Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  For the album’s cover the group went to Mapplethorpe, who had shot the cover of Horses. The photograph they ultimately selected situates Verlaine a step in front of the rest of the band, with Lloyd staggered next, then Smith, and Ficca receding farthest into the background. Everyone looks rather serious, muscles tensed, veins bulging on the back of hands. Only Ficca approaches anything like a smile. Verlaine’s right hand crosses his body; his left is held up in front of him as if he’s about to offer something to the viewer, but his hand is empty, his fist slightly clenched. He could just as easily be withholding something from you as offering.

  When Mapplethorpe gave the band the contact prints, Lloyd took the band’s favorite shot to a Times Square print shop and asked for color Xeroxes — still a rarity in 1976 — so the band members could each take a copy home to mull over. The first few came out oddly colored, but Lloyd asked to keep them and told the worker to make several more copies “while turning the knobs with his eyes closed.” It was like a Warhol thing, he thought to himself, recalling Terry Ork’s work on Warhol’s screenprint multiples. When he took the distorted images back to the band, they chose one of the altered versions over Mapplethorpe’s original, which Fred Smith framed and kept in his possession.271 The final result looks like reception on a color television with the contrast slightly off. Or perhaps you could call it a double exposure.

  Marquee Moon is a nocturnal album, set largely out of doors. But in the era before the Walkman, these are experiences and scenes to be imagined from the comfort of an interior space with a stereo system. While it’s absolutely possible in 2011 to listen to this album while actually walking the streets of lower Manhattan after midnight — an experience I’d recommend — that possibility didn’t exist for most in 1977, though Nick Kent would later describe listening to an advance tape of the album on a portable recorder as he stumbled through London’s smack houses.272 For most of the original release’s listeners, the album began by fitting the disc on your turntable’s spindle, setting the grooves spinning, and lowering the needle. Then, when the grind of “See No Evil” kicked in, you’d imagine yourself walking through a semi-medieval downtown landscape, by turns bright and doubly dark.

  Maybe you’d follow along with the lyrics, printed on the sleeve. Making sense of Verlaine’s lyrics has always been a bit of a dangerous proposition: their obscurity is a good part of Television’s mystique, and the act of deciphering — and arguing with friends about — their meanings remains one of the album’s many pleasures. If you knew these songs live before you heard them on vinyl, or if you never bothered to read the lyrics, you might already have formed phrases of your own to fill in where you couldn’t make out what Verlaine was saying. “I couldn’t understand a single word [of] Verlaine’s strangled vocals,” Peter Laughner said of seeing Television live before they’d recorded, “but the feelings came on like razors and methadrine. His singing voice has this marvelous quality of slurring all dictions into what becomes distortions of actual lines, so that without a lyric sheet you can come away with a whole other song … which means you’re doing a third of the work.”273 Adding to this sense, Verlaine’s lyrics, as Hell’s had been, were fueled by puns and double-entendres, filled with riddles and word games, inside jokes: “Get it?” he asks before launching into the final section of “See No Evil,” as if he’s calling on you to make sense of things or join him in a joke. Asked by Punk magazine about the lyrics, Verlaine called them atmospheric: “I mean, you don’t have to say what you mean to get across.” Lloyd chimed in: “It’s like you say five words and you mean the sixth.” Verlaine: “Right.”274 In such moments, Verlaine’s project is compatible with a post-Cagean conceptualism that would bring audiences to some awareness of ways they participate in meaning-making, though in rock ‘n’ roll that process is less overt than in other forms of performance Cage inspired.

