Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)

by Bryan Waterman

  As Lisa Robinson suggests in her memoir of these “Rebel Nights,” to downtown’s youthful inhabitants in the 1970s, that nighttime world was their own. Whatever SoHo factories remained operational were closed for the night or converted to performance spaces, blocks of seemingly abandoned buildings, inhabited here and there by rogue theater companies, jazz ensembles, early no-wave noisemakers, or underground discos. Street traffic dwindled. A couple old bars catered to loft-livers and nocturnal freaks. The whole lower portions of the city, from the Village to TriBeCa, became a world occupied by the young and the hip, on one hand, or the hopelessly derelict on the other. The line between the two was thin at times.

  Of all Television’s songs, “Venus” is the one that most overtly participates in one of the dominant trends of New York School poetry: the practice of dropping names of friends and fellow poets into your work to create a sense of community and/or cliquishness. (Contrast Television’s oeuvre on this score with Patti Smith’s, which brims with names and musical references that invoke a pantheon of Romantic and rock ‘n’ roll heroes.) The relevant lines from “Venus” offer the album’s most poignant reminder, left behind like a scar, of the falling out between Verlaine and Hell. Falling out: the word “fell” recurs at the end of the first and third verses, returning in each repetition of the chorus. At the end of the second verse we find “And I felt” where we’re previously heard “fell.” What is the relationship between falling and feeling? The song’s call-and-response structure perpetuates this conflation:

  “And I fell.”

  “DIDJA FEEL LOW?”

  To fall is to feel? Nah. Not at all. The word “felt” follows the most personal verse, the one with a shout-out, most listeners have assumed, to Richard Hell by name. Though this song predates Television, which means it also predates the end of Hell and Verlaine’s friendship, by 1977 the words would have taken on additional meaning for many. If the anecdote about Richard suggesting that the friends dress up like cops is autobiographical — and there’s no reason to insist it has to be — the action probably took place during the period of time, in their early twenties, that Verlaine has described as a consistent period of drug use: “From 21 to 23,” he later said, “I was using all kinds of hallucinogenics.”281 The specificity of the time frame suggests that he put an end to drug use around the time Television formed, though most of his comments on the subject come retrospectively, after Hell’s departure from the band (amid gossip about his heroin use), and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt. “People who mess with drugs, I can’t stand to be around them too long,” Verlaine would add in a typical aside, obviously flung in Hell’s direction. “Do you still experiment with drugs a lot?” one interviewer asked in 1976. Tom:

  No, not much at all. I wouldn’t say really at all. Drugs are like … if you’re intuitive about things or something and you take drugs, they make you believe in your own intuitions more ‘cause there’s something very nebulous about drugs, and there’s something unspeakably true about what you go through with any given drug.282

  Richard Hell’s cameo in “Venus” had its parallels in Verlaine’s poetry. In the manuscript for the collection 28TH Century, which Hell declined to publish following his departure from Television, one poem specifically invokes Hell. In it, Verlaine phones up Hell and tells him the time has come for a planned takeover, of what isn’t made clear. Richard responds by taking him less than seriously, and Tom pretends not to be himself. 283 As in this poem, and as in “See No Evil” as well, “Venus” consists of a speaker engaged in dialogue with another character, or in this case a series of them. In the first verse it’s “another person who was a little surprised.” The second verse begins with a generic second person address: “You know it’s all like some new kind of drug.” The third verse brings us to a past-tense narration of the episode with Richie/Richard, who suggests they dress up like cops. Two other voices enter the song, though: the band’s responses to Verlaine’s calls (“I fell.” “DIJA FEEL LOW?”) and the voice of conscience at the end of the third verse: “But something, something said ‘You better not.’” That final bit of dialogue — an internal one between the speaker and a Donald Duck angel sitting on his shoulder — puns on the form of the song itself. When Verlaine sings “Something, something …” it sounds, even if you’ve heard the song hundreds of times, as if he’s forgotten the lyrics. A moment of disenchantment, it reminds us we’re not in lower Manhattan at all; rather, we’re caught up in a fantasy about would-be rockstars, a band of friends.

