In the summer of ’75, CB’s crackled with electricity, notwithstanding the feeling some old-timers had that its clubhouse days were past. A whole bohemian genealogy now materialized on the Bowery like ghosts inhabiting descendents’ homes: Ginsberg and Burroughs could be seen at tables near the stage. Lou Reed now regularly hung out. “[A]ll those types of people,” one regular would recall, “which [lent] an underground poet-beat sort of feeling to it.”213 At the end of June Bob Dylan resurfaced in the Village, making an impromptu appearance at a show Patti Smith played at the Other End (as the Bitter End was briefly renamed) on 26 June. When he introduced himself afterwards, the press heralded the meeting of old and new scenes and treated Patti like a star. “He said to me, ‘Any poets around here?’” Patti reported, “[a]nd I said, ‘I don’t like poetry anymore. Poetry sucks!’ I really acted like a jerk.” When photographers approached them backstage, she pushed Dylan aside and said: “Fuck you, take my picture, boys!”214 On 7 July their photo showed up on the Voice’s cover with the headline: “Tarantula Meets Mustang: Bob Dylan Gives His Blessing to Patti Smith.” Dylan played several shows in the Village that week as part of the First Annual Village Folk Festival, including sets with Muddy Waters and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. On the 12th he showed up with Bobby Neuwirth, Patti Smith, and Tom Verlaine in tow. Patti, described by one less-sympathetic Voice reporter as “your basic androgynous Keith Richard freak” — joined Dylan on stage for several numbers while Verlaine watched from the audience.215 Before long Television would add Dylan and Stones songs — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Satisfaction” — to their setlists, usually as encores.
Two weeks later Television hit the road to Ohio for their first out-of-town gigs. Patti had sequestered herself in advance of recording her debut album with John Cale. CBGB’s, meanwhile, was held down by Talking Heads and the Ramones. The invitation to play Cleveland’s Piccadilly Inn came from Peter Laughner, a Creem writer and member of the Cleveland-based Rocket from the Tombs. Laughner had been to New York that summer and was transformed by seeing Television play. In Cleveland, Laughner’s band opened for Television both nights, though the New Yorkers rolled into town just as Rocket was imploding. (Its members would later resurface in punk bands Pere Ubu and Dead Boys, both of which would make strong showings in New York.) Television, for its part, played two respectable sets, soldiering through old standards (“Hard On Love” “Poor Circulation”) and newer ones (a rousing version of “Foxhole,” in which the suggestive opening line “Hey, soldier boy!” is replaced by a more antagonistic shout). They also displayed their new tendency to improvise, with gradually expanding versions of “Little Johnny Jewel,” “Marquee Moon,” and a rocking ten-minute rendition of “Breaking In My Heart,” which departed from a Velvets-like “White Light White Heat” stomp to proceeded along Patti Smith’s spoken-word line, gradually bringing a chattering crowd to silence. Laughner had built up Television to mythic status among the Cleveland scene, with only a tape of four live tracks to support his case. As his bandmate Cheetah Chrome (later of Dead Boys) would recall years later, Laughner wanted Television all to himself, exacerbating tensions within his own band. Verlaine, Chrome recalled, seemed unapproachable, distant.216
According to Fields’s column in the News on 24 July, several of Television’s New York fans made their way to Cleveland for the concerts.217 A few weeks later Laughner raved about their live sets in Creem, more national press for a band that still hadn’t signed a recording contract:
No, they don’t have a record out yet, and they’ll probably be hard to translate fully onto vinyl (records don’t have eyes like Tom Verlaine), but these people play with the tactile intensity of those who’ve looked hard and long at things they could never have. “Fire Engine” and “Breaking In My Heart” are as good as anything the Velvet Underground ever cut, and since it’s 1975, maybe much better.
Rock Scene ran photos of the Cleveland shows several months later, in January ’76, under the headline “Television Visits the New Liverpool.”
