Setting the Scene
“The NYC post-punk scene in the late ‘70s was unmatched, with figureheads like Talking Heads, Blondie and, of course, Television, at its vanguard.” PM Robert Christgau of the Voice declared Television the “most interesting of New York’s underground rock bands.” BW-119 They trekked across what Rolling Stone’s Ken Tucker called “the same cluttered, hostile terrain as bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls.” OB Regarding the Velvets’ influence, Television “soaked up…John Cale’s conceptual clarity and Lou Reed’s guitar tone.” CM
They were one of the first bands to play CBGB’s in 1974, ahead of other club luminaries such as Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, and the Talking Heads. While “it’s impossible to imagine post-punk soundscapes without it,” AM Television “never officially considered themselves a part of punk.” OB “Television were in almost every sense an exemplary rock n’ roll band—the sound was raw and uncompromising yet melodious and in some ways sweet.” JSH “This owes more to Tom Verlaine’s not-exactly-smooth vocals than anything else; as an instrumental band, they were probably better than any other punk band (and a fair number of rock bands.” PK
“Their predecessors…had fused blues structures with avant-garde flourishes” AM and their “peers turned up the distortion, revved up the tempo, and stripped their songs down to tight three-chord anthems.” AZ They took “a much different approach to rock than its jokey counterparts,” RV the Ramones. “While Joey Ramone deconstructed rock, Television tried to set it free and inspired R.E.M., Sonic Youth and Pavement in the process.” RV
Television’s sound is built on “an incongruous, soaring amalgam of genres.” RS “They were the King Crimson to hard rock’s Led Zeppelin, Funkadelic to soul’s Otis Redding.” OB Television “distinguished themselves as the math nerds of punk,” OB gaining the attention of Brian Eno, who’d recently bolted from Roxy Music for a solo career. They recorded a demo with him, but weren’t satisfied with the sound. They ended up watching their peers land record deals, while Television didn’t release their first full-length LP until 1977.
Background
“Mercurial frontman” PF Tom Verlaine “took his surname from a renowned French poet.” OB He had “that rare combo of street-poet ala Dylan or Reed, and certified guitar genius.” JSH The latter was sparked by a “love of raw garage rock and challenging free jazz.” PF
He met bassist Richard Hell in New York in the early ‘70s. Hell “was the first to sport the ripped and safety-pinned clothing – soon copied by the Sex Pistols – that would become the punk uniform.” CS They formed the band Neon Boys with drummer Billy Ficca. They reformed as Television in late 1973 with second guitarist Richard Lloyd. He and Verlaine traded “long and winding solos like all the great mythic duos.” JSH They didn’t “bludgeon listeners” TM with their guitar interplay, but used the two guitars to, as Lloyd said, “play rhythm and melody back and forth.” TM “Verlaine would establish a rhythmic phrase, against which Lloyd would splatter defiant, often deliriously dissonant, melodies.” TM
Verlaine and company weren’t just part of the CBGB scene, but its founders. Verlaine was the one to convince Hilly Kristal, the bar’s owner, to let unsigned local bands play at CBGB’s. Television “launched the punk and new-wave scences in New York when they played their first gig at CBGB on March 31, 1974.” CS
Hell left the group in 1975. Verlaine reportedly thought Hell upstaged him with his frenzied stage presence and sometimes refused to play his songs. Hell was replaced by Fred Smith, previously with Blondie.