  The notion that we’re dwelling in the realm of imagination is underscored by the song’s central refrain — “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo” — which works in much the same way as the earlier “boat made out of ocean,” given that the Venus de Milo, at least as we know the statue, has no arms at all. “Do those amputated arms beckon? Or repulse?” asked Creem’s reviewer, Stephen Demorest. “Do they modestly try to cover her privates? The high ones or the low? Verlaine says: ‘The arms of Venus de Milo are everywhere. It’s a term for a state of feeling. They’re loving arms.’”

  What we’ve fallen into, then, is love. Or emptiness. Or imagination. Which could mean nothing, or everything.

  “Friction”

  So far Side A’s tone has been up, almost optimistic. If this is urban noir, it’s also a fun house. Enter “Friction,” as the title would suggest, to provide counterpoint and conflict.

  The first guitar plays octaves, the drums roll, the second guitar enters with light alarm-bell harmonics followed by cascading downward scales, like skipping rocks over a minor-key waterfall in a Chinese garden, before we get the lyrical throwdown: “I knew it must have been some big setup.”

  It’s tempting to read the placement of this confrontational snarl, hot on the heels of the album’s only overt personal reference (generally taken to be a nod to Hell, at that), as personal in some way. “If I ever catch that ventriloquist / I’ll squeeze his head right into my fist,” Verlaine will sing in a few lines, and you want to know who’s the target of this anger. On the Island demo, Hell plays a rough, bouncing bass, and the opening lyric is slightly different: “I knew it must have been some sweet set up,” suggesting fulfillment and abundance rather than the disillusionment of a “big setup” exposed. In its early versions “Friction” was more of a rocker than it is on the album, its solos unconstrained, Lloyd noodling all over the song’s surface. The album version’s more controlled, even if the tempo’s sped up a bit. Verlaine’s sneer on “set up” retains the bite of Wayne County or the Dolls.

  Nick Kent, writing in NME, saw “Friction” as filling Television fans’ expectations for the album, but thought it a little predictable:

  “Friction” is probably the most readily accessible track from this album simply because, with its fairly anarchic, quasi-Velvets feel plus (all important) Verlaine’s most pungent methedrine guitar fret-board slaughter, here it’ll represent the kind of thing all those weaned on the hype and legend without hearing one note from Television will be expecting … “Friction” is just that — throwaway lyrics — “diction/Friction” etc. — those kind of throwaway rhymes, vicious instrumentation and a perfect climax which has Verlaine vengefully spelling out the title “F-R-I-C-T-I-O-N” slashing his guitar for punctuation.284

  Actually, the lyrics don’t seem throwaway at all. Like the music’s evocation of train crossings and warning bells, the lyrics tell us we’re in dangerous territory. Once again the danger comes from adolescence itself: “All us boys are going to wind up in jail.” Recalling Peter Pan’s “I Won’t Grow Up,” the singer asserts a desire to stave off adulthood: “There’s too much contradiction.” Nevertheless this is a song about transformations: “How did the snake get out of its skin?” Verlaine’s double entendres underwrite the sense of adolescent danger, a key feature of Neon Boys and early Television songs that never saw studio release (“Hot Dog,” “Hard On Love,” “Love Comes in Spurts,” “Horizontal Ascension”). “I just start t
o spin the tale,” Verlaine sings, when “you complain of my DICK [pause] shun.” Words (“diction”) are no substitute for nagging sexual desires unevenly fulfilled. When Verlaine asks “How does a snake get out of its skin?” he has his own answer: “Here’s a depiction,” he sings, then leaves words behind as he rips into a chainsaw ascension. To get here we’ve been through stages of desire: “Gimme friction,” the singer pleads. “I dig friction,” he promises. “I betcha it’s friction,” he anticipates. And only then the “depiction” arrives: aural, not verbal or visual. This moment resembles one from a favorite choice for Television to cover, “Psychotic Reaction,” which launches into a solo following the declaration: “And it feels like this.” Like other references in “Friction” to physical sensation (“My eyes are like telescopes,” for instance), the urgency of the skin-shedding “depiction” suggests that friction is physical as much as metaphorical, the kind of friction that takes place in a car parked off the main road, the dry humping that substitutes for teenage foreplay.

  Nagging sexual desires unevenly fulfilled. What could be more adolescent? What better characterization of the energy that drives you into city streets at night?

