Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  The idea of Midler covering Reed isn’t as far-fetched as it might seem today. The “Divine Miss M” had cut her chops at Hilly Kristal’s pre-CBGB clubs and at gay bath houses on the Upper West Side, where the Dolls also played in the summer of ’72. Invoking her in relation to Reed was a nod to Reed’s sexual ambiguity in the early ’70s. But Kent’s comment also nodded to downtown’s cabaret revival, combining ’60s nightclub settings (previously dominated by folk and jazz) with influences from Happenings, the Theater of the Ridiculous, and a longer underground drag tradition to establish a decadent Weimar aesthetic as the city and nation seemed poised to crumble amidst financial crisis and political corruption.

  Like the Dolls, Patti Smith was a natural fit for this cabaret scene. Following several solo readings opening for bands the Mercer in ’72, she and Lenny Kaye followed their “Rock n Rimbaud” event with a string of dates opening for folk veteran Phil Ochs at Max’s and another run in April ’74 supporting the Warhol drag star Holly Woodlawn at the Village supper club Reno Sweeney. This nostalgic cabaret club, founded in 1973, catered to what the Times called “the traditional supper-club mix of porky businessmen and garment-center models, show-business fringe characters, willowy men and short-haired women.”65 Its Paradise Room was, like Max’s and like the Mercer, a place to be seen, though an upscale version that tended toward more straightforward show tunes for a mixed gay/straight, uptown/downtown audience. Its owners had hoped Midler would headline their opening, though she already beyond their reach.66 Smith’s interests ran to cabaret’s darker side — Weill and Lenya — celebrations of subterranean decadence. She brought to Reno Sweeney a proto-punk edge that didn’t undermine her sincere appreciation of the cabaret genre.

  The confluence of downtown scenes Kent witnessed in ’73 — cabaret, glitter, and garage revival — had the unlikely effect of spawning punk rock. Meyers and Miller had been particularly energized by the Mercer’s ’73 New Year’s celebration, featuring Suicide, the Modern Lovers, Wayne County, and the Dolls. Hell recalled a “hysterical” audience, “very campy, lots of gorgeous young girls, too, all in mini-skirts and platforms and feather boas, heavy make-up.”67 It occurred to him that “there was so much more excitement in rock & roll [than] sitting home writing poetry … I mean I could deal with the same matters that I’d be sweating over alone in my room, to put out little mimeograph magazines that five people would ever see. And we definitely thought we were as cool as the next people, so why not get out there and sell it?”68 What he saw at the Mercer directly contrasted corporate rock: “Music had just become so bloated,” he’d recall. “With the Dolls, it was just like the street put onstage, you know?”69 Being on stage, he implies, didn’t have to be artificial. He’d make a paradoxical stage presence by performing authenticity.

  The friends’ second attempt to break into the scene came when Miller, with Meyers as manager, auditioned at Reno Sweeney in October 1973. Miller and Meyers seemed an unlikely match for the supper club, though perhaps Meyers hoped to pass off Miller, like Patti Smith, as a streetwise version of glossier cabaret acts. Lloyd would later claim that Meyers ripped Miller’s shirt on his way in, hoping to make him look “ragged.” When Miller plugged in his guitar on stage, the volume was up so loud that the amplifier popped, sending the manager scurrying over in a panic.70

  Miller’s 15-minute audition at Reno Sweeney consisted of three songs, one of which, “Venus de Milo,” would later appear on Marquee Moon. The owners hated him, but the audience that night included two people who would help bring Television into existence. Terry Ork, a Warhol assistant and Max’s regular, was a friend of Smith and Mapplethorpe’s and was Meyers and Miller’s boss at Cinemabilia, a 12th Street bookstore devoted to film titles. He’d brought along Richard Lloyd, a young guitarist with bottle-blond Iggy Poppet bowl cut and, on occasion, pink lipstick, who’d been splitting time between Ork’s loft and Danny Fields’s, having just arrived from LA.

