Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (21 page)

In a post–
Marquee Moon
interview, Verlaine tells a different story about fire:

And so the album ends with punk’s revolutionary injunction: burn it down and start again.

263
Elliot (1977).

264
Demorest (1977).

265
Gholson (1976).

266
Robbins (2001).

267
Lloyd, “Ask Richard.”

268
Mengaziol (1981).

269
Lloyd, “Ask Richard.”

270
Licht (2003).

271
Lloyd (2007), email to Casey.

272
Kent (2010: p 314).

273
Laughner (1977).

274
“
Punk
Talks.”

275
Savage (2010: p. 138).

276
Wolcott (1977); Laughner (1977).

277
Demorest (1977).

278
Mitchell (2006: p. 64).

279
Wolcott (1977).

280
Rockwell (1977a).

281
Heylin (1993: p. 96).

282
Kugel (1977).

283
Hell Papers, Box 9, Folder 594.

284
Kent (1977a).

285
Kent (1977a).

286
Wolcott (1977).

287
Emerson (1977).

288
Demorest (1978).

289
Kent (1977a).

290
“Television” (1977).

291
Kent (1997a).

292
“Television” (1977).

293
Robbins (2001). Lloyd, though not quoted outright, is the implied source.

294
Mitchell (2006: p. 69).

295
Leo Casey made a good case for this reading on the Marquee Moon Mailing List in March 2004.

296
Licht (2003).

297
Demorest (1977).

V
erlaine vacationed in London in February 1977.
Marquee Moon
had come out in the States and he chose to skip town. Since it wouldn’t drop in England until March, he was taken off guard to find the band on the cover of
New Musical Express
one morning, complete with the headline: “TELEVISION: Vinyl Masterwork for Spring Schedules Everywhere.” Even more surprising: the rave review inside came from Richard Hell’s old heroin buddy, Nick Kent:

Two years had passed since Television first received notice from UK music writers who’d ventured to the Bowery looking for the next big thing, and Television had been harder than most to convey in print. (Hell’s photos, Kent noted, fared better on the transatlantic voyage.) But here was a record to set things straight at last, one “not fashioned merely for the N.Y. avant-garde rock cognoscenti. It is a record for everyone who boasts a taste for a new exciting music expertly executed, finely in tune, sublimely arranged.”
²⁹⁹

Television’s fans had worried that their live electricity wouldn’t transfer to vinyl. “Little Johnny Jewel,” which received some initial thumbs down, had been a test case in that regard. But reviews for
Marquee Moon
were overwhelmingly positive, with many, like Kent, declaring the album an instant classic. The
Voice’s
Robert Christgau placed the album at the top of his 1977 list. It landed at No. 3 on his annual composite “Pazz & Jop” poll of music critics he respected, coming in just behind the Sex Pistols’
Anarchy in the UK
and Elvis Costello’s
My Aim Is True
but just ahead of Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumours
. The quick take in Christgau’s annual consumer’s guide was as effusive as Kent’s:

Christgau’s friend Lester Bangs, having given up on Detroit’s depleted scene and moved to New York, gave his top honors that year to Richard Hell & the Voidoids, refusing to put Television on his list at all (as did Greil Marcus, who gave the Sex Pistols his top slot).
³⁰¹
But even Bangs gave begrudging kudos in a review for the glossy mainstream rock weekly,
Circus
, though he couldn’t resist slamming the band for being just plain boring as people: “The grooves of Television’s first album are the most interesting of the year so far,” he wrote. “The group has been compared to the Velvet Underground and the Stooges, and I thought citifried Grateful Dead when I saw them live, but none of that really holds re this LP.” He concluded by repeating the confession that he likes the album in spite of himself: “it’s not pretentious, it has a gritty churn that’ll get in your blood like specks of gravel or the rust that comes to neon.” It wouldn’t sell, he predicted, because it doesn’t sound like the corporate hard rockers Boston, but that’s half the reason he likes it: “So thrash on and bless you, Verlaine,” he ends, revealing just how personal this review has been, “even if you are a creep and never think about jumping a little bit on stage like this guy Richard Hell in the news? Now there’s an image of a rock ‘n’ roll prince, later for stars (that’s for you, Patti).”
³⁰²

