Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (20 page)

Given the heights of “Marquee Moon,” it’s hardly surprising to find ourselves dizzy as side two starts. The guitars open like alarm bells and Fred Smith takes the melody on bass, inverting typical roles and emphasizing disorientation. And yet the song isn’t set on a mountaintop at all, but on “these shores.” The speaker “sleep[s] light” and “live[s] light,” the repetition of “light” suggesting light-headedness, but also speaking to the images of light and dark that fill side one and preparing us for the “Guiding Light” of the next track. Sleeping light and living light aren’t exactly the same thing: one suggests insomnia and mental burdens, the other a feeling that you could care less. At some point in the song, the address changes from first person singular to second person: “Now you give me no trouble / You give me no help,” Verlaine sings, suggesting perfect balance in his addressee’s indifference. As Tim Mitchell points out, “Elevation,” one of the newest songs on the record, was written in the midst of Verlaine’s breakup with Patti Smith. In a live version caught on tape the previous spring, he includes a lyric that would be dropped by the time they recorded the album: “I tell you, darling, how you must make me fade / I wish I’d never, never been wed.”
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The song retains a haunted quality, once again bracketed by Verlaine’s high guitar chops that sound like warning signals. Lloyd’s solo is positively plaintive.

Mitchell also notes the similarity between Verlaine’s lyric and Baudelaire’s poem “Élévation,” from the infamous collection
Flowers of Evil
(1857). That poem also invokes bodies of water and upward motion: the speaker’s soul rises above lakes and vales, passing clouds as it rises above this mortal sphere and leaves the earth’s miasma and all concerns behind. Purification will be found in ethereal realms. Baudelaire’s poem is a fantasy of losing one’s ego, a fitting counterpart to Verlaine’s play on “don’t go to my head.” But the pun preserves a sense of literal dizziness and disorientation, and in doing so keeps Verlaine’s speaker from absolute transcendence. Instead of floating away into the atmosphere, he haunts the shoreline like a hermit in search of a hut. The last word before the final chorus is “shore.” If the last word is, in fact, the lost word, then what has been lost is precisely the ground on which the speaker stands, and he’s left adrift at sea. The song doesn’t end so much as dissolve, the last note a hollow, barely audible drone.

If there’s a moment of soul-searching on
Marquee Moon
, it comes with dramatic shift in tone that ushers in “Guiding Light,” a quietly soulful tune that glimmers through the darkness like a distant lighthouse or an
ignis fatuus
. “Do I, Do I? / belong to the night?” Verlaine opens over chiming piano octaves, metronomic guitars, and Fred Smith’s funkiest bass line on this virtually funk-free album. Questioning the entire landscape of the previous five tracks, the song’s opening line begs the question of relationship between the “I” and the songwriter, since authorship is doubled here: this is the only track whose words are jointly credited to Verlaine and Lloyd.

Everything on “Guiding Light” — the slower tempo, the delicate guitar work and drums, light bells that chime in the background, the piano part dangling above the chorus — suggests an earnest attempt to escape the urban out-of-doors and retreat — where? Inside, with “all the ladies”? Possibly. The “ladies [who] stay inside” contrast the only other feminine presence on the album thus far: the Venus de Milo, who stands not only for love but for sexual desire, and more importantly who greets the wandering friends in that song out of doors. The contrast between “the night” and a feminized domesticity suggests that the song’s title may refer to the soap opera of the same title. The singer is unable to “pull a trick,” which may play on “trick” as slang for sex with a prostitute, but may also simply refer to the inability to pull oneself together: “Never the rose / Without the prick,” Verlaine puns. As the song moves toward its final verse, a hush falls and the singer finds himself trapped by time itself: “Time may freeze,” he suggests early on, and now “I woke up and it was yesterday.” The feeling is cyclical, the movements are unmoored, and only the guiding light of unspecified source is helping to “get thru these nights.” As the final verse arrives, the music swells, moving from bass and minimal guitar to a controlled solo that resolves into a repeated line by Lloyd (his eight-layer multi-track ringing like church bells). All of this rides over the layers of a recurring piano line and Ficca’s cymbals like the gradual crest of an incoming tide. In the final verse the singer parts from a love “like the seas” parted for Moses, cymbals shimmering like the sound inside a shell. Escape may be possible, in other words, but not for both of them. The sense of victory is muted: is this a triumph over night, or merely
this
night — a note that time has passed after all, that it’s not frozen, that it can’t repeat itself?

