Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)
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Less than a month later, the New York Dolls called it quits. Rockwell fretted in the Times about the effects of overexposure on young New York bands. Though he doesn’t name groups other than the Dolls and the Velvets, coming as his comments do during the last week of Smith and Television’s reign at CBGB’s they seem to ask what impact Smith’s contract will have on the new scene.185 And yet Rockwell was complicit as part of the press machine that had been tracking Patti for years — and which she’d explicitly courted. From the moment he broke news of her contract with Arista, the crowds at CB’s started to grow until the club was past capacity. “CB’s was the first time we had played so many times in a row,” Smith’s manager, Jane Friedman, recalled a decade later. “We didn’t just pack CB’s, we had people literally standing around the block who couldn’t get in.”186 Fields corroborates: On 17 April he wrote that “Hundreds were turned away from Patti Smith’s gig at CBGB last weekend. Way to go, Patti!” At the conclusion of this run, Ork cornered Hilly and told him he couldn’t beat these receipts “with your country and bluegrass, dude!” He recalled in Please Kill Me: “I considered that the official beginning of the scene.”187
In early April, as the CB’s shows were gaining momentum in the wake of Smith’s contract, SoHo Weekly News ran a “Know Your New York Bands” piece by Betrock profiling Television. The piece pinpoints tensions that would soon lead Hell out of the band and would eventually separate Television from the scene it had helped to establish. Treating Verlaine as the band’s clear leader, Betrock gives nods to Hell for “Blank Generation” and Lloyd for “What I Heard,” though it’s clear these are token turns in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Betrock quotes Verlaine praising Patti Smith but dismissing the general CB’s scene as “campy and non-sincere — and that’s not the way rock should be.”188
Though Betrock didn’t seem to anticipate that Hell would actually leave the band, Fields caught wind, and in his 10 April column warned “a certain musician in a certain hot new band! Don’t leave the group! Wait a year and a half — then you’ll be able to do anything you want!”189 The advice obviously didn’t take: the following week Fields reported that in “a shockeroo move, bassist Richard Hell has left Television, to start a new group (details must wait until next week). Replacing Richard temporarily will probably be the bass player of Blondie, and no doubt Television will continue to thrive, but Richard will be missed.”190 The following week he reported on the Dolls’ breakup and the formation of the Heartbreakers with Hell and ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan.
Verlaine told the crowd at Television’s first post-Hell show, on 17 April, that Fred Smith had learned 15 songs in two days. Smith later said that he already knew the band’s songs fairly well, given a year of performing in opening slots for them with the Stillettoes, Angel and the Snake, and Blondie. On some accounts, Verlaine had been discussing the personnel change with Smith even in advance of Hell’s departure; Verlaine even admitted having jammed with Smith on off hours just to feel out the fit.191 Still others suggest Verlaine had also sounded out Ernie Brooks, bassist for the Modern Lovers.192 Hell halted production on poetry chapbooks by Verlaine and Smith his Dot Books imprint had planned to publish. Verlaine’s 28TH Century, already typeset, remains unpublished.193
Fred Smith had been with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in one band or another for over two years. In Please Kill Me, Harry responds to Smith’s departure from the other side of Blondie’s breakthrough: “Fred Smith fucking quit Blondie. I was pissed. I was pissed at all of them — all of Television, all of the Patti Smith Group, and Patti and Fred. I was pissed at Patti because she talked Fred into joining Television. Boy, did he make a mistake. Ha ha ha.”194 Photographer Roberta Bayley, who worked the CB’s door and was living with Hell at the time he quit Television, also noted the irony that Blondie eventually outstripped Television commercially: “But at that point Television was the one tipped for big, big success. Blondie was the worst band in the city — they were just a joke. Everybody liked them personally but they didn’t really have it together on a musical level.”195 Patti had already poached Kral from Blondie and Dougherty from Mumps. For Harry and Stein, these personnel shifts marked the end of CBGB’s communal era. With Patti’s contract a done deal and rumors afloat of others, knives came out.196 For years Harry would complain that Patti Smith had had it out for her from the start: “Basically she told me that there wasn’t room for two women in the CBGB’s scene and that I should leave the business ’cause I didn’t stand a chance against her! She was going to be the star, and I wasn’t.”197
