Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3)
Read Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) Online
Authors: Bryan Waterman
Bryan Waterman
The Continuum International Publishing Group
80 Maiden Lane, New York, NY 10038
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright © 2011 by Bryan Waterman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Library of Congress Catalogue-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-441-12777-8
Digital conversion
katebroome.co.nz
for Sacha, Derick, and Linda and with gratitude to Stephanie
On their bitter guitars These libertines strike the shrill string; Intoning the chants bizarre, Nostalgic and revolting.
— Paul Verlaine, from “Grotesques” (1866)
T
hanks above all to Stephanie Smith-Waterman, whose patience, love, and support made this book — and make anything else I do — possible. Thanks also to Anna, Molly, and Charlie for going without a dad far too often in the last six months. I’m grateful to David Barker for taking on the project and waiting patiently for the results, and to Cyrus Patell, partner in New York literary crimes, for reactions to multiple drafts. Sean Nortz provided invaluable research/library assistance, especially at the very beginning and the very end. The librarians at Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU deserve many thanks, especially Marvin Taylor, who has assembled the world’s premier collection of materials related to New York’s Downtown Scene, 1974–1984. Thanks also to Lisa Darms, Senior Archivist at Fales, for timely help with images, and to Bobst Library’s Interlibrary Loan staff. I am indebted to two Television fans I’ve never met: Keith Allison, for his Television website The Wonder, which collects a large number of articles about the band, some of which I wasn’t able to track down elsewhere; and Phil Obbard, for maintaining the Marquee Moon Mailing List, whose archived discussions cover every conceivable aspect of the band and this album. My friend Jason Connolly first gave me the itch to write for this series. Jason Gross of the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever helped me track down the photo of Richard Lloyd in the famous Please Kill Me T-Shirt. Special thanks to Michael Carlucci, Richard Hell, and Andy Schwartz for permission to reproduce the images I wanted. All material from the Richard Hell Papers is quoted by permission. I have been carried along, whether or not they knew it, by friends in the downtown NYC blogosphere — Tim Broun of Stupefaction, EV Grieve, and Alex Smith of Flaming Pablum. Bryan Kuntz (aka NYCDreamin) of the blog This Ain’t the Summer of Love helped me in attempts to track down arcane bits of info. My brother, Nathan, helped me scour the Web for bootlegs I didn’t already own. Jim Rader, author of my favorite piece on early Television, has been a generous correspondent. I’ve also benefited from conversations with Daniel Kane, whose work on the LES’s interstitial scenes is inspirational. My students in Writing New York and Downtown Scenes helped me think through several ideas that made their way here, as did friends at The Great Whatsit. Special thanks for many conversations about music to Sacha Jones, Derick Melander, and Linda Perkins, my fellow members of the original Record Club New York.
Obviously what was going on here was the earliest germinal stage of the late-Seventies American punk rock scene, which eventually exploded in three places: New York, London, and the international communications media
.— Lester Bangs, on the early CBGB’s scene, in
Blondie
(1980)
The first album I ever paid for with my own money was an LP born in the waning days — some would say the death throes — of CBGB’s first generation: Blondie’s
Parallel Lines
, released in the fall of 1978, a few months after Television’s sophomore album,
Adventure
. I would have been eight or nine years old. I lived in a rural, cedar-ringed town in the mountains of northern Arizona, and would not have heard of Blondie for several more years if it hadn’t been for my uncle, living in the metropolitan Phoenix area, who received the record in the mail as part of an LP club and, as a devout listener of George Thorogood and Ted Nugent, had no interest in Debbie Harry and her black-and-white-striped mod squad. To me, though, the cover seemed stunning, otherworldy, and I gladly forked over his asking price of 25 cents. In retrospect I’d like to think it was a defining moment in my musical development, the moment I could no longer abide my parents’ Carpenters and Bee Gees and Neil Sedaka records that had defined my Seventies (which is to say, my life) to that point. Maybe it was. My clearer memory, though, is that my father, who also had records by the Rascals and the Stones, thought my 5th grade teacher, his best friend and an avowed Abba fan, would dig Blondie’s girl-group vocals, and so I took the record to school for show and tell. We played it one afternoon in class as a reward for good behavior, though Mr. Smith, who’d previewed the lyrics sheet, made me stand like a sentinel by the turntable and jerk down the volume each time the word “ass” appeared in the song “Heart of Glass.” Maybe that record didn’t change my life, though I did wear it out. And somewhere in my parents’ library is a cassette tape of me singing my prepubescent heart out to that nuclear holocaust deep cut, “Fade Away and Radiate.”