  Verlaine’s long engagement with poetry, especially in this period, would seem to authorize some literary critical self-indulgence. His lyrics, after all, are a main reason Television’s contemporaries referred to the band as cerebral or intellectual, though they were sometimes also dismissed as inscrutable LSD after-effects whose meaning was only plain to their author. The lyrics sheet itself creates some tension on this front: it offers an invitation to interpretation, not simply by printing the words, but because it sometimes obscures more than it illuminates. One thing’s printed, but Tom seems to sing another. At times it seems like we’re being misdirected by homophonic phrases (the way Kurt Cobain would later print “find my nest of salt” for what sounded more like “feminist assault” on Nirvana’s “All Apologies”). In terms of poetic schools, Verlaine’s lyrical style, despite some comparability to the New York School, relates more closely to the French poets he and Hell — and other contemporaries — had been steeped in: Marquee Moon’s urban nocturne derives from long traditions of bohemian decadence, not so far removed from Ginsberg’s celebrations of “Negro streets at dawn” and other presumed danger zones. Marquee Moon isn’t a concept album, but it has a consistent geography overtly identified with lower Manhattan, and as such lends itself to a coherent reading as a song cycle.

  Television’s New York settings are, as Patti Smith suggested in her earliest criticism on the band, relentlessly adolescent. They occupy the parts of town most resistant to the bright lights that had long since conquered New York’s night; his characters seem consciously to flee overlit areas for deeper shadows. The area below 14th Street seemed like the special province of the young and wild at night, a sense exacerbated by the city’s financial crisis, which left much of downtown empty and dark. “I remember standing at windows,” remembered Roberta Bayley, “looking out over the Lower East Side, and feeling that the whole city was infested, and crumbling, but wonderful.”275 In such an environment, friends roamed in packs, searching for adventure, for trouble, but also for a sense of self, or perhaps even for the purity of egoless transcendence over the urban surround. If Marquee Moon celebrates relentless adolescence in the mode of the urban pastoral, it also looks for visionary truth through Rimbaud’s prescription of sensory derangement. Such wandering and transcendental flashes are as propulsive as Marquee Moon’s opening riff.

  Side A

  “See No Evil”

  It’s one of the great starts to a rock ‘n’ roll album ever. For the first five seconds we’re at the starting line, engine revving, three times from the left. In the fourth measure the bass line enters on the right, an octave higher than we’d expect, as if to say “Ready, Set, Go!” Like most Television songs this one starts with an extended introduction, a sense of anticipation, hesitation, building tension. Then, we’re off, though the stress falling on the first and third beats creates a slightly syncopated sense of lurching. The music is repetitive, churning, the sounds of machinery, the lead guitar rolling on the right hand side like a power saw cutting pavement. It’s the same grinding force Eno poured into the opening track of his solo debut, “Needle in the Camel’s Eye.” Ficca’s drumming leaves behind blues structures generally and specifically departs from early versions of the song that were still tied to Byrds-like go-go beats. Then, an opening lyric, in Verlaine’s strained, nasal harangue, that runs counter to the sense of waiting we’ve already experienced: “What I want / I want NOW.”

  Like live staples that didn’t make it onto the album — “O Mi Amore” and especially their cover of the Elevators’ “Fire Engine” — “See No Evil” suggests an urban landscape in the clack of a subway or the Doppler Effect of a passing ambulance or firetruck. It recalls the New York Dolls, but only the slightest hint of a campy lisp remains in the backing chorus. Rather, as they have throughout the album, the band has worked to strip away what Verlaine called “reference points,” gestures or figures that reassure listeners by recalling the familiar sounds of an earlier era. The song does bear some similarity to the sound of ’66, and you might even think it’s a Yardbirds cover. (Their “Train Kept A-Rollin’” anticipated Ficca’s open
ing drum line on “Fire Engine.”) But Television strips away the Yardbirds’ rootsiness to produce this New York noir: no harmonicas here. The territory we’re in is nervous, angular, to use adjectives contemporaries often applied to them. The sound’s industrial, even: the Ficca/Smith rhythm section is “a fist punching metal rivets of sound,” as Nick Kent wrote. The buzzsaw of Verlaine’s “soaring [vocal] screech at the fadeout” suggests the united howling of “what sounds like about 25 over-dubbed Verlaines screaming.”276 We’re not being warned that the train is coming, as in old blues songs. We’re in the front car, watching the tracks disappear beneath us as we go.

