Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  Together Smith and Hell would be Television’s and CBGB’s earliest and most influential mythologizers, and Smith would outlast Hell as a booster for the band. Ork later told Legs McNeil that Patti had come up to him after her first Television show and said, “I want him. I want Tom Verlaine. He has such an Egon Schiele look.”123 (Schiele’s paintings featured lanky, often nude and sexually suggestive figures, who do bear a remarkable similarity to Verlaine’s body type.) For the next three years she worked behind the scenes to ensure the success of Television and CBGB’s, with all the fervor of a missionary, even as she crafted her own rock poetess persona in full public view.

  Television fit right into a narrative Smith had already been crafting in her criticism. Like John the Baptist wandering through the wilderness, she’d both prophesied and searched the stars for signs of revolution. In the March 1973 issue of Creem, Smith called for a “dirtier,” more “old school” form of rock than she saw around her; she thought it might be “coming down and we got to be alert to feel it happening. something new and totally ecstatic.”124 Her sense of pending revolt may have been influenced by the Dolls, but she seemed less than satisfied with glitter’s vaudeville groove. “I really felt that was it, what I was hoping for,” she later said of her first time hearing Television: “[T]o see people approach things in a different way with a street ethic but also their full mental faculties.”125 To this day she narrates the moment as portentous: “Tom Verlaine had definitely read A Season in Hell,” she writes in her 2010 memoir Just Kids. “As the band played on you could hear the whack of the pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki [Hilly’s dog] barking, bottles clinking, the sounds of a scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.”126

  If Smith recognized Television as Ginsbergian “angel-headed hipsters,” that revelation was relatively exclusive in 1974. Press on Television’s earliest gigs is slim. In April they registered on the radar of the year-old SoHo Weekly News, which for the better part of a decade competed with the Voice in covering the downtown scene. (Its early distribution plan was to have employees stand outside Max’s and hand papers to the crowd at closing time.) Writing about the first string of Sunday shows, Josh Feigenbaum mistakenly refers to the band as Television Set, yet offers valuable insight into their formative stages. Feigenbaum compares them to Hamburg-era Beatles: “disjointed black leather jacketed and bad,” turning out “the kind of music you might hear coming out of some poor bastard’s recreation room in suburban Long Island, loud, out of tune and pretentious as hell.” If the Dolls hadn’t been playing the Bottom Line the same night, Feigenbaum wrote, “the place would have been packed to the rafters.” And even though Television had room to grow, their attitude compensated. “[F]or all of their musical ineptness,” he wrote, the band

  understand[s] in a basic way what their presentation is about. They sort of exude a nastiness which has always been part of R & R. Through all of their heavy metal histrionics — the great thing about this band is they have absolutely no musical or socially redeeming characteristics and they know it.127

  Television liked the line so much they used it on fliers and ads for future gigs. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect nutshell for what would before long be called punk: do-it-yourself, back-to-basics rock that sloughed off the water-logged carcass corporate rock had become.

  A month later Patti Smith’s first piece about the band appeared, also in SoHo Weekly News. That fall a revision of this piece, suggesting collaboration with band members, would appear in Rock Scene, but the original channels her gut reaction and lays out the key elements of the band’s mythology. Above all, Smith emphasizes sex appeal: “Confused sexual energy makes young guys so desirable,” she writes. “Their careless way of dressing; Their strange way of walking; filled with so much longing.” She sets the stage, too, by minutely describing CBGB’s itself, which she incorrectly locates as “a dark little soho bar” with a “Lousy P.A., long nervous dogs running random, women smoking french cigarettes and mostly boys on the prowl hanging by a thread waiting for Television to tune up.”128

  Smith also repeatedly mentions the band’s apparent insanity, another attempt to locate them in Beat or longer Romantic literary traditions. She highlights their cover of “Psychotic Reaction,” calls their music “maniac,” and quotes some “non-believers” in the audience who suggest they look like “escapees from some mental ward.” One early Monday morning following a midnight gig, someone told her they were “just too insane but me,” she concludes, “I heard this funny flapping of wings, and the wild boys the wild boys the wild boys … just smiled.”129 These last lines reference Burroughs’s 1971 novel The Wild Boys, on whose protagonist she would later model her character Johnny in the song “Land,” just as Television would the eponymous hero of its first single, “Little Johnny Jewel”: the unsupervised adolescent male, dangerous and sexual and beautiful, traveling through a violent, apocalyptic landscape. In spite of her rigorous attention to their heterosexual posturing, the final line queers them in her most overt effort to make them Romantic outlaws, a tradition inspired not just by Beats but by a form of “antisocial innocence” that Hell, like Smith, derived from Rimbaud.130

  Television’s association with Smith was mutually beneficial. Her cult status turned a spotlight on the band, and especially on Tom, who launched a relationship with her in spite of the fact that she was living with Allen Lanier. Smith’s doo wop-inspired “We Three,” eventually released on her 1978 album, Easter, depicted her simultaneous relationships with both musicians. Its opening lines invoke both CBGB’s and Verlaine: “Every Sunday I will go down to the bar / and leave him the guitar,” she crooned. He reciprocated with one of his best early songs, “I’m Gonna Find You,” a bluesy slow-boiler about a lover with “shiny dirty black hair” and “clothes they just don’t make anymore,” which transforms into a murderous revenge ballad after she leaves him. Smith’s shows were already being reviewed in national publications — Creem reviewed one of the Reno Sweeney gigs — and in September she performed with Sam Shepard in a revival of Cowboy Mouth. “I started makin’ my move when all the rock stars died,” she told one interviewer. “Jimi and Janis and Jim Morrison. It just blew my mind, because I’m so hero-oriented. I just felt total loss. And then I realized it was time for me.”131 Verlaine helped give her older poems a rock ‘n’ roll makeover.

  By summer’s end, Smith and Verlaine were “definitely a twosome,” and had been dubbed, in a gossip column Danny Fields had started writing for SoHo Weekly News, “the Downtown Couple of the Year thus far.”132 Patti showed up at one show with a bouquet of flowers, marching through the crowd to place them at Verlaine’s feet.133 She and Tom danced to the Who’s “Call Me Lightning” on the club’s jukebox.134 When Debbie Harry caught them making out in the alley behind the joint, Verlaine blushed and Patti told her to fuck off. (“But then again, Patti didn’t really ever talk to me much,” Harry would add, telling the story years later, after Blondie had made it big.135)

  That summer Verlaine helped Smith record her first single, a rendition of the standard “Hey Joe” (prefaced by a poem about the famous kidnap victim and publishing heiress Patty Hearst), backed with her song-poem “Piss Factory,” the story of her escape from blue-collar piece work in Jersey, which culminates in her boarding a train for New York, where she plans to become “a big star.” Verlaine played a guitar Smith had purchased for him, and they recorded the songs during a three-hour rental at Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland Studio. Mapplethorpe bankrolled a thousand copies of the 45. If Patti intended to become a star, she planned to take Verlaine and company with her.

  In addition to writing about them, Smith paved the way for an extended co-headline at Max’s later that year by spending July opening there for Elephant’s Memory, Lennon and Ono’s sometime backing band. Smith’s summer shows at Max’s gained the attention of Times columnist John Rockwell, who placed her songs “somewhere between Kurt Weill and early Velvet Unde
rground, with their out-of-tune tinny tackiness and their compulsive repertory of three-chord nineteen-fifties riffs.” In terms of her “words and ideas,” Rockwell pays her a high compliment: Lou Reed, he wrote, isn’t even in her league.136

  Sometime in 1974 Richard Hell sketched out his own review of Television, written from an outsider’s perspective. Describing CB’s atmosphere first — the smell of dogshit, the “damned dog” itself, the noise of the pool tables, the punch-drunk finale of Music Machine’s “Talk Talk” pounding from the jukebox — he eventually turns his attention to the band:

  They were all skinny and had hair as short and dirty and ragged as their shirts. Their pants didn’t fit very well but were pretty tight with the exception of one guy who was actually wearing a very baggy 20-year-old suit over his torn shirt. While the lights were still down they continued to tune for five minutes looking intense and sharing a cigarette. The pool table was abandoned and some fancy-looking numbers at the door were trying to talk their way past the $2.00 admission. A little guy with big shoulders in a Hawaiian shirt went over and told them to go back to New Jersey.137

  Hell’s one-by-one run-down of the band members begins with Verlaine, “with a face like the Mr. America of skulls,” who stands frozen, his mouth moving like a machine to let the lyrics escape. His solos verge on epileptic fits, his “eyes shut like somebody barely able to maintain consciousness.” Lloyd stands between Verlaine and Hell, his guitar slung low. He has a “perfect male-whore pretty boy face,” Hell writes, “alive with such fear and determination as he wracked the guitar for you could almost hear his mother scolding him. He looked like he was going to cry.” Hell himself wears “black boots, the baggy suit, and sunglasses.” His hair is short on the sides, spiked on top “like anticipating the electric chair.” Hell’s antics, like Verlaine’s, run to extremes: at first he stands comatose, head lolling, drooling from the corner of his mouth, “and then suddenly [he’d] make some sort of connection and his feet would start James Browning and he’d jump up in the air half-splits and land hopping around utterly nuts with his lips pointed straight out at you.” Billy Ficca has his head “held like you tilt your head to tune in on a sound.” The band’s overall vibe is “raw, perverse, and real as the band members looked.” For Hell there is no distance between image and authenticity, though there’s serious conflict within the image itself: are these psychotic tough guys, or are they Dickensian orphans? This was the same antisocial innocence Smith had emphasized. “They looked so vulnerable and cold at the same time,” Hell writes, “I wondered how they’d lived long enough to get here.” The piece concludes: “Me and some other people think they’re the best band in the world,” then deflates the whole as some kind of maniacal ego trip with a deadpan closer: “Anyway, I went home, started to write a book, and then asked my sister for a blow job.”138

  Hell’s voice shines through another account of the band from 1974. Apparently written as a press release, the one-sheet typewritten page fixes specific elements of the Television myth, including Tom and Richard running away from school and being arrested in Alabama before eventually making their way to New York. Tom appears as a child prodigy, misunderstood by his parents, who read “gory” comic books, watched sci-fi flicks, and listened to free jazz before moving on to Absurdist playwrights and the Velvet Underground. Hell was a text-book juvenile delinquent, a “problem child” who “blew up school buses” and listened to only two albums, The Rolling Stones Now and Bringing It All Back Home. He earned his ticket to New York by working in a porn shop, and after he arrived he “began writing and publishing imitations of decadent French poetry.” Lloyd’s contribution to Television’s mythos came here, as everywhere else, via his hustler persona: “since the age of 17 [he] has fended for himself in New York and Hollywood.” He’d also done time in an asylum, something he would later elaborate on in constructing his own public front. “He’s probably the most social member of the band,” too, “being seen almost every night at an event, a nightspot or a party,” and “[l]ike Richard Hell, he likes his glass of liquor.” Billy Ficca, in his turn, had started drumming before he owned his first set — another precocious child musician — and joined a band with Tom in Wilmington as a teenager. His cred came from a long line of work: he’d played with “the best Chicago blues band in Philadelphia” and with a Top 40 covers band in Boston. We’re told that Ficca is the “most diligent at practice” of the band members and that he spends his spare time screening “B” movies on his huge TV.139 The press sheet ends by situating Television as East Village locals: Billy and Tom live together on 11th Street and the rest of the band live “in the neighborhood.” The gesture — one of belonging — grounds the group in what was now a richly symbolic space. CBGB’s was turning into a neighborhood bar for unsigned musicians.