  “Marquee Moon”

  The title track brings the sublime moment all Side A has worked toward. Routinely praised since its release as one of the great guitar songs of all time, it simmers and then boils for close to ten minutes. The original LP version fades at 9:58, necessary to preserve the album’s sound quality; like “Little Johnny Jewel” the track would also be spread over both sides of a 7-inch single. On remastered CD and vinyl reissues the song is closer to eleven minutes. “Conceived at a time when rock tracks lasting over ten minutes are somewhere sunk deep below the subterranean depths of contempt,” Kent wrote, “‘Marquee Moon’ is as riveting a piece of music as I’ve heard since the halcyon days of … oh, God knows too many years have elapsed.”285

  Opening with an off-beat interplay between the two guitars, “like voices [conversing] across the railroad tracks,”286 the sixteen-bar intro allows each instrument to enter individually, creating the effect of a chamber piece, or the beginning of an old musical in which the combined sounds of street noise eventually form a symphonic overture. Alarm systems overlay a bass line thumping from a passing car. Sirens blend as fire trucks head in opposite directions. Partially set in a darkened cemetery that could be rural as easily as it could sit on lower Broadway, the song also invokes the Great White Way, your name in Times Square’s lights. “Moonlight drips on 42nd Street,” Verlaine mumbles at the start of a live version from early ’75, recorded at CBGB’s. But the title could also refer to London’s famous Marquee club, to the Stones and Yardbirds what CB’s was to Television. As on the rest of the album, the setting is shadowy, the double darkness offset by moonlight and lightning. “Marquee Moon” helps to clarify that the antagonistic pairs running through all side A’s songs are figures of doubling. Is there a coherent self behind these songs? Can we exist without reflection? If the other songs to this point have all featured traveling companions, on this one the singer journeys solo.

  “Marquee Moon” is structured on a backward glance: “I remember,” it opens as the rhythm section carries us forward on a mechanical current. The voice is a survivor’s, someone who remains to tell the tale, like Job or Melville’s Ishmael. Combined with the gothic setting, the glance back prepares us for the devil-at-the-crossroads story to follow. Robert Johnson’s “Crossroads Blues” is a key precursor, revived by Cream in 1968 and made one of rock’s great singles. “Marquee Moon” could almost be a blues lyric or a folk ballad, but it abandons the formal repetition of either form for a straightforward, linear progression, a story building verse by verse, which will eventually climax in something much freakier than a blues solo.

  As the song moves forward, the speaker, who’s been waiting/hesitating, finally makes a break — “I ain’t waiting” — only to be met by “a man / down at the tracks.” The speaker asks for advice: “How do you not go mad?” And the man replies: “Look here, junior, don’t you be so happy / And for Heaven’s sake don’t you be so sad.” The use of opposite extremes here, both of which are off limits, echoes the pairing a few lines earlier: “the kiss of death, the embrace of life.” How to hold on to both sides, to avoid being absorbed by one or the other?

  Ken Emerson, reviewing the album for the Voice, reads it primarily through this preoccupation with doubling (the darkness doubles, and words like listening and hearing are paired). For Emerson, this recurring feature is a balancing act, which he sees as evidence that Television has already grown up, perhaps in spite of themselves.287 (It could also derive from Verlaine’s experience as an identical twin.) Yet the balance Emerson sees is itself offset by something extrasensory and unsettling: “I was listening / listening to the rain / I was hearing / hearing something else.” If “listening” and “hearing” are doubles, as Emerson suggests, the contrast between listening and hearing emphasizes distinction. What is it we’re waiting for, straining to tune in?

  As warning bells gather force, the man at the crossroads is joined, in the next verse, by what Kent called “various twilight loony rejects from King Lear” who pull up in a Cadillac and motion for the speaker to climb in. They’ll ferry him, in this pimped-out Styx-crossing transport, to the cemetery from whence they’ve come. When the singer obliges, apparently embracing death, the Cadillac putters back to the graveyard, but our hero has the final laugh, getting “out again” before it’s too late. Whatever deal with the devil may have gone down, the narrator’s going to live to see another day, having cheated the Reaper.

