Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (4 page)

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Authors: Bryan Waterman

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Max’s Kansas City and the Poetry Project provided crucial coordinates for Meyers, Miller, and other new arrivals in the late ’60s, including another aspiring poet, Patti Smith, and her sometime lover, a young photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe. The mere existence of a scene for poetry was a revelation: “[I]n Delaware, there was no ‘cultural life,’” Verlaine would later say. “You might meet some guy who’s four years older than you because it’s your girlfriend’s college brother who might have a copy of Allen Ginsberg or something.”
³⁸In New York, poetry readings abounded and the poetry scene provided a model of community and DIY publishing that musicians would later mimic. Meyers developed a “big crush” on local poet Bernadette Mayer, a recent New School graduate who co-edited a self-published poetry journal called
O To 9
. Meyers also idolized second-generation New York School poets such as Ted Berrigan, Anne Waldman, and Ron Padgett. Still “too shy to introduce myself to anyone,” he began to model his career after these self-styled outlaws and pioneers, including Ed Sanders, a singer for the proto-punk anti-folk band the Fugs, who published his journal
Fuck You / a Magazine of the Arts
from “a secret location in the Lower East Side.”
³⁹These poets had a profound impact on the emergence of the downtown music scene, not just in terms of style or substance, but of production mode and cultural politics: “In a way, those guys had a big influence on me in music in the sense of their attitudes towards themselves and their relationship to the existing world,” Hell would recall in the mid-’90s:

The only poets who got any attention or respect from the mainstream world were really conservative and lived their lives in universities. Rather than be frustrated and beat their heads against the wall and work their way up that system, the St. Mark’s poets just stayed in the streets and did it themselves on mimeo machines and created an alternative. It’s just like we ended up doing in music. We made the record companies come to us by making noise for the kids directly rather than trying to impress the record companies to make deals. We brought out records on small labels and started fanzines. We created our own culture until they were forced to acknowledge it and give our records some distribution.
⁴⁰

Meyers purchased a used table-top offset printing press and launched his own journal,
Genesis : Grasp
, from an apartment on Elizabeth Street in northern Little Italy, a block off the Bowery. “Of course there is no art, only life,” he announced in the manifesto that headed the first issue. The second issue was dedicated to Thomas Merton and Marcel Duchamp. The third included a Dadaist satire on philosophical criticism by Miller and Meyers on “Antilove and the Supraconscious.” (“Happy trails till the next sentence!” they offer at one point. “And here I am with a personal letter for each of you. The letter U — now this is personal.”) Having fallen in love with little poetry journals while working at Gotham Book Mart, Meyers sought to insert himself into this tradition.
⁴¹A handful of Miller’s poems appear in the final issue — a mixture of psychedelic imagery, violence, transcendentalism, and humor. (“all the air everywhere today enters my noses taking my breath away / I figger it’s parta being a cowboy,” runs one poem in its entirety.)
Genesis : Grasp
published six issues between 1968 and 1971, and although it included poems, fiction, and photography by some recognized figures, Meyers and Miller remained marginal to the dominant scenes, something Miller seemed to resent long after he’d changed his name to Verlaine: “[P]oets would get together in various groups,” he recalled, “and develop similar styles and share the same ideas and the same girlfriends. I don’t know if incest is the right word, but it got to the point where everyone was just patting each other on the back and congratulating each other all the time.”
⁴²

In addition to writing poetry — sometimes collaborating on a shared typewriter — Meyers and Miller spent their first few years in the city taking psychedelics, “Just out of interest. To see what scrambling your senses could do to you.”
⁴³Their bookstore jobs provided plenty of time for finding new poets and just enough money to make rent and score drugs. Occasionally they hit an artsy hotspot like Max’s or the St. Adrian’s, an artist’s bar built into the same old hotel on Broadway that would house the Mercer Arts Center a few years later. On one such outing in 1969 or 1970, Meyers met Patty Oldenburg, recently separated from her husband, the Pop sculptor Claes Oldenburg. They kicked off a relationship that would last close to two years. Oldenburg’s husband was Meyers’s senior by twenty years; Patty herself was nearly 15 years older than Meyers. The affair granted him access to downtown’s elite art circles.

Meyers, in turn, published her poems in
Genesis : Grasp
under the pseudonym Patty Machine, along with such noted poets as Clark Coolidge and Bruce Andrews. The magazine was Meyers’s attempt to “fashion a community of writers into which I fit,” he later said.
⁴⁴His own poems sometimes appeared under the name Ernie Stomach. He and Miller collaborated under the pseudonym Theresa Stern, whose “photo” — a composite of their faces, crowned with a dark wig — graced the cover of
Genesis : Grasp
’s final issue, along with portraits of Rimbaud and Artaud. Two years later, when Hell issued a volume of Theresa Stern’s poetry entitled
Wanna Go Out?
, a biographical statement described her as a half-German, half-Puerto Rican Hoboken hooker whose date of birth fell in the few weeks that separated Hell’s from Verlaine’s at the end of 1949. That collaboration would be their last strictly poetic effort together; by the time
Wanna Go Out?
appeared, Meyers and Miller had shifted their sights to rock ‘n’ roll.

