Television’s fans had worried that their live electricity wouldn’t transfer to vinyl. “Little Johnny Jewel,” which received some initial thumbs down, had been a test case in that regard. But reviews for Marquee Moon were overwhelmingly positive, with many, like Kent, declaring the album an instant classic. The Voice’s Robert Christgau placed the album at the top of his 1977 list. It landed at No. 3 on his annual composite “Pazz & Jop” poll of music critics he respected, coming in just behind the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK and Elvis Costello’s My Aim Is True but just ahead of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. The quick take in Christgau’s annual consumer’s guide was as effusive as Kent’s:
I know why people complain about Tom Verlaine’s angst-ridden voice, but fuck that, I haven’t had such intense pleasure from a new release since I got into Layla three months after it came out, and this took about fifteen seconds. The lyrics, which are in a demotic-philosophical mode (“I was listening/listening to the rain/I was hearing/hearing something else”), would carry this record alone; so would the guitar playing, as lyrical and piercing as Clapton or Garcia but totally unlike either. Yes, you bet it rocks. And no, I didn’t believe they’d be able to do it on record because I thought this band’s excitement was all in the live raveups. Turns out that’s about a third of it.300
Christgau’s friend Lester Bangs, having given up on Detroit’s depleted scene and moved to New York, gave his top honors that year to Richard Hell & the Voidoids, refusing to put Television on his list at all (as did Greil Marcus, who gave the Sex Pistols his top slot).301 But even Bangs gave begrudging kudos in a review for the glossy mainstream rock weekly, Circus, though he couldn’t resist slamming the band for being just plain boring as people: “The grooves of Television’s first album are the most interesting of the year so far,” he wrote. “The group has been compared to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and I thought citifried Grateful Dead when I saw them live, but none of that really holds re this LP.” He concluded by repeating the confession that he likes the album in spite of himself: “it’s not pretentious, it has a gritty churn that’ll get in your blood like specks of gravel or the rust that comes to neon.” It wouldn’t sell, he predicted, because it doesn’t sound like the corporate hard rockers Boston, but that’s half the reason he likes it: “So thrash on and bless you, Verlaine,” he ends, revealing just how personal this review has been, “even if you are a creep and never think about jumping a little bit on stage like this guy Richard Hell in the news? Now there’s an image of a rock ‘n’ roll prince, later for stars (that’s for you, Patti).”302
Christgau noted that his year-end poll indexed an industry watershed: the top three artists were all “rank amateurs.” (He doesn’t say “punks,” but all three fell under that loose umbrella as well.) In retrospect other signs are visible: what Christgau had famously dubbed the “Rock-Critic Establishment” had thrown its weight, in 1977, behind UK rather than New York punk. The “punk” label would haunt Television in multiple ways, leading Verlaine to think for years that it, along with too close an identification with the New York scene, had stymied Television’s commercial breakthrough. Following a cross-country American tour in spring 1977 (incongruously supporting Peter Gabriel, a fan of the band but most popular among prog rockers who detested punk) the band spent most of May and June touring the UK and Europe to audiences eager to see the group that had long been lionized as punk founders. The mythology of CBGB’s, partially their creation, preceded them. With mainstream media already equating “punk” with the fashion sensibility McLaren and the Sex Pistols had popularized — already three-years old in New York have having lost a little of its edge — Television puzzled reviewers and some audience members who expected flashier stage antics or the snottiness and violence associated with UK punks. Television, by contrast, seemed “cold,” an assessment buttressed by press accounts, hardly exaggerated, of icy relations with their supporting act, Blondie. The album, which sold much better in the UK than it did at home, peaked on the British charts at No. 28.