The Debut Album
Marquee Moon, Television’s debut album, “is a vivid distillation of the milieu that its bandmates inhabited.” PM “Though the band's rough and ragged beginnings made them a centerpiece of the mid-70s CBGB's New York punk scene, you wouldn’t know it from the album, which is every bit as tight and slick as any other classic rock album of the era.” PK Verlaine “demonstrated a particular affinity for mid-1960s psychedelic jam bands like Moby Grape and the Grateful Dead, but with a strong Velvet Underground influence.” CS
“You can hear its influence throughout the ages, from the noisy, howling dynamism of the Pixies to the hooky, synthy guitar tones of The Strokes.” PM It is comprised…of tense garage rockers that spiral into heady intellectual territory.” AM It is as “exhilarating in its ambitions as the Ramones’ debut was in its simplicity.” RS Television “completely strip away any sense of swing or groove” AM and smartly “avoid the cursory punk snarl” TM by employing “a radical rethinking of rock guitar.” TM
Verlaine supplied “an excellent set of songs that conveyed a fractured urban mythology unlike any of his contemporaries.” AM The lyrics were “fueled by puns and double-entendres, filled with riddles and word games, inside jokes.” BW-161 The songs “were thought-provoking, memorable, danceable” AZ and “sounded as if they might have come from a Mike Hammer pulp detective novel.” RS
“Smith’s warm basslines and Ficca’s stern playing” CM created the foundation for “Verlaine’s edgy, upper atmosphere vocals.” CM Peter Laughner said Verlaine’s “singing voice has this marvelous quality of slurring all dictions into what becomes distortions of actual lines.” BW-161 The rest of the group “flesh out Verlaine’s poetry into sweeping sonic epics” AM via “long, interweaving instrumental sections.” AM
It is “a record of ecstatic repetition and grave guitar solos offset by spectral characters and theatrical asides.” CM “There is simply not a bad song on the entire record.” AM
Production
The album was recorded over three weeks in November 1976 at A & R Studios, where legends such as John Coltrane, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, and Velvet Underground had recorded. BW-156 It was produced by Andy Johns, who’d worked with Led Zeppelin, Mott the Hoople, and the Rolling Stones. Television wanted to work with him because he kept arrangements minimal and “the result would approximate their live sound.” BW-157
The band initially found themselves at odds with Johns. Lloyd said, “he was used to being with people who are also rock ‘n roll…You know: you’ve got a 2 o’clock start, and the engineer shows up at 4:30, and the guitarist shows up at 5 and the singer rolls in at midnight. But Television were not like that. We were punctual. And serious.” OB Meanwhile, Johns said, “My first impression was that they couldn’t play and couldn’t sing and the music was very bizarre.” BW-157
“Once they got on the same page, Johns and Television created a literal master’s class in the kind of crisp yet sharp production that enhanced the angularity of their rhythms without losing their sense of melody and pop appeal.” OB “There's an energy and edge that shines through the album's solid production.” PK
The Album’s Impact
This is one of those albums with sales “inversely proportional to the outsize influence it had on generations of disillusioned youth.” EW’12 It is “a trailblazing” AM “classic bit of punk rock,” AZ “one of the most beloved punk albums of all time.” PK It “paved the way for every ambitious rock record to follow in the next 40 years.” OB It is “a sinuous, entrancing and gorgeous debut” ZG and “a revolutionary album, but it’s a subtle, understated revolution.” AM
Clinton Heylin, author of Babylon’s Burning: From Punk to Garage, says this is one of American punk’s four “most enduring landmarks;” BW-9 the others being Patti Smith’s Horses, Pere Ubu’s The Modern Dance, and Richard Hell and the Voidoid’s Blank Generation. BW-9 New Musical Express’s Nick Kent called it “a 24-carat inspired work of pure genius, a record finely in tune and sublimely arranged with a whole new slant on dynamics.” PF However, not everyone was a fan. Critic Lester Bangs said, they “reminded me so much of the Grateful Dead, just boring solos, y’know.” PF
The Songs
Here are thoughts on the individual songs on the album.