For many fans, Hell’s departure marked the end of an era as much as had the arrival of gawkers, wannabes, and record labels. The acrimonious split intensified over the next two years, especially during the UK media frenzy that followed Marquee Moon’s release. Hell and Verlaine’s mutual rage seemed evidence of abiding feelings: “[T]he two new wave culture heroes regularly vilify one another with Romeo/Juliet intensity,” Vivien Goldman wrote in 1977.198 Certainly the scenario echoed other high profile falling-outs: Lennon and McCartney, Zappa and Beefheart, Reed and Cale, Ferry and Eno. “It’s very hard to know just how honest I should be about the reasons for my demise from Roxy,” Eno had told Nick Kent in the summer of ’73. “The problem is that when it gets printed, it all seems to look much more meaningful and serious when unqualified by that chuckle at the back of the throat. … People who do great hatchet-jobs on the members of their old band usually come out looking like losers when it all appears in print.”199
Kent should have relayed that warning when he started tracking Television in 1976. Instead he helped widen the gulf between the former friends. Kent returned to the states in the spring of ’76 to cover the British glam band Sweet at an Ohio gig. Stopping over and returning via New York, on Malcolm McLaren’s advice he looked up Richard Hell, hoping to score heroin, and wound up crashing a few weeks on Hell’s couch in a perpetual nod. After publishing Hell’s side of the break-up that year, Kent offered an ecstatic review of Marquee Moon in early 1977, followed only a few weeks later by an article repeating some of Hell’s most damning (and most frequently reprinted) characterizations of Verlaine: “I knew though from the very beginning — with Tom — that it’d probably end that way,” Kent quotes Hell as saying. “Years and years ago, when we were dropping acid together — God, it’d get very, very scary. He’d really open up then and he more or less revealed that he had this fundamental belief in his absolute inherent superiority to everyone else on this earth.”200
Kent gave space to this swipe in what was supposed to be a post-album feature on Verlaine, even as he acknowledges Verlaine’s dissatisfaction with Kent’s earlier piece on the friends’ breakup:
When the subject of Hell occurs in our interview Verlaine has well established a striking propensity for resolute eloquence. He is very concerned about expressing his interests accurately and having them reported exactly as such.
Yes, he’d read my previous NY City article and yes, he was “Rather upset” by the Hell accusations.
“Patti too.”
(Verlaine didn’t have to remind me of his sweetheart’s reactions as I’d spent a taxing half-hour the previous year debating the charges against the lovely Tom with a fraught and very feisty Miss S.)
“I was going to ask you about Hell,” Verlaine retorts with a slick smirk of sorts on his lips.
So I tell him straight. Hell thinks you’re a hot talent — particularly as a guitar-player — but as a human being, he mmm … hates you. (Is that it, Richard?)
“Oh, come on now. He doesn’t hate me, whatever he may say. Let’s face it, man, when two best friends sort of go separate ways … when that bond is severed, then both parties usually discover feelings about each other that are based on hurt, on aspects of rejection that often manifest themselves openly in very juvenile ways.
“And that’s not a slight on him. I was probably as bad.”201
Offended by this piece, Verlaine responded by attacking Kent
to another magazine’s interviewer: “Nick Kent is the guy who prints hearsay, total hearsay,” he told the British underground paper ZigZag in June of ’77. He’d given a platform to Hell, “a guy who’s said a million times that he’s out to get me, and who’ll say anything that’s going to make me look bad.” No stopping there:
I don’t have any respect for Nick Kent as a person. Anybody that prints gossip about somebody, and then sees them and still prints gossip … I mean, I did everything I could to straighten out that stuff, I spent an hour talking to him, and it still came out as … he’s sick. He gets this fantasy idea about somebody and won’t let go, even if you confront him face-to-face about it.
