Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (14 page)

Wolcott celebrates CBGB’s above all as a place that allowed bands to refine their sounds in front of live audiences. Television offers his prime example of the fruits of this approach:

Wolcott’s piece, elevating an unsigned local band to comparison with the biggest band in the world, is significant for its careful consideration of the new scene’s relationship to its predecessors, whether British invasion, Mercer’s glitter, or the amphetamine-fueled Happenings of the Exploding Plastic Inevitable. Unlike ’60s Happenings, though, which aimed for total involvement of the spectators (Wolcott quotes John Cale on this point), the new bands aimed for cool detachment. And as for the holdovers from glitter, Wolcott wants none of them: he doesn’t mince words in dismissing Ruby and the Rednecks and lobs a grenade at their supporters in the
Interview
crowd. The Ramones, by contrast, Wolcott thinks are a “killer band.” Obviously, for him they have shed any early Warhol overtones.
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That fall, Television decided to follow Patti Smith’s example and release an independent single. Smith was now in the studio with John Cale recording
Horses
, where Verlaine played guitar on “Break It Up,” a song he’d co-written. He continued to see Smith romantically, though she was still entangled with Lanier, who also appears on the LP. With Smith’s career moving into high gear, it was time for Television to make its move. Recording at Patti Smith’s midtown rehearsal space, with each band member in a separate room, they used a four-track Teac tape deck into which Verlaine plugged his guitar directly, with no amplification. The band recorded six songs, most of which had been on the Picadilly Inn setlists: “Hard On Love,” “Careful,” “Friction,” “Prove It,” “Little Johnny Jewel,” and “Fire Engine.” Notably absent, considering they were thinking about a single, was “Venus de Milo,” which as one of their oldest crowd pleasers would have been a natural choice.

Some of the arrangements from the fall ’75 demos suggest the band’s trajectory toward increased accessibility. “Hard On Love” (which shares a title with a Marc Bolan record from ’72), for instance, has been slowed to a gentler Latin beat, with pleasant arpeggios in the lead guitar line and a comforting call-and-response in the chorus (Verlaine sings: “You’re so hard on love” and the band responds: “Tell me why, tell me why”). But Verlaine seized on the most inaccessible of these tracks as his choice for the single: “Little Johnny Jewel,” a seven-minute song that epitomized his tendency toward visionary Romanticism. Think William Blake, Verlaine told a reporter for
Crawdaddy!
some months later: “He was the same kinda guy.” The song stages a conflict, then, between Romanticism and modernity: “Johnnie [
sic
] Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago,” Verlaine went on to explain:

The song follows Johnny, who’s somnambulistic or perhaps stoned, to an airfield, where, “with a chest full of lights,” he crouches behind a fence while airplanes roar overhead, taking off and landing. It takes minutes to narrate this sequence before Johnny “loses his senses” and Verlaine’s guitar, spasmodically approximating Johnny’s derangement, itself takes into flight, the solo climbing higher and higher as Lloyd strums a rhythm line that recalls Link Wray’s “Rumble” (1958). Verlaine jams for two and a half more minutes — Nick Kent would later disparagingly, though with uncanny accuracy, compare the solo to Country Joe and the Fish — before the band coordinates a come-down and Verlaine reprises the opening lines. “If you see him looking lost,” the song advises in its finale, “You don’t got to come on so boss.” Come on in what sense? Is Johnny Jewel, like the character in the Ramones’ “53rd and 3rd,” turning tricks? Perhaps: “All you gotta do for that guy / Is wink your eye.” Others have suggested that Johnny’s prototype may have been Verlaine’s twin brother, John, whose heroin addiction would eventually claim his life in the mid ’80s.
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In any case, if Kent is right that the song recalls Barry Melton’s proto-psych guitar solos with Country Joe and the Fish, it’s as if the guy in that band’s “Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine” actually
was
in the city, trying to get back in the subway of Martha’s mind. As the roaring engines of “Little Johnny Jewel” made clear, Television’s music has no patience for country life, period.

The Blakean reference suggests that Johnny is more than a simple observer of modernity. He’s prophetic, “Just trying to tell a vision.” Like Blake’s, Verlaine’s own poetry had been preoccupied with vision, violence, flashes of lightning, and sensory doubling — what Ginsberg called “Blake-light tragedy” — meant to suggest the capacity for, and yet the tendency to fall short of, transcendental experience. In a 12-minute live version from 1978, released in 2003 on
Live at the Old Waldorf
, Johnny is stymied not only by modernity’s predilection for “preferences” but also by the drudgery of day labor on the docks: “Pick it up there, and put it over there,” he’s told, over and over and over, until he finally flees in order to find himself the recipient of revelation near the runway.

