Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  Hell’s and Verlaine’s new names resonated with the atmosphere of sexual decadence that had reigned in downtown bohemian enclaves for decades but had been especially intense, and visible, on the glitter scene. For Tom’s part, as Ork made plain, the post-Bowie vogue for bisexuality that ran through the downtown satyricon wasn’t in the picture: “He was just so tightly wound,” Ork says in Please Kill Me.

  He was always concerned about men coming on to him. I mean, he was pretty, but I think he didn’t really know what life was about. He had just accrued experience from books — it was all read, and not lived. He was very naïve in a lot of ways. As opposed to Richard Hell, who had both feet in the ooze.87

  (Ork, Hell, and Lloyd all developed heroin habits in the ’70s; heroin, in Roberta Bayley’s recollection, organized a secret society within the downtown scene.88) McNeil and McCain juxtapose Ork’s comments on Verlaine with Ork’s and Fields’s effusions about Richard Lloyd, who played the role of Television’s requisite male hustler: Ork said he’d been “in love” with Lloyd, who was “certainly even more ‘lived’ than Hell or Verlaine.” Nick Kent, shortly after Marquee Moon’s release, thumb-nailed Lloyd as having a “pretty-boy pout to his features that apparently was most appealing to the gay community.”89 Fields played to the same tune: “Everybody fucked Richard Lloyd. He was another one with gorgeous skin. He was another gorgeous beauty. It was the band of beauties.”90 Though Lloyd would later complain that McNeil had reduced eight hours of interviews to their most lurid residue, he still seemed pleased at having been designated the band’s bisexual darling: “The wonderful thing in Please Kill Me,” he said years later, “is that I so come across as though everyone is all talking about ‘how much they loved me.’ So it’s a stroke to my vanity.”91 Who needed to change names to try on a new identity?

  Now for the new look: Hell cut his hair. He wanted something short and spiky, the opposite of hippie long hair or cascading prog perms or the androgynous locks of glitter gods. “I really thought all this stuff out in ’73 and ’74,” Hell recalled in the mid ’80s. “I wanted the way we looked to be as expressive as the material on the stage, down to what the posters were like.”92 He wanted to invoke youth, rock iconoclasm, and marketability: “The way I remember coming up with the haircut,” he said years later, was by asking “what is it about rock & roll haircuts that makes them work. Like the Beatles. And my conclusion was that it’s grown men more or less wearing haircuts that five-year-olds of their generation wore. What kind of haircut, I thought, did I have when I was five or six?”93 If Hell’s new haircut — a grown-out butch or buzz from the ’50s — also resembled the surrealist playwright Antonin Artaud in an asylum, or even the youthful Rimbaud, all the better. In Television’s early years critics would compare Verlaine’s haircut, cut in longer layers than Hell’s and flipped back, to Artaud’s look from Dreyer’s film La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928).94

  The band’s new look may have been an un-look — “as if they rolled out of bed, came in, and played,” as Kristal put it95 — but it still made a theatrical statement. It combined uncivilized street kid with bohemian poet and Bowery bum: a modern take on being old-fashioned, 1950s if not nineteenth-century, suits and loosened ties, clothing torn just so.96 It referenced the Bowery Boys — a.k.a. the Dead End Kids, the prototypical cinematic New Yawk hoodlums. (Critics had earlier made the same allusion in describing the Dolls’ Bowery ethos.97) Heroes first of William Wyler’s film Dead End (1937), the Dead End Kids became the Bowery Boys, protagonists of serial shorts that would still have been shown in theaters when Hell and Verlaine were kids. On the other hand Television resembled the bums who lodged upstairs from CBGB’s in the Palace Hotel or were sprawled, mornings, against the wall outside the club: downtrodden but still old-school, sometimes in suits, escapees from a Weegee photo. Stillettoes singer Elda Gentile, who dated Hell for a while, thought Television dressed like old men.98

  Fliers for Television’s debut show — along with the advertisement Ork took out in the Voice — reinforced their rejection of androgyny: “There was not another rock & roll band in the world with short hair,” Hell recalled. “There was not another rock & roll band with torn clothes. Everybody was still wearing glitter and women’s clothes. We were these notch-thin, homeless hoodlums, playing really powerful, passionate, aggressive music that was also lyrical.”99 Still, the flier photo walks a finer line between camp and cool than Hell lets on: Verlaine has his head on Hell’s bare shoulder, gazing into the distance like a zombie. Hell may or may not be awake behind his shades. Lloyd, in a blond bowl cut, looks away from the camera, and Ficca engages viewers with a coy pout. Though the band disavowed glitter’s excesses — no makeup, no women’s clothing, no funky-chicken Jagger poses, hands on hip, elbows out — they still looked a little dolled up, in man-drag.

  The fliers for their debut included a constellation of voices that characterizes the cultural cauldron from which the band emerged. Endorsements came from a range of tastemakers, all associates of Ork’s: Interview editor Scott Cohen called them “Killers. Sharp as tacks … They made me cry.” Danny Fields declared: “They’re finally here — in full pathological innocence … Color, skin, guitars: Love in Spurts, Eat the Light, Enfant Terrible.” And Nicholas Ray, director of the 1955 James Dean classic Rebel Without a Cause, called the band “Four cats with a passion.” The cultural blessing from Interview suggests a target audience of Max’s back-room smart set. As 16’s editor, Fields suggests an almost parodic ambition to become fave raves, top of the pops, though Fields was also well known for his connections to Iggy and the MC5. Nicholas Ray speaks to the significance of the ’50s to the transforming underground. His Rebel Without a Cause, in punk chronicler Nicholas Rombes’s words, offered “a vision of disaffected and alienated youth that is strangely prophetic not only of the Beats, but of other subcultures such as the punks.”100 By 1974, ’50s nostalgia was cresting in the mainstream and underground alike: Malcolm McLaren, who the following year would be smitten with Richard Hell’s aesthetic, had already opened his London teddy boy boutique, Let It Rock. Back in the states, George Lucas’s film American Graffiti, with a soundtrack full of fifties jukebox gems, paved the way for Garry Marshall’s smash TV series, Happy Days, which premiered in January ’74.101

  FIGURE 3.1 Television, 1974. L-to-R: Lloyd, Verlaine, Hell, Ficca. Photo by Jay Craven, Copyright Richard Meyers, courtesy of Fales Library, NYU

  Television was less interested in television, though, than in the idea of television (fig. 3.1). For their inaugural show, 2 March 1974, Ork booked the Townhouse Theater, where Suicide and the Fast had just played and where the Modern Lovers had given a farewell show shortly before that.102 Located on W. 44th St. at Sixth Avenue, the venue seated fewer than 100 and served as a preview theater for art films, notably Fellini’s.103 The show’s stage concept, designed by Hell, played on the band’s name and drew on the flavor of ’60s Happenings, especially Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, if more minimally and muted. Hell later recalled: “I had four TV monitors on stage and they were turned on to various channels. We had a guy in the audience roaming around with a portapack video camera shooting live in to one of the TV sets.”104 Though the band never repeated this gimmick, others took notice. Within a few years, after Television had secured its preeminence on the scene, Lou Reed himself would perform backed by TV sets.

  No one recalls being satisfied with the show — “we used to fall over a lot on stage,”105 Lloyd said looking back — but Television’s ship had officially launched. Within weeks, perhaps even within days, band members and Ork had met Hilly Kristal and secured a Sunday spot at his newly renamed club on the Bowery.

  In 1974, Hilly Kristal was a 43-year-old ex-Marine who had already been in the music business for years as owner of two other clubs — one called Hilly’s on West 9th and another Hilly’s on 13th. Even earlier he managed the Village Vanguard, where he booked Miles Davis and Nina Simone, Lenny Bruce and Woody Allen. He’d also promoted a
Central Park concert series. The Village versions of Hilly’s, not far from Reno Sweeney’s eventual location, had drawn neighbors’ ire for the loud music Hilly booked — some country, some cabaret — and so he turned his attention to the Bowery. His decision to rename the club CBGB in 1973 may have been a late attempt to cash in on the cowboy vibe the East Village poetry scene had fostered through the ’60s: CBGB’s featured Wednesday poetry nights for its first two years. The country theme also built on the honky tonk vibe he’d fostered in the Village, where he’d even sponsored hayrides and, on occasion, imported live farm animals. The idea that country might be the next big scene wasn’t as far-fetched as it would later seem: country had made a decent showing in 1973 at Max’s, with acts like Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Gram Parsons, and Charlie Rich all sharing the same stage that welcomed the New York Dolls. Hilly originally took the idea of “uplifting gormandizers” quite literally, too, planning to spread sawdust on the floor and serve country breakfast to his patrons come sunrise.106 Still, country music turned out to be only part of the line-up for CBGB’s first year; without a consistent line-up of country acts, the club returned to Hilly’s earlier eclecticism.

  During the club’s earlier incarnation, wide-ranging offerings already contained elements that would flow in to punk’s formative pool: Hilly’s first stage was built by Eric Emerson and Sesu Coleman of the Magic Tramps, the first group to play there.107 Hilly’s also hosted the Bowery Chamber Music Society, the jazz of the Rashied Ali Quintet, and even (after hours) Bette Midler, who was living at the Broadway Central and performed at nearby Hilly’s on the Bowery (and more frequently at Hilly’s on 9th Street) after long nights as a cast member of Broadway’s Fiddler on the Roof.108 Her sets included a cover of the Shangri-Las’ “Leader of the Pack,”109 the bad-girl-group anthem that would later inspire CBGB’s acts such as Blondie. In 1971 Hilly’s hosted the San Francisco drag troupe the Cockettes, who like Wayne Country later claimed to have kicked off the international glitter and glam scenes. Voice critic Robert Christgau, who maintained in 1977 that he was far too old to be a punk,110 was a regular at Hilly’s before it became CBGB’s. Later he would tell Roman Kozak that he had one of his first meaningful conversations with his future wife following a Cockettes show there.111

  Other Hilly’s acts that would later appear at CBGB’s included Wayne County, who was also a regular at Max’s and at Club 82, a venerable drag venue nearby on East 4th Street, where the last of the old-school female impersonators shared their stage with glitter bands. Debbie Harry later remembered the 82 as the destination of choice for New Jersey high schoolers following graduation or the prom,112 but in the post-Mercer era it had become a primary site for glitter’s refugees. The Dolls famously performed there in high drag in April ’74; some of the early CB’s bands, including Television and the Stillettoes, followed suit; and rock celebrities including Bowie, Reed, Lennon, and the Who were sometimes seen holed up at corner tables.

  Wayne County’s presence at Hilly’s and CBGB’s indicates additional continuities between underground theater, glitter, and punk. County had one of downtown’s largest cult followings: her early shows at the Mercer and in downtown lofts — some still factory spaces by day, “full of drills and lathe presses”113 — were typically taken as an extreme version of what the critic Miles, writing in the International Times about the Dolls, called “post-Rolling Stones New York faggot rock”: “Marc Bolan, Slade, Elton John, David Bowie … [combined] with such historical figures as The Fugs, the early Mothers [of Invention] and the very much present day Lou Reed.”114 County tells a slightly different story about transatlantic transgender influence: Her stage career, like Patti Smith’s, began in the Theater of the Ridiculous, and she’d traveled to London in ’71 with Andy Warhol’s play Pork, which pushed David Bowie toward new heights of gender-fuck.115

  In some ways, Wayne County’s appearance at Hilly’s and CB’s suggests the clubs weren’t as odd a presence on the Bowery as some later accounts would indicate. The nearby theaters, the legacy of an older vaudeville district, occasionally featured drag shows, but the Bowery had an even longer-standing entertainment culture. In the nineteenth century it had been Broadway’s working-class shadow, running from Cooper Square south to the notorious Five Points. The Bowery Theatre, near Canal Street, catered to rowdy antebellum audiences who liked their theater rough and loud; the famed Bowery B’hoys, who would later lend their name — if not its spelling — to the silver screen’s Dead End Kids, made the Bowery a fashionable working-class promenade, a stage on which they parodied aristocratic affectations. When the gentry invaded the neighborhood in the 1840s, taking over working-class leisure gardens and erecting a fancy-pants opera house at Astor Place, local butchers and B’hoys rebelled, staging a riot that brought out the National Guard and ended in civilian bloodshed. Half a century later, an estimated 25,000 men lived in Bowery missions and welfare hotels. Through the middle of the twentieth century the Third Avenue El ran along the Bowery, casting a permanent shadow on sidewalks along either side. One result: the Bowery remained the domain of the down-and-out for 150 years. In CB’s early days, the walls next to the stage featured oversized portraits of nineteenth-century Bowery burlesquers, an homage to the street’s pop cultural legacy.