With “Prove It” the album returns to the realm of Television oldies, a faithful fan favorite since the band first performed it in 1974. Each band member enters “Prove It” separately, sounding a distinct presence. Like “Marquee Moon,” this song is essentially a chamber piece: we follow each line separately through the song, getting one of the clearest examples of how intensely this band can focus together, put each part into a perfectly moving whole.

With the exception of “Guiding Light,” this is the album’s lightest song, opening over a vaguely Latin rhythm that references the Brill Building’s golden era, the sound Leiber and Stoller brought to the Drifters and, later, the Shangri-Las, or that Phil Spector created for the Crystals or the Ronettes. Songs like “Uptown” and “Spanish Harlem.” The song’s closest cousins from other CBGB’s bands are “Venus of Avenue D” or “Spanish Stroll” from Mink DeVille, whose Latin-inflected concoction of Sam Cooke and Lou Reed spoke more to Loisaida sounds than most other CB’s bands. (Willy DeVille, in his “Venus,” sounds like a tough guy sitting on the hood of a Caddy, wearing an alligator-skin jacket, threatening to throw knives at Tom Verlaine’s toes.) Of their own output, the closest relation to “Prove It” is Lloyd’s solo from “O Mi Amore,” or the whole of late takes on “Hard On Love,” both of which pick up on the same Latin vibes. Along with Television’s “Prove It” and Mink DeVille’s “Spanish Stroll,” Blondie’s girl-group send-up “In the Flesh” or their cover of the Shangri-Las’ “Out in the Streets” could have been combined to make a Lower East Side version of
West Side Story
or
Grease
, the latter of which played on Broadway through the entire CB’s golden era.

Unlike most of the songs on
Marquee Moon
, the reference points aren’t entirely banished here. And it’s understandable: the CB’s scene was so enamored of the Shangri-Las that Lenny Kaye briefly helped the group reassemble in the mid-’70s for a CB’s show and some sessions for Sire that were, unfortunately, never released. Snatched up and thrust into stardom while still high school girls in Queens in the ’60s, the Shangri-Las were, ironically, so young during their fleeting fame that they were actually younger than most of the CB’s acts who paid them homage a decade later, including Debbie Harry. And yet “Prove It” can’t be reduced simply to Brill Building nostalgia or pastiche. There are no castanets, and though the song carries a bit of Ben E. King in its chord progression, by the time Verlaine’s first “Prove it!” escapes him, we realize we’re on much more tormented ground than you find in “Stand By Me.”

Two things become clear if we situate “Prove It” in
Marquee Moon
’s urban night cycle. One, the speaker, in spite of the domesticity invoked in “Guiding Light,” has still fallen asleep out of doors, down by the docks. When the song opens it’s just before dawn, birds chirping. Waves lap, as do “waves / of light the unreal night,” which seems to invoke all the songs we’ve already heard. The second thing that becomes clear is that the speaker is still hung up on love to the point of derangement. The sense of disorientation persists not only in the high to low soloing, cascading downward scales that suggests a fall (echoes of “Venus”?). Other echoes suggest upward movement: the hundred-foot leap in the second verse recalls the desire to “jumpjumpjump / jump a mountain” in “See No Evil.” On one hand, the derangement could be drug-induced — think of the “flat curving / of a room” in the opening verse, a line that Verlaine had formerly followed with: “It gets so funny.” The world may just be the projections of a deranged mind — on psychedelics? — losing its “sense of human.” But the singer could also be in “in [love] so deep / you could write the Book [of Love],” another favorite figure of ’50s pop music. As a parable about falling in love, the song makes a certain amount of sense: hesitation gives way to adventure as “first you creep / then you leap / up about a hundred feet.” (Ficca’s clever drumroll and cymbal crash, bordering on a rimshot, add emphasis.) Euphoria sets in. Birds feed the singer lines like something out of a Disney film. And “The world is just a feeling / you undertook. / Remember?”

