I remember
Ooh, how the darkness doubled
I recall
Lightning struck itself
I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else
Television with Richard Hell on the Underground Tonight Show, club gig, NYC 1974.
“Broadway looked so medieval, it seemed to flap like little pages.” Television were the first band I saw at CBGB. Changed everything overnight. “Lightning struck itself” RIP Tom Verlaine, beneath the Marquee Moon.First Ave 1977 & CBGB 1976.
This is
morning
thinking
about Tom.
Grief is not
an affliction,
but a privilege.
Beautifully lyrical guitarist, underrated vocalist. Television made a new kind of music and inspired new kinds of music. Marquee Moon is a perfect record. My favorite thing about especially the more meandering parts of Television was the way the music held onto a tonal center without having to frame it in "changes" or "heads" or even a fucking riff. You could tell it was still going almost through telepathy... As Verlaine and Richard Lloyd unfolded their ideas, wrapping around a kind of song that didn't need to be sung. Their music retained its identity without the crutch of structural scaffolding other bands relied on, giving us license to disregard it elsewhere in our lives. The Ork single and Marquee Moon are essential, but the bootleg "Arrow," from their tour opening for Peter Gabriel, getting bottled and jeered nightly, where they trusted the durability and intensity of their ideas despite their audience, was inspirational to me.
“Marquee Moon,” Live CBGB, February 18, 1976.
For all the mythology inherent to any discussion of punk -rock history—all of the half truths and “I was there…” mumblings by marginal hangers-on—Television’s importance cannot be overstated. The fact remains that, while earlier bands like the Fugs, Velvet Underground, the New York Dolls, Suicide, and the Dictators may have laid the groundwork and even stuck around to see the weird inherit the earth, it was Television who convinced Hilly Kristal to let them play his bar, Country Bluegrass Blues and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers, better known as CBGB. Soon the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, and Blondie would all follow suit, but Television is most responsible for planting the punk flag on the Bowery. Those other bands would go on to more fruitful careers, sell their logos to companies that would splash them across thousands of overpriced T-shirts, or make disco records; but Television produced a masterpiece, and then made two more full-lengths that, while both good and largely overlooked, hardly matched their first attempt.
Devastated by this news. Tom Verlaine was a true great. His role in our culture and straight up awesomeness on the electric guitar was completely legendary. Name 10 minutes of music as good as Marquee Moon. You can’t. It’s perfect. Rest in peace Tom x
“Marquee Moon” in performance, 1985.
Hell and Verlaine consciously fashioned themselves after Verlaine and Rimbaud in just about every possible way, with the exception of actually shooting each other. They weren’t lovers, but they were best friends. They wrote together and they plotted their particular type of world domination. Both young men were exquisitely beautiful: Verlaine tall and languid with haunting, dramatic, hollowed-out eyes and Hell with the square-jawed matinee idol looks and sullen vulnerability of Montgomery Clift. Verlaine was quiet, tense, and reserved. Hell was horny, consumptive, and gregarious. They published chapbooks and faux biographies and various literary acts of vandalism of the Burroughs-inspired sort. They called their first band the Neon Boys. It was sorta trash rock and sorta poetry. They were good, but too bookish for the Dolls crowd and too glam for the lit scene. If the New York intelligentsia wouldn’t have them, then they would just have to change the calculus. They’d have to program a channel all their own…
Legacy is a difficult thing to parse. Musically and aesthetically, Television created more than their share of contemporary culture from whole cloth, but Marquee Moon can sometimes feel like a fading signal. Blondie’s hits still blast from the speakers of classic rock radio, and the Ramones’ “Blitzkrieg Bop” is a get-pumped staple of stadium events the world over. Talking Heads and David Byrne did indeed fill the art-punk vacuum left by Television and took it all the way to cultural ubiquity.
