Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  Compare Lloyd’s account with Kristal’s, from CBGB’s website: “I was on a ladder in front of the club fixing the awning in place, when I looked down to notice three scruffy dudes in torn jeans and T shirts looking up at me inquisitively.”5 That would be Verlaine, Lloyd, and Richard Hell, three-fourths of the band. Hilly’s inclusion of Hell makes you wonder: did Lloyd’s memory lapse in the omission, or has Hell been squeezed out of the story as well as the band? In 1976, when Lloyd first put his version in print, he also gave only himself and Verlaine the credit.6 Hilly, by contrast, downplays Television’s role in favor of his own as impresario, scenemaker, gruff but loving patriarch. He’d managed the famed Village Vanguard jazz club, for God’s sake. He’d opened his bar on the Bowery because artists and musicians were already flocking to cheap east side apartments and loft spaces in nearby SoHo. Hilly’s earliest versions of the story, in fact, directly refute the band’s: “Television were not the first” on the scene, he insisted, they were just “the first to be successful. Actually, it was Terry Ork who badgered me into having Television back time and time again, because they were so god-awful when they started.”7

  In 1978, when Kristal gave this quote to London’s New Musical Express, Verlaine had already distanced himself from the original CB’s scene; Hilly’s feelings seem a little sore. Then, within months of the NME article, Television would call it quits, having toured briefly in support of its second album, Adventure. And Verlaine, who’d asserted Television’s claim as CBGB’s founders, insisted there had never really been a scene at all: “Newspapers were making it into a scene,” he said, “but to me it was just a club we played for three years.”8

  Marquee Moon emerged in part from Verlaine’s ambivalence on this point. He wanted credit for starting a scene he feared would box him in, and as a result Television’s debut both grows and departs from the downtown scene, marked by entry and exit in specific ways. A monument to the beginning and the ending of the scene’s founding era, the album, like the band, has been understood from its time to our own as intimately linked to the story of a broader movement, including the story’s emergence in international print, in some cases before the music had even made it across the pond. Taking seriously Lester Bangs’s comment that one of punk’s birthplaces was the international media, I’ve chosen to write about Marquee Moon in that context, as emerging from a dialogue between the music and the way the band was portrayed in print.

  As should already be clear, any punk origin story will inevitably betray some idea about who deserves credit for heroic acts of avant-garde self-creation. Even among the accounts told by Television’s members, disparities abound. Verlaine tells one version where he’s accompanied not by band mates but by a ragtime-playing buddy named Alan Ostlund.9 Hell would claim that he’d been scouting out venues to replace the Mercer Arts Center, a key site on the underground until the building collapsed a few months before Hilly renamed his Bowery club.10 Hell would also argue his status as punk founder had been robbed, both by his exit from Television in early 1975 and by the London pop svengali and haberdasher Malcolm McLaren, who blatantly ripped off his style to create the Sex Pistols.11 This alternative account eventually morphed into a version of the origin story featuring Hell solo: “Exactly because [CBGB’s] was an unprepossessing dive that stank from the piss of the winos upstairs,” the London Independent wrote in 2008, “Hell had discovered a place where punk could germinate uncontaminated by outside interest.”12 And Hell’s not alone in taking or getting credit for a role in the story that typically goes to Verlaine. Lloyd recently exclaimed to one interviewer: “CBGBs is the most famous rock ‘n’ roll club to have ever existed and I fucking created it!”13

  These attempts to secure credit aren’t limited to individuals: Joey Ramone on occasion made the specious claim that the Ramones were first on the CB’s scene.14 But the fact that so many punk heroes came from one dive bar also underscores the importance of community to the scene’s start. As Blondie’s Clem Burke puts it, CB’s bands “were also the audience. In the beginning it was this little microcosm of hip culture that no one else knew about.”15 Hell concurs: “At CBGB’s, we imagined our own world into being, because we didn’t feel comfortable in the existing one. It was a place you could go to every night and feel like you belonged. And that’s because it flowered out of our own brains.”16 In Kristal’s New York Times obit in 2007, Jon Pareles promotes this communal ethos by crediting Patti Smith along with Verlaine for stumbling onto Hilly’s bar while on their way to William Burroughs’s “Bunker,” the converted YMCA at 222 Bowery where the Beat icon lived in the 1970s. Though this account can’t possibly be accurate — Smith and Verlaine wouldn’t meet until Television had already started playing the club — the invocation of Burroughs as the scene’s spiritual godfather is something Smith has frequently cited herself, linking CB’s punks to downtown predecessors, the Beats. So much for self-creation.

