Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (16 page)

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Authors: Bryan Waterman

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Verlaine was already swimming against an historiographic tide. In the effort to define the new wave, the
Voice
’s Wolcott again offered the most thoughtful criticism at this juncture. Taking a genealogical approach that would become standard over time, he starts with the Velvets, describing Patti Smith, Roxy Music, David Bowie, the Dolls, Talking Heads, and Television all as transatlantic inheritors of their “nihilism of the street.” Also at the
Voice
, Christgau took his own stab at pinning down Television and the downtown scene, via a comparison of a night spent watching the Who at Madison Square Garden (his fourteenth time seeing that band) and the next night seeing Television at CBGB’s (his eighth time seeing them). While he preferred the intimacy downtown, he still worried that “[Tom] is too sensitive for this crummy Bowery bar,” a view that Verlaine would soon endorse. But could Television ever become as big as the Who? “Television is a little too ambitious, and yes, a little too uncommercial, as well,” Christgau worried. “I don’t think they’re capable of a statement as powerful as ‘Baba O’Riley’ at the Garden last Thursday.”
²⁴⁶

Christgau suggests the degree to which CB’s was becoming a critics’ bar as much as it belonged to the bands. Its regulars also included a bevy of photographers, filmmakers, and other visual artists. Just as the ’60s downtown scene had crossed disciplinary lines, so the new “punk” ethos drew on and borrowed from other arts scenes in adjacent neighborhoods. The first show curated by Jeffrey Deitch in 1975, for instance, which helped launch nearby TriBeCa as an artists’ neighborhood, featured Warhol-influenced “artists who made the practice of art inseparable from their actual lives — a life performance,” the same sentiment Hell had expressed about the Dolls and tapped when he conceptualized Television’s image. Deitch’s show included work by Marc Miller and others who directly engaged the CBGB’s scene.
²⁴⁷Commercial rock photographers such as Godlis and Bob Gruen also hung out at CB’s, and Roberta Bayley leveraged photos of the Ramones and other local bands into a career. As a result, CB’s early period is thoroughly documented, often by prodigious talent. John Rockwell, who famously attended shows at CBGB’s wearing a suit and bowtie, noted in the summer of ’76 that CB’s “has its palpable attractions for writers who might have grown up in clubs but who now find themselves forced to cover a never-ending circuit of concerts in indoor arenas and outdoor stadiums.”
²⁴⁸Hanging out became a way for critics, artists, and photographers to maintain a sense of adolescent danger and belonging.

By early 1976, with crowds continuing to grow, some writers were already expressing nostalgia for the club’s earlier days, when Hilly stocked bookcases near the entrance and provided a homier feel. The days of haggling with Roberta Bayley to get in the door without paying were coming to an end. And Television, who played monthly four-night stands between January and May, was already starting to position its members as the scene’s founding fathers, now too big for the bar. In Verlaine’s inaugural profile in
New York Rocker
, he highlighted his own role in “stumbl[ing] upon CBGBs.” Even Richard Hell, no longer in the band, was locating Television’s historic position as punk’s vanguard; in a piece on the Ramones he wrote for
Hit Parader
in 1976 he noted that the band was one of a half dozen drawn to the Bowery by “Television’s ‘success’ there in late 1974.”
²⁴⁹

Verlaine’s sense that his band was “made for a bigger stage” depended on catching the same train out that Patti was on. The pressure was increased, too, by label interest in other CB’s bands. In January, Richard Hell recorded demos with the Heartbreakers, including a version of “Blank Generation.” Blondie’s act was tightening as it debuted a new five-piece format on Valentine’s Day. The group had attracted the attention of Marty Thau, the Dolls’ first producer, who would eventually help Harry and company land a nationally distributed single and sign them to his own label for a full album that summer. Seymour Stein of Sire Records had put the Ramones under contract the previous November and would shortly get Talking Heads too, based on demos they recorded in April. Richard Hell would leave the Heartbreakers and assemble a new band, the Voidoids, debuting at CBGB’s late that year after releasing an EP on Ork Records.

As downtown acts groped around for their own ways to mainstream attention, and with Patti touring the country in the early part of that year, Verlaine and Lanier, left behind, recorded a new set of Television demos to give to Clive Davis. Two years had passed since the band had played its first gigs at the Townhouse Theater and CBGB’s. A year and a half had passed since Richard Williams had heard them play the Truck and Warehouse show, and over a year had gone by since the failed Eno sessions for Island. The band had matured considerably since then, and Lanier knew them better than Eno had. His demos were “warmer,” as Verlaine put it later. The songs they recorded were “Torn Curtain,” “I Don’t Care,” “Guiding Light,” and “O Mi Amore”: two old, two new, two up tempo, and two slow burners, two that would make it onto
Marquee Moon
and two that would be left on the cutting room floor. Davis’s Arista showed interest; Sire and Atlantic were also sniffing around, but the former offered too little and the latter thought the band was from another planet. When Davis finally offered them a contract, they passed, worried about direct competition with Patti. By the end of the summer, though, they had finally found a match: Elektra, home of the Doors, Love, the Stooges, and
Nuggets
. Danny Fields helped arrange a private set at CB’s for Elektra’s Karin Berg, who signed them near the end of July.
²⁵⁰The deal called for a second album within a year.
²⁵¹