I start with this anecdote not simply to situate myself chronologically or geographically in relation to the downtown New York scene this book seeks to reconstruct — and not merely to warn readers up front that I wasn’t at CBGB’s in the ’70s along with the dog shit, the bums, and the birth of the music that would define the rest of my life (to this point) — but to note that it had taken only four years for a dirty index finger of a bar on the Bowery in New York, a city of which I had almost no conception outside
Sesame Street
, to escape its underground origins and erupt into mainstream American consciousness, reaching even the rural hinterlands — all without the help of the internet. If you’d told someone at CBGB’s in the spring of ’74 that four years later the brassy blonde singer for the Stillettoes [
sic
] would have a record that sold 20 million copies, they would have assumed you’d been smoking up behind the club between sets. And yet here she was, arriving unsolicited in my uncle’s post office box, simply because he forgot to return a slip telling Columbia House he didn’t want his record of the month.
Not that I would know anything about CBGB’s or the Bowery for several years to come. That knowledge I pieced together as a teenager via a subscriptions to mainstream rock magazines and my discovery of the
Readers’ Guide to Periodicals
and Interlibrary Loan. Sending off for photocopies of old articles on my favorite bands, I learned that the post-punk/new wave music that filled my teenage years — thanks to hip kids I met at orchestra camp in the summers, and also to John Peel, whose show played very late nights on a KTNN, the Navajo Nation’s radio station — traced its genealogy back directly to that same club’s earliest bands: Television, Blondie, the Ramones, Patti Smith, Talking Heads. Even so, when I first read about REM’s admiring Television or U2’s declaration of indebtedness to the whole CBGB’s scene, I still knew no one who had even a third-generation dubbed cassette tape of Television’s or Patti Smith’s albums. My music, like my uncle’s before me, came primarily by mail-order, and I don’t recall CBGB’s old-timers as part of the catalog, with the exception of Talking Heads and Blondie, who’d scored a handful of pop hits in the ’80s. That very distinction — the commercial success of a few of the groups and the total unavailability of others — rendered Television or Patti Smith all the more iconic.
It wasn’t until later — when I was a college student, then a graduate student in American Studies, situated in more suitable climes in east coast urban centers — that the full CBGB’s constellation came into view. In college, outside the confines of pre-internet Smallville, I found friends with similar tastes and crates full of records I’d heard of but never seen, all mine for the cost of a few dozen blank cassettes. Serious record stores became a reality, not something I read about. Just about the time I finished my PhD, Napster (then Audiogalaxy, then Soulseek) became available and then even the most elusive bootlegs could be mine with a few keystrokes. Rather than spend much time on the music I had grown up with in the ’80s, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the sounds and music mythology of earlier eras. The bands that dominated my music listening in the ’90s — the whole American Pixies-and-Pavement-inspired indie scene — were name-checking Television the same way my post-punk idols had.
In spite of the fact that CBGB’s logo has become as ubiquitous as Journey songs at a wedding dance, the club’s location at 315 Bowery given over to high-end retailers who want to cash in on rock chic and four decades of neighborhood hipness, Television remains not just a cult band but a cool kids’ cult band. Television still separates sheep from goats, righteous rock snobs from Philistines. I don’t remember the first time I listened to
Marquee Moon
, but I do remember my first conversations about Television, with my friend Shelley in her Brooklyn apartment, before I moved to New York. Shelley oozes cool, cuts through crap with razor-sharp observations and, as anyone who’s ever received a mix-tape from her knows, can work a 90-minute freeform mix like few others. Shelley called me out once long ago for not having taken
Adventure
seriously enough. She was right: Wanna hear where American college rock came from? Listen to “Days.” It will make you question your early devotion to REM. And
Adventure
was supposed to be a sophomore slump.
If Television’s story in the ’70s was a continual effort to break out of the New York scene it helped to found, the fact that its records remained underground following its four-year flirtation with fame meant that it would always be the province of in-groups, those who transmitted secret knowledge from one rock underground to another via record-store recommendations, fanzines, mix-tapes, college radio shows, and podcasts, all transmitted with a kind of Masonic solemnity. Television lends itself to the genre of secret history: its members were mythologizing the band before it was even born, which means more often than not its story gets told in fits of nostalgia for a club and a neighborhood scene and a glorious moment in rock ‘n’ roll that no longer exists. In aiming to present a cultural history of that scene, 1973–1978, using Television and the music on and leading up to
Marquee Moon
as windows onto that world, I aim less to recycle these myths than to ask how and why this music was produced when it was, and what purposes it served for those who created it and continue to find so much meaning in it.
Some portions of what follows will be familiar to the thousands who still fixate on this scene: the recognizable names CBGB’s spawned, the infighting between Television’s members, the aborted early sessions with Brian Eno, Richard Hell’s acrimonious departure from the band. But my approach here is less a rock journalist’s than that of a literary and cultural historian with an archival bent and an eye for details that don’t quite fit the standard story. My biggest motivation in writing this book is to offer a more carefully documented reception history than you’ll find in the gossipy books on the scene that, if given the chance, go for sensation over substance, let alone discussion of the music itself. I’m interested, rather, in how tradition forms and fractures, in the origins of sounds that seemed so new when Tom Verlaine started warbling for audiences, or when he and Richard Lloyd first aimed dueling guitar lines at one another like lightning striking itself.