  With “See No Evil,” Marquee Moon begins not quite out of doors, but with a desire to exit, a fantasy of escaping to the hills. That desire is complex: “What I want / I want NOW / and it’s a whole lot more / than ‘anyhow.’” Lines are being drawn in the sand. The scare quotes on ‘anyhow’ are the first instance on the lyrics sheet of a pattern that recurs — a distancing effect, making a portion of the lyrics suspect even to their speaker. “Anyhow” seems to be a synonym here for “good enough,” and recalls comments Verlaine made to Creem on the album’s release: “I do think in terms of good and evil,” he said. “Evil is an attitude that comes over a person who refuses to discriminate. There was a California expression: ‘It’s all the same.’ Drinking a glass of water or cutting a leg off, ‘Oh, it’s all the same.’”277 Wanting a lot isn’t the same as being indiscriminate; it’s a sentiment diametrically opposed to the resignation in “I Don’t Care,” the early Television favorite that would resurface on Adventure as “Careful.” In that song Verlaine sings “I don’t care” over and over, a statement of apolitical detachment from the American 1970s, a decade of perpetual crisis: Watergate, Vietnam, New York’s fiscal quicksand. In “See No Evil,” Verlaine’s speaker doesn’t retreat, defeated. “No don’t say doom,” he warns. Rather, he’s all action, wanting to “fly / fly a fountain” or “jumpjumpjump / jump a mountain,” even as the stutter suggests stasis. Perhaps the sense of action remains fantasy after all.

  The second verse, Ficca pulling us along like a conveyer belt, offers the song’s best wordplay, a few lines among Verlaine’s wittiest: “I get ideas / I get a notion,” he sings, another hint of his indebtedness to conceptualism: “I want a nice little boat / made out of ocean.” The “notion” here seems to be paradox: can you stay afloat in a vessel made out of the stuff it’s meant to keep out? This “nice little boat,” impossible and imaginary, is the song’s — and the album’s — first reference to sea-going, and seems significant in that regard. These images will accumulate, especially on the album’s second side, when the action seems to be set on the waterfront: in “Elevation,” the Side B opener, we’ll find the singer sleeping “light / on these shores tonight”; from “Guiding Light”: “Darling Darling / Do we part like the seas”; from “Prove It”: “The docks / the clocks,” “the cave / the waves.” And the list goes on. Verlaine’s paradoxical “nice little boat / made out of ocean” relates to all of these in suggestive ways. The desire for something impossible persists through all the other sea images. What are you waiting for, sleeping there on the shore, or strolling the waterfront with an eye on the clock? “What I want / I want NOW” may be an aggressive way to start an album, but that desire is countered at every turn by a competing sense of anticipation, longing, unfilled possibility.

  That sense of hesitation will be borne out over the entire album as the singer seems caught in a tug-of-war with something or someone. Perhaps the speaker argues with himself: “I get your point. / You’re so sharp,” the song’s sharpest pun, is followed up immediately by Verlaine’s most inscrutable lyric: “Getting good reactions / with your ‘BeBo’ talk.” What “BeBo” is meant to signify remains a mystery. Is it “Be Bop,” meaning his interlocutor is jive talking, talking smack? Is it a homophone for Patti Smith’s favorite self-referential play on words: “Babel/babble”? Is he actually saying “when your people talk,” despite what’s printed on the lyrics sheet? The move from a finely honed lyric in the point/sharp pun to something this inscrutable might be offputting, if he weren’t couching it in a line that attacks someone for empty speech that wins acclaim.

  At precisely this point the lyrics give way to Lloyd’s first solo, supplanting the vocals just when words fail. Prefiguring most of the solos to follow on the album, Lloyd runs up, up, up — following a major scale but falling back slightly after each step. Adding to the sense of climbing, anticipation, waiting, desire, this pattern will have its fullest effect on the album’s title track, with a slight alteration as Verlaine’s mixolydian mode — lowering the seventh by half a step — prolongs the wait to the last possible moment. In “See No Evil,” however, Lloyd brings the solo through a full octave of gradual climbing, starts and stops, before unleashing a blues-inflected riff, Berry-via-Beck, that, compared with the minimalist repetition and restraint elsewhere in the song feels like he’s cleaning out his arsenal.