If Verlaine was beginning to distance himself from the underground, some there returned his disdain. “The truth was,” Lisa Robinson would recall, some of “these bands didn’t like each other very much.”
²⁵²One newcomer, the streetwise rocker Willy DeVille, was infuriated when Terry Ork wouldn’t book “just another white blues band.” He appealed to Hilly on behalf of his band, Mink DeVille. “It was like a school of vampires,” he said of the CB’s scene a decade later.
²⁵³Mink DeVille’s first gig almost resulted in a rumble with the Ramones, and DeVille, whose music more fully engaged the Latino Lower East Side than most CB’s bands, would later disparage the rest of the punk scene to reporters: “Yeah, the Blank Generation — I understand what guys like Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell are talking about,” he told a writer from
NME
in 1977, “but they’re fuckin’ rich kids from private schools in New Jersey. Personally I live close enough to the void that I don’t have to flirt with it.”
²⁵⁴

Verlaine also rubbed the critic Lester Bangs the wrong way, resulting in long-standing friction. Bangs, who quit
Creem
and moved to New York in mid-’76, was eager to enter the scene. He loved the Ramones but thought Talking Heads were preppy nerds and that Television sounded like San Francisco psychedelia warmed over. “
This
is punk?” he asked on first seeing them.
²⁵⁵Though he later warmed to CBGB’s, he never gained affection for Verlaine. Being a Television fan seemed to be prerequisite for admission to the scene’s inner circle, which turned him off, and he thought Television’s shows, filled with worshipful fans, were church-like.
²⁵⁶“[E]verybody had been telling me for three years they’re the new Velvet Underground, y’know?” he told fellow critic Richard Meltzer. “And I mean they reminded me so much of the Grateful Dead, just boring solos, y’know, … endless, laborious climbing up in the scales, then get to the top and there’d be a moment of silence and everybody in the crowd would go berserk applauding, ha!” Bangs was also miffed by an awkward dinner with Verlaine and Patti Smith. “Who gives a fuck what I think of your fuckin’ band, let’s just be friends,” Bangs demanded, but Verlaine remained reserved. Bangs later heard from Peter Laughner that Verlaine didn’t think he’d “make it” in New York, for which Bangs never forgave him. For the most part they’d pass in the street without acknowledging one another. He “always pretends that he doesn’t see me, y’know,” Bangs told Meltzer, “he’s a weird
snob
!”
²⁵⁷Asked about the stand-off as late as ’79, Verlaine said: “I don’t know if I’d recognize him. I met him, like, twice about four years ago.”
²⁵⁸

Tension within the original CB’s scene escalated in March, when perceived homophobic heckling from the Dictators’ singer, Handsome Dick Manitoba, led Wayne County to clobber him with a mic stand, resulting in Manitoba hauled off to the ER with a broken collarbone. Fields reported that Manitoba had been insulting performers for weeks and that some thought he deserved it, but the incident caused rifts among the club’s regulars. Benefit shows were held on both sides (three out of four Ramones performed on Wayne’s behalf, but Joey abstained).
²⁵⁹Newcomer Bangs threw himself into the fray, championing Manitoba against what he called the “faggot mafia” that secretly ruled the downtown scene, and which he planned to expose in a
Punk
magazine piece that would also trash Television, though he perhaps wisely had the editors kill the article before it could run.

In May, the Ramones became the second CB’s band to release an album.
New York Rocker
ran the glossy national ad campaign. Television, though, remained “the stars of the scene,” and Verlaine its “reigning sex symbol,” in the
News
’s estimation. (“Don’t see them if you’re on speed,” the reporter added helpfully.
^²⁶⁰) Through the summer of 1976, just as the nation was celebrating its bicentennial birthday, the band performed steadily at CB’s. Verlaine and Smith published a small volume of poems together, called
The Night
. The poems’ temperature was high — riddled with references to arson and “High gloss lipstick kiss[es]” while sirens and flames blared. But their romantic relationship had finally run its course. That March Patti had met Fred “Sonic” Smith, a member of the proto-punk Detroit legends the MC5, and kicked off an entanglement that would, eventually, lead to marriage and her relocation to Michigan, where she would withdraw from public view for a decade and a half, until her husband’s death in 1994.

With a contract secured in July, the band took off nearly the rest of the year from live performance while they prepared to record. Verlaine worried about marketability and thought the local brand might prove a stumbling block. “I don’t think we’re an inaccessible New York band,” he told one interviewer on the eve of signing with Elektra. “I think we’ve got a lot of commercial potential, given the right company support.”
²⁶¹Once the contract was settled, the band selected producer Andy Johns, who was best known as engineer for most of Led Zeppelin’s records, to engineer and co-produce their debut. Verlaine said he was drawn to Johns out of admiration of his work on the Stones’ 1973
Goats Heads Soup
. After spending November in the studio, they emerged via a lavish photo spread for the December
New York Rocker
and five year-end shows, culminating in full houses at CBGB’s on 30 December (300 people) and a sold-out show to 3,000 the following night at the Palladium, where they shared a bill with Patti Smith and John Cale.
²⁶²Only a decade had passed since Cale was on his way up with the Velvets. Now, on the eve of
Marquee Moon
’s release, Television — so frequently compared to Cale’s former band — were
New York Rocker
’s Band of the Year, poised at last to break out of the downtown unerground.