Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  The specifics of New York’s Lower East Side poetry scene were probably not known to two kids named Richard Meyers and Tom Miller, runaways in 1966 from the Sanford School, a private prep nestled outside Wilmington, Delaware. But they knew that poets gathered in New York: Ginsberg, O’Hara, Dylan, LeRoi Jones, and others they probably hadn’t even heard of. So when they showed up in New York eighteen months apart, in 1966 and 1968, they told a story about themselves that they’d run away from reform school, bound to write. Sanford had more comforts than the fugitives let on, but their parents had sent them there to keep them out of trouble. Both were obviously bright but not quite cut for traditional schooling, and Sanford wouldn’t work out for either. Meyers had already been suspended once, for getting high on morning glory seeds, and the story they told of their escape from school had a distinct Beat ring to it: They stole some money from Miller’s parents and headed west, first for Washington, DC, and then for Lexington, Kentucky, where Meyers had grown up and still had friends. From there: south, Florida-bound. Somewhere in Alabama they were arrested for setting fire to the field they were camping in, possibly in retribution for being harassed by rednecks. Busted, Meyers returned to his mother in Virginia but left for New York as soon as he had the cash. Miller finished high school, then flirted with college in South Carolina and Pennsylvania before dropping out and heading to find Meyers.26 He would later say that he’d faked a suicide attempt to avoid Vietnam.27 Meyers also convinced a military shrink that it would be in the army’s interest not to draft him.28 In New York, they worked bookstore jobs and sought out the writers and musicians they admired.

  These biographical details emerge from press releases and press accounts dating from 1974–1977, stories bound up with the birth of Television, the band Meyers and Miller eventually founded together. By then, of course, they had changed their names to Hell and Verlaine. And if they colored things a little, who could blame them? The possibility for self-invention was half of New York’s appeal. The Lower East Side, for young bohemians, was like a stage. Poets dressed like cowboys, strutting the streets of this urban frontier.29 Meanwhile, the descendents of immigrant Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Puerto Ricans sheltered their children from speed freaks and a few stray hippies invading their tenements.30 To the south and west, artists had begun to inhabit the near-abandoned Cast-iron District, a West Side neighborhood once filled with factories and warehouses, renamed SoHo in 1968.31

  For at least a century, geographic density and low rents had made these neighborhoods conducive to artistic collaboration and cultural cross-pollination. By the time Meyers and Miller arrived, New York had witnessed several bohemian scenes in succession: As early as Herman Melville’s 1852 novel Pierre you’ll find references to “miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby black.” Walt Whitman was a regular at a bar called Pfaff’s at Broadway and Bleecker, a meeting ground for writers, artists, and actors who published their own literary rags. An 1872 guidebook describes this neighborhood as belonging to “long-haired, queerly dressed” artists who live in attics. By 1900, provincial bohemians joined slumming Ivy Leaguers in what were still predominantly immigrant ghettos. In 1917, as the United States prepared to enter the Great War, the French painter Marcel Duchamp, who helped introduce New York to modern art, stood atop the Washington Square arch and declared Greenwich Village an independent republic of the mind.

  That declaration renewed itself decade by decade as the neighborhood became synonymous with the idea of artistic and sexual undergrounds. By mid-century, abstract painters and New York School poets congregated at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, wresting the art world away from Paris. The rapid notoriety granted Beat poets in the late ’50s led the Village Voice’s Norman Mailer to rhapsodize about “White Negro” hipsters. With rents rising and Italian Villagers hostile toward an influx of would-be beatniks, writers moved eastward as the ’50s closed.32 These successive scenes did not always overlap, nor did they adhere to consistent artistic or political principles, but they retained adjacent downtown neighborhoods as the site of artistic ferment.

  In Lipstick Traces, his 1989 freewheeling “secret history” of the twentieth century, Greil Marcus unearths a punk archaeology revealing European Dadaists and mid-century Situationists as laying antiauthoritarian groundwork that would eventually crack open to reveal the Sex Pistols. Though Marcus has always shown less interest in New York’s punk scene than in London’s, he could have made a similar case without leaving a few square miles in downtown Manhattan. Right about the time Meyers and Miller were born, a handful of key artists took root downtown who, along with Ginsberg, would serve as presiding spirits over New York’s underground for the next several decades. The composer John Cage moved to the Lower East Side in 1949, already having won notice for early works on prepared piano. In his courses at the New School in the late ’50s and early ’60s he emphasized concept as much as everyday materials in artistic production, unleashing a wave of conceptual and performance art and minimalist music, including the Fluxus movement and likeminded loft artists such as La Monte Young and Yoko Ono. From Cage and his followers, downtown musicians would inherit key artistic tenets that traced to Dada, if not to the earlier French decadents: an impulse to eliminate lines between art and life and high and low culture; a countercultural, anti-bourgeois sensibility; and a playful openness to the unknown, to chance, and to sensory derangement.33 It’s not too much of a stretch to trace lines of influence from Television back to Cage — the clear link comes through the Velvet Underground, whose members, especially John Cale, had been influenced by Cage and involved with Young’s downtown minimalist movement. But it’s not necessary to establish such conscious debts: as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, a band influenced by Television, put it: “The ‘existence’ of La Monte young was influential” in its own right. “I had no idea what his music sounded like until later [but] it had already changed my world through others.”34 Even so, Verlaine had encountered Cage’s influence even back in Wilmington, where as a middle schooler he had purchased, for 99 cents each, titles from Time’s modern music series, including work by Cage’s friend Morton Feldman. He squirreled himself away in an attic room to listen, “half-asleep and half awake, … a totally great state of mind,” he later wrote in New York Rocker.35 “I played them over and over thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen here?’ Nothing ever occurs in the usual fashion in any of these records. I can’t possibly call it an influence, but it did something in terms of space, maybe.”36