Back home in February, amid encouraging early reviews and not yet on the road to support the album, the band played three triumphal nights at CBGB’s. John Rockwell, in the Times, warned, as he had when Patti Smith first signed with Arista, that audiences should hurry downtown, since the group couldn’t play small venues for long. “There’s a certain point where you think you deserve something,” Verlaine told Rockwell. The article ran with a large close-up of the singer glancing to the side of the frame, cigarette ash aglow. “I’m sick of playing places where we bump into things.” This was a comment Verlaine made more than once that spring. When Rockwell rattles off the now familiar story of how Television stumbled onto CBGB’s three years earlier, Verlaine comments with confidence on his role in the interaction with Kristal: “I went and asked him, ‘Why don’t you play rock here?’ … He wasn’t making any money so he said, ‘Why not?’ Soon we got a following, and every band in the world converged on the place.”303
True to Rockwell’s prediction, Television never played CBGB’s again, a clear signal of Verlaine’s increased distance from the scene. Many assumed he had shrugged it off in direct mimicry of Dylan rejecting the folk movement, as if he and Patti Smith had conspired to imitate jointly Dylan’s cool detachment on display in Don’t Look Back.304
On returning from their European tour, the band headlined a few dates in the Midwest, then returned to New York, though they dropped out of sight on the local scene, especially Verlaine. One reason was purely financial: with no money to show for their troubles, they sold off their equipment to live. Over a decade later Verlaine insisted they had never made royalties on the album beyond the initial advance. Other troubled plagued them: Lloyd had parlayed the band’s critical cache, and a mutual rehab doctor, into a friendship with Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend. Their shared habit led them into adventures such as roaming the Lower East Side in a limo, looking for their dealer. (“The dealers were like, ‘GET THAT FUCKING LIMO OFF MY BLOCK! WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY?” he recalled in Please Kill Me.305) Lloyd’s addiction ominously echoed the one that had been partly responsible for alienating Verlaine from Hell two years earlier.
Still, the band threw its energy into recording a follow-up record, Adventure. That album — which had a cleaner sound and poppier production than the debut, tracks like “Days” and “Glory” in retrospect seeming to predict a decade of American college rock — fared well with American critics generally but received mixed reactions on the local scene and in the UK. Roy Trakin, reviewing the album for New York Rocker (which was generally supportive of Television), predicted that “die-hard Television addicts are gonna be disappointed with this LP” and thought it “eliminates much of the fiery dynamism the band still manages in live performance.”306 Trakin’s criticism was rooted in the album’s recording history: Richard Lloyd had spent several weeks in the hospital in the middle of the recording sessions with a heart inflammation, endocarditis, brought on, as he acknowledged, by shooting up. As a result his presence on the album is severely diminished. The same issue of New York Rocker featured Television as one of New York’s top 10 bands, but gave them only 7–1 odds of breaking into the mainstream: “Their followup has insiders buzzing, but the group’s low public profile hurts their immediate chances for widespread exposure. Ultimately it must be in the grooves and if FM programmers ever wake up to the fact, they’ll find that Television possesses strong ‘crossover’ potential.”307 Many on the scene seemed to take Television’s “low public profile” personally.
If such withdrawal had hurt them at home, the enthusiasm they had generated in the UK quickly spawned a backlash. The NME’s Julie Burchill, nursing grudges against her rival writer Nick Kent, savaged Adventure and the whole New York scene, under the headline “The TV Backlash Starts Here.” Kent’s endorsement of Marquee Moon, she suggested, had prompted that album’s unwarranted success by “auto-suggest[ion].” In her view, Verlaine’s “acid-casualty-type-gibberish
” lyrics were sufficient only for him and Patti Smith to curl up and read French poetry to. Though not all critics agreed by any means, a backlash — perhaps inevitable, considering years of hype — did seem in the works. A British tour in support of the album drew crowds, the album outsold Marquee Moon (making it to No. 7 on the UK charts), but even supportive critics fretted enthusiasm for the band had declined.
