Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (9 page)

That summer Verlaine helped Smith record her first single, a rendition of the standard “Hey Joe” (prefaced by a poem about the famous kidnap victim and publishing heiress Patty Hearst), backed with her song-poem “Piss Factory,” the story of her escape from blue-collar piece work in Jersey, which culminates in her boarding a train for New York, where she plans to become “a big star.” Verlaine played a guitar Smith had purchased for him, and they recorded the songs during a three-hour rental at Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland Studio. Mapplethorpe bankrolled a thousand copies of the 45. If Patti intended to become a star, she planned to take Verlaine and company with her.

In addition to writing about them, Smith paved the way for an extended co-headline at Max’s later that year by spending July opening there for Elephant’s Memory, Lennon and Ono’s sometime backing band. Smith’s summer shows at Max’s gained the attention of
Times
columnist John Rockwell, who placed her songs “somewhere between Kurt Weill and early Velvet Underground, with their out-of-tune tinny tackiness and their compulsive repertory of three-chord nineteen-fifties riffs.” In terms of her “words and ideas,” Rockwell pays her a high compliment: Lou Reed, he wrote, isn’t even in her league.
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Sometime in 1974 Richard Hell sketched out his own review of Television, written from an outsider’s perspective. Describing CB’s atmosphere first — the smell of dogshit, the “damned dog” itself, the noise of the pool tables, the punch-drunk finale of Music Machine’s “Talk Talk” pounding from the jukebox — he eventually turns his attention to the band:

Hell’s one-by-one run-down of the band members begins with Verlaine, “with a face like the Mr. America of skulls,” who stands frozen, his mouth moving like a machine to let the lyrics escape. His solos verge on epileptic fits, his “eyes shut like somebody barely able to maintain consciousness.” Lloyd stands between Verlaine and Hell, his guitar slung low. He has a “perfect male-whore pretty boy face,” Hell writes, “alive with such fear and determination as he wracked the guitar for you could almost hear his mother scolding him. He looked like he was going to cry.” Hell himself wears “black boots, the baggy suit, and sunglasses.” His hair is short on the sides, spiked on top “like anticipating the electric chair.” Hell’s antics, like Verlaine’s, run to extremes: at first he stands comatose, head lolling, drooling from the corner of his mouth, “and then suddenly [he’d] make some sort of connection and his feet would start James Browning and he’d jump up in the air half-splits and land hopping around utterly nuts with his lips pointed straight out at you.” Billy Ficca has his head “held like you tilt your head to tune in on a sound.” The band’s overall vibe is “raw, perverse, and real as the band members looked.” For Hell there is no distance between image and authenticity, though there’s serious conflict within the image itself: are these psychotic tough guys, or are they Dickensian orphans? This was the same antisocial innocence Smith had emphasized. “They looked so vulnerable and cold at the same time,” Hell writes, “I wondered how they’d lived long enough to get here.” The piece concludes: “Me and some other people think they’re the best band in the world,” then deflates the whole as some kind of maniacal ego trip with a deadpan closer: “Anyway, I went home, started to write a book, and then asked my sister for a blow job.”
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Hell’s voice shines through another account of the band from 1974. Apparently written as a press release, the one-sheet typewritten page fixes specific elements of the Television myth, including Tom and Richard running away from school and being arrested in Alabama before eventually making their way to New York. Tom appears as a child prodigy, misunderstood by his parents, who read “gory” comic books, watched sci-fi flicks, and listened to free jazz before moving on to Absurdist playwrights and the Velvet Underground. Hell was a text-book juvenile delinquent, a “problem child” who “blew up school buses” and listened to only two albums,
The Rolling Stones Now
and
Bringing It All Back Home
. He earned his ticket to New York by working in a porn shop, and after he arrived he “began writing and publishing imitations of decadent French poetry.” Lloyd’s contribution to Television’s mythos came here, as everywhere else, via his hustler persona: “since the age of 17 [he] has fended for himself in New York and Hollywood.” He’d also done time in an asylum, something he would later elaborate on in constructing his own public front. “He’s probably the most social member of the band,” too, “being seen almost every night at an event, a nightspot or a party,” and “[l]ike Richard Hell, he likes his glass of liquor.” Billy Ficca, in his turn, had started drumming before he owned his first set — another precocious child musician — and joined a band with Tom in Wilmington as a teenager. His cred came from a long line of work: he’d played with “the best Chicago blues band in Philadelphia” and with a Top 40 covers band in Boston. We’re told that Ficca is the “most diligent at practice” of the band members and that he spends his spare time screening “B” movies on his huge TV.
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The press sheet ends by situating Television as East Village locals: Billy and Tom live together on 11th Street and the rest of the band live “in the neighborhood.” The gesture — one of belonging — grounds the group in what was now a richly symbolic space. CBGB’s was turning into a neighborhood bar for unsigned musicians.