When the band returned to New York, CBGB’s had already been the site of an underground rock festival for two weeks — what Kristal was billing as a showcase for “New York’s top 40 unsigned bands.” Targeting summer weeks when nothing much was happening downtown, Hilly had no problem finding bands to audition despite the stifling heat. He turned acts and patrons away. The initial ads, for shows running from July 16 to 27, listed 24 bands in alphabetical order: “Antenna, Blondy [sic], City Lights, Day Old Bread, David Patrick Kelly, the Demons, Jelly Roll, Johnny’s Dance Band, Mad Brook, Mantis, Marbles, Movies, Mink DeVille, Planet Daze, Ramones, Raquel, Shirts, Silent Partners, Sting Rays, Talking Heads, Television, Tuff Darts, Trilogy, and Uncle Son.”218 Short sets started late and ran through the night, winding down at four or five o’clock the next morning. Crowds spilled onto the sidewalk outside the club. The “Arabian swelter,” James Wolcott wrote in the Voice, was exacerbated by a broken AC system.219 Along with Wolcott, other local press supporters swung into action. The Voice listed the festival as a pick, though it warned, defensively, that the club’s atmosphere wasn’t as exotic as NME had made out. Hell and Thunders’s Heartbreakers headlined the second weekend, the same nights Television was playing Cleveland. Although Television was named in the early ads, they only returned in time to play the final two nights of what was already a substantial extension, headlining over Marbles, Talking Heads, and the old Mercer’s act Ruby and the Rednecks on Saturday and Sunday, August 2–3. Crowning CBGB’s highest profile event yet, Television reigned as undisputed kings of the unsigned underground.
Post-festival press was substantial and aimed to make Big Statements about the meaning of what the September Rock Scene dubbed the “New York IMPLOSION!” Writing in the Voice, Wolcott called the festival “the most important event in New York rock since the Velvet Underground played the Balloon Farm” and identified what he saw as a “conservative impulse” in the new wave, by which he meant a back-to-basics “counterthrust to the prevailing baroque theatricality” of corporate rock. But Wolcott stresses that CB’s isn’t a “flash” scene like the Mercer: regulars are “dressed in denims and loose-fitting shirts — sartorial-style courtesy of Canal Jeans.” New bands heralded a retrenchment: they would call mainstream rock’s dinosaurs — the Who, the Stones, the Beach Boys — back to edgier ’60s roots. It’s no accident, Wolcott writes, that 1975’s album of the year so far was “a collection of basement tapes made in 1967.”220
Wolcott celebrates CBGB’s above all as a place that allowed bands to refine their sounds in front of live audiences. Television offers his prime example of the fruits of this approach:
[T]he first time I saw them, everything was wrong — the vocals were too raw, the guitar-work was relentlessly bad, the drummer wouldn’t leave his cymbals alone. They were lousy all right but their lousiness had a forceful dissonance reminiscent of the Stones’ “Exile in Main Street,” and clearly Tom Verlaine was a force to be reckoned with.
