Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  A SMOKING 45: “Television,” one of New York’s best underground bands, has released a single, “Little Johnny Jewel (Parts I and II),” which is characteristically dynamic and spooky — Tom Verlaine sings as if a knife were being held to his throat. The record doesn’t capture Verlaine’s Texas-chainsaw intensity (his live performances are thick with tension) but its dissolute aura isn’t easy to shake off.230

  The same issue that featured this rave from Wolcott also included an ad for shows Television was slated to play at Mother’s with a UK band called Bananas. Wolcott’s concert listing notes that fliers for the show, posted around downtown, announce Tom Verlaine rather than Television: in any case, Wolcott felt, this would be a “should-see event”: “Verlaine and crew are erratic in performance but their material is unique, and when they rise to the moment, they’re thrillingly out of control.”

  Before the Mother’s shows could take place, peace was somehow brokered between Verlaine and Lloyd. Laughner was dismissed. He returned to Cleveland where he wrote a wistful review of the single for Creem:

  Live, in person, where your eyes and your groin and your undercover Sigmund Freud connections to the realistics of rock ‘n’ roll can all be engaged at once, Television put out the kind of energy and mania that must have permeated the Marquee Club on Who nights circa 66. Trying to describe TV in print has sent rock-print luminaries like James Wolcott & Lisa Robinson scurrying to their thesauruses for words like “dissolute” and “chiaroscuro.” Trying to play with each other has caused Tom Verlaine and his various partners (one of whom for a week was me) all kinds of hypertense fall-down-the-stairs scenes but brother, IT WILL STAND!

  This is the best band in America right now, it’s like a subway ride thru a pinball game, like coming and puking at the same time, and they don’t sound like the Velvets and they don’t sound like Stooges, THEY DON’T EVEN SOUND LIKE NEW YORK BANDS ARE THOUGHT TO SOUND … and problematically enough, they don’t sound AT ALL like this single. But you should buy it, the least of reasons being that someday you will have it to show to yourself and your friends and say “See …”231

  Some listeners, hearing Television for the first time on vinyl, were as enthusiastic as Laughner. In London, Vic Goddard, who would soon help form the British punk band Subway Sect, had imagined Television would sound like something else entirely as he stared at New York gig posters Malcolm McLaren prominently displayed in his new fashion boutique. When he eventually heard the single, he “thought it was a modern jazz quartet. I was totally blown away — it was one of the best things I had ever heard.”232 Others, especially those who favored the band’s earlier incarnation with Hell, were perplexed or put off. Charles Shaar Murray, returning to New York to profile the “Sound of ’75,” called it “rotten.” Creem’s lead critic, Lester Bangs, agreed. Both would turn out to be short sighted, as the single would become a collector’s item and the song a crowd favorite. The 15-minute version performed in 1978 and released on the bootleg cassette The Blow Up (1982) would be compared by Christgau to Coltrane; the solo, he wrote in the liner notes, was Verlaine’s “ultimate statement.”

  The shows at Mother’s in October ’75 featured Television in its mature incarnation, having weathered a close call with another personnel change that may have proven disastrous, given the band’s increasing reliance on the interplay between its two guitarists as one of its defining elements. Set lists now included a new song, the funereal, Oriental-chainsawed “Torn Curtain,” which would appear on Marquee Moon. “Marquee Moon,” now an audience favorite, was clocking in at over eight minutes, the dueling guitar solos now sounding like the braided bolts of lightning referenced in the lyrics. (The song’s climax and dénouement, though, remained to be evened out.) Wolcott, writing in early 1977, recalled one of the Mother’s shows as the moment Television’s “image came in crisp and clear.” He shared a table with Richard Robinson, Lou Reed, and Reed’s current flame, a Club 82 drag queen named Rachel:

  [T]hroughout the evening Lou grumbled and bitched about everything and nothing, like a sailor with a sore case of the clap. When Television did its version of Dylan’s “Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door,” Lou finally made a grouchy exit, but some loose voltage of rancor hung in the air, and when TV concluded with its anthem “Kingdom Come,” the song surged with angry force. Towards the end of the song, Verlaine broke a string, then methodically broke every string, snapping them with stern malicious delight; he then laid his guitar down, and went to his amplifier and began slamming it against the wall, slamming it hard and obsessively, with the manic cool of Steve McQueen assaulting a pillbox in “Hell Is For Heroes.” The band kept playing, Verlaine kept pummeling the amplifier, and, finally, Verlaine abandoned the battered amplifier and sauntered off stage and the kingdom come was spent.233

  This wasn’t the first time Verlaine had engaged in this sort of assault on his equipment. Back in July, Richard Mortifoglio had described a very similar act of “strangely quiet violence,” shortly following Hell’s departure from the band, when Verlaine “ripped all the strings off his guitar and them methodically knocked his amp around a bit.” Instead of nodding to McQueen’s portrait of a soldier on a suicide mission, Wolcott should have recognized Verlaine’s act as an echo of Jeff Beck’s assault on an amplifier in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 film Blow-Up, itself modeled on Pete Townshend’s infamous guitar-smashing antics. In the film, pieces of Beck’s guitar pass from the stage into the audience like a sacrament, starting a riot while the Yardbirds chug through “Stroll On.” In Verlaine’s case, too, smashing equipment seemed liturgical, a ritual by which he let band members go or took them back, in either case for the sake of the music. He was, you could say, just trying to tell a vision.

  168 Heylin (1993: p. 121). Fliers for the Truck and Warehouse show feature a photo with Lloyd in the middle.

  169 Dove (1974).

  170 Swirsky (2003).

  171 Heylin (2007: p. 26).

  172 “Television” (1975).

  173 “Tom Verlaine” (1995).

  174 Fields (1996: p. 23 [16 January 1975]).

  175 Betrock (1975b).

  176 Jones (1977).

  177 Charlesworth (1976).

  178 Hoffmann, Mumps History; Fields, SoHo Weekly News, 7 Nov. 1974.

  179 Betrock (1975c).

  180 Betrock (1975c).

  181 Kozak (1988: p. 39). Despite Kaye’s recollection, Smith signed her contract with Arista only a few days into the spring residency.

  182 Fields (1996: pp. 24–5 [27 March 1975]).

  183 Rockwell (1975b).

  184 Fields (1996: p. 25 [10 April 1975]).

  185 Rockwell (1975a).

  186 Kozak (1988).

  187 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 172).

  188 Betrock (1975b).

  189 Fields, SoHo Weekly News, 10 April 1975.

  190 Fields, SoHo Weekly News, 17 April 1975.

  191 Heylin (1993: p. 138).

  192 Mitchell (2006: p. 58).

  193 Richard Hell Papers, Box 9, Folder 594.

  194 McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 196).

  195 Heylin (1993: p. 160).

  196 See esp. Heylin (1993: pp. 160–1).

  197 Bockris and Bayley (1999: p. 112).

  198 Goldman (1977).

  199 Kent (1973a).

  200 Kent (1977b).

  201 Kent (1977b).

  202 Kendall (1977).

  203 Gendron (2002: pp. 252–4).

  204 See, for example, Bangs (1980: p. 17); Harry, et al. (1998 [1982], p. 18).

  205 Heylin (1993: p. 139).

  206 Betrock (1975a).

  207 Baker (1975).

  208 Murray (1975a).

  209 Murray (1975a).

  210 Fields (1996: p. 26 [12 June 1975]).

  211 Heylin (1993: p. 182).

  212 Mortifoglio (1975).

  213 Photographer Maureen Nelly, in Heylin (1993: p. 237).

  214 Bockris and Bayley (1999: p. 122).

  215 Shelton (
1986: p. 447); Leichtling (1975). During the ’70s Richards omitted the “s” from his surname.

  216 Chrome (2010: p. 127).

  217 Fields (1996: p. 27 [24 July 1975]).

  218 Kozak (1988: p. 42).

  219 Wolcott (1975a).

  220 Wolcott (1975a).

  221 Wolcott (1975a).

  222 Wolcott (1975a).

  223 Elliott (1977).

  224 Mitchell (2006: ch. 12).

  225 Hell (1996: p. 50).

  226 Hell (2001: p. 41).

  227 Verlaine (1976).

  228 Marcus (2005: p. 3).

  229 Licht (2003).

  230 Wolcott (1975b).

  231 Laughner (1976).

  232 Heylin (2007: p. 75).

  233 Wolcott (1977).

  Punk Is Coming

  The [CBGB’s] bands weren’t really alike. There was a self-awareness to their work that spoke of some knowledge of conceptual art — these weren’t cultural babes-in-the-woods, despite Johnny’s and Joey’s and Dee Dee’s and Tommy’s matching leather jackets. Tom Verlaine once said that each grouping was like a separate idea, inhabiting their own world and reference points. Of them all, I loved watching Television grow the best.