  Lloyd had met Ork at Max’s, where he’d headed to sniff out scenesters he’d met out West, including the photographer Leee Black Childers. Childers had singled out Lloyd in an LA audience for British glam rockers Mott the Hoople and invited him, based on looks, to a backstage party. Lloyd parlayed the connection into a stint sleeping at Fields’s when he arrived back in New York. At some point he started crashing at Ork’s Chinatown loft. Years later he’d refer to Ork as having been his “lover,” then quickly qualify: “Oh, he wasn’t, he just chased me around.”71 Hilly Kristal recalled Ork as a “pudgy little dynamo with a penchant for non-stop talking.”72 Ork aspired to be like the Robinsons and Fields, like Warhol, even. A behind-the-scenes conduit, he enjoyed making connections. Earlier he’d introduced Patti Smith to Malanga.73 Now he suggested that Miller and Lloyd form a band. He’d buy equipment and offer his space for rehearsals. Miller and Meyers phoned up Ficca in Boston and asked him to come back. After flirting with various names (including the Libertines and Goo Goo) they settled on Television, a name Meyers suggested. “It’s so obtrusive, it’s unobtrusive,” Lloyd would later say.74 What better symbol of an era than the medium that threatened to absorb all others?

  52 Killen (2006: p. 138).

  53 Heylin (1993: p. 240).

  54 Harron (1980).

  55 Goldberg (2008: pp. 30, 29).

  56 Lisa Robinson, in Gorman (2001: p. 146).

  57 Bockris and Bayley (1999: pp. 13–18).

  58 Fletcher (2009: pp. 301–2).

  59 Cagle (1995: p. 189).

  60 Verlaine (1976).

  61 Kent (1973b).

  62 Kent (1973b).

  63 Cf. Bangs (1973).

  64 Kent (1973c).

  65 Buckley (1973).

  66 Gavin (2006: chs. 9–10).

  67 Mitchell (2006: p. 29).

  68 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 163).

  69 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 119).

  70 Mitchell (2006: p. 34).

  71 “Richard Lloyd, Man on the Marquee Moon” (2009).

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

  73 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 106).

  74 Gholson (1976).

  Stunned into an Electric Metaphor

  Rock music, which came of age with television, is totally obsessed by personality.

  — Mary Harron, Melody Maker, February 1980

  What came first and foremost to Television was mystique.

  — Craig Gholson, New York Rocker, March 1977

  Certain New York scene residents recall being placed under the distinct impression that Hell was of some dark German ancestry (as opposed to the tame reality of a Kentucky upbringing) and that Verlaine was possibly a product of some obscure Gallic nobility, though it remains to be seen whether this was just wishful thinking on the part of spectators instead of a knowing ploy conducted by the two young artists.

  — Nick Kent, NME, March 1977

  In August 1973, two months before Miller and Meyers met Lloyd at Reno Sweeney, the old Broadway Central Hotel, which housed the Mercer Arts Center, collapsed. Eric Emerson and the Magic Tramps were rehearsing inside and escaped unharmed; the Dolls were up at Madison Square Garden, preparing to open that night for Mott the Hoople. The Broadway side of old hotel simply sagged and fell, spilling tons of debris into the street and burying four welfare tenants in the rubble.75 It’s hard not to view the event, in retrospect, as a handy organizational device, a dividing line between glitter and punk, though that line is not so neat, and by the time Marquee Moon was recorded three years later the new mythology surrounding Television’s discovery of CBGB’s served also to divide an early CB’s scene from a late one. Either you were at CB’s from the beginning or you’d arrived a little too late. And nobody was there as early as Television, or so the story would go.

  In retrospect, things would seem to fall into place almost effortlessly. Meyers and Miller changed their names to Hell and Verlaine; they played a debut show in a small theater near Times Square; and then one or more of the band members chanced upo
n a crummy little club on the Bowery. The rest, as a Boston Phoenix writer put it in 1977, was already “punk rock history”:

  The first press notice [for Television] — a rave by Patti Smith in the Soho Weekly News; the Tom and Patti liaison that followed; the dispute with Richard Hell and his replacement by Fred Smith, the bassist from Blondie; the Patti Smith/Television double bill in the spring of 1975 that established CBGB’s as the avant-garde rock hangout sans pareil; and the rapid development of a complete CBGB’s scene, with CBGB’s bands, a CBGB’s fan mag and, of course, a CBGB’s record.76

  But at the start of 1974, all this was prospect, and though the venues were shifting (literally, in the case of the Mercer), what started at CBGB’s was less a new scene than what one friend of Debbie Harry’s band, the Stillettoes, later described as “the heavy tail end of glitter.”77 It was still the Age of Warhol, and that meant presenting a carefully choreographed image, one that would lend itself to legend.