Christgau noted that his year-end poll indexed an industry watershed: the top three artists were all “rank amateurs.” (He doesn’t say “punks,” but all three fell under that loose umbrella as well.) In retrospect other signs are visible: what Christgau had famously dubbed the “Rock-Critic Establishment” had thrown its weight, in 1977, behind UK rather than New York punk. The “punk” label would haunt Television in multiple ways, leading Verlaine to think for years that it, along with too close an identification with the New York scene, had stymied Television’s commercial breakthrough. Following a cross-country American tour in spring 1977 (incongruously supporting Peter Gabriel, a fan of the band but most popular among prog rockers who detested punk) the band spent most of May and June touring the UK and Europe to audiences eager to see the group that had long been lionized as punk founders. The mythology of CBGB’s, partially their creation, preceded them. With mainstream media already equating “punk” with the fashion sensibility McLaren and the Sex Pistols had popularized — already three-years old in New York have having lost a little of its edge — Television puzzled reviewers and some audience members who expected flashier stage antics or the snottiness and violence associated with UK punks. Television, by contrast, seemed “cold,” an assessment buttressed by press accounts, hardly exaggerated, of icy relations with their supporting act, Blondie. The album, which sold much better in the UK than it did at home, peaked on the British charts at No. 28.

Back home in February, amid encouraging early reviews and not yet on the road to support the album, the band played three triumphal nights at CBGB’s. John Rockwell, in the
Times
, warned, as he had when Patti Smith first signed with Arista, that audiences should hurry downtown, since the group couldn’t play small venues for long. “There’s a certain point where you think you deserve something,” Verlaine told Rockwell. The article ran with a large close-up of the singer glancing to the side of the frame, cigarette ash aglow. “I’m sick of playing places where we bump into things.” This was a comment Verlaine made more than once that spring. When Rockwell rattles off the now familiar story of how Television stumbled onto CBGB’s three years earlier, Verlaine comments with confidence on his role in the interaction with Kristal: “I went and asked him, ‘Why don’t you play rock here?’ … He wasn’t making any money so he said, ‘Why not?’ Soon we got a following, and every band in the world converged on the place.”
³⁰³

True to Rockwell’s prediction, Television never played CBGB’s again, a clear signal of Verlaine’s increased distance from the scene. Many assumed he had shrugged it off in direct mimicry of Dylan rejecting the folk movement, as if he and Patti Smith had conspired to imitate jointly Dylan’s cool detachment on display in
Don’t Look Back
.
³⁰⁴

On returning from their European tour, the band headlined a few dates in the Midwest, then returned to New York, though they dropped out of sight on the local scene, especially Verlaine. One reason was purely financial: with no money to show for their troubles, they sold off their equipment to live. Over a decade later Verlaine insisted they had never made royalties on the album beyond the initial advance. Other troubled plagued them: Lloyd had parlayed the band’s critical cache, and a mutual rehab doctor, into a friendship with Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards’s girlfriend. Their shared habit led them into adventures such as roaming the Lower East Side in a limo, looking for their dealer. (“The dealers were like, ‘GET THAT FUCKING LIMO OFF MY BLOCK! WHAT ARE YOU, CRAZY?” he recalled in
Please Kill Me
.
³⁰⁵
) Lloyd’s addiction ominously echoed the one that had been partly responsible for alienating Verlaine from Hell two years earlier.