  Through the end of ’74, “new music” still only made up part of the club’s calendar. For the most part, the early CB’s rock nights were still hard to separate out from the glitter scene, the Theater of the Ridiculous, or the campier end of the cabaret circuit. The club served food and for the first few years kept booths and tables or folding chairs rather than standing room around the stage. The scene’s contiguities with cabaret and glitter are also apparent in Television’s choices of other performance venues. In April ’74, Television played off-nights from CB’s at the Hotel Diplomat’s gay discotheque, on one such occasion opening for the local glitter act Dorian Zero. The Dolls were still stars of the downtown scene, returning from a year of touring in Europe and the U.S. and played two homecoming shows at Max’s, followed by a night at Club 82. (This was the show where the band members — with the exception of Johnny Thunders — performed in full drag.) The support act for their New York shows that spring was the Miamis, made up of Wayne County’s backing band.

  Club 82 soon announced Wednesday night “Live Rock” shows, which competed with CB’s poetry nights. A few weeks after the Dolls’ big gig at the 82, Television and Leather Secrets — an act that had been opening their shows at CBGB’s — played there. Fronted by singer and poet Camille O’Grady, who would later appear in gay art porn and on San Francisco’s leather scene, Leather Secrets delivered scatological, proto-punk songs with titles like “Toilet Kiss,” often delivered from a gay male persona.140 At Club 82, Television’s audience included David Bowie, who gave the band a line they first used in an ad for a 12 May gig back at CB’s: “The most original band I’ve seen in New York. They’ve got it.”

  A week earlier Hell had landed a spot at CB’s for the Sillettoes — Debbie Harry, Elda Gentile, Chris Stein, Fred Smith and company — who dished up an homage to the ’60s girls group sensation and Queens natives, the Shangri-Las. The Stillettoes had strong ties to Max’s, where Debbie Harry had waited tables and where Elda Gentile had been a back-room regular as Eric Emerson’s girlfriend. Gentile had a child with Emerson but that spring was seeing Richard Hell. The group’s bass player, Fred Smith, would leave the Stillettoes with Stein and Harry to form Blondie that summer; the following spring Smith would make another departure to replace Hell in Television.

  As Television honed its sound, the celebrities in Club 82’s audiences, Bowie’s relocation to New York, and persistent curiosity about the Dolls all returned British press attention to the downtown rock scene. In the summer of ’74, on the heels of the Dolls’ sophomore album, Chris Charlesworth of Melody Maker came sniffing around CBGB’s, Club 82, and the Mushroom, a glitter-friendly venue on E. 13th Street where Television would share a bill with the Miamis at the end of June. Charlesworth’s two-page spread, which ran in July, depicts an underground still steeped in Mercer’s-style theatricality: “Shock and outrage is the name of the game. The more freakish, the more outlandish the fetishes of the personnel and the more bizarre their clothes the better. It’s not much more than grabbing a guitar, learning a few chords, applying lipstick and bingo!” Charlesworth places Television among others in this late glitter scene: Teenage Lust, the Fast, Jet Black, the Stillettoes, Anoth
er Pretty Face, and the Brats. The audience for these bands, especially at Club 82, was composed of “Female impersonators, transvestites and their ilk,” with an “element of bisexuality run[ning] strong.”141

  If the Mercer’s Warholian sensibility sustained itself through much of CBGB’s first year (on “new music” Sundays anyway) so did the avant-garde theatricality of the downtown arts scene, suggesting that Television’s Bowery Boys schtick was just one of several possible costumes acts could don. Alan Vega and Martin Rev’s electronic duo, Suicide, had been performing what they called “punk masses” since the fall of 1970. They later claimed to have borrowed the term from Lester Bangs, who used it in Creem in December 1970 to describe Iggy Pop, but their fliers include the phrase a month earlier. Suicide appeared at CB’s in June of ’74 in support of the Fast, a bubble-gum glitter band from Brooklyn who were remaking themselves as mod revivalists.142 Suicide’s punk masses consisted of sometimes violent displays of aggression directed at their instruments — leaving Martin Rev bleeding on occasion — and a threatening posture in relation to the audience, as in Vega’s signature move: swinging chains from the stage like a medieval cowboy twirling a lasso.