Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (17 page)
Read Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) Online
Authors: Bryan Waterman
Electricity kills the subtle mysteries of the city night — and then resurrects them in new forms.
— William Chapman Sharpe,
New York Nocturne
(2008)
I like thinking of myself as invisible.
— Tom Verlaine,
Spin
, 1987
In November 1976, Television and Andy Johns spent three weeks recording
Marquee Moon
at A&R Studios on 48th Street. Opened by Phil Ramone in 1960, the studio still had its original soundboard. Ramone had since expanded operations, taking over a Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue, where he’d recently engineered Dylan’s
Blood on the Tracks
. But he continued to lease the 48th Street space for a price the band could afford on its budget from Elektra. The studio may have been run down — “How can I work in a place like this?” Johns repeatedly asked — but it was storied: Coltrane had recorded there, as had Dylan, Van Morrison, and the Velvet Underground.
Johns had no prior knowledge of the band and had never heard them perform before entering the studio. Verlaine had been attracted to him because he remained relatively invisible as a producer, “getting really decent overall rock sounds without messing with the arrangements,” Verlaine told a writer for
Crawdaddy!
. The band wanted to keep arrangements minimal, even more stripped down than the Stones had on
Goats Head Soup
: “no horns, no strings, no synthesizers, no acoustic guitar.”
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The result would approximate their live sound, foregrounding the friction between Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s guitars. Verlaine later ascribed the sessions’ success to Johns being so “performance oriented — he recognized the hot take.”
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The band had spent the better part of fall ’76 in rehearsal, sharpening the songs: “We had to learn to play all of our songs without the vocals because that’s the way you make a record,” Lloyd told
New York Rocker
. “Where I would normally play a certain basic riff and then throw frills around it, we had to condition ourselves to know the basics first.” The result was a tighter sound on all the songs. “It’s not that there is less experimentation going on, it’s just that everything is clear in our heads as to the way we want it to sound.”
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Settling in with Johns required acclimation on all sides. “My first impression was that they couldn’t play and couldn’t sing and the music was very bizarre,” Johns said later. He also had to bring in equipment to supplement the outdated studio’s set-up. Lloyd recalled that Johns had set up the drums without input from the band and when he played back the initial recordings, “by God, out of the speakers, out of Billy Ficca’s drums, came John Bonham’s drum sound! Tom looked at me, and looked at Fred and Billy. Billy was like, ‘It sounds pretty good to me,’ and Tom’s like, ‘No, no, no, no, no. You’ve got to undo all of this.’” When Verlaine described the sound he wanted, Johns responded: “Oh, this must be like a Velvets thing, right? It’s New York thing, right?’”
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Verlaine wanted to keep studio gimmickry minimal, sticking with a live sound: “clean Fender guitars.” Lloyd pushed the envelope a little more, double-tracking his parts, repeating his lead and rhythm lines virtually note for note: “When Andy Johns began recording us I suggested that I could double my parts,” Lloyd recalled, an idea he took from Phil Spector and the Beatles. On some songs he layered his parts even further — up to eight tracks on “Guiding Light.”
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What resulted is the shimmering, chorused quality of the album’s guitar sounds. Verlaine approved of the results, agreeing that the doubling “sounds better than just a little delay, left and right,” he later told
Guitar World
magazine.
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Other effects were subtle: Johns swung a mic like a lasso while Lloyd played his part for “Elevation.”
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Otherwise the takes were relatively straightforward. After the first week recording, Johns jaunted to California, returning to mix after the band had done a good portion of the production legwork. When he heard what they’d done, according to Verlaine, he said, “Jesus, this is great!”
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For the album’s cover the group went to Mapplethorpe, who had shot the cover of
Horses
. The photograph they ultimately selected situates Verlaine a step in front of the rest of the band, with Lloyd staggered next, then Smith, and Ficca receding farthest into the background. Everyone looks rather serious, muscles tensed, veins bulging on the back of hands. Only Ficca approaches anything like a smile. Verlaine’s right hand crosses his body; his left is held up in front of him as if he’s about to offer something to the viewer, but his hand is empty, his fist slightly clenched. He could just as easily be withholding something from you as offering.
When Mapplethorpe gave the band the contact prints, Lloyd took the band’s favorite shot to a Times Square print shop and asked for color Xeroxes — still a rarity in 1976 — so the band members could each take a copy home to mull over. The first few came out oddly colored, but Lloyd asked to keep them and told the worker to make several more copies “while turning the knobs with his eyes closed.” It was like a Warhol thing, he thought to himself, recalling Terry Ork’s work on Warhol’s screenprint multiples. When he took the distorted images back to the band, they chose one of the altered versions over Mapplethorpe’s original, which Fred Smith framed and kept in his possession.
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The final result looks like reception on a color television with the contrast slightly off. Or perhaps you could call it a double exposure.
Marquee Moon
is a nocturnal album, set largely out of doors. But in the era before the Walkman, these are experiences and scenes to be imagined from the comfort of an interior space with a stereo system. While it’s absolutely possible in 2011 to listen to this album while actually walking the streets of lower Manhattan after midnight — an experience I’d recommend — that possibility didn’t exist for most in 1977, though Nick Kent would later describe listening to an advance tape of the album on a portable recorder as he stumbled through London’s smack houses.
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For most of the original release’s listeners, the album began by fitting the disc on your turntable’s spindle, setting the grooves spinning, and lowering the needle. Then, when the grind of “See No Evil” kicked in, you’d
imagine
yourself walking through a semi-medieval downtown landscape, by turns bright and doubly dark.