That question calls attention to the song’s narrative point of view. It opens as a story about “him” waking up near the docks, though in the second verse the address shifts to second person (you creep / you leap). When the singer asks “Remember?” he could be trying to talk down either himself or a companion. If the former, he could be calling himself to the recognition that his entire consciousness has become wrapped up in this affair. If the latter, he could still be in love. Ego disintegrates; comforts settle in, all warm, calm, and perfect. And the feeling is difficult to describe: it’s “too ‘too too’ / to put a finger on.”
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The sense is less that words fail than that they are superseded by something better.

That sense of indefinite bliss, however, seems at odds with the song’s governing refrain, the gumshoe’s demand for “just the facts.” How can you prove what can’t be pinned down? When Richard Hell used Verlaine’s line as an epigraph for his pseudo-review of a Television show in 1974, he attributed it both to Sergeant Joe Friday, Jack Webb’s character on the ’50s TV cop drama
Dragnet
, and to Verlaine in this song. The relationship between Television and hard-boiled noir was something Patti Smith had picked up during Television’s first year: she mentions in her
Rock Scene
piece both Phillip Marlow and Jack the Ripper; in the earlier version she had made the claim that Hell’s suit had once belonged to Raymond Chandler. From the detective-story standpoint, the song isn’t simply an account of falling in love, but also is an investigation of the facts of love, a tougher case to close. Hell, though, wrote “Jest the facts” instead of “just”: joke them, in other words. Humorous wordplay evinces a sense of human. Alternating between what could be a rather sweet love song and a chorus that apes a TV detective’s interrogation creates a sense of comedy that heightens if we consider that Sergeant Friday’s tagline actually comes from a parody of Webb’s character by the comedian Stan Freberg, who issued a number of
Dragnet
send-ups on 78 rpm records in the early ’50s. The sense of parody is heightened in Verlaine’s earliest recorded versions of the song: all the way through the Island demo he camps up the chorus, which, along with the “too ‘too too’” line he delivers in his best queeny lisp, mocking social authority. A
Dragnet
drag queen. Let’s dress up like cops indeed.

“Torn Curtain” is the one song fans of this album divide over. It drags. It’s melodramatic. It certainly could have been sacrificed in order to make room for other, more popular songs from Television’s live set: “Foxhole” or “I Don’t Care,” both of which would be held over to
Adventure
, or “O Mi Amore,” the crowd favorite that would only be released years later as an untitled instrumental on the
Marquee Moon
reissue. And yet there’s something thematically appropriate about finishing the album with a funeral dirge.

The song opens with the drumroll from Tony Williams’s “Emergency” (1969), a key recording for both Verlaine and Ficca, but instead of kicking into Williams’s high-gear, drum-fueled jazz fusion, “Torn Curtain” slows things by half (the opening drum is twice as long, for starters) and moves into chord progressions Verlaine says he borrowed from Stravinsky.
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Though the drumroll sounds like a prelude, the song serves as the album’s epilogue. A case has already been closed at the end of “Prove It.” The curtain has come down, that is, before the song starts, and then the curtain’s torn, revealing another scene backstage. The song’s title invokes the rending of the temple veil in Matthew 27:51, an apocalyptic miracle in the wake of Jesus’ crucifixion: “At that moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.” At the same time, the figure of the curtain points to live rock’s theatrical origins. How many rock venues in New York occupy what were once vaudeville theaters?

If a torn curtain lets us see behind the scenes, suggesting vulnerability to exposure, there’s a world-weariness to this song that outdoes even the line “I’ve been working on so long” from the prior track. And the notion that the album ends with a lamentation for wasted “YEARS … Flowing by like tears,” amid wailing guitars, would seem to underscore the idea that all was not right with the world at the end of “Prove It.” If the urban night has been a stage, for the characters on
Marquee Moon
it’s one whose devices are left out in the open when the show is over, a stage set. To the degree that the title invokes the Hitchcock film of the same name, we’re still in a world of noir. “Burn it down,” Verlaine says at the end, a nod to the arson obsession that runs through his poetry and was an integral part of the mythology he’d created with Richard Hell. You get the feeling he’s burning evidence.