  Marquee Moon doesn’t trumpet its own origins. It seems, in fact, out of time, perpetually new, like a dispatch from rock’s future. It nonetheless emerged from and plays into this desire to mark new beginnings. As Heylin argues, the Television of Marquee Moon was quite a different band than the one that first played CBGB’s in March 1974, but he still lists Marquee Moon as one of American punk’s four “most enduring landmarks.” (The others are Patti Smith’s Horses, Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation.) Moreover, he deems Marquee Moon “probably the most dramatic debut of any American rock band.”17 This album has, from its release, sent rock historians scrambling to situate it, in spite of the fact that its audience has never been as broad as it deserves. One of the paradoxes of Television’s trajectory is that mainstream success might have prevented the band’s preeminence in critical estimations: its cult status buttresses the album’s claims on authenticity and originality.

  In cementing Television’s centrality to punk’s origins, no text plays as significant a role as McNeil and McCain’s Please Kill Me, in spite of the fact that, compared to Heylin’s history, it devotes more attention to sex and drugs than to the revolutionary music. Please Kill Me, which takes its very title from a legendary T-shirt Hell designed and Lloyd wore on stage, offers a wistful glance at a gritty pre-AIDS ’70s New York rock scene. It has two clear agendas where Television’s concerned: First, it argues that Television laid foundations for American punk well before the Sex Pistols were a glint in McLaren’s eye. Second, it makes Hell the scene’s unsung hero. Hell’s heroism is defined not simply against McLaren’s thievery, but also against Verlaine’s desire for complete control of Television, which resulted in Hell’s departure.

  The early/late Television split is almost as important to the band’s mythology as the discovery of the club. Decades later you’ll find partisans still facing off. If they preferred Television with Hell, they would rather hear early bootlegs and rougher arrangements than the finished versions on Marquee Moon. To them, the album might as well have come from a different band. Others will tell you that Television only benefitted from Fred Smith’s more subtle and supple bass. If Marquee Moon’s story can’t be told without covering the Hell/Verlaine fallout, this should only remind us that creation myths also serve to explain the emergence of good and evil, gods and devils, heroes and villains. They outline rituals for preserving the purity of such categories and reinforcing tribal identity. In Please Kill Me, Verlaine and his consort Patti Smith come off as devils in disguise.

  And then there are the alternate accounts that make Television and Legs McNeil the villains while valorizing New York’s earlier glitter scene as punk’s true fountainhead. The notion that CBGB’s founding marked glitter’s grave still gets a rise out of those who emphasize the continuity between the Mercer Arts Center and the later scene. This camp complains that back when CB’s was still Hilly’s on the Bowery, the club’s acts included glitter pioneers Eric Emerson and the Magic Tramps and the transgendered drag artist Wayne (later Jayne) County, whose backin
g bands included Queen Elizabeth, the Electric Chairs, and the Backstreet Boys. “Queen Elizabeth actually played CBGB’s four months before Television,” Jayne County complained in 2005. “I love Television, but enough of this shit, give Jayne credit!”18 Fair enough. If we want to understand the mythology that consolidated around Television, perhaps we’ll have to ask not just what that story’s longevity means, but also what other possible pasts the myth obscures, and how those historical alternatives might relate to the music that eventually became Marquee Moon.