  “See No Evil” has been read as a rejoinder to Hell’s supposed nihilism in “Blank Generation,” primarily on the grounds of Verlaine’s disavowal of “destructive urges.”278 But the two songs share more than separates them. In spite of Lester Bangs’s famous reproach to Hell for what seemed a constant death wish, or Wolcott’s reading of “Blank Generation” as a smack-induced “nod-off anthem,” Hell’s insistence that the “blank” in “blank generation” stands for possibility aligns him with Verlaine’s sentiments here. Verlaine closes “See No Evil” by replacing the opening’s fantasies of flight with a limitless terrain, “runnin wild with the one I love.” The renegade sensation is contagious, an imperative to go and do likewise. “Pull down the future with the one you love,” he repeats as the song ends. It’s creative and destructive all at once. Is he still talking to the same antagonist or interlocutor? Or has he moved from an intimate conversation to a more inclusive stance, letting us in as listeners?

  “Venus”

  If the opening track suggested urban out-of-doors, on “Venus” the landscape is explicitly defined as New York’s.

  One of the oldest songs in Television’s repertoire, “Venus” existed in an acoustic version dating all the way back to Verlaine’s ventures into Greenwich Village folk clubs, pre-Neon Boys, pre-Reno Sweeney. “[H]ardcore Televisionaries will be pleased that ‘Venus de Milo’ is on the album,” Wolcott wrote in his review for Hit Parader, which he composed after just two pre-release listens when Verlaine and Smith brought master tapes to Lisa and Richard Robinson’s apartment. “[I]t’s to Television what ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ is to Sinatra — a signature song. Like ‘Tramp’ it wears well: I’ve heard ‘Venus de Milo’ at least 70 times and have yet to tire of it.”279 John Rockwell, using the album’s release as an occasion for a retrospective on the underground’s last several years, suggested that Venus “epitomize[d] the whole scene”: “the distant, hypersensitive, painfully acute sensibility that permeates the late-night, fluorescent-lit New York landscape.”280 The song starts with nine and a half bars of intro — a full twenty seconds — before Verlaine comes in: more hesitation and anticipation. Ficca establishes a lighter tone than the earliest recorded versions of the song convey: 1-2-cha-cha-cha, whereas the beat in the Island demo had been almost martial.

  The opening lines move us into story-land: “It was a tight toy night.” Again we’re confronted with a rather obscure phrase. Is it the night or the singer that’s tightly wound (in the Warholian sense of being “up-tight”)? Or is it just the sort of night that leaves you tightly wound, played with? The phrase is evocative but remains opaque: the alliteration (“tight toy”) and the internal rhyme (“tight/night”) call attention to the lyrics’ status as just words, hinting at Verlaine’s obsession with verbal play as much as anything else. But the opening structure lends to storytelling, stage-setting: here the streets are bright, the nocturnal atmosphere established by contrast, as if you need to escape the more brightly lit parts of town and find some darker
quarter downtown in which to take solace.

  “Broadway looks so medieval”: Tim Mitchell suggests Grace Church at Broadway between 10th and 11th Streets as the setting invoked in this line, the clearest signal that the album’s world is our own. But I’ve never biked down Broadway at night, the Woolworth Building’s lighted gothic spire looming at the bottom-most tip of Manhattan, without thinking of this lyric. The song’s geography has a downward sweep that corresponds with the repeated idea of fall/falling: in the third verse the friends wander down Broadway, which after dark, especially amid the nineteenth-century factories and warehouses of SoHo’s Cast-iron District, seemed positively abandoned. In the distance, towers hulked: the new World Trade Center looming. The Woolworth, once the epitome of modernity, seems dwarfed, hunchbacked and ancient.