Maybe you’d follow along with the lyrics, printed on the sleeve. Making sense of Verlaine’s lyrics has always been a bit of a dangerous proposition: their obscurity is a good part of Television’s mystique, and the act of deciphering — and arguing with friends about — their meanings remains one of the album’s many pleasures. If you knew these songs live before you heard them on vinyl, or if you never bothered to read the lyrics, you might already have formed phrases of your own to fill in where you couldn’t make out what Verlaine was saying. “I couldn’t understand a single word [of] Verlaine’s strangled vocals,” Peter Laughner said of seeing Television live before they’d recorded, “but the feelings came on like razors and methadrine. His singing voice has this marvelous quality of slurring all dictions into what becomes distortions of actual lines, so that without a lyric sheet you can come away with a whole other song … which means you’re doing a third of the work.”
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Adding to this sense, Verlaine’s lyrics, as Hell’s had been, were fueled by puns and double-entendres, filled with riddles and word games, inside jokes: “Get it?” he asks before launching into the final section of “See No Evil,” as if he’s calling on you to make sense of things or join him in a joke. Asked by
Punk
magazine about the lyrics, Verlaine called them atmospheric: “I mean, you don’t have to say what you mean to get across.” Lloyd chimed in: “It’s like you say five words and you mean the sixth.” Verlaine: “Right.”
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In such moments, Verlaine’s project is compatible with a post-Cagean conceptualism that would bring audiences to some awareness of ways they participate in meaning-making, though in rock ‘n’ roll that process is less overt than in other forms of performance Cage inspired.
Verlaine’s long engagement with poetry, especially in this period, would seem to authorize
some
literary critical self-indulgence. His lyrics, after all, are a main reason Television’s contemporaries referred to the band as cerebral or intellectual, though they were sometimes also dismissed as inscrutable LSD after-effects whose meaning was only plain to their author. The lyrics sheet itself creates some tension on this front: it offers an invitation to interpretation, not simply by printing the words, but because it sometimes obscures more than it illuminates. One thing’s printed, but Tom seems to sing another. At times it seems like we’re being misdirected by homophonic phrases (the way Kurt Cobain would later print “find my nest of salt” for what sounded more like “feminist assault” on Nirvana’s “All Apologies”). In terms of poetic schools, Verlaine’s lyrical style, despite some comparability to the New York School, relates more closely to the French poets he and Hell — and other contemporaries — had been steeped in:
Marquee Moon
’s urban nocturne derives from long traditions of bohemian decadence, not so far removed from Ginsberg’s celebrations of “Negro streets at dawn” and other presumed danger zones.
Marquee Moon
isn’t a concept album, but it has a consistent geography overtly identified with lower Manhattan, and as such lends itself to a coherent reading as a song cycle.
Television’s New York settings are, as Patti Smith suggested in her earliest criticism on the band, relentlessly adolescent. They occupy the parts of town most resistant to the bright lights that had long since conquered New York’s night; his characters seem consciously to flee overlit areas for deeper shadows. The area below 14th Street seemed like the special province of the young and wild at night, a sense exacerbated by the city’s financial crisis, which left much of downtown empty and dark. “I remember standing at windows,” remembered Roberta Bayley, “looking out over the Lower East Side, and feeling that the whole city was infested, and crumbling, but wonderful.”
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In such an environment, friends roamed in packs, searching for adventure, for trouble, but also for a sense of self, or perhaps even for the purity of egoless transcendence over the urban surround. If
Marquee Moon
celebrates relentless adolescence in the mode of the urban pastoral, it also looks for visionary truth through Rimbaud’s prescription of sensory derangement. Such wandering and transcendental flashes are as propulsive as
Marquee Moon
’s opening riff.
“See No Evil”
It’s one of the great starts to a rock ‘n’ roll album ever. For the first five seconds we’re at the starting line, engine revving, three times from the left. In the fourth measure the bass line enters on the right, an octave higher than we’d expect, as if to say “Ready, Set, Go!” Like most Television songs this one starts with an extended introduction, a sense of anticipation, hesitation, building tension. Then, we’re off, though the stress falling on the first and third beats creates a slightly syncopated sense of lurching. The music is repetitive, churning, the sounds of machinery, the lead guitar rolling on the right hand side like a power saw cutting pavement. It’s the same grinding force Eno poured into the opening track of his solo debut, “Needle in the Camel’s Eye.” Ficca’s drumming leaves behind blues structures generally and specifically departs from early versions of the song that were still tied to Byrds-like go-go beats. Then, an opening lyric, in Verlaine’s strained, nasal harangue, that runs counter to the sense of waiting we’ve already experienced: “What I want / I want NOW.”
Like live staples that
didn’t
make it onto the album — “O Mi Amore” and especially their cover of the Elevators’ “Fire Engine” — “See No Evil” suggests an urban landscape in the clack of a subway or the Doppler Effect of a passing ambulance or firetruck. It recalls the New York Dolls, but only the slightest hint of a campy lisp remains in the backing chorus. Rather, as they have throughout the album, the band has worked to strip away what Verlaine called “reference points,” gestures or figures that reassure listeners by recalling the familiar sounds of an earlier era. The song does bear some similarity to the sound of ’66, and you might even think it’s a Yardbirds cover. (Their “Train Kept A-Rollin’” anticipated Ficca’s opening drum line on “Fire Engine.”) But Television strips away the Yardbirds’ rootsiness to produce this New York noir: no harmonicas here. The territory we’re in is nervous, angular, to use adjectives contemporaries often applied to them. The sound’s industrial, even: the Ficca/Smith rhythm section is “a fist punching metal rivets of sound,” as Nick Kent wrote. The buzzsaw of Verlaine’s “soaring [vocal] screech at the fadeout” suggests the united howling of “what sounds like about 25 over-dubbed Verlaines screaming.”
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We’re not being warned that the train is coming, as in old blues songs. We’re in the front car, watching the tracks disappear beneath us as we go.