He has frequently been compared to Lou Reed in the Velvet days, but he most reminds me of Keith Richard. The blood-drained bone-weary Keith on stage at Madison Square Garden is the perfect symbol for Rock ’75, not playing at his best, sometimes not even playing competently, but rocking swaying back and forth as if the night might be his last and it’s better to stand than fall. Though Jagger is dangerously close to becoming Maria Callas, Keith, with his lanky grace and obsidian-eyed menace, is the perpetual outsider …
Tom Verlaine occupies the same dreamy realm, like Keith he’s pale and aloof. He seems lost in a forest of silence and he says about performing that “if I’m thinking up there, I’m not having a good night.” Only recently has the band’s technique been up to Verlaine’s reveries and their set at the CBGB festival was the best I’ve ever seen: dramatic, tense, tender … with Verlaine in solid voice and the band playing as a band and not as four individuals with instruments. Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Bea
tles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them sound intimate, and that’s what Television had that night: loud intimacy.221
Wolcott’s piece, elevating an unsigned local band to comparison with the biggest band in the world, is significant for its careful consideration of the new scene’s relationship to its predecessors, whether British invasion, Mercer’s glitter, or the amphetamine-fueled Happenings of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Unlike ’60s Happenings, though, which aimed for total involvement of the spectators (Wolcott quotes John Cale on this point), the new bands aimed for cool detachment. And as for the holdovers from glitter, Wolcott wants none of them: he doesn’t mince words in dismissing Ruby and the Rednecks and lobs a grenade at their supporters in the Interview crowd. The Ramones, by contrast, Wolcott thinks are a “killer band.” Obviously, for him they have shed any early Warhol overtones.222
That fall, Television decided to follow Patti Smith’s example and release an independent single. Smith was now in the studio with John Cale recording Horses, where Verlaine played guitar on “Break It Up,” a song he’d co-written. He continued to see Smith romantically, though she was still entangled with Lanier, who also appears on the LP. With Smith’s career moving into high gear, it was time for Television to make its move. Recording at Patti Smith’s midtown rehearsal space, with each band member in a separate room, they used a four-track Teac tape deck into which Verlaine plugged his guitar directly, with no amplification. The band recorded six songs, most of which had been on the Picadilly Inn setlists: “Hard On Love,” “Careful,” “Friction,” “Prove It,” “Little Johnny Jewel,” and “Fire Engine.” Notably absent, considering they were thinking about a single, was “Venus de Milo,” which as one of their oldest crowd pleasers would have been a natural choice.
Some of the arrangements from the fall ’75 demos suggest the band’s trajectory toward increased accessibility. “Hard On Love” (which shares a title with a Marc Bolan record from ’72), for instance, has been slowed to a gentler Latin beat, with pleasant arpeggios in the lead guitar line and a comforting call-and-response in the chorus (Verlaine sings: “You’re so hard on love” and the band responds: “Tell me why, tell me why”). But Verlaine seized on the most inaccessible of these tracks as his choice for the single: “Little Johnny Jewel,” a seven-minute song that epitomized his tendency toward visionary Romanticism. Think William Blake, Verlaine told a reporter for Crawdaddy! some months later: “He was the same kinda guy.” The song stages a conflict, then, between Romanticism and modernity: “Johnnie [sic] Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago,” Verlaine went on to explain:
Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day — there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnnie. For him, it’s all right there — it’s a freer state, and that’s what my music is looking for.”223
The song follows Johnny, who’s somnambulistic or perhaps stoned, to an airfield, where, “with a chest full of lights,” he crouches behind a fence while airplanes roar overhead, taking off and landing. It takes minutes to narrate this sequence before Johnny “loses his senses” and Verlaine’s guitar, spasmodically approximating Johnny’s derangement, itself takes into flight, the solo climbing higher and higher as Lloyd strums a rhythm line that recalls Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958). Verlaine jams for two and a half more minutes — Nick Kent would later disparagingly, though with uncanny accuracy, compare the solo to Country Joe and the Fish — before the band coordinates a come-down and Verlaine reprises the opening lines. “If you see him looking lost,” the song advises in its finale, “You don’t got to come on so boss.” Come on in what sense? Is Johnny Jewel, like the character in the Ramones’ “53rd and 3rd,” turning tricks? Perhaps: “All you gotta do for that guy / Is wink your eye.” Others have suggested that Johnny’s prototype may have been Verlaine’s twin brother, John, whose heroin addiction would eventually claim his life in the mid ’80s.224 In any case, if Kent is right that the song recalls Barry Melton’s proto-psych guitar solos with Country Joe and the Fish, it’s as if the guy in that band’s “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” actually was in the city, trying to get back in the subway of Martha’s mind. As the roaring engines of “Little Johnny Jewel” made clear, Television’s music has no patience for country life, period.
