Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (13 page)

After 20 nights with Patti, and still weathering Hell’s departure, Television played three more four-night stands at CBGB’s through June, each with a week or two off in between, headlining over the Modern Lovers as well as newcomers like Planets and the Shirts. In early June, between Television’s runs, Talking Heads made their CBGB’s debut opening for the Ramones. By now CB’s was drawing a couple hundred people per night. But problems seemed to loom on the horizon. In May, Betrock reported a crowd of around 150 for Marbles and the Ramones on a Monday “new band night,” including members of several other bands: “2 Televisions; 3 Milk ‘n’ Cookies; 2 Mumps; 1 Planets; 2 Blondies; 2 ex-Dolls; 1 ex-Television, and so on,” along with friends, relatives, hangers-on, scenemakers, and the press. Fretting that only a third of the crowd may have paid admission, Betrock worried that the scene wouldn’t be able to sustain itself.
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Other tensions threatened the scene’s stability. In the wake of the Television/Patti Smith run and the rise of the Ramones, glitter was becoming increasingly marginal at CB’s, to the degree that one writer, reviewing the previous weekend’s “gay erotic poetry rock” of Emilio Cubeiro, warned of a “precarious sex stance” increasingly inhospitable to women and gays. “[T]he musician-dominated C.B.G.B. crowd,” this critic worried, was wary of threats to “their heterosexual superiority (and usually sexist) bag.” Characterizing the crowd as “young city rednecks” bristling with “teenage machismo,” he reported that some audience members were heckling “faggots” to get off the stage.
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With the Dolls’ demise, glitter’s wane seemed inevitable. Another blow fell in May, when Eric Emerson was killed by a hit and run driver while biking near the West Side Highway.

The end of the glitter era seemed to be confirmed by the UK press’ first major report on CBGB’s. The
NME
, which had mentioned Television the previous summer in a feature on the post-Mercer scene, sent 24-year-old Charles Shaar Murray to gauge the local effects of Patti Smith’s signing. (Murray, along with Nick Kent, was part of an effort on
NME
’s behalf to tap into new music markets and to attract younger readers.) The report was hardly flattering, yet homed in on a major shift that had taken place over the course of the previous year: “scuz” had replaced “flash,” Murray announced. “C.B.G.B. is a toilet. An impossibly scuzzy little club buried somewhere in the sections of the Village that the cab-drivers don’t like to drive through.” The scene that had sprung up there featured “chopped-down, hard-edged, no-bullshit rock ‘n’ roll, totally eschewing the preening Mickey-Mouse decadence that poleaxed the previous new wave of N.Y. bands.” Television provided one of his chief examples of the new order, since they “don’t dress up and they don’t even move much.”
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Anticipating a key descriptor of punk in the coming years, Murray frames Television as “an imaginative return to [rock’s] basics.” He also sees them as “a total product of New York,” a blend of the “traditional and the revolutionary.” Verlaine, he writes, “was evidently severely traumatized by Lou Reed at an impressionable age” and performs “frozen-faced and zombie-eyed, alternately clutch[ing] his mic stand with both hands and blaz[ing] away at off-balance methedrine speed-fingers lead guitar marathons.” Lloyd features as “spraddle-legged and blank-eyed, chopping at his Telecaster like some deranged piece of machinery, braced so that he can lurch in any direction without falling over. He’s wearing Fillmore East T-shirt, which is the ultimate in dressing down.” The bass player (it’s not clear if he’d seen Smith or Hell) “wears his shades on every other number.” The common thread is a detachment from the audience more characteristic of the new movement than its predecessors, though one that had clear precedent in the coolness modeled by Dylan and Lou Reed. “That a band like Television are currently happening and that people are listening to them,” he wrote, “is indisputable proof that rock is a hardier beast than much of the more depressing evidence would suggest.”
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The transatlantic seal of approval seemed to validate and vitalize the scene: Fields gushed in the
News
about Murray’s “raving” review of Television and Patti Smith: “I’ll bet he had been expecting to hate” Television, Fields said, noting that the band had “attract[ed] international attention without yet having signed a recording contract.”
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Finally recognized on their own terms — and not just as afterthoughts to the Velvets or the Dolls — underground bands also edged their way into mainstream domestic publications that summer. Lisa Robinson, now a champion of the Ramones as well as Television, followed a
Rock Scene
feature called “Ballroom on the Bowery” with a more substantial scene profile in
Hit Parader
.
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That summer the
Voice
’s music editor, Robert Christgau, declared Television the “most interesting of New York’s underground rock bands,” and noted that Fred Smith’s arrival led “aficionados” to identify a “thicker” sound in recent shows.