By the late summer of ’77 it seemed apparent that the new wave of British punk bands would define the movement that had been lumped under that umbrella term. Alan Betrock, in New York Rocker, sounded slightly resentful: “What the Ramones, Blondie, Patti, and Television started well over two years ago has now become the biggest force in rock ‘n’ roll,” he wrote. “Only one suspects that the English new-wave, with their more extreme politics, sounds, and costumes … will bear the fruits of New York’s labor.”308 The Sex Pistols, writer Lisa Jane Persky complained in the same issue, were nothing more than a Monster made up of bits McLaren stole from early Television and the Ramones. If the band was hampered by transatlantic expectations of what “punk” meant, at home Verlaine felt they had been pigeonholed as a New York band, which made it difficult to get mainstream airplay. To make matters worse, Elektra was not supporting the band domestically, instead favoring the London market, which had shown more initial interest. For years Verlaine would complain that the label had chosen to throw its weight behind Canadian newcomers the Cars — a band with a similar sound but a softer, more pleasant vocals and glossier, radio-friendly production. (The Cars, he said, had broken through by relying on “automatic reference points,” exactly what he had hoped to avoid in his own work.309) In Marquee Moon’s wake, Verlaine had told the Boston Phoenix that there’s “so much prejudice against New Yorkers it’s incredible. In a town like St. Louis, you can’t even get played on the radio if you’re from New York. You walk into a radio station and the guy looks at you like, ‘Here’s another bunch of New York assholes.’ It makes you either want to be an asshole or try to get through to the guy. I don’t mind if they play the record or not, but I’d really like it if they’d listen to it. We’re a different sort of band from what they’re used to, so I think we’re worth a listen.” A year later, following Adventure’s release, he echoed the complaint to Richard Robinson in Hit Parader:
If people still think we are a punk rock band, they’re not even going to listen to this record. I mean I know, especially among radio people, I know how they are — “Oh another New York punk band” phhhewwt they’re not even going to open it. If people listen to, you know, Fleetwood Mac — they’re going to think our first record was grating. There’s all guitars, no sweet harmonies, I mean sure. They’re just going to hear it as like exhausting or something. I mean I like that about our records. I think a record should exhaust you by the time it’s done, otherwise it’s not even worth the seven dollars.310
When the band did play New York again — three nights at the Bottom Line in July 1978 — they were homecoming shows in multiple senses. The band hadn’t played the city for 18 months, and they’d just returned from a UK tour and several successful West Coast shows. Christgau, in an enthusiastic review, highlighted the gulf that separated the band from their erstwhile scenemates:
Television’s disappearance from Manhattan music over the past year and a half has emphasized their musical distance from the flourishing little club scene they helped create. For although they started out post-Velvets, and although “Blank Generation,” which now passes for an anthem at CBGB, began life as a showpiece for Television’s first bassist, Richard Hell, the term punk sits even more oddly on this band than on Talking Heads. At least the Heads remain committed to their own versions of two basic punk principles, brevity and manic intensity, but Television’s principles, as both admirers and detractors have observed, are throwbacks to the psychedelic era. These musicians are lyrical, spaced out, and obscure, and they don’t live in fear of boring somebody. Never mind the raveups and long solos — many of their intros, in which single riffs repeat again and again, stretch toward the one-minute mark, about where the Ramones begin the chorus.311
Christgau concluded by pin-pointing the band’s iconoclastic Utopianism, derived from its bohemian heritage, as its defining feature. They were a revolution unto themselves, a self-contained vanguard unwilling to be associated with the train that followed: “Television is representative of nothing,” Christgau wrote. “Almost every great rock band and a lot of the most successful bad ones culminate some general social tendency, be it the Ramones’ pop economy or Kansas’s greedy middle-American pseudo-seriousness or Steely Dan’s expert programmability or Kiss’s life-sized caricature. But while it’s possible to imagine a late-’60s revival in which Television would spawn countless imitators, at the moment their single-minded Utopian individualism sets them apart. And it is just that that makes them seem so precious.”312
What Christgau couldn’t have known is that within two months the band would throw in the towel.