Downtown’s music scene, on Meyers and Miller’s arrival, divided into leftover folk utopians and an experimental underground scene influenced by Cage and his followers. The former, in spite of their countercultural politics, had spawned enormous commercial successes such as Baez and Dylan, and by mid-decade had seen Dylan defect to rock ‘n’ roll. Dylan epitomized the transforming power of image as he cultivated his own mystique, first as folk troubadour, then as rock’s coolest cat. Touted outside the academy as a poet, he sought out ties to Beat heroes, which they reciprocated. The back cover to
Bringing It All Back Home
(1965) uses photos of Ginsberg to establish Dylan’s poetic credentials, and in D. A. Pennebaker’s film
Don’t Look Back
, which follows Dylan through a 1965 tour of England, Ginsberg hovers over the setpiece for “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” an authorizing force. Dylan’s break from the Village folk scene — “fat people,” he famously dismissed them — was a turn toward hipster cool, influencing not only the Velvets’ post-Beat image but later musicians as well. When Dylan performed “Like A Rolling Stone” and other electric songs in Manchester, England, in 1966, and an audience member called him out as a “Judas” to the folk movement, Dylan responded by telling his band to play the song “fucking loud.” In that performance we hear one origin point of a disposition that would later be recognized as punk. Richard Hell took this version of Dylan as an inspiration: “I knew him for the first electric records he made and I was so full of aggression myself when I first started playing music that I really didn’t understand anything else. I wanted music that just RIPPED through you.”
⁴⁵

While Dylan forced the folk scene’s identity crisis, other musicians pioneered forms that would later prove significant to Television’s development. Inspired by Cage, younger underground artists, beginning in 1959, staged downtown events known as Happenings, which combined art forms — dance, theater, film, poetry, music, sculpture — in multimedia events that smudged lines between artists and audiences.
⁴⁶On one hand, Happenings pointed to the theatricality of everyday life; on the other, they made art more democratic. Some of the work that emerged from these contexts — especially Pop art — came to be commercially viable, though much of it willfully resisted commodification.

Warhol, who never pretended his work existed outside a commercial realm, oversaw the combination of rock ‘n’ roll and Happenings when he incorporated the largely unknown Velvet Underground into multi-media, amphetamine-fueled spectacles he dubbed Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable.
⁴⁷But even earlier, he and other artists attempted to incorporate popular music into Pop. In 1963 the Oldenburgs unsuccessfully tried to form a band, with Patty as lead singer. Andy Warhol and artist Lucas Samaras would sing backup, with painter Larry Poons on guitar, sculptor Walter de Maria on drums, and composer La Monte Young on saxophone. The painter Jasper Johns would contribute lyrics.
⁴⁸The group folded because Young had no interest in entertainment or commercial culture, but De Maria would later play in a short-lived rock band, the Primitives, with filmmaker and composer Tony Conrad and violist John Cale, both of whom also worked with Young. The Primitives formed to promote a novelty dance single written by 22-year-old Lou Reed, with whom Cale would go on to form the Velvet Underground, whose rock ‘n’ roll referenced downtown avant-garde predecessors.
⁴⁹Unlike Young, these artists felt that pop music — like other forms of culture appropriated, satirized, and celebrated by Pop Art — was a field rife with artistic opportunities.

For years after their breakup, the Velvets served as the benchmark of New York’s rock underground, in spite of the fact that they never reached mainstream audiences. Local radio offered no support. Once Warhol’s media experiments had expired, the band looked elsewhere for an audience, spending the end of the ’60s on the road. Many listeners, even sympathetic ones like Richard Williams of the British music paper
Melody Maker
, found their music “hard, ugly, and based on a kind of sadomasochistic world which few dared enter,” though Williams, for one, heralded their music as superior to
Sgt. Pepper
.
⁵⁰The Velvets’ commercial failure would be attributed to their artistic integrity, since they rejected commercial radio format for representational practices — and subject matter — required by narrative and artistic agendas they set for themselves. The Velvets’ ill-fated career arc set a template for Television’s, as would the influence they eventually exerted on subsequent generations of musicians.

When Lou Reed played his final shows with the Velvet Underground at Max’s in the summer of 1970, a vacuum opened downtown. Warhol himself had been scarce since an attempted assassination in ’68. His party crowd still hung out. But what would it take as an organizing principle? The answer would come soon enough, flamboyant and covered in glitter, and the UK’s music and culture tabloids, addicted to Dylan and fearing they had come too late to the Velvets, would be in the right place to welcome it with arms open. Verlaine would later claim that CBGB’s bands “shared a dislike for ’70s bands, which may have included — besides bands like the Eagles and the Bee Gees — even the New York Dolls and that glamour rock crap.”
⁵¹But a closer look at the downtown scene throughout CBGB’s early years suggests plentiful continuities between New York’s glitter and nascent punk scenes. Television owed a greater debt to these camp nostalgists than is often assumed.