Some uncertainty remained about the final effect of Hell’s departure. Offering the most perceptive criticism of the band to see print since Patti Smith’s early mythmaking, the
Voice
writer Richard Mortifoglio zeroed in on Verlaine’s stage-presence and Hell’s absence. The more animated Verlaine became in recent shows, the more “spittle and sweat flew off his mouth as he screamed,” he couldn’t escape his own reticence, Mortifoglio wrote, which was his “most affecting and engaging quality.” There’s some irony that the focus here, in the wake of Hell’s departure, trains on Verlaine’s image more than on the music. But Mortifoglio sees in Verlaine’s “austere personal style” a “graceful self-effacement” that lends to Television’s mystique, the projection of a “Gary Cooper manchild, stunned into an electric metaphor by the shock of city life.” The recurrence of electric metaphors in Verlaine’s lyrics, poetry, and stage presence suggested the “ecstatic insanity” of his own self-invention: “like a village idiot visited by tongues, [he] suddenly become articulate enough to communicate exactly how it is up there.” Ficca and Lloyd seem to distract from Verlaine’s transcendent effect, Mortifoglio feels, and not even Smith’s “cushiony undercurrent,” which newly grounds Television’s songs, can make up for the “conceptual void” Hell left behind. In spite of technical shortcomings, Hell had balanced Verlaine’s “mystifications” through his “wide-eyed loony tunes.” Now Verlaine just seemed lonely. Hell, that is, would continue to shape Television’s image even in his absence, which served to make Verlaine, the “genuine auteur,” all the more “precious.”
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In the summer of ’75, CB’s crackled with electricity, notwithstanding the feeling some old-timers had that its clubhouse days were past. A whole bohemian genealogy now materialized on the Bowery like ghosts inhabiting descendents’ homes: Ginsberg and Burroughs could be seen at tables near the stage. Lou Reed now regularly hung out. “[A]ll those types of people,” one regular would recall, “which [lent] an underground poet-beat sort of feeling to it.”
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At the end of June Bob Dylan resurfaced in the Village, making an impromptu appearance at a show Patti Smith played at the Other End (as the Bitter End was briefly renamed) on 26 June. When he introduced himself afterwards, the press heralded the meeting of old and new scenes and treated Patti like a star. “He said to me, ‘Any poets around here?’” Patti reported, “[a]nd I said, ‘I don’t like poetry anymore. Poetry sucks!’ I really acted like a jerk.” When photographers approached them backstage, she pushed Dylan aside and said: “Fuck you, take
my
picture, boys!”
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On 7 July their photo showed up on the
Voice
’s cover with the headline: “Tarantula Meets Mustang: Bob Dylan Gives His Blessing to Patti Smith.” Dylan played several shows in the Village that week as part of the First Annual Village Folk Festival, including sets with Muddy Waters and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. On the 12th he showed up with Bobby Neuwirth, Patti Smith, and Tom Verlaine in tow. Patti, described by one less-sympathetic
Voice
reporter as “your basic androgynous Keith Richard freak” — joined Dylan on stage for several numbers while Verlaine watched from the audience.
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Before long Television would add Dylan and Stones songs — “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” and “Satisfaction” — to their setlists, usually as encores.