  — Lenny Kaye, intro to Blank Generation Revisited, (1996)

  Patti Smith’s Horses appeared in November to general acclaim and brisk early sales. Lester Bangs, in a rave review for Creem, declared she was backed by “the finest garage band sound yet in the Seventies” and discerned in her songs a heady mix of “the Shangri-Las and other Sixties girl groups, as well as Jim Morrison, Lotte Lenya, Anisette of Savage Rose, Velvet Underground, beatniks, and Arabs.”234 The New York Times Magazine profiled her in December, though the piece had nothing on the rest of the downtown scene and instead featured a photograph of her with Dylan. At the end of December her band played three nights at the Bottom Line for a star-studded audience that included Hollywood actors, most of CBGB’s major players, rising rock luminaries such as Springsteen and Peter Wolf (with his wife, Faye Dunaway), and the rock critical establishment, including Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone’s editor, who had been slow to come around to the new New York sound. Television joined Smith’s band on stage at least one night, as did John Cale. “[S]imply, it was a wonderful weekend,” wrote Danny Fields, “and it bodes well for everyone involved.”235

  As 1976 began, Television seemed ready to fulfill that promise. The sound that would make Marquee Moon was more or less in place. Once they began performing new compositions “See No Evil” and “Guiding Light” in late ’75, all the songs were written that would eventually be on the album. Their live shows attracted larger crowds than ever: at CBGB’s they broke house records two nights in a row in December before headlining the final show of CB’s Christmas Rock Festival on New Year’s Eve. Smith joined them on stage at CBGB’s around 5 am to help them finish their second set. Fields, who named Television and the Ramones the “Cosmic Newcomers” in his year-in-review column, reported that Lou Reed had been won over as a fan, that the underground film director John Waters had been to see them, and that Paul Simon had come to a show in November with Arista’s Clive Davis.236 But still no contract, a situation that would wear thin Television’s relations to other CB’s bands over the coming months, as Verlaine came to feel more and more distant from the scene he had helped start. Some of their peers — starting with the Ramones — had negotiated contracts of their own. He would feel even more separated from the musicians overseas who would form the UK punk scene, many of them fueled by legends of New York’s Bowery enclave.

  When the NME sent Murray back to New York near year’s end to find “The Sound of ’75,” he somehow missed Television’s live shows. He did hear the single, though, which couldn’t live up to his memory of seeing the band live the previous spring, and so he only offered the band a mixed review in his feature, which was the most extensive the scene had received overseas. Noting the band’s “wilful inconsistency,” he concedes: “And since they still haven’t recorded anything impressive (viz the debacle of the Eno Tape, a tale of almost legendary status in CBGB annals), it seems unlikely that any of the major labels who’ve decided that they can get along without Television are likely to change their minds unless a particularly hip A&R man manages to catch Tom Verlaine and his henchmen on a flamingly good night.”237

  That a reporter from the NME was talking about having heard the “legendary” Eno tapes seriously unsettled Verlaine. It’s not quite clear when Verlaine first heard Roxy Music’s new album Siren, but by the end of ’76 he was telling reporters he believed Richard Williams or Brian Eno had distributed their demo tape so promiscuously that Ferry had ripped off at least a dozen lines. Roxy’s song “Whirlwind,” for instance, included the line “This case is closed,” Verlaine’s sign-off in “Prove It.” But Verlaine’s list of resemblances seems superficial. The lack of a contract seemed to be pushing him toward paranoia. As early as December ’75, Danny Fields had noted Lou Reed’s habit of taping CBGB’s shows on a portable Sony cassette recorder, still a novelty.238 But when Reed packed his recorder into a Television show in the summer of ’76, Verlaine bristled. Lisa Robinson took notes on the confrontation, which came on the cusp of Television’s finally signing with Elektra:

  “What’s he doing with that tape recorder?” mumbled Tom Verlaine. “Do you think I should ask him to keep it in the back?” Ask him for the cassette, I suggested, or the batteries. “Hey, buddy,” Verlaine said to Reed. “Watcha doin’ with that machine?” Lou looked up, surprised. “The batteries are run-down,” he said. “Oh yeah?” responded Verlaine. “Then you won’t mind if I take it and hold it in the back, will ya?” Lou handed a cassette over, then said, “You’d make a lousy detective, man. You didn’t even notice the two extra cassettes in my pocket, heh-heh.” Verlaine was not amused. “O.K. then, pal, let me have the machine. I’ll keep it in the back for you.” Reed handed over the machine, then said, “Can you believe him?” His eyes widened in surprise.239

  Verlaine’s paranoia may have been warranted: when Reed played the Palladium at the end of ’76 in support of his Rock and Roll Heart LP, he played in front of a bank of Television sets, as if to stage a pissing contest with the new underground.