Through the end of ’74, “new music” still only made up part of the club’s calendar. For the most part, the early CB’s rock nights were still hard to separate out from the glitter scene, the Theater of the Ridiculous, or the campier end of the cabaret circuit. The club served food and for the first few years kept booths and tables or folding chairs rather than standing room around the stage. The scene’s contiguities with cabaret and glitter are also apparent in Television’s choices of other performance venues. In April ’74, Television played off-nights from CB’s at the Hotel Diplomat’s gay discotheque, on one such occasion opening for the local glitter act Dorian Zero. The Dolls were still stars of the downtown scene, returning from a year of touring in Europe and the U.S. and played two homecoming shows at Max’s, followed by a night at Club 82. (This was the show where the band members — with the exception of Johnny Thunders — performed in full drag.) The support act for their New York shows that spring was the Miamis, made up of Wayne County’s backing band.

Club 82 soon announced Wednesday night “Live Rock” shows, which competed with CB’s poetry nights. A few weeks after the Dolls’ big gig at the 82, Television and Leather Secrets — an act that had been opening their shows at CBGB’s — played there. Fronted by singer and poet Camille O’Grady, who would later appear in gay art porn and on San Francisco’s leather scene, Leather Secrets delivered scatological, proto-punk songs with titles like “Toilet Kiss,” often delivered from a gay male persona.
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At Club 82, Television’s audience included David Bowie, who gave the band a line they first used in an ad for a 12 May gig back at CB’s: “The most original band I’ve seen in New York. They’ve got it.”

A week earlier Hell had landed a spot at CB’s for the Sillettoes — Debbie Harry, Elda Gentile, Chris Stein, Fred Smith and company — who dished up an homage to the ’60s girls group sensation and Queens natives, the Shangri-Las. The Stillettoes had strong ties to Max’s, where Debbie Harry had waited tables and where Elda Gentile had been a back-room regular as Eric Emerson’s girlfriend. Gentile had a child with Emerson but that spring was seeing Richard Hell. The group’s bass player, Fred Smith, would leave the Stillettoes with Stein and Harry to form Blondie that summer; the following spring Smith would make another departure to replace Hell in Television.

As Television honed its sound, the celebrities in Club 82’s audiences, Bowie’s relocation to New York, and persistent curiosity about the Dolls all returned British press attention to the downtown rock scene. In the summer of ’74, on the heels of the Dolls’ sophomore album, Chris Charlesworth of
Melody Maker
came sniffing around CBGB’s, Club 82, and the Mushroom, a glitter-friendly venue on E. 13th Street where Television would share a bill with the Miamis at the end of June. Charlesworth’s two-page spread, which ran in July, depicts an underground still steeped in Mercer’s-style theatricality: “Shock and outrage is the name of the game. The more freakish, the more outlandish the fetishes of the personnel and the more bizarre their clothes the better. It’s not much more than grabbing a guitar, learning a few chords, applying lipstick and bingo!” Charlesworth places Television among others in this late glitter scene: Teenage Lust, the Fast, Jet Black, the Stillettoes, Another Pretty Face, and the Brats. The audience for these bands, especially at Club 82, was composed of “Female impersonators, transvestites and their ilk,” with an “element of bisexuality run[ning] strong.”
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If the Mercer’s Warholian sensibility sustained itself through much of CBGB’s first year (on “new music” Sundays anyway) so did the avant-garde theatricality of the downtown arts scene, suggesting that Television’s Bowery Boys schtick was just one of several possible costumes acts could don. Alan Vega and Martin Rev’s electronic duo, Suicide, had been performing what they called “punk masses” since the fall of 1970. They later claimed to have borrowed the term from Lester Bangs, who used it in
Creem
in December 1970 to describe Iggy Pop, but their fliers include the phrase a month earlier. Suicide appeared at CB’s in June of ’74 in support of the Fast, a bubble-gum glitter band from Brooklyn who were remaking themselves as mod revivalists.
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Suicide’s punk masses consisted of sometimes violent displays of aggression directed at their instruments — leaving Martin Rev bleeding on occasion — and a threatening posture in relation to the audience, as in Vega’s signature move: swinging chains from the stage like a medieval cowboy twirling a lasso.