  Cage’s notoriety in the early ’60s coincided with a revival of interest in early twentieth-century Dadaism, and especially in Marcel Duchamp. Another Duchampian, painter and Pop conceptualist Andy Warhol, also moved to Manhattan in 1949, working in commercial illustration until he established his own solo painting career in the early 1960s. Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, introduced him to downtown poetry and performance circles, and though Warhol spent time on these scenes, producing cover art for small poetry journals like Ted Berrigan’s C, he made his mark in painting and film. By 1965 he had capitalized on downtown’s conceptual art gospel, making objects from ordinary life marketable in an art economy. Expanding on this concept he assumed the role of star-maker, transforming his hangers-on into “superstars” who became famous for their proximity to him as much as for appearing in his films.

  From Whitman to Warhol, the downtown avant-garde perpetuated itself through institutions like cafés, pubs, and playhouses, all friendly to conversation, performance, publication, and mind-altering substances. Beat poets preferred jazz clubs like the Five Spot on Cooper Square or coffee houses like those owned by Mickey Ruskin: the Tenth Street Coffee House (1960) and Café Les Deux Mégots, (1962). These gave way, for poets at least, to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the late ’60s. Ruskin also owned a post-Cedar Tavern artists’ bar, The Ninth Circle (1962). From ’65 forward, another Ruskin establishment, Max’s Kansas City, off Union Squar
e, attracted a painter crowd. In 1968, when Warhol moved his studio, the Factory, from midtown to Union Square, he made the back room of Max’s Kansas City the social destination for celebrities of all stripes.37

  Max’s Kansas City and the Poetry Project provided crucial coordinates for Meyers, Miller, and other new arrivals in the late ’60s, including another aspiring poet, Patti Smith, and her sometime lover, a young photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe. The mere existence of a scene for poetry was a revelation: “[I]n Delaware, there was no ‘cultural life,’” Verlaine would later say. “You might meet some guy who’s four years older than you because it’s your girlfriend’s college brother who might have a copy of Allen Ginsberg or something.”38 In New York, poetry readings abounded and the poetry scene provided a model of community and DIY publishing that musicians would later mimic. Meyers developed a “big crush” on local poet Bernadette Mayer, a recent New School graduate who co-edited a self-published poetry journal called O To 9. Meyers also idolized second-generation New York School poets such as Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and Ron Padgett. Still “too shy to introduce myself to anyone,” he began to model his career after these self-styled outlaws and pioneers, including Ed Sanders, a singer for the proto-punk anti-folk band the Fugs, who published his journal Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts from “a secret location in the Lower East Side.”39 These poets had a profound impact on the emergence of the downtown music scene, not just in terms of style or substance, but of production mode and cultural politics: “In a way, those guys had a big influence on me in music in the sense of their attitudes towards themselves and their relationship to the existing world,” Hell would recall in the mid-’90s:

  The only poets who got any attention or respect from the mainstream world were really conservative and lived their lives in universities. Rather than be frustrated and beat their heads against the wall and work their way up that system, the St. Mark’s poets just stayed in the streets and did it themselves on mimeo machines and created an alternative. It’s just like we ended up doing in music. We made the record companies come to us by making noise for the kids directly rather than trying to impress the record companies to make deals. We brought out records on small labels and started fanzines. We created our own culture until they were forced to acknowledge it and give our records some distribution.40

  Meyers purchased a used table-top offset printing press and launched his own journal, Genesis : Grasp, from an apartment on Elizabeth Street in northern Little Italy, a block off the Bowery. “Of course there is no art, only life,” he announced in the manifesto that headed the first issue. The second issue was dedicated to Thomas Merton and Marcel Duchamp. The third included a Dadaist satire on philosophical criticism by Miller and Meyers on “Antilove and the Supraconscious.” (“Happy trails till the next sentence!” they offer at one point. “And here I am with a personal letter for each of you. The letter U — now this is personal.”) Having fallen in love with little poetry journals while working at Gotham Book Mart, Meyers sought to insert himself into this tradition.41 A handful of Miller’s poems appear in the final issue — a mixture of psychedelic imagery, violence, transcendentalism, and humor. (“all the air everywhere today enters my noses taking my breath away / I figger it’s parta being a cowboy,” runs one poem in its entirety.) Genesis : Grasp published six issues between 1968 and 1971, and although it included poems, fiction, and photography by some recognized figures, Meyers and Miller remained marginal to the dominant scenes, something Miller seemed to resent long after he’d changed his name to Verlaine: “[P]oets would get together in various groups,” he recalled, “and develop similar styles and share the same ideas and the same girlfriends. I don’t know if incest is the right word, but it got to the point where everyone was just patting each other on the back and congratulating each other all the time.”42