  The song’s hardly over, though. We’ve been through all the verses in the song’s first four minutes; one more chorus, and then: back to the start? The singer still insists he’s not waiting, but now waiting is exactly what we have to do. At 4:50 we get the stirrings of Tom’s solo, which unfolds at roughly half Lloyd’s speed. His line rings, tentatively, in multiple directions, like a junebug beating against the glass, until at just past the seven-minute mark he finds some release by climbing scales, doubled the second time around by Lloyd’s harmonies a third higher. This signature scale-climb was drawn from an older Television song, “Change Your Channels,” a driving highlight of the band’s early sets. Back then it was used to bring things to a fever pitch. Here the progression also pushes toward climax, but backs off repeatedly. Once. Twice. The third time up, the axes chop in unison: do-2-3-rest, do-2-3-rest, re-2-3-rest, re-2-3-rest, mi-2-3-rest, mi-2-3-rest, and so on, two measures per step, leading up this fourteen-measure hillside like Fraulein Maria’s evil twin. As it builds, the drums hit double time, the bass glides an upward slide, and if you listen closely you’ll catch a dissonant current multi-tracked beneath it all. Then, just as the scale finally approaches completion, what seemed at first to be a straight-forward major scale has its mixolydian moment, the half-step “gotcha” at the end, one final deferral before a burst of harmonics scatter like a shower of “little bells,”288 “droplets of electricity,”289 bluebirds singing.

  Nick Kent tied the scattered guitar lines that follow the climax to Richard Thompson’s playing on Fairport Convention’s eleven-minute epic rendition of the traditional folk song “A Sailor’s Life,” from the 1969 classic Unhalfbricking. The cymbals’ rolling thunder adds to the echo. It’s an unlikley comparison, but Verlaine does bear some similarity to Thompson, as he does to Neil Young and Jerry Garcia. Fairport’s folk song works well as an earnest counterpoint to Television’s nervous energy. The comparison also helps us hear how “Marquee Moon” overwrites as urban pastoral both the crossroads song and the seafaring tale, the latter being another of the album’s consistent motifs. To be adrift in the nocturnal cityscape of “Marquee Moon” is very much like being at sea; the characters on Marquee Moon, if you take in the album’s action as a whole, move gradually toward the waterfront, pulled by a sort of Melvillean magnetism. As the soaring climax finishes, “Marquee Moon” returns to the familiar ground
of the song’s opening verse. The record still spins. Regarding the fade that originally closed the LP’s first side, Lloyd told New York Rocker: “I think it’s mood-evoking in a way that the voice starts to come in and then just fades away. It gives you the conception that the song never really ends.”290 On the reissues, the restored version of the track fades at 10:40 over the whisper of rolling piano arpeggios, a Cadillac idling, waves moving back out to sea.

  Side B

  “Elevation”

  On one hand, anything to follow “Marquee Moon,” once you turn over the platter and start Side B, will be a coming down: How to match the dizzying climb of Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s intertwined solos on the title track? Though Side B is in general a little mellower than the first four songs, rather than a letdown we’re offered a self-referential meditation on “Elevation.” Are your senses sufficiently deranged following the heights of Side A?

  We may get a meditation on Television as well. It’s impossible to know who started the rumor that Verlaine actually substitutes the word “Television” for the word “Elevation” in the refrain: “Elevation don’t go to my head.” But someone jumped on that possibility as soon as the record was released, if not before. Kent was just one of the critics to pounce: “The song again is beautiful, proudly contagious with a chorus that lodges itself in your subconscious like a bullet in the skull — ‘Elevation don’t go to my head’ repeated thrice until on the third line a latent ghost-like voice transmutes ‘Elevation’ into ‘Television.’”291 Maybe the band promoted the rumor themselves. In the months after the record was released, their answer was a uniform denial. As Lloyd told New York Rocker: “There’s a mechanical harmonizer that adds the third, fifth and octave of a voice. Just on the word ‘elevation’ to fill it out.” When asked if Tom sings “Television, don’t go to my head,” Lloyd answered: “No, he really doesn’t say that. We even thought so when it was happening and he articulated it as best he could. It’s just magic or something.”292 Later writers would assume the studio tweaking was meant to emphasize the conflation of band name and song title,293 and certainly those who wanted to could hear him acknowledge the band’s impact on his personality (“Television, don’t go to my head”). “The last word / is the lost word,” the song begins, almost as if to offer a challenge: Which word is lost? The song title or the band name?