  Hilly’s primary clientele in the early ’70s was as uneven as the neighborhood’s reputation. In addition to some stray drag performers from the Bouwerie Lane across the street, he’d poured drinks mostly for members of the Hell’s Angels, whose HQ was nearby, and residents of the Palace and other adjacent flophouses. “I ran it for a while as a derelict bar,” Kristal later recalled, “and bums would be lining up at eight in the morning, when I opened the doors.”116 And though the neighborhood had supported upperclass slummers of one sort or another since the middle of the last century, there was nothing mainstream about its appeal. Drivers locked doors when bums offered to wash windows at intersections: in his 1973 novel Great Jones Street, about a Dylanesque rock star who holes up downtown to escape his celebrity status, Don DeLillo describes the Bowery as full of these “wild men with rags.”117 Invariably, early press on CBGB’s stressed the club’s undesirable location. It was a district even cab-drivers avoided, stripped-out cars on the sidestreets and trash-can fires on corners at night. Then again, the kids who came to CB’s by and large came on foot. And though “[a]nybody who passed 315 Bowery after ten o’clock in the evening risked getting a knife in the back,” as Karen Kristal remembered about the early days,118 the danger lent street cred to a self-consciously underground movement.

  Although Hilly had run Times listings using the name CBGB as early as the summer of ’73, journalists have traditionally followed his lead in dating the name-change to December of that year. But with the new awning Verlaine and company had see him hang a few months later, Hilly threw an official grand re-opening in March of ’74, only a few weeks before Television’s first show there. His opening night, Wednesday the 20th, featured ridiculously cheap drink specials, followed by three nights of the Con-Fullam Band, a bluegrass act from Maine. The next week he advertised three nights of Elly Greenberg’s country blues over a smaller, innocuous listing for Sunday: “ROCK Concert TELEVISION March 31.” Another ad for the first show, paid for by Ork, foregrounds a photo of the band and also lists the “fancy guitar pickin’s [sic]” of Erik Frandsen.

  Television’s first Sunday shows may or may not have attracted enough patrons to allow Hilly to make money from the bar, but they did lead to a confluence of interests and talents that would be significant to Television’s — and the scene’s — development. Ork, Hell, and Verlaine brought friends from Cinemabilia, including their fellow employee Rob Duprey, who would go on to form Mumps and would later play drums with Iggy Pop. Ork also drew on his Max’s connections, and Hell worked literary circles. The biggest payoff came on the third Sunday of Television’s residency, when Hell succeeded in getting his friends Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye to drop by and see his new band.

 
; Smith’s arrival at the club is clearly the most fortuitous event of Television’s and CBGB’s early phase — and of her early career as well. Smith has narrated the scene consistently for over three decades: how she knew Hell through the poet Andrew Wylie, whose book Hell had published; how she talked Lenny Kaye into heading downtown to CB’s following a press screening of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Her biographer describes her as arriving in her best Baudelaire: “a boy’s back suit, crisp white dress shirt, skinny tie,”119 but Smith recalls wearing “a black velvet Victorian dress with a white collar.”120 Either way, she was dressed to meet peers who also wanted to bridge poetry and rock. She and Kaye had spent the last few months rehearsing as a trio with a new pianist, Richard Sohl, in order to make an earnest stab at performing as an electric cabaret ensemble, if not quite yet a full-fledged rock act.

  When they came to CBGB’s to see Television, Smith’s group had just come off a five-night, two-sets-per-night run at Reno Sweeney opening for Warhol star Holly Woodlawn. Andy himself had shown up one night; his Interview magazine had profiled Smith the previous October.121 In the spring of ’74 Smith was on the rise, turning up in London rock magazines for her relationship with Allen Lanier, to whose Long Island band, Blue Öyster Cult, she’d contributed some lyrics. Melody Maker had referred to her as “a poet who appears at New York rock clubs,” and Nick Kent in NME already dubbed her “the remarkable N.Y. poetess.”122 But it was Television’s raw set, together with images of the Stones’ 1972 tour in her head, that made her sense something big was about to give. What Smith found, when she arrived on the Bowery in April 1974, would lift her from the outer orbit of the nostalgic cabaret circuit and help to establish her own sense of vocation as a rock star. As Smith would describe it, Television was nothing short of rock ‘n’ roll Messiahs.