In mid-August Debbie Harry and Chris Stein played their first show at CBGB’s with their new group, Angel and the Snake, soon to be renamed Blondie. Also on the lineup was the Ramones, making their CBGB’s debut as well. Both bands typified the new scene’s ongoing indebtedness to Warhol as much as they pointed, at this stage, to something new. The Ramones’ frontman, Joey Ramone (born Jeff Hyman), had until that spring sung for the glitter band Sniper under the name Jeff Starship. Tommy Ramone (née Tommy Erdelyi) had toyed with experimental filmmaking and was a sound engineer who had worked with Hendrix and Herbie Hancock. The band also included Johnny Ramone (John Cummings) and Dee Dee Ramone (Doug Colvin), the latter of whom had auditioned to be the Neon Boys’ second guitar player a year earlier but hadn’t made the grade.

Leather-clad and only acting dumb, the Ramones played up their musical ineptness, something Hell would later claim to have done as well. Like Television, they sloughed off glam trappings and presented themselves as ordinary hoodlums. Initially, at least, some observers saw this as theater. The art critic Dave Hickey wrote in the
Voice
in 1977 that as conceptual art the Ramones were “beautiful.” They weren’t “just a band,” he wrote, but “a real good idea … poised with mathematical elegance on the line between pop art and popular schlock. From your aesthete’s point of view, the Ramones sound has the ruthless efficiency of a Warhol portrait.”
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Craig Leon, who produced the Ramones’ debut in 1976, considered them part of the “the NY underground ‘art’ scene of The Velvets and Warhol & co.,” the world of Patti Smith and Television.
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The downtown scene-crosser Arthur Russell, a cellist who had worked with Ginsberg and directed the experimental music series at The Kitchen, dragged the composer Rhys Chatham to see the Ramones against his will. “While hearing them,” Chatham remembered, “I realized that, as a minimalist, I had more in common with this music than I thought.”
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Soon Chatham would begin composing minimalist epics for rock instruments. Though Television was never musically minimalist on the order of the Ramones or Chatham, compared to the excesses of glam, prog, or early metal they were cut to the bone, stripped down. Among the viewers at the Ramones’ first show were Alan Vega of Suicide and an art student named David Byrne, who’d just moved into a friend’s loft around the corner on Great Jones Street. Vega dug the Ramones’ act from the start; Byrne liked them enough that he determined on the spot to form a new band, which he called Talking Heads.

In Joey Ramone’s mind the early CB’s scene was a seamless extension of period when Hilly’s on the Bowery featured the Cockettes, whose members Tomata du Plenty and Gorilla Rose now performed regularly across the street in the “Palm Casino Revue,” a drag showcase staged at the Bouwerie Lane Theater. Joey Ramone described his band’s earliest CB’s audiences as “the Warhol type crowd, like the gay crowd.”
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Dee Dee Ramone recalled that The Ramones’ first show at CBGB’s in the summer of ’74 was “filled with drag queens who had spilled over into CBGB’s from the Bowery [
sic
] Lane Theater.”
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