punk to have all of the punks going crazy about us doing a disco song. When we were working on ‘Heart of Glass,’ we didn’t think it was a disco song. We just thought it was like Kraftwerk or something.”

Blondie’s boundary pushing also included rap (“Rapture”), which at the time was a fledgling sound heard only on the streets of the Big Apple, as well as reggae (“The Tide is High.”). Overall, the band couldn’t be pigeonholed, with other hits including “Call Me” and “Sunday Girl.”

Today, the influence of Blondie is ubiquitous with modern acts such as She & Him, The Killers, Franz Ferdinand, Alicia Keys and even One Direction having covered the Rock Hall inductee band that sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. Stein believes part of the reason Blondie remains relevant is its material isn’t dated.

“It just sounds modern, which I think is nice,” Stein said. “And I don’t know if I’m surprised, but it’s gratifying people are still paying attention. It seems like the older we get, the more and more attention we get. It’s nice kind of being a kind of elder statesmen and being looked up to by younger people and musicians.

“Like, we’re starting on a new recording project now. So we’re asking people for material and reaching out for people, and everybody just comes back right away with a pretty positive response. That’s gratifying.”

Stein said it’s too early to talk about the new project, which will be a follow-up to 2014’s “Ghosts of Download.” Still, he’s hoping the upcoming album is more of a lo-fi effort that finds the band performing live in the studio together instead of being a file-sharing creation like that of its predecessor, “Ghosts of Download.”

What’s interesting about Blondie’s decision to release what will be its 11th studio release is the fact the group wants to record new material at a time its peers seem, well, content being just heritage acts on package tours.

“It’s crazy, because we just always felt you have to move forward,” Stein said. “We’re not an oldies act.”