  CBGB’s significance in our own day derives from a desire to preserve the authenticity of New York’s East side neighborhoods, long a stand-in for the possibility of artistic subculture itself, or perhaps for the spark of authentic rebellion at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll. (Consider, though, that we’re twice as far removed from the mid-’70s as the downtown bands were from the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s.) But anxieties about downtown’s decline or rock’s relevance bring up yet another purpose served by avant-garde origin myths: the preservation of community by excluding late arrivals. Such a posture ironically represses CBGB’s own role as vanguard of Bowery gentrification. In the 1980s, Karen Kristal, Hilly’s ex-wife, proudly rebroadcasted NYPD opinion “that CBGB has done more than anything else to clean up the area and bring safety.”19 But to others these transformations already heralded the traditional neighborhood’s death: Richard Hell wasn’t on the East Side because his “folks have just pulled in from Puerto Rico,” wrote the critic Vivien Goldman in 1977. He’s “one of the new generation of artist types flocking to low-rent areas, a process which will inevitably result in the rents slowly rising, the scabrous tenements being tarted up till the immigrant families can’t afford it any more.”20 In our century, nostalgia not for displaced immigrants but for displaced bohemians has worn itself thin in the mass production of CBGB’s paraphernalia. In 1976 bohemian nostalgists already told stories about a time at CBGB’s before limousines delivered celebrity slummers onto the scene. Part of the bohemian legacy, of course, is mourning and memorializing an authentic past, as is recognizing the “elusiveness of authentic experience.”21 To many fans, Marquee Moon serves just such a function, perhaps more than ever.

  The authentic past eludes us precisely because we ritually sacrifice memory to create mythical accounts of origins — and endings. When Television reunited in 1992 to record a third album, at least one bemused interviewer sat by while the band had it out over the details of their own legend. Verlaine took issue with the way Lloyd had recounted their breakup for over a decade:

  Verlaine: “Richard remembers this dinner in August 1978 where we all got together and broke up. I don’t remember that. Billy doesn’t remember that.”

  Ficca: “I don’t remember that.”

  Verlaine: “Fred doesn’t remember that.”

  Smith: “I really can’t remember that.”

  Verlaine: “Richard says we went to Chinatown and ate chow mein or something.”

  Lloyd: “No, no. Tom called me up and he said, I’m thinking of leaving the band and I said, Well, you don’t have to leave the band because I’m thinking of leaving the band too, so why don’t we just call it a day? And we called up Fred and Billy and we said, We’ll meet at The Loft, which was in Chinatown, and we’ll make it a happy event rather than a sad one. And then when we got there, Tom was the one that mentioned Moby Grape because I had Moby Grape records …”

  Verlaine: “The man’s memory!”

  Lloyd: “… so we went out to this Chinese joint in an alley in Chinatown we used to call Whore Alley …”

  Verlaine (deciding at this point to stop his pacing and lie face down in the middle of the long table): “The guy is cracked!”

  Lloyd: “… and we had dinner and we told jokes and then we split. And then we went on our dismal way.”

  Verlaine: “Speak for yourself!”

  Lloyd: “I just did. I have a very good memory …”

  … The tiff continues …

  Verlaine: “I’m not dismissing what you’re saying. I’m merely saying that I don’t think that anybody’s memory is infallible. All I’m saying is that the three of us don’t remember the dinner …”

  Lloyd: “That we all went to! That’s incredible!”22

  Memory isn’t infallible. Myths settle into lives of their own. Collaboratively produced, they lay claim on originality, authorship, and agency. Television lasted, in its original run, from 1973 to 1978. CBGB’s had a longer life, but still died an early death in 2006. (At 33, it was the same age as the crucified Christ, as Patti Smith noted at the time.) The club was replaced by a John Varvatos boutique that tries in its own way to preserve the rock club’s feel — down to preserving original graffiti — while hocking $3500 rocker jackets. In this century, the consensus myth of CBGB’s origins doesn’t require a villain from within: gentrification has usurped that role. Awnings will come and go. But pilgrims will continue to worship at the intersection of Bowery and Bleecker. They’ll close their eyes and imagine a different entrance at number 315. Then they’ll cue up a favorite album, adjust their headphones, and wander south, toward Chinatown, tracing an earlier generation’s movements through tight toy nights.

  1 Wolcott (1977).

  2 Krauss (1981: p. 53).

  3 Kozak (1988: p. 13).

  4 Kozak (1988: p. 13).

  5 Kristal, “The History of CBGB & OMFUG.”

  6 Gholson (1976).

  7 Murray (1978).

  8 Heylin (1993: p. 321).

  9 “Tom Verlaine” (1995).

  10 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 169).

  11 Hell (1980).

  12 Hasted (2005).

  13 “Endurance: The Richard Lloyd Interview” (2007).

