Read Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) Online
Authors: Bryan Waterman
Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (22 page)
Television’s disappearance from Manhattan music over the past year and a half has emphasized their musical distance from the flourishing little club scene they helped create. For although they started out post-Velvets, and although “Blank Generation,” which now passes for an anthem at CBGB, began life as a showpiece for Television’s first bassist, Richard Hell, the term punk sits even more oddly on this band than on Talking Heads. At least the Heads remain committed to their own versions of two basic punk principles, brevity and manic intensity, but Television’s principles, as both admirers and detractors have observed, are throwbacks to the psychedelic era. These musicians are lyrical, spaced out, and obscure, and they don’t live in fear of boring somebody. Never mind the raveups and long solos — many of their
intros
, in which single riffs repeat again and again, stretch toward the one-minute mark, about where the Ramones begin the chorus.
311
Christgau concluded by pin-pointing the band’s iconoclastic Utopianism, derived from its bohemian heritage, as its defining feature. They were a revolution unto themselves, a self-contained vanguard unwilling to be associated with the train that followed: “Television is representative of nothing,” Christgau wrote. “Almost every great rock band and a lot of the most successful bad ones culminate some general social tendency, be it the Ramones’ pop economy or Kansas’s greedy middle-American pseudo-seriousness or Steely Dan’s expert programmability or Kiss’s life-sized caricature. But while it’s possible to imagine a late-’60s revival in which Television would spawn countless imitators, at the moment their single-minded Utopian individualism sets them apart. And it is just that that makes them seem so precious.”
312
What Christgau couldn’t have known is that within two months the band would throw in the towel.
When that announcement came in September, Television’s breakup heralded, for many, the end of an era. Alan Betrock printed an obituary for the band in
New York Rocker
, along with a two-page spread that featured photos of the band’s final shows and a full-page reproduction of the homemade flier for a Max’s show with Patti Smith four years earlier. The breakup made Betrock fret for the life of underground rock in general. As the title of another piece in the same issue asked, was this “New Wave Goodbye?” Betrock’s postmortem is deeply personal, revealing how closely critics as well as musicians had pinned their own stories to this scene, which helps to explain the enduring appeal of the CBGB’s mythology: if other bands would successfully break into the mainstream, Television would be the band that remained so true to its principles that they doomed themselves to an early death and cult status. Automatic authenticity.
“SO TELEVISION has broken up and most people want to know why,” Betrock began:
There must be a story there: find out who did what, who said such and such, how much each record sold, and so on. But all that behind-the-scenes stuff is totally beside the point. Does it really matter why? I mean, are there lessons to be learned, mistakes to be circumvented, follies to be unearthed? I think not. Out of New York, they played bars still, college towns with half-filled houses, on stages more accustomed to local amateurs than visionary professionals. Chris Stamey [of the dB’s] said: “They were my favorite band. It’s probably the last time I’ll ever have a favorite.” And he was right.
There were off nights. Granted. There were weak spots. Granted. There were tactical errors, production deficiencies, and hurt egos. All granted. But there was brilliance. There were times when the roof would fly away and we sailed upwards like UFO’s on the Bowery. Perhaps there was just too much to be contained in one unit.
… Now perhaps you wonder if this isn’t all a little too serious. Like, I mean, “Hey, all right already, a great rock band broke up. But there’ll be new ones and spinoffs and solo albums, and commercial success and more great music. So c’mon, what’s the big deal?”
Well, I dunno really. But something is gone, something is lost forever. Something that leaves you feeling a little more alone, a little more empty, and a little more helpless. It gets you in the gut, in the pit of your stomach, where it seems to churn and warn you in advance that something painful is on the horizon. They are survived by artifacts, plastic and mercurial, photos and snapshots of an era that went by too fast and will never come again. They are faded now, unfocussed, unsmiling and cold. I’m feeling kind of cold now myself. Kind of distant. Kind of mixed up and drifting. A beacon has vanished. The anchor is gone. TV is dead. Long live TV.
313
298
Kent (1977a).
299
Kent (1977a).
300
Christgau (1991: p. 391).
301
Christgau (1978a).
302
Bangs (1977).
303
Rockwell (1977b).
304
Bangs (1977); Cf. McNeil and McCain (1996: pp. 195–6).
305
McNeil and McCain (1996: pp. 303).
306
Trakin (1978).
307
“N.Y. Bands” (1978).
308
Betrock (1977).
309
Kozak (1981).
310
Robinson (1978).
311
Christgau (1978b).
312
Christgau (1978b).
313
Betrock (1978).
Village lore had it that whenever you spotted [Tom] Verlaine in daylight, it was a good omen.
— James Wolcott,
The Catsitters: A Novel
(2009)
Over the next dozen years, Verlaine released half a dozen solo records, some of which sold better than Television’s albums initially had, all of which deserve larger audiences than they’ve enjoyed, but none of which made him a household name.
Marquee Moon
, like
The Velvet Underground and Nico
, enjoyed wider acclaim from subsequent generations of musicians and critics than it did from general audiences.
Rolling Stone
lists it as number 128 on its list of all-time greatest rock albums; in 2003 the
NME
ranked it much higher, at number four, beating out anything by the Beatles, the Stones, or Bob Dylan. I was a teenager in the ’80s, and though I lived in the Arizona sticks, I knew enough from reading
Rolling Stone
and
Spin
that the post-punk bands soundtracking my smalltown angst — REM, U2, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Smiths, the Cure — all cited Television and other CB’s bands as primary influences. Still, as a teenager I didn’t know anyone who owned
Marquee Moon
, let alone Verlaine’s solo stuff. When, in my early twenties, I finally found Television’s albums and bootlegs, they were both familiar and disorienting on first listen, the way you might feel when you find an ancestor’s photograph in an attic trunk and see some of yourself in that strange face.
Richard Lloyd’s three solo albums through the mid-’80s tended toward bluesy riffs, and though his licks continued to be highly regarded, he didn’t quite carry Verlaine’s following. In the late ’80s and early ’90s he performed with power popster Matthew Sweet, an avowed Television fan. Fred Smith played on both Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s solo records. Billy Ficca drummed for the new wave band The Waitresses and rejoined Verlaine in 1992 for his seventh solo release. That same year Television reunited as well, releasing a third album that, though it contained solid songs and was well received critically, didn’t reach the heights of their original incarnation and couldn’t possibly live up to the legendary status and influence the first two records had attained. The band played festival dates in the wake of the reunion record, then took another hiatus, this one eight years long, before returning to the festival circuit at 2001’s All Tomorrow’s Parties. Over the next half dozen years the band made occasional appearances. In 2004 they played shows in New York with Patti Smith to mark the 30th anniversary of their first co-headline at Max’s. They even toyed with recording another album before Lloyd left the band for good in 2007, replaced by guitarist Jimmy Rip, who had long supported Verlaine’s solo recordings and live sets.
When CBGB’s closed in the fall of 2006 — Hilly Kristal unable or unwilling to renegotiate his lease and the back-rent he owed the non-profit Bowery Residents’ Coalition — New York’s media outlets and many fans mourned, even those who hadn’t been into the club in decades. Television received requisite nods as founders in most accounts of the club’s history, though unlike other early CB’s performers — David Byrne, Patti Smith — Verlaine kept his distance from the closing drama. Hilly planned to take the club to Las Vegas, even the urinals, but instead his 2007 death left his family scrapping with one another over inheritance and the club’s lucrative trademark logo.
Patti Smith headlined the club’s final shows. Standing out front, amidst crowds, reporters, and paparazzi, she snapped her own photo of the famous awning. “I’m sentimental,” she told the
Times
, blaming the closing on “the new prosperity of our city.” She encouraged kids to go somewhere else — anywhere — to start scenes of their own: “CBGB’s is a state of mind.”
314
As part of her three-hour final set, which would culminate in her reading the names of CBGB’s dead over the last strains of her song “Elegie,” Smith performed songs that invoked her history with the space, including “We Three,” which she’d originally written about her, Verlaine, and Lanier, and which refers to the club in the opening lines. She read the lyrics to “Marquee Moon” with Lloyd backing her on guitar. Recalling her first Television show in April 1974, she saluted the band for its role in establishing the scene. She’d been recording new music with Tom Verlaine the night before, she said, then added with a smile that “he reluctantly sends his love.”
314
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