About Hell, Verlaine stepped it up, denouncing him not just as a bad bass player but also as a junkie:
Let me tell you what happened … and I really hope you print this. When Richard Hell left the band he was doing all kinds of heavy drugs, and at that same time Nick Kent was in New York and moved in with him for a couple of weeks. Richard at that time was super-bitter about any involvements he’d had with me, and he totally broke off our friendship. I didn’t have anything against him when he left the band. I was still willing to spend time with him, because I like the guy a lot … he’s my best friend. But all of a sudden there was no communication. Then Terry Ork told me that this guy was living with Richard … and he never came over to talk to me. So whatever Richard told him is, like, all this garbage that came out of bitterness.202
There’s more here than just “he said/he said” between former friends. The Hell/Verlaine split has been taken to indicate tensions running through the entire scene. The critic Bernard Gendron, for instance, reads this conflict as competing discourses — art versus pop — with Verlaine representing high-minded art aspirations and Hell representing punk’s DIY ethos and pop image-orientation. On the larger scene, Gendron argues, art rockers like Talking Heads lined up with Television and Patti Smith, while the Ramones sided with the “fuck art, let’s rock” agenda of Hell and his later bands, the Heartbreakers and Voidoids.203 But this view, though compelling, overlooks ways in which the Ramones and Blondie (and the Dolls before them) grew out of Pop contexts (not just pop, lower-case p); Hell’s very image for Television betrays Warholian influence. Plus, part of Hell and Verlaine’s beef seems to have resulted from Verlaine’s desire for broad commercially viability. Contra Gendron, what emerged during CBGB’s first phase was nearly the inverse of his art/pop dynamic, one that aligns art and pop bands like Patti Smith Group, Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones with aspirations for commercial success and left other bands — the Voidoids, the Dead Boys — more closely identified with transatlantic punk, which kept an emphasis on the original impulse to stick it to the record industry. Though some believed that punk had commercial potential in the late ’70s, its mass appeal would remain much more limited than would the art-pop new wave stylings of Blondie or Talking Heads.
Fred Smith’s arrival was to Television what Lloyd’s had been to the erstwhile Neon Boys. Things fell into place. The band’s sound tightened, taking on a more streamlined tone. Like Verlaine and Ficca, Smith had played in bands throughout high school. A Forest Hills, Queens, native, he’d joined a short-lived band called Captain Video in 1971 and had responded to Elda Gentile’s ad for a bass player a few years later, which led him to the Stillettoes. Photos of Fred with the Stillettoes show him in full flash mode: knee boots, velvet shirts, long hair parted down the middle and feathered, eye shadow and lipstick.204 Fred’s bass playing was certainly more fluid and jazz-derived than Hell’s, a better fit with Verlaine’s impulse to improvise on long, rollicking numbers like “Breakin In My Heart,” which shared ground with Patti Smith’s improvisatory style. “At the first rehearsal me and Lloyd [were] looking at each other and thinking, ‘God, this is a real relief.’ It was like having a lightning rod you could spark around. Something was there that wasn’t there before. Fred could follow stuff. I remember starting up in the longer songs and being able to do stuff that wouldn’t throw everybody.”205 Though such comments emerged from the drawn-out feud with Hell, and so should be taken with a grain of salt, Smith’s arrival — and the elimination of Hell’s material and stage presence — pushed Television toward Marquee Moon’s emphasis on precision over rough proximity, even as many fans mourned the loss of Hell’s energy on stage.
After 20 nights with Patti, and still weathering Hell’s departure, Television played three more four-night stands at CBGB’s through June, each with a week or two off in between, headlining over the Modern Lovers as well as newcomers like Planets and the Shirts. In early June, between Television’s runs, Talking Heads made their CBGB’s debut opening for the Ramones. By now CB’s was drawing a couple hundred people per night. But problems seemed to loom on the horizon. In May, Betrock reported a crowd of around 150 for Marbles and the Ramones on a Monday “new band night,” including members of several other bands: “2 Televisions; 3 Milk ‘n’ Cookies; 2 Mumps; 1 Planets; 2 Blondies; 2 ex-Dolls; 1 ex-Television, and so on,” along with friends, relatives, hangers-on, scenemakers, and the press. Fretting that only a third of the crowd may have paid admission, Betrock worried that the scene wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.206
Other tensions threatened the scene’s stability. In the wake of the Television/Patti Smith run and the rise of the Ramones, glitter was becoming increasingly marginal at CB’s, to the degree that one writer, reviewing the previous weekend’s “gay erotic poetry rock” of Emilio Cubeiro, warned of a “precarious sex stance” increasingly inhospitable to women and gays. “[T]he musician-dominated C.B.G.B. crowd,” this critic worried, was wary of threats to “their heterosexual superiority (and usually sexist) bag.” Characterizing the crowd as “young city rednecks” bristling with “teenage machismo,” he reported that some audience members were heckling “faggots” to get off the stage.207 With the Dolls’ demise, glitter’s wane seemed inevitable. Another blow fell in May, when Eric Emerson was killed by a hit and run driver while biking near the West Side Highway.