Still, the band threw its energy into recording a follow-up record,
Adventure
. That album — which had a cleaner sound and poppier production than the debut, tracks like “Days” and “Glory” in retrospect seeming to predict a decade of American college rock — fared well with American critics generally but received mixed reactions on the local scene and in the UK. Roy Trakin, reviewing the album for
New York Rocker
(which was generally supportive of Television), predicted that “die-hard Television addicts are gonna be disappointed with this LP” and thought it “eliminates much of the fiery dynamism the band still manages in live performance.”
³⁰⁶
Trakin’s criticism was rooted in the album’s recording history: Richard Lloyd had spent several weeks in the hospital in the middle of the recording sessions with a heart inflammation, endocarditis, brought on, as he acknowledged, by shooting up. As a result his presence on the album is severely diminished. The same issue of
New York Rocker
featured Television as one of New York’s top 10 bands, but gave them only 7–1 odds of breaking into the mainstream: “Their followup has insiders buzzing, but the group’s low public profile hurts their immediate chances for widespread exposure. Ultimately it must be in the grooves and if FM programmers ever wake up to the fact, they’ll find that Television possesses strong ‘crossover’ potential.”
³⁰⁷
Many on the scene seemed to take Television’s “low public profile” personally.

If such withdrawal had hurt them at home, the enthusiasm they had generated in the UK quickly spawned a backlash. The
NME
’s Julie Burchill, nursing grudges against her rival writer Nick Kent, savaged
Adventure
and the whole New York scene, under the headline “The TV Backlash Starts Here.” Kent’s endorsement of
Marquee Moon
, she suggested, had prompted that album’s unwarranted success by “auto-suggest[ion].” In her view, Verlaine’s “acid-casualty-type-gibberish” lyrics were sufficient only for him and Patti Smith to curl up and read French poetry to. Though not all critics agreed by any means, a backlash — perhaps inevitable, considering years of hype — did seem in the works. A British tour in support of the album drew crowds, the album outsold
Marquee Moon
(making it to No. 7 on the UK charts), but even supportive critics fretted enthusiasm for the band had declined.

By the late summer of ’77 it seemed apparent that the new wave of British punk bands would define the movement that had been lumped under that umbrella term. Alan Betrock, in
New York Rocker
, sounded slightly resentful: “What the Ramones, Blondie, Patti, and Television started well over two years ago has now become the biggest force in rock ‘n’ roll,” he wrote. “Only one suspects that the English new-wave, with their more extreme politics, sounds, and costumes … will bear the fruits of New York’s labor.”
³⁰⁸
The Sex Pistols, writer Lisa Jane Persky complained in the same issue, were nothing more than a Monster made up of bits McLaren stole from early Television and the Ramones. If the band was hampered by transatlantic expectations of what “punk” meant, at home Verlaine felt they had been pigeonholed as a New York band, which made it difficult to get mainstream airplay. To make matters worse, Elektra was not supporting the band domestically, instead favoring the London market, which had shown more initial interest. For years Verlaine would complain that the label had chosen to throw its weight behind Canadian newcomers the Cars — a band with a similar sound but a softer, more pleasant vocals and glossier, radio-friendly production. (The Cars, he said, had broken through by relying on “automatic reference points,” exactly what he had hoped to avoid in his own work.
³⁰⁹
) In
Marquee Moon
’s wake, Verlaine had told the Boston
Phoenix
that there’s “so much prejudice against New Yorkers it’s incredible. In a town like St. Louis, you can’t even get played on the radio if you’re from New York. You walk into a radio station and the guy looks at you like, ‘Here’s another bunch of New York assholes.’ It makes you either want to be an asshole or try to get through to the guy. I don’t mind if they play the record or not, but I’d really like it if they’d listen to it. We’re a different sort of band from what they’re used to, so I think we’re worth a listen.” A year later, following
Adventure
’s release, he echoed the complaint to Richard Robinson in
Hit Parader
:

When the band did play New York again — three nights at the Bottom Line in July 1978 — they were homecoming shows in multiple senses. The band hadn’t played the city for 18 months, and they’d just returned from a UK tour and several successful West Coast shows. Christgau, in an enthusiastic review, highlighted the gulf that separated the band from their erstwhile scenemates: