Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  Betrock positioned his publication in territory adjacent to Punk and Rock Scene. Like Rock Scene, Betrock modeled his approach on fan-mags like 16. If the Robinsons featured photos of David Byrne shopping for groceries, Betrock ran weekly write-in popularity polls. (Television captured the spot of #1 band in the inaugural issue.) An article on “NY Rock Dress Sense” in the magazine’s second issue glossed Television’s post-Hell look: “Tom Verlaine cheek bones, and Tom Verlaine eyes. Get them at your nearest hobby and toy store. Clothes — nothing more than functional.” If Betrock aimed to consolidate the scene’s energies by representing local musicians as already having achieved star status, some tension exists with Verlaine’s growing desire to keep himself from being pinned with a New York label: “I mean, NY’s a great town,” Verlaine wrote. “Coltrane, Dylan, The Blues Project — but now all they think of is glamour. … [T]oo many of them seem overly fixated on someone else — you know the Beatles, Lou Reed, or the Dolls.”245

  FIGURE 5.1 New York Rocker #3, May 1976, centerfold pin-up. Photo by Guillemette Barbet. Clockwise from top left: Verlaine, Lloyd, Ficca, Smith. Courtesy Andy Schwartz/New York Rocker

  Verlaine was already swimming against an historiographic tide. In the effort to define the new wave, the Voice’s Wolcott again offered the most thoughtful criticism at this juncture. Taking a genealogical approach that would become standard over time, he starts with the Velvets, describing Patti Smith, Roxy Music, David Bowie, the Dolls, Talking Heads, and Television all as transatlantic inheritors of their “nihilism of the street.” Also at the Voice, Christgau took his own stab at pinning down Television and the downtown scene, via a comparison of a night spent watching the Who at Madison Square Garden (his fourteenth time seeing that band) and the next night seeing Television at CBGB’s (his eighth time seeing them). While he preferred the intimacy downtown, he still worried that “[Tom] is too sensitive for this crummy Bowery bar,” a view that Verlaine would soon endorse. But could Television ever become as big as the Who? “Television is a little too ambitious, and yes, a little too uncommercial, as well,” Christgau worried. “I don’t think they’re capable of a statement as powerful as ‘Baba O’Riley’ at the Garden last Thursday.”246

  Christgau suggests the degree to which CB’s was becoming a critics’ bar as much as it belonged to the bands. Its regulars also included a bevy of photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists. Just as the ’60s downtown scene had crossed disciplinary lines, so the new “punk” ethos drew on and borrowed from other arts scenes in adjacent neighborhoods. The first show curated by Jeffrey Deitch in 1975, for instance, which helped launch nearby TriBeCa as an artists’ neighborhood, featured Warhol-influenced “artists who made the practice of art inseparable from their actual lives — a life performance,” the same sentiment Hell had expressed about the Dolls and tapped when he conceptualized Television’s image. Deitch’s show included work by Marc Miller and others who directly engaged the CBGB’s scene.247 Commercial rock photographers such as Godlis and Bob Gruen also hung out at CB’s, and Roberta Bayley leveraged photos of the Ramones and other local bands into a career. As a result, CB’s early period is thoroughly documented, often by prodigious talent. John Rockwell, who famously attended shows at CBGB’s wearing a suit and bowtie, noted in the summer of ’76 that CB’s “has its palpable attractions for writers who might have grown up in clubs but who now find themselves forced to cover a never-ending circuit of concerts in indoor arenas and outdoor stadiums.”248 Hanging out became a way for critics, artists, and photographers to maintain a sense of adolescent danger and belonging.

  By early 1976, with crowds continuing to grow, some writers were already expressing nostalgia for the club’s earlier days, when Hilly stocked bookcases near the entrance and provided a homier feel. The days of haggling with Roberta Bayley to get in the door without paying were coming to an end. And Television, who played monthly four-night stands between January and May, was already starting to position its members as the scene’s founding fathers, now too big for the bar. In Verlaine’s inaugural profile in New York Rocker, he highlighted his own role in “stumbl[ing] upon CBGBs.” Even Richard Hell, no longer in the band, was locating Television’s historic position as punk’s vanguard; in a piece on the Ramones he wrote for Hit Parader in 1976 he noted that the band was one of a half dozen drawn to the Bowery by “Television’s ‘success’ there in late 1974.”249

  Verlaine’s sense that his band was “made for a bigger stage” depended on catching the same train out that Patti was on. The pressure was increased, too, by label interest in other CB’s bands. In January, Richard Hell recorded demos with the Heartbreakers, including a version of “Blank Generation.” Blondie’s act was tightening as it debuted a new five-piece format on Valentine’s Day. The group had attracted the attention of Marty Thau, the Dolls’ first producer, who would eventually help Harry and company land a nationally distributed single and sign them to his own label for a full album that summer. Seymour Stein of Sire Records had put the Ramones under contract the previous November and would shortly get Talking Heads too, based on demos they recorded in April. Richard Hell would leave the Heartbreakers and assemble a new band, the Voidoids, debuting at CBGB’s late that year after releasing an EP on Ork Records.

  As downtown acts groped around for their own ways to mainstream attention, and with Patti touring the country in the early part of that year, Verlaine and Lanier, left behind, recorded a new set of Television demos to give to Clive Davis. Two years had passed since the band had played its first gigs at the Townhouse Theater and CBGB’s. A year and a half had passed since Richard Williams had heard them play the Truck and Warehouse show, and over a year had gone by since the failed Eno sessions for Island. The band had matured considerably since then, and Lanier knew them better than Eno had. His demos were “warmer,” as Verlaine put it later. The songs they recorded were “Torn Curtain,” “I Don’t Care,” “Guiding Light,” and “O Mi Amore”: two old, two new, two up tempo, and two slow burners, two that would make it onto Marquee Moon and two that would be left on the cutting room floor. Davis’s Arista showed interest; Sire and Atlantic were also sniffing around, but the former offered too little and the latter thought the band was from another planet. When Davis finally offered them a contract, they passed, worried about direct competition with Patti. By the end of the summer, though, they had finally found a match: Elektra, home of the Doors, Love, the Stooges, and Nuggets. Danny Fields helped arrange a private set at CB’s for Elektra’s Karin Berg, who signed them near the end of July.250 The deal called for a second album within a year.251

  If Verlaine was beginning to distance himself from the underground, some there returned his disdain. “The truth was,” Lisa Robinson would recall, some of “these bands didn’t like each other very much.”252 One newcomer, the streetwise rocker Willy DeVille, was infuriated when Terry Ork wouldn’t book “just another white blues band.” He appealed to Hilly on behalf of his band, Mink DeVille. “It was like a school of vampires,” he said of the CB’s scene a decade later.253 Mink DeVille’s first gig almost resulted in a rumble with the Ramones, and DeVille, whose music more fully engaged the Latino Lower East Side than most CB’s bands, would later disparage the rest of the punk scene to reporters: “Yeah, the Blank Generation — I understand what guys like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell are talking about,” he told a writer from NME in 1977, “but they’re fuckin’ rich kids from private schools in New Jersey. Personally I live close enough to the void that I don’t have to flirt with it.”254

  Verlaine also rubbed the critic Lester Bangs the wrong way, resulting in long-standing friction. Bangs, who quit Creem and moved to New York in mid-’76, was eager to enter the scene. He loved the Ramones but thought Talking Heads were preppy nerds and that Television sounded like San Francisco psychedelia warmed over. “This is punk?” he asked on first seeing them.255 Though he later warmed to CBGB’s, he never gained affection for Verlaine. Being a Television fan seemed to
be prerequisite for admission to the scene’s inner circle, which turned him off, and he thought Television’s shows, filled with worshipful fans, were church-like.256 “[E]verybody had been telling me for three years they’re the new Velvet Underground, y’know?” he told fellow critic Richard Meltzer. “And I mean they reminded me so much of the Grateful Dead, just boring solos, y’know, … endless, laborious climbing up in the scales, then get to the top and there’d be a moment of silence and everybody in the crowd would go berserk applauding, ha!” Bangs was also miffed by an awkward dinner with Verlaine and Patti Smith. “Who gives a fuck what I think of your fuckin’ band, let’s just be friends,” Bangs demanded, but Verlaine remained reserved. Bangs later heard from Peter Laughner that Verlaine didn’t think he’d “make it” in New York, for which Bangs never forgave him. For the most part they’d pass in the street without acknowledging one another. He “always pretends that he doesn’t see me, y’know,” Bangs told Meltzer, “he’s a weird snob!”257 Asked about the stand-off as late as ’79, Verlaine said: “I don’t know if I’d recognize him. I met him, like, twice about four years ago.”258

  Tension within the original CB’s scene escalated in March, when perceived homophobic heckling from the Dictators’ singer, Handsome Dick Manitoba, led Wayne County to clobber him with a mic stand, resulting in Manitoba hauled off to the ER with a broken collarbone. Fields reported that Manitoba had been insulting performers for weeks and that some thought he deserved it, but the incident caused rifts among the club’s regulars. Benefit shows were held on both sides (three out of four Ramones performed on Wayne’s behalf, but Joey abstained).259 Newcomer Bangs threw himself into the fray, championing Manitoba against what he called the “faggot mafia” that secretly ruled the downtown scene, and which he planned to expose in a Punk magazine piece that would also trash Television, though he perhaps wisely had the editors kill the article before it could run.

  In May, the Ramones became the second CB’s band to release an album. New York Rocker ran the glossy national ad campaign. Television, though, remained “the stars of the scene,” and Verlaine its “reigning sex symbol,” in the News’s estimation. (“Don’t see them if you’re on speed,” the reporter added helpfully. 260) Through the summer of 1976, just as the nation was celebrating its bicentennial birthday, the band performed steadily at CB’s. Verlaine and Smith published a small volume of poems together, called The Night. The poems’ temperature was high — riddled with references to arson and “High gloss lipstick kiss[es]” while sirens and flames blared. But their romantic relationship had finally run its course. That March Patti had met Fred “Sonic” Smith, a member of the proto-punk Detroit legends the MC5, and kicked off an entanglement that would, eventually, lead to marriage and her relocation to Michigan, where she would withdraw from public view for a decade and a half, until her husband’s death in 1994.

  With a contract secured in July, the band took off nearly the rest of the year from live performance while they prepared to record. Verlaine worried about marketability and thought the local brand might prove a stumbling block. “I don’t think we’re an inaccessible New York band,” he told one interviewer on the eve of signing with Elektra. “I think we’ve got a lot of commercial potential, given the right company support.”261 Once the contract was settled, the band selected producer Andy Johns, who was best known as engineer for most of Led Zeppelin’s records, to engineer and co-produce their debut. Verlaine said he was drawn to Johns out of admiration of his work on the Stones’ 1973 Goats Heads Soup. After spending November in the studio, they emerged via a lavish photo spread for the December New York Rocker and five year-end shows, culminating in full houses at CBGB’s on 30 December (300 people) and a sold-out show to 3,000 the following night at the Palladium, where they shared a bill with Patti Smith and John Cale.262 Only a decade had passed since Cale was on his way up with the Velvets. Now, on the eve of Marquee Moon’s release, Television — so frequently compared to Cale’s former band — were New York Rocker’s Band of the Year, poised at last to break out of the downtown unerground.

  234 Bangs (1976).

  235 Fields (1996: pp. 29–30 [1 January 1976]).

  236 Fields, SoHo Weekly News, 30 October, 27 November, and 25 December 1975.

  237 Murray (1975b).

  238 Fields (1996: p. 29 [18 December 1975]).

  239 Robinson (2002).

  240 Rockwell (1976a).

  241 “Punk Talks” (1976).

  242 Wolcott (1996: p. 74).

  243 Gorman (2001: p. 147).

  244 Verlaine (1976).

  245 Verlaine (1976).

  246 Christgau (1976).

  247 For more on Deitch’s show and Miller’s brilliant photo collaboration “Bettie Visits CBGB” see http://98bowery.com/

  248 Rockwell (1976c).

  249 Hell (2001: p. 41).

  250 Robbins (2001).

  251 Gholson (1976).

  252 Robinson (2002).

  253 Kozak (1988: p. 65).

  254 Miles (1977).

  255 DeRogatis (2000: p. 120).

  256 Bangs (1976).

  257 Taped conversation, in Meltzer (2000: pp. 337–8).

  258 Trakin (1979).

  259 County (1995: pp. 109–10).

  260 Wadsley (1976).

  261 Strick (1976).

  262 Rockwell (1976b).

  Marquee Moon

  Electricity kills the subtle mysteries of the city night — and then resurrects them in new forms.

  — William Chapman Sharpe, New York Nocturne (2008)

  I like thinking of myself as invisible.

  — Tom Verlaine, Spin, 1987

  In November 1976, Television and Andy Johns spent three weeks recording Marquee Moon at A&R Studios on 48th Street. Opened by Phil Ramone in 1960, the studio still had its original soundboard. Ramone had since expanded operations, taking over a Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue, where he’d recently engineered Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks. But he continued to lease the 48th Street space for a price the band could afford on its budget from Elektra. The studio may have been run down — “How can I work in a place like this?” Johns repeatedly asked — but it was storied: Coltrane had recorded there, as had Dylan, Van Morrison, and the Velvet Underground.

  Johns had no prior knowledge of the band and had never heard them perform before entering the studio. Verlaine had been attracted to him because he remained relatively invisible as a producer, “getting really decent overall rock sounds without messing with the arrangements,” Verlaine told a writer for Crawdaddy!. The band wanted to keep arrangements minimal, even more stripped down than the Stones had on Goats Head Soup: “no horns, no strings, no synthesizers, no acoustic guitar.”263 The result would approximate their live sound, foregrounding the friction between Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s guitars. Verlaine later ascribed the sessions’ success to Johns being so “performance oriented — he recognized the hot take.”264 The band had spent the better part of fall ’76 in rehearsal, sharpening the songs: “We had to learn to play all of our songs without the vocals because that’s the way you make a record,” Lloyd told New York Rocker. “Where I would normally play a certain basic riff and then throw frills around it, we had to condition ourselves to know the basics first.” The result was a tighter sound on all the songs. “It’s not that there is less experimentation going on, it’s just that everything is clear in our heads as to the way we want it to sound.”265

  Settling in with Johns required acclimation on all sides. “My first impression was that they couldn’t play and couldn’t sing and the music was very bizarre,” Johns said later. He also had to bring in equipment to supplement the outdated studio’s set-up. Lloyd recalled that Johns had set up the drums without input from the band and when he played back the initial recordings, “by God, out of the speakers, out of Billy Ficca’s drums, came John Bonham’s drum sound! Tom looked at me, and looked at Fred and Billy. Billy was like, ‘It sounds pretty good to me,’ and Tom’s like,
‘No, no, no, no, no. You’ve got to undo all of this.’” When Verlaine described the sound he wanted, Johns responded: “Oh, this must be like a Velvets thing, right? It’s New York thing, right?’”266 Verlaine wanted to keep studio gimmickry minimal, sticking with a live sound: “clean Fender guitars.” Lloyd pushed the envelope a little more, double-tracking his parts, repeating his lead and rhythm lines virtually note for note: “When Andy Johns began recording us I suggested that I could double my parts,” Lloyd recalled, an idea he took from Phil Spector and the Beatles. On some songs he layered his parts even further — up to eight tracks on “Guiding Light.”267 What resulted is the shimmering, chorused quality of the album’s guitar sounds. Verlaine approved of the results, agreeing that the doubling “sounds better than just a little delay, left and right,” he later told Guitar World magazine.268 Other effects were subtle: Johns swung a mic like a lasso while Lloyd played his part for “Elevation.”269 Otherwise the takes were relatively straightforward. After the first week recording, Johns jaunted to California, returning to mix after the band had done a good portion of the production legwork. When he heard what they’d done, according to Verlaine, he said, “Jesus, this is great!”270