  With some rehearsal down, the band began to cultivate its identity, sonically and conceptually. They rejected glitter’s nostalgia for the ’30s in favor of a post-apocalyptic take on rough ’50s street style. Sonically, Lloyd brought exactly what the Neon Boys had lacked. Born outside Pittsburgh, a couple years younger than his bandmates, Lloyd had grown up in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York, playing drums and piano before settling on guitar. Living in Greenwich Village and attending Manhattan’s Stuyvesant High School, Lloyd honed his axe skills, imitating heroes like Jeff Beck and Hendrix, the latter of whom he met once through a friend and watched once or twice in studio.78 He also took inspiration, he would say on the eve of Marquee Moon’s release, from the “primitive electric blues” of Buddy Guy, Magic Sam, and Elmore James. Before he’d made much of his talent, though, a bad drug trip in Times Square landed him in a psychiatric hospital — “tied down for two weeks once and I thought flying saucers were landing”79 — a stint he followed up by skipping town and traveling to Boston and LA, where he hung around local music scenes.

  Lloyd churned out rough rhythm guitar and bluesy riffs; when he soloed he tended, like Beck, toward volatility, pushing from untamed noodling into new, ethereal spheres. Verlaine, by contrast, provided governing shapes and structure, sounding out foundational patterns that would play off one another, balance, unbalance, repeat. His solos shredded single-string tremolos and scrambled-up scales, improvisations testing the terrain one dissonant step at a time. From the start he showed a preference for old-school Fenders (Verlaine helped launch a Jazzmaster revival), creating clean sounds, thick but precise. On occasion he would lose control in a free jazz barrage, evidence of his early admiration for Albert Ayler, Tony Williams, the New York Art Quartet, and especially the guitarist John McLaughlin, who like Verlaine soaked free-range solos in chilly harmonics.80

  Most early Television numbers were firmly in the Nuggets vein: 4/4 signatures (though never four-to-the-floor boogies), thumping bass from Hell, trebly guitar lines and urgent ascensions. Verlaine’s vocals were adenoidal and anguished. Kristal’s memories of Television’s first shows as terrible may have been accurate, judging from footage of loft rehearsals taken sometime in ’74. The band’s energy discernibly derives from the Velvets’ “Sister Ray” or the Elevators’ more frenetic side. If they retained psychedelic traces, as critics would frequently suggest, they mixed San Francisco sounds with Music Machine’s testosterone-fuelled, bass-heavy “Talk Talk” or the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction,” the latter of which they covered in early sets. Several songs filmed in Ork’s loft disintegrate into noise, and one, “Eat the Light,” includes a miserable attempt at group harmony, but true gems stand out, including a rough version of a rather sweet song called “What I Heard” with vocals by Lloyd. (Its tune and arrangement would reappear years later as Verlaine’s “Postcard from Waterloo.”)

  The rehearsal tapes reveal Television’s continuities with the Mercers scene. The Dolls’ “Personality Crisis” blares in the background at one point, presumably as inspiration. Hell and Lloyd reveled in rock theatricality from the start, swiveling hips, taking Townshend leaps, Lloyd kicking back platformed heels on the offbeat. Verlaine’s unique vocals have glam antecedents: they shared ground with Dylan and Neil Young, sure, but tonally relied more on Reed, Pop, and Johansen, often with the same drag queen attitude that Reed pulled on the Warhol-inspired “Vicious,” or Iggy had unleashed even earlier on “Loose.” That campy sneer, like Wayne County’s and David Johansen’s the offspring of Mick Jagger, suggests Television’s commonalities with glitter’s sound if not style: well into 1975, Verlaine would preface early versions of “Foxhole” with a suggestive “Hey, soldier boy …” The song “Eat the Light,” with its harmonies that never cohered, has the girl-group call-and-response structure that would resurface in “See No Evil” and “Venus.” Some early tunes, though, broke the glitter-garage mold. Many clocked in at under four minutes, suggesting early punk’s enshrinement of primitive rock, but a few stretch past five minutes. These early rehearsal tapes reveal songs (“Horizontal Ascension,” “Change Your Channels”) that already eschew radio-single formats for wandering introductions and choruses that build toward drawn-out climaxes.