The Blakean reference suggests that Johnny is more than a simple observer of modernity. He’s prophetic, “Just trying to tell a vision.” Like Blake’s, Verlaine’s own poetry had been preoccupied with vision, violence, flashes of lightning, and sensory doubling — what Ginsberg called “Blake-light tragedy” — meant to suggest the capacity for, and yet the tendency to fall short of, transcendental experience. In a 12-minute live version from 1978, released in 2003 on Live at the Old Waldorf, Johnny is stymied not only by modernity’s predilection for “preferences” but also by the drudgery of day labor on the docks: “Pick it up there, and put it over there,” he’s told, over and over and over, until he finally flees in order to find himself the recipient of revelation near the runway.
“Little Johnny Jewel” recalls Patti Smith’s sense of Television as a band both Messianic and vulnerable. Written in the wake of Hell’s departure from the band, its boy-hero with lights in his chest echoes an image Hell had developed in an unpublished novella, The Voidoid, written around the time the Neon Boys folded but unpublished until 1996. Hell’s story featured characters loosely based on Verlaine and Hell — Skull and Lips — and included a long sequence narrated from the Hoboken hooker-poet Theresa Stern’s point of view. The image from the novella that resonates with “Little Johnny Jewel” involves Hell’s avatar, Lips, a vampire who develops a hole in his chest, which eventually fills with a bulb, then a lens, then a television for a heart: “The hole in there gets a picture, and he thinks, ‘Maybe this is what the hole is for?’”225 The image would return in an article Hell wrote about the Ramones for Hit Parader after he’d left Television: “The music The Ramones create from [their general frustration] is incredibly exciting. It gives you the same sort of feeling you might derive from savagely kicking in your smoothly running TV set and then finding real thousand dollar bills inside.”226 If the vampire had grown a TV heart, a few years later that heart had shattered.
Verlaine’s choice of “Little Johnny Jewel” as the band’s first single created a major conflict. By far the longest track they had recorded, it clocked in at just over seven minutes and would have to be spread over both sides of a 7-inch single. “Careful” or “Fire Engine” would have been closer to a three-minute radio edit and either would have made a more accessible vinyl debut, as would have the catchier “Hard On Love” or “Prove It.” Lloyd thought Verlaine’s choice was disastrous. The song wasn’t yet well known by fans of their live shows, and it didn’t pack the punch of their steady-building double boilers, such as “Marquee Moon” (equally problematic given the length: so much so that they didn’t even record it at this juncture). The solo belonged entirely to Verlaine. Plus, there would be no B-side, hence no exposure for another song. Verlaine would later say he had conceived it more as an album than as a single.227
In Verlaine’s defense, however, this problem wasn’t exactly unprecedented in American rock: Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” itself six minutes long in willful disregard of radio formats, had been spread over two sides of a 45 rpm disc, at least on the promotional versions given to DJs. “[T]he other side was just a continuation,” Dylan had explained in a press conference at the time. “[I]f anyone was interested they could just turn it over and listen to what really happens.”228 Verlaine may have had similar feelings about “what really happens” in the second half of this song. Alan Licht notes how radical Verlaine’s move was: “[F]ew bands of the day would have thought of documenting themselves for art’s sake using a medium that was mainly geared toward radio play.”229
Lloyd threatened to qu
it if Verlaine went ahead with his choice, and that’s exactly what happened. The single, underwritten by Terry Ork, launched the Ork label. Less than ten days after the tracks were recorded, Fields reported in his 28 August column that Lloyd had left the band, to be replaced by “a famous musician from Cleveland.” For several weeks it looked as if Peter Laughner really would join Television, especially after Fields reported that Lloyd would launch a new band of his own. In October the single went on sale at Village Oldies, by mail order (advertised in the Voice and in Creem), and at the door at CBGB’s. Despite Lloyd’s reservations, the Voice gave it prominent notice in its centerfold spread:
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