  In addition to writing poetry — sometimes collaborating on a shared typewriter — Meyers and Miller spent their first few years in the city taking psychedelics, “Just out of interest. To see what scrambling your senses could do to you.”43 Their bookstore jobs provided plenty of time for finding new poets and just enough money to make rent and score drugs. Occasionally they hit an artsy hotspot like Max’s or the St. Adrian’s, an artist’s bar built into the same old hotel on Broadway that would house the Mercer Arts Center a few years later. On one such outing in 1969 or 1970, Meyers met Patty Oldenburg, recently separated from her husband, the Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg. They kicked off a relationship that would last close to two years. Oldenburg’s husband was Meyers’s senior by twenty years; Patty herself was nearly 15 years older than Meyers. The affair granted him access to downtown’s elite art circles.

  Meyers, in turn, published her poems in Genesis : Grasp under the pseudonym Patty Machine, along with such noted poets as Clark Coolidge and Bruce Andrews. The magazine was Meyers’s attempt to “fashion a community of writers into which I fit,” he later said.44 His own poems sometimes appeared under the name Ernie Stomach. He and Miller collaborated under the pseudonym Theresa Stern, whose “photo” — a composite of their faces, crowned with a dark wig — graced the cover of Genesis : Grasp’s final issue, along with portraits of Rimbaud and Artaud. Two years later, when Hell issued a volume of Theresa Stern’s poetry entitled Wanna Go Out?, a biographical statement described her as a half-German, half-Puerto Rican Hoboken hooker whose date of birth fell in the few weeks that separated Hell’s from Verlaine’s at the end of 1949. That collaboration would be their last strictly poetic effort together; by the time Wanna Go Out? appeared, Meyers and Miller had shifted their sights to rock ‘n’ roll.

  Downtown’s music scene, on Meyers and Miller’s arrival, divided into leftover folk utopians and an experimental underground scene influenced by Cage and his followers. The former, in spite of their countercultural politics, had spawned enormous commercial successes such as Baez and Dylan, and by mid-decade had seen Dylan defect to rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan epitomized the transforming power of image as he cultivated his own mystique, first as folk troubadour, then as rock’s coolest cat. Touted outside the academy as a poet, he sought out ties to Beat heroes, which they reciprocated. The back cover to Bringing It All Back Home (1965) uses photos of Ginsberg to establish Dylan’s poetic credentials, and in D. A. Pennebaker’s film Don’t Look Back, which follows Dylan through a 1965 tour of England, Ginsberg hovers over the setpiece for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” an authorizing force. Dylan’s break from the Village folk scene — “fat people,” he famously dismissed them — was a turn toward hipster cool, influencing not only the Velvets’ post-Beat image but later musicians as well. When Dylan performed “Like A Rolling Stone” and other electric songs in Manchester, England, in 1966, and an audience member called him out as a “Judas” to the folk movement, Dylan responded by telling his band to play the song “fucking loud.” In that performance we hear one origin point of a disposition that would later be recognized as punk. Richard Hell took this version of Dylan as an inspiration: “I knew him for the first electric records he made and I was so full of aggression myself when I first started playing music that I really didn’t understand anything else. I wanted music that just RIPPED through you.”45

  While Dylan forced the folk scene’s identity crisis, other musicians pioneered forms that would later prove significant to Television’s development. Inspired by Cage, younger underground artists, beginning in 1959, staged downtown events known as Happenings, which combined art forms — dance, theater, film, poetry, music, sculpture — in multimedia events that smudged lines between artists and audiences.46 On one hand, Happenings pointed to the theatricality of everyday life; on the other, they made art more democratic. Some of the work that emerged from these contexts — especially Pop art — came to be commercially viable, though much of it willfully resisted commodification.

  Warhol, who never pretended his work existed outside a commercial realm, oversaw the combination of rock ‘n’ roll and Happenings when he incorporated
the largely unknown Velvet Underground into multi-media, amphetamine-fueled spectacles he dubbed Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.47 But even earlier, he and other artists attempted to incorporate popular music into Pop. In 1963 the Oldenburgs unsuccessfully tried to form a band, with Patty as lead singer. Andy Warhol and artist Lucas Samaras would sing backup, with painter Larry Poons on guitar, sculptor Walter de Maria on drums, and composer La Monte Young on saxophone. The painter Jasper Johns would contribute lyrics.48 The group folded because Young had no interest in entertainment or commercial culture, but De Maria would later play in a short-lived rock band, the Primitives, with filmmaker and composer Tony Conrad and violist John Cale, both of whom also worked with Young. The Primitives formed to promote a novelty dance single written by 22-year-old Lou Reed, with whom Cale would go on to form the Velvet Underground, whose rock ‘n’ roll referenced downtown avant-garde predecessors.49 Unlike Young, these artists felt that pop music — like other forms of culture appropriated, satirized, and celebrated by Pop Art — was a field rife with artistic opportunities.