  In the Age of Warhol, surface was substance, and Television’s visual image was initially more coherent than its music. Hell crafted Television’s anti-glitter image prior to the band’s debut, suggesting a clean break from the old scene, a cleaner break than the sound would suggest by itself. Hell’s ’50s street style set the stage for the Ramones’ variation on the theme. When Lloyd re-encountered Leee Back Childers in New York and invited him to a Television rehearsal, the photographer sensed the coming revolution. He’d thought of the glitter scene, including the Dolls, as an extension of “the Theatre of the Ridiculous, it was the same people — more as an art movement” than as a music scene, he told Jon Savage in the late ’80s. “Shortly thereafter, when Patti Smith started up, I still looked at it as a theatrical thing, a poetry thing.” But watching Television rehearse he sensed something else: “[I]t was very rough, very weird, but very different. That was the first time I realized the thing I was thinking of theatrically could in fact become rock ‘n’ roll. I loved Television from that time on.”81

  Television’s image called for a set of new names. Having dabbled with pseudonyms in their poetry, Meyers and Miller didn’t have to stretch for the idea of crafting rock personalities. Moreover, renaming themselves on the inauguration of a new artistic career had an obvious precedent in Robert Zimmerman’s transformation into Bob Dylan. Like Dylan, Meyers and Miller would replace their given surnames with loaded literary references: if Zimmerman had aligned himself with Dylan Thomas, Meyers reached back even further for his patronym: his new name, “Hell,” paid homage to Rimbaud’s Une Saison en Enfer on the centennial of that bohemian lodestone’s publication.

  Rimbaud had been a key figure for Ginsberg, O’Hara, Burroughs, and Dylan (who in ’75 would name-check Verlaine and Rimbaud, rhyming the latter with the title of “You’re Going to Make Me Lonesome When You Go”), as he had been for Dadaists and surrealists even earlier and was for contemporaries such as Reed, Smith, Mapplethorpe, and Carroll. In the spring of ’74, just as Television was gearing up to go public, Rimbaud and Verlaine were on New York’s cultural radar as the subject of Christopher Hampton’s play Total Eclipse, which held a steady run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Chelsea Theater. For all these artists, Rimbaud was a metonym for decadence, the way Blake was a metonym for Romantic vision or Whitman for sexual liberation. As recently as 2008, reviewing a Rimbaud biography for the Times, Hell brims with youthful enthusiasm when he describes Rimbaud’s rebellion as “a function of his peasant, punkish ultra-confidence in the value of his pure (unegotistic) honesty, as an adolescent seeing through the adult hypocrisy and convention veiling the sensual, unsane world.”82 Reading Hell writing about Rimbaud, it’s hard not to sense lingering autobiographical reverberations.

  Miller renamed himself too. H
is comments on the process came long after Hell left Television, and should be so qualified: “It was this very conscious decision on one level,” he told NME’s Nick Kent after Marquee Moon’s release.

  We just felt that we had to change our names in order to make a mark — though mostly it was done just for fun, now I recall. Richard had already chosen his name — Hell as much for the sound as for its implications (laughs). And for my name … I had a list of, oh, at least 30 names down and we were both just going through them when I mentioned “Verlaine.” Richard thought it sounded fantastic — y’know, “Wow that’s a fantastic name! Use that one,” so that really clinched it. I just liked the sound of it. That’s all.83

  The slight defensiveness suggests exasperation only a few years after taking on a new identity. He showed similar impatience when asked whether the band name was “punning on Tom’s adopted initials?” “‘Maybe, I dunno,’ Verlaine hedges. He’s clearly bored with the joke.”84 Elsewhere Verlaine waxed philosophical:

  It was just some kind of way of disassociating yourself from your own past, a way to be something that you want to be … You didn’t have any choice in your name when you were born, so you realize that, and then figure out maybe you do have a choice.85

  The nod to self-invention aligns Verlaine with Hell’s desire to return to rock ‘n’ roll “the knowledge that you invent yourself.”86 In their renaming, the choice of Verlaine and Rimbaud as antecedents was hardly accidental: they were a pair, perhaps literary history’s most famous gay lovers. The title of Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell refers to their tempestuous, violent, dragging-themselves-drunk-through-the-streets relationship. At one point Verlaine had fired shots at Rimbaud, who had him arrested on attempted murder charges and examined to evaluate his sanity. This dimension of their relationship, fundamental to their legendary stature, seems to have been on Hell’s radar. (His fascination with the Verlaine-Rimbaud romance would resurface in his 2005 novel Godlike, set in the East Village poetry scene of the early ’70s.) Though not romantic or sexual, Hell and Verlaine’s relationship had an intensity that made them seem a pair. Note, for instance, that the other two band members didn’t feel compelled to change their names as well.