Two weeks later Television hit the road to Ohio for their first out-of-town gigs. Patti had sequestered herself in advance of recording her debut album with John Cale. CBGB’s, meanwhile, was held down by Talking Heads and the Ramones. The invitation to play Cleveland’s Piccadilly Inn came from Peter Laughner, a
Creem
writer and member of the Cleveland-based Rocket from the Tombs. Laughner had been to New York that summer and was transformed by seeing Television play. In Cleveland, Laughner’s band opened for Television both nights, though the New Yorkers rolled into town just as Rocket was imploding. (Its members would later resurface in punk bands Pere Ubu and Dead Boys, both of which would make strong showings in New York.) Television, for its part, played two respectable sets, soldiering through old standards (“Hard On Love” “Poor Circulation”) and newer ones (a rousing version of “Foxhole,” in which the suggestive opening line “
Hey
, soldier boy!” is replaced by a more antagonistic shout). They also displayed their new tendency to improvise, with gradually expanding versions of “Little Johnny Jewel,” “Marquee Moon,” and a rocking ten-minute rendition of “Breaking In My Heart,” which departed from a Velvets-like “White Light White Heat” stomp to proceeded along Patti Smith’s spoken-word line, gradually bringing a chattering crowd to silence. Laughner had built up Television to mythic status among the Cleveland scene, with only a tape of four live tracks to support his case. As his bandmate Cheetah Chrome (later of Dead Boys) would recall years later, Laughner wanted Television all to himself, exacerbating tensions within his own band. Verlaine, Chrome recalled, seemed unapproachable, distant.
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According to Fields’s column in the
News
on 24 July, several of Television’s New York fans made their way to Cleveland for the concerts.
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A few weeks later Laughner raved about their live sets in
Creem
, more national press for a band that still hadn’t signed a recording contract:

Rock Scene
ran photos of the Cleveland shows several months later, in January ’76, under the headline “Television Visits the New Liverpool.”

When the band returned to New York, CBGB’s had already been the site of an underground rock festival for two weeks — what Kristal was billing as a showcase for “New York’s top 40 unsigned bands.” Targeting summer weeks when nothing much was happening downtown, Hilly had no problem finding bands to audition despite the stifling heat. He turned acts and patrons away. The initial ads, for shows running from July 16 to 27, listed 24 bands in alphabetical order: “Antenna, Blondy [
sic
], City Lights, Day Old Bread, David Patrick Kelly, the Demons, Jelly Roll, Johnny’s Dance Band, Mad Brook, Mantis, Marbles, Movies, Mink DeVille, Planet Daze, Ramones, Raquel, Shirts, Silent Partners, Sting Rays, Talking Heads, Television, Tuff Darts, Trilogy, and Uncle Son.”
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Short sets started late and ran through the night, winding down at four or five o’clock the next morning. Crowds spilled onto the sidewalk outside the club. The “Arabian swelter,” James Wolcott wrote in the
Voice
, was exacerbated by a broken AC system.
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Along with Wolcott, other local press supporters swung into action. The
Voice
listed the festival as a pick, though it warned, defensively, that the club’s atmosphere wasn’t as exotic as
NME
had made out. Hell and Thunders’s Heartbreakers headlined the second weekend, the same nights Television was playing Cleveland. Although Television was named in the early ads, they only returned in time to play the final two nights of what was already a substantial extension, headlining over Marbles, Talking Heads, and the old Mercer’s act Ruby and the Rednecks on Saturday and Sunday, August 2–3. Crowning CBGB’s highest profile event yet, Television reigned as undisputed kings of the unsigned underground.

Post-festival press was substantial and aimed to make Big Statements about the meaning of what the September
Rock Scene
dubbed the “New York IMPLOSION!” Writing in the
Voice
, Wolcott called the festival “the most important event in New York rock since the Velvet Underground played the Balloon Farm” and identified what he saw as a “conservative impulse” in the new wave, by which he meant a back-to-basics “counterthrust to the prevailing baroque theatricality” of corporate rock. But Wolcott stresses that CB’s isn’t a “flash” scene like the Mercer: regulars are “dressed in denims and loose-fitting shirts — sartorial-style courtesy of Canal Jeans.” New bands heralded a retrenchment: they would call mainstream rock’s dinosaurs — the Who, the Stones, the Beach Boys — back to edgier ’60s roots. It’s no accident, Wolcott writes, that 1975’s album of the year so far was “a collection of basement tapes made in 1967.”
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