When that announcement came in September, Television’s breakup heralded, for many, the end of an era. Alan Betrock printed an obituary for the band in New York Rocker, along with a two-page spread that featured photos of the band’s final shows and a full-page reproduction of the homemade flier for a Max’s show with Patti Smith four years earlier. The breakup made Betrock fret for the life of underground rock in general. As the title of another piece in the same issue asked, was this “New Wave Goodbye?” Betrock’s postmortem is deeply personal, revealing how closely critics as well as musicians had pinned their own stories to this scene, which helps to explain the enduring appeal of the CBGB’s mythology: if other bands would successfully break into the mainstream, Television would be the band that remained so true to its principles that they doomed themselves to an early death and cult status. Automatic authenticity.
“SO TELEVISION has broken up and most people want to know why,” Betrock began:
There must be a story there: find out who did what, who said such and such, how much each record sold, and so on. But all that behind-the-scenes stuff is totally beside the point. Does it really matter why? I mean, are there lessons to be learned, mistakes to be circumvented, follies to be unearthed? I think not. Out of New York, they played bars still, college towns with half-filled houses, on stages more accustomed to local amateurs than visionary professionals. Chris Stamey [of the dB’s] said: “They were my favorite band. It’s probably the last time I’ll ever have a favorite.” And he was right.
There were off nights. Granted. There were weak spots. Granted. There were tactical errors, production deficiencies, and hurt egos. All granted. But there was brilliance. There were times when the roof would fly away and we sailed upwards like UFO’s on the Bowery. Perhaps there was just too much to be contained in one unit.
… Now perhaps you wonder if this isn’t all a little too serious. Like, I mean, “Hey, all right already, a great rock band broke up. But there’ll be new ones and spinoffs and solo albums, and commercial success and more great music. So c’mon, what’s the big deal?”
Well, I dunno really. But something is gone, something is lost forever. Something that leaves you feeling a little more alone, a little more empty, and a little more helpless. It gets you in the gut, in the pit of your stomach, where it seems to churn and warn you in advance that something painful is on the horizon. They are survived by artifacts, plastic and mercurial, photos and snapshots of an era that went by too fast and will never come again. They are faded now, unfocussed, unsmiling and cold. I’m feeling kind of cold now myself. Kind of distant. Kind of mixed up and drifting. A beacon has vanished. The anchor is gone. TV is dead. Long live TV.313
298 Kent (1977a).
299 Kent (1977a).
300 Christgau (1991: p. 391).
301 Christgau (1978a).
302 Bangs (1977).
303 Rockwell (1977b).
304 Bangs (1977); Cf. McNeil and McCain (1996: pp. 195–6).
305 McNeil and McCain (1
996: pp. 303).
306 Trakin (1978).
307 “N.Y. Bands” (1978).
308 Betrock (1977).
309 Kozak (1981).
310 Robinson (1978).
311 Christgau (1978b).
312 Christgau (1978b).
313 Betrock (1978).
Coda
Village lore had it that whenever you spotted [Tom] Verlaine in daylight, it was a good omen.
— James Wolcott, The Catsitters: A Novel (2009)
Over the next dozen years, Verlaine released half a dozen solo records, some of which sold better than Television’s albums initially had, all of which deserve larger audiences than they’ve enjoyed, but none of which made him a household name. Marquee Moon, like The Velvet Underground and Nico, enjoyed wider acclaim from subsequent generations of musicians and critics than it did from general audiences. Rolling Stone lists it as number 128 on its list of all-time greatest rock albums; in 2003 the NME ranked it much higher, at number four, beating out anything by the Beatles, the Stones, or Bob Dylan. I was a teenager in the ’80s, and though I lived in the Arizona sticks, I knew enough from reading Rolling Stone and Spin that the post-punk bands soundtracking my smalltown angst — REM, U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Cure — all cited Television and other CB’s bands as primary influences. Still, as a teenager I didn’t know anyone who owned Marquee Moon, let alone Verlaine’s solo stuff. When, in my early twenties, I finally found Television’s albums and bootlegs, they were both familiar and disorienting on first listen, the way you might feel when you find an ancestor’s photograph in an attic trunk and see some of yourself in that strange face.
Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) Page 17