The end of the glitter era seemed to be confirmed by the UK press’ first major report on CBGB’s. The NME, which had mentioned Television the previous summer in a feature on the post-Mercer scene, sent 24-year-old Charles Shaar Murray to gauge the local effects of Patti Smith’s signing. (Murray, along with Nick Kent, was part of an effort on NME’s behalf to tap into new music markets and to attract younger readers.) The report was hardly flattering, yet homed in on a major shift that had taken place over the course of the previous year: “scuz” had replaced “flash,” Murray announced. “C.B.G.B. is a toilet. An impossibly scuzzy little club buried somewhere in the sections of the Village that the cab-drivers don’t like to drive through.” The scene that had sprung up there featured “chopped-down, hard-edged, no-bullshit rock ‘n’ roll, totally eschewing the preening Mickey-Mouse decadence that poleaxed the previous new wave of N.Y. bands.” Television provided one of his chief examples of the new order, since they “don’t dress up and they don’t even move much.”208
Anticipating a key descriptor of punk in the coming years, Murray frames Television as “an imaginative return to [rock’s] basics.” He also sees them as “a total product of New York,” a blend of the “traditional and the revolutionary.” Verlaine, he writes, “was evidently severely traumatized by Lou Reed at an impressionable age” and performs “frozen-faced and zombie-eyed, alternately clutch[ing] his mic stand with both hands and blaz[ing] away at off-balance methedrine speed-fingers lead guitar marathons.” Lloyd features as “spraddle-legged and blank-eyed, chopping at his Telecaster like some deranged piece of machinery, braced so that he can lurch in any direction without falling over. He’s wearing Fillmore East T-shirt, which is the ultimate in dressing down.” The bass player (it’s not clear if he’d seen Smith or Hell) “wears his shades on every other number.” The common thread is a detachment from the audience more characteristic of the new movement than its predecessors, though one that had clear
precedent in the coolness modeled by Dylan and Lou Reed. “That a band like Television are currently happening and that people are listening to them,” he wrote, “is indisputable proof that rock is a hardier beast than much of the more depressing evidence would suggest.”209
The transatlantic seal of approval seemed to validate and vitalize the scene: Fields gushed in the News about Murray’s “raving” review of Television and Patti Smith: “I’ll bet he had been expecting to hate” Television, Fields said, noting that the band had “attract[ed] international attention without yet having signed a recording contract.”210 Finally recognized on their own terms — and not just as afterthoughts to the Velvets or the Dolls — underground bands also edged their way into mainstream domestic publications that summer. Lisa Robinson, now a champion of the Ramones as well as Television, followed a Rock Scene feature called “Ballroom on the Bowery” with a more substantial scene profile in Hit Parader.211 That summer the Voice’s music editor, Robert Christgau, declared Television the “most interesting of New York’s underground rock bands,” and noted that Fred Smith’s arrival led “aficionados” to identify a “thicker” sound in recent shows.
Some uncertainty remained about the final effect of Hell’s departure. Offering the most perceptive criticism of the band to see print since Patti Smith’s early mythmaking, the Voice writer Richard Mortifoglio zeroed in on Verlaine’s stage-presence and Hell’s absence. The more animated Verlaine became in recent shows, the more “spittle and sweat flew off his mouth as he screamed,” he couldn’t escape his own reticence, Mortifoglio wrote, which was his “most affecting and engaging quality.” There’s some irony that the focus here, in the wake of Hell’s departure, trains on Verlaine’s image more than on the music. But Mortifoglio sees in Verlaine’s “austere personal style” a “graceful self-effacement” that lends to Television’s mystique, the projection of a “Gary Cooper manchild, stunned into an electric metaphor by the shock of city life.” The recurrence of electric metaphors in Verlaine’s lyrics, poetry, and stage presence suggested the “ecstatic insanity” of his own self-invention: “like a village idiot visited by tongues, [he] suddenly become articulate enough to communicate exactly how it is up there.” Ficca and Lloyd seem to distract from Verlaine’s transcendent effect, Mortifoglio feels, and not even Smith’s “cushiony undercurrent,” which newly grounds Television’s songs, can make up for the “conceptual void” Hell left behind. In spite of technical shortcomings, Hell had balanced Verlaine’s “mystifications” through his “wide-eyed loony tunes.” Now Verlaine just seemed lonely. Hell, that is, would continue to shape Television’s image even in his absence, which served to make Verlaine, the “genuine auteur,” all the more “precious.”212