“See No Evil”
The “raw rip” JSH of See No Evil makes for “one of the great starts to a rock ‘n’ roll album ever.” BW-163 “Like most Television songs this one starts with an extended introduction, a sense of anticipation, hesitation, building tension.” BW-164 “The music is repetitive, churning, the sounds of machinery.” BW-164 “The territory we’re in is nervous, angular.” BW-165 The song is about “a desire to exit, a fantasy of escaping to the hills.” BW-165
“Venus”
“If the opening track suggested urban out-of-doors, on ‘Venus’ the landscape is explicity defined as New York’s.” BW-169 The song dates back to even before the Neon Boys. Its “opening structure lends to storytelling, stage-setting: here the streets are bright, the nocturnal atmosphere established by contrast, as if you need to escape the more brightly lit parts of town and find some darker quarter downtown in which to take solace.” BW-170 Solace, however, is elusive considering the song’s central refrain: “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo,” a reference to the famous statue which has no arms at all. BW-174
“Friction”
As its title would suggest, the third song offers “counterpoint and conflict.” BW-174 “Like the music’s evocation of train crossings and warning bells, the lyrics tell us we’re in dangerous territory.” BW-176 In one example of wordplay, Verlaine sings “you complain of my DICK…shun.,” illustrating that “words (diction) are no substitute for nagging sexual desires unevenly fulfilled.” BW-176
“Marquee Moon”
The “intoxicating, effortlessly epic title track” CM has been “routinely praised…as one of the great guitar songs of all time.” BW-177 “For precedents, we’d have to go back to the expansive West Coast psychedelia of the Paul Butterfield Band’s “East-West” or even the Grateful Dead’s twin epics ‘Dark Star’ and “The Other One.’” PF
“Ffeaturing an exploratory Verlaine guitar solo,” PF “is a 10-minute guitar fantasia, enveloping tricky hooks and cacophony with a spare drum and bass groove.” RV “The song builds and abates, growing in intensityuntil a crescendo that feels final but instead returns to where it all began.” CM It is “miles away from the Ramones’ minimalist rock antics or Blondie’s ironic pop moves.” PF It is “the Grateful Dead filtered through a Velvet Underground/Stooges backdrop.” PK
“Elevation”
Critic Nick Kent called “the jazzed up” PK Elevation “beautiful, proudly contagious with a chorus that lodges itself in your subconscious like a bullet in the skull.” BW-183 It “has a sighing guitar refrain that informs the song’s melancholy.” CM
There’s a rumour that Verlaine substitutes the word “television” for the word “elevation” in the refrain, making for an interesting meditation on the line “elevation (Television) don’t go to my head.” BW-183
The song also has an interesting story regarding its recording. Lloyd said, “We wanted to rent a rotating speaker to get the sound…but the rental people wanted way too much. So Andy came up with an idea. He took a microphone, and while I did the guitar solo to ‘Elevation,’ he stood in front of me in the studio, swinging this microphone around his head like a lasso. He nearly took my fucking nose off. I was backing up while I was playing.” OB
“Guiding Light”
Guiding Light “is a tremulous ballad that finds Verlaine dedicating himself with quiet ardour.” CM It is a “quietly soulful tune that glimmers through the darkness like a distant lighthouse.” BW-186 Everything on the song – “the slower tempo, the delicate guitar work and drums, lights bells that chim in the background, the piano part dangling above the chorus – suggests and earnest attempt to escape the urban out-of-doors and retreat.” BW-186
“Prove it”
This is a “faithful fan favorite since the band first performed it in 1974.” BW-187 It is “one of the clearest examples of how intensely this band can focus together, put each part into a perfectly moving whole.” BW-187-8 The song’s “opening over a vaguely Latin rhythm…references the Brill Building’s golden era, the sound Leiber and Stoller brought to the Drifters and, later, the Shangri-La’s, or that Phil Spector created for the Crystals or the Ronettes.” BW-188 However, the song “can’t be reduced to Brill Building nostalgia or pastiche…we’re on much more tormented ground.” BW-189
“Torn Curtain”
This “is the one song fans of this album divide over.” BW-192 It “turns the ballad on its head in seven heartbreaking minutes,” RV playing “like a requiem for a tragedy.” CM “It drags. It’s melodramatic. It certainly could have been sacrificed to make room for other, more popular songs from Television’s live set.” BW-192 Nonetheless, “there’s something thematically appropriate about finishing the album with a funeral dirge.” BW-192
The title references “an apocalyptic miracle in the wake of Jesus’ crucifixion” in which, as Matthew 27:51 says, “At the moment the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. The earth shook and the rocks split.” BW-192 However, it can also be viewed as a reference to live theater and the notion that a torn curtain would let the audience see behind the scenes. BW-193
Notes:
A 2003 reissue added alternate versions of “See No Evil,” “Friction,” and “Marquee Moon” as well as an untitled instrumental and the single “Little Johnny Jewel (Parts 1 & 2).”
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