  As 1976 began critics still grappled with how to label the music on the downtown scene. A profile piece by Lisa Robinson in Creem called the CB’s bands the “new Velvet Underground.” John Rockwell, in the Times, continued to use the label “underground rock,” and in January he placed Television at the top of the “pecking order [that] has emerged on the feverishly active New York” scene. Talking Heads, whom he personally found more “gripping” than Television, followed close behind.240 The search for a label flexible enough to accommodate the broad-ranging CB’s scene ended in the first weeks of the year, when fliers popped up around the neighborhood announcing that “PUNK Is Coming.” They heralded the arrival of a new magazine, whose first issue appeared in January, obviously influenced by MAD, hand-lettered and with a Frankensteinish Lou Reed on the cover. The image simultaneously suggested Reed’s repeated return from the dead and also the way the new scene had been stitched together from ingredients including large chunks of the Velvets’ corpse. “DEATH TO DISCO SHIT!” thundered John Holmstrom’s first editorial headline. In Punk’s second issue, a supposedly drunken Verlaine dispenses a dissertation on the French poet Gérard de Nerval (he preferred Nerval to Paul Verlaine), and Richard Lloyd suggests that “you can’t admire life unless you admire death.” Punk asks Television’s guitarists about their historic stint at CBGB’s with Patti. “We were playing there a year and a half before we did that,” says Verlaine, a tad defensively. Lloyd chimes in: “Two years.” Verlaine: “But nobody knows that. At least two years.” Lloyd mistakenly asserts it was April or May of ’72, and Tom offers a version of the origin myth in which he and Lloyd discover the bar. When Punk asks about Theresa Stern’s Wanna Go Out?, Tom answers: “Teresa’s in the hospital. Yeah. She had a breakdown … in Hoboken
. She was turnin’ on some John and she — she just — her mind just snapped. I don’t think she writes no more. She’s the Syd Barrett of the poetic scene.”241 Over time it would become clear that Punk’s editors preferred the straight-forward pummeling of the Ramones or the raw intensity of Richard Hell’s bands to Television’s more cerebral anthems: “party punk” over “arty punk,” in terms Wolcott would later use.242

  In February yet another new magazine appeared on the scene: New York Rocker, edited by SoHo Weekly News’s Alan Betrock, with staff writers including Debbie Harry, Roberta Bayley, and Theresa Stern (now a solo pseudonym for Hell), who offers a humorous review of a Heartbreakers show. Like Rock Scene, New York Rocker helped create the sense that local culture heroes were already stars — “before they’d even crossed the Hudson,” as the magazine’s second editor, Andy Schwartz, recalls.243 Much more than Punk did, New York Rocker lavished attention on Television (fig. 5.1). The debut issue featured Verlaine on the cover and, in its centerfold, included an extensive autobiographical sketch, in which he described his childhood music experiences on piano and sax, his twin brother (“I believe that stuff about twins having this ethereal connection between each other”), his high school friendship with Hell and their experience running away, his introduction to Genet and Kerouac. The extensive space devoted to this narrative makes plain Verlaine’s star status on the scene: he is also perceived to be the band’s organizing force. When he reaches the point of his arrival in New York, he says he hung around Hell “but then I didn’t see him too much; he was running around his [poetry] circle an’ I was working at the Strand Bookstore; same place as Patti.” The bookstore gave him opportunities to read and take drugs and opened him to the realization that “people are really doing things. It’s not just words; it’s a real event that’s happening, so to speak.” To some extent, Verlaine’s entire narrative is about the need for something to happen: “I’m not disappointed that we haven’t signed,” he wrote, “but it’s about time now. I mean you have to decide if it’s going to be a career or a hobby, and if it’s going to be a career, you have to sign.”244