PERSONALITIES
HIS FIRST
Plastic Letters (1977)
HIS LAST
The Hunter (1982)
EVEN IF YOU didn’t know that Frank Infante is a Jersey boy, it wouldn’t take you long to figure it out. Born and raised in Jersey City, next door to Hoboken and a tunnel or bridge away from Manhattan, the 71-year-old guitarist still has his gritty North Jersey accent intact. It’s a tone and attitude thing, a certain street flair to the way he occasionally says “dis” for “this” or “dat” for “that.” When he talks about guitar parts, it sometimes comes out as “guitar pahts.” And as for the way he says “forget about it,” well, fuhgeddaboudit.
Back in the 1970s, Infante brought plenty of tone, attitude and flair to a New York City band that wasn’t lacking in any of those areas: Blondie, the pioneering, shape-shifting outfit, led by guitarist Chris Stein and singer Debbie Harry, who, over a six-year span, deftly — and in many ways, presciently — mixed punk and new wave with the sounds of Sixties girl groups, garage rock, disco, reggae and hip-hop. The band was one of the first success stories out of CBGB’s, and by the time their run ended in 1982, they had dominated the airwaves with a steady succession of smash hits like “Heart of Glass,” “One Way or Another,” “Call Me,” “The Tide Is High,” “Atomic” and “Rapture.”
Infante remembers the downtown New York scene where it all started. “It was a cool time,” he says. “You didn’t have to be a