  14 Black (1985).

  15 Fletcher (2009: p. 342).

  16 Hasted (2005).

  17 Heylin (1993: pp. 351, 275).

  18 Nobakht (2005: p. 73); Holmstrom (2007).

  19 Kozak (1988: p. 3).

  20 Goldman (1977).

  21 Bradshaw (2010: p. 158).

  22 Hibbert (1992).

  Some Big Set-Up: New York Bohemia

  The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in ’64 and ’65.

  — Tom Verlaine, Raygun, November 1994

  I was a beardless seventeen-year-old stick figure, all wrists and ankles, with rumpled hair starting to cover my ears, little wire glasses that had a thin tortoise shell casing around their round lenses, work shirt, jeans and not much sign of any status outside of dispossessed youth. I did look like a poet.

  — Richard Hell, Brooklyn Rail, October 2007

  Marquee Moon is a quintessential album of the New York night. In its lower Manhattan landscape — largely desolate — darkness resounds with sirens, clangs, revving engines, the subway’s rattling tracks. The album has a literary landscape, too, filled (contrary to myths of self-creation) with echoes of New York’s long bohemian traditions, celebrations of freedoms found in the city’s dark patches and forgotten corners. Television joins a parade of writers and artists, from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp to Jackson Pollack, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg to the band’s contemporary, Jim Carroll, along with musicians working in jazz traditions, all of whom contribute to an artistic mode we call the urban pastoral. If ancient Greek pastorals celebrated the virtues of country life (personal freedom, repose, delight in nature, escape from social conventions), Television’s debut album echoes dozens of urban predecessors in the conviction that these qualities are even more intense in cities, where they rub up against opposite extremes of degradation, claustrophobia, and the excessively unnatural.23 Marquee Moon’s very title combines urban and pastoral imagery, suggesting the kind of night sky only visible above the neon glare of city-dwellers’ assault on the dark. By implication the marquee, not the actual moon, sets the album’s mood.

  The album’s title also suggests that sensory experience will be of prime impor
tance to these eight songs. What can we see by the light of a marquee moon? What will be revealed on Marquee Moon’s grooves? If its songs reverberate with an urban soundscape and echo artistic forerunners, they abound with references to other senses — and sensory derangement — in general: vision and blindness; flashes of transcendental revelation; dizzying heights; the smell of a seaport. When Verlaine sings “My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves” he’s not just suggesting that his nighttime wanderings are filtered through “some new kind of drug”: he’s recognizing general conditions of corporeality and consciousness. Hyperconsciousness, even: the album is full of hesitations, pauses, periods of waiting — sometimes for several minutes — while the music builds and then recedes, like a tide pulled by lunar gravity. So much time to think. If these hesitations seem nervous they also allow for delayed gratification.

  From the beginning, Television’s New York nocturne has frequently been compared to the Velvet Underground’s a decade earlier, but Verlaine’s reportage fundamentally differs from Lou Reed’s. Reed is a realist. Think of the detachment with which he narrates “Heroin,” or the way “Walk on the Wild Side” captures specific details of Max’s Kansas City’s backroom scene. Reed draws on older literary genres like the flâneur’s voyeuristic slice of urban life. By contrast, Verlaine sings from within experience, narrating consciousness or confusion more than reporting specific details of what he sees. Each song, he’s said, “is like a little moment of discovery or releasing something or being in a certain time or place and having a certain understanding of something.”24 Or, as Peter Laughner of the Cleveland bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu put it, Verlaine “takes experience and abstracts it, not to the point of obscurity, but to the point of suggestion,” so it’s not restricted to “Verlaine’s experience per se.”25 Identifiable landmarks are few in Television songs, as are references to specific people, though the album hints at both. In this way, Verlaine’s writing differs from the dominant strains of New York’s poetry scene — Beats and New York School, followers of Ginsberg and O’Hara, respectively — when he and Richard Hell and Patti Smith all arrived in the late ’60s, ready to write. But like the downtown scene’s conceptual artists and poets, Television aimed to bring their audience along for the ride, allowing them vicariously to witness the process of a song’s unfolding, to fill in spaces or gaps with their own perceptions, to contribute to the meaning being made in acts of imaginary circumambulation of a dreamy urban night.