“Little Johnny Jewel” recalls Patti Smith’s sense of Television as a band both Messianic and vulnerable. Written in the wake of Hell’s departure from the band, its boy-hero with lights in his chest echoes an image Hell had developed in an unpublished novella,
The Voidoid
, written around the time the Neon Boys folded but unpublished until 1996. Hell’s story featured characters loosely based on Verlaine and Hell — Skull and Lips — and included a long sequence narrated from the Hoboken hooker-poet Theresa Stern’s point of view. The image from the novella that resonates with “Little Johnny Jewel” involves Hell’s avatar, Lips, a vampire who develops a hole in his chest, which eventually fills with a bulb, then a lens, then a television for a heart: “The hole in there gets a picture, and he thinks, ‘Maybe this is what the hole is for?’”
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The image would return in an article Hell wrote about the Ramones for
Hit Parader
after he’d left Television: “The music The Ramones create from [their general frustration] is incredibly exciting. It gives you the same sort of feeling you might derive from savagely kicking in your smoothly running TV set and then finding real thousand dollar bills inside.”
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If the vampire had grown a TV heart, a few years later that heart had shattered.

Verlaine’s choice of “Little Johnny Jewel” as the band’s first single created a major conflict. By far the longest track they had recorded, it clocked in at just over seven minutes and would have to be spread over both sides of a 7-inch single. “Careful” or “Fire Engine” would have been closer to a three-minute radio edit and either would have made a more accessible vinyl debut, as would have the catchier “Hard On Love” or “Prove It.” Lloyd thought Verlaine’s choice was disastrous. The song wasn’t yet well known by fans of their live shows, and it didn’t pack the punch of their steady-building double boilers, such as “Marquee Moon” (equally problematic given the length: so much so that they didn’t even record it at this juncture). The solo belonged entirely to Verlaine. Plus, there would be no B-side, hence no exposure for another song. Verlaine would later say he had conceived it more as an album than as a single.
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In Verlaine’s defense, however, this problem wasn’t exactly unprecedented in American rock: Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” itself six minutes long in willful disregard of radio formats, had been spread over two sides of a 45 rpm disc, at least on the promotional versions given to DJs. “[T]he other side was just a continuation,” Dylan had explained in a press conference at the time. “[I]f anyone was interested they could just turn it over and listen to what really happens.”
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Verlaine may have had similar feelings about “what really happens” in the second half of this song. Alan Licht notes how radical Verlaine’s move was: “[F]ew bands of the day would have thought of documenting themselves for art’s sake using a medium that was mainly geared toward radio play.”
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Lloyd threatened to quit if Verlaine went ahead with his choice, and that’s exactly what happened. The single, underwritten by Terry Ork, launched the Ork label. Less than ten days after the tracks were recorded, Fields reported in his 28 August column that Lloyd had left the band, to be replaced by “a famous musician from Cleveland.” For several weeks it looked as if Peter Laughner really would join Television, especially after Fields reported that Lloyd would launch a new band of his own. In October the single went on sale at Village Oldies, by mail order (advertised in the
Voice
and in
Creem
), and at the door at CBGB’s. Despite Lloyd’s reservations, the
Voice
gave it prominent notice in its centerfold spread:

The same issue that featured this rave from Wolcott also included an ad for shows Television was slated to play at Mother’s with a UK band called Bananas. Wolcott’s concert listing notes that fliers for the show, posted around downtown, announce Tom Verlaine rather than Television: in any case, Wolcott felt, this would be a “should-see event”: “Verlaine and crew are erratic in performance but their material is unique, and when they rise to the moment, they’re thrillingly out of control.”

Before the Mother’s shows could take place, peace was somehow brokered between Verlaine and Lloyd. Laughner was dismissed. He returned to Cleveland where he wrote a wistful review of the single for
Creem
:

Some listeners, hearing Television for the first time on vinyl, were as enthusiastic as Laughner. In London, Vic Goddard, who would soon help form the British punk band Subway Sect, had imagined Television would sound like something else entirely as he stared at New York gig posters Malcolm McLaren prominently displayed in his new fashion boutique. When he eventually heard the single, he “thought it was a modern jazz quartet. I was totally blown away — it was one of the best things I had ever heard.”
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Others, especially those who favored the band’s earlier incarnation with Hell, were perplexed or put off. Charles Shaar Murray, returning to New York to profile the “Sound of ’75,” called it “rotten.”
Creem
’s lead critic, Lester Bangs, agreed. Both would turn out to be short sighted, as the single would become a collector’s item and the song a crowd favorite. The 15-minute version performed in 1978 and released on the bootleg cassette
The Blow Up
(1982) would be compared by Christgau to Coltrane; the solo, he wrote in the liner notes, was Verlaine’s “ultimate statement.”