Television - Marquee Moon
- 6 days ago
- 22 min read
You could record a Marquee Moon sound-alike today – and almost get away with it. television
Tom Verlaine: vocals, guitar, keys
Richard Lloyd: guitar, backing vocals
Fred Smith, no not that one this one: bass
Billy Ficca: drums
Produced by Andy Johns with Tom Verlaine
art by Robert Mapplethorpe and Richard Lloyd
Television’s original run lasted from 1973 to 1978. They put out just two albums in that time. Their debut, Marquee Moon, wasn’t released until 1977. I’m in a position where, in telling the story of how this album came to be, I have to condense five years of a band’s six-year original run – including one major lineup change! – into a post of manageable length. On top of that, a lot of the band’s history is wrapped up in the early history of CBGB’s. I’ll only be hitting the necessary beats. If you want a complete history of Television that’s also a history of CBGB’s, I recommend Bryan Waterman’s 33 1/3 installation. This is my pick for the second-best in the series so far (nothing beats that Trout Mask Replica volume.)
Waterman observed that Marquee Moon “has, from its release, sent rock historians scrambling to situate it…” Let’s start by situating the axis of early Television: Tom Miller and Richard Meyers.
A lot of punk rock (more on Television’s relation to the label later) is wrapped up in myth. Tom and Richard were no different. They spun this story that they were childhood friends who ran away from reform school together; Tom the misunderstood child prodigy, Richard the archetypal juvenile delinquent blowing up school buses. They did know each other in their school years, but in reality they turned up in New York a year-and-a-half apart. Tom was the little psychonaut of the pair. He sang the praises of the Stones, the Doors, Yardbirds, and the “primitive electric blues” of Elmore James and Buddy Guy. He liked garage rock and loved the Thirteenth Floor Elevators. A cover of “Fire Engine” was an early Television set staple, as was The Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.”
Then you have Richard Hell, who loved the Stooges. He was anti-glitter, all rock-and-roll. Remember in the Velvet Underground & Nico review when I offhandedly mentioned Warhol first tried for an art-rock band with La Monte Young? (You’re forgiven if you don’t, it was the passing-est of comments.) Patty Oldenburg was the group’s singer. After the band broke up and she split with her husband, she briefly dated Richard! Everything is connected, people!!
New York in the post-Silver Factory sixties through the seventies was, for lack of a better term, a hovel. The Lower East Side was the worst of the worst. In the days before flashy rock-and-roll-themed boutiques, the neighborhood was afflicted by poverty, riddled with drugs and crime, and there were more abandoned buildings than not. Forgive me for being the art historian in the room, but these descriptors invoke Thomas Cole’s The Course of Empire. While the rest of New York was around here...
...the Lower East Side was about here.
As Cole shows, when a society falls, its rules, laws, and social norms go out the window. Their institutions, physical and societal, rot until they return to nature. This is perfect for young artists who don’t give a fuck about “the rules” to begin with. Nasty as it was, Richard and Tom couldn’t have picked a better place to be. The Lower East Side was the only part of the city kids like him could afford. In this environment of debauchery and decay, the future members of Television and their peers birthed something new and different. (We’d see this post-apocalyptic wasteland effect with the short-lived but monumentally important no wave scene.)
What was going on in rock-and-roll at the moment? Prog and stadium rock. Excess on excess. The post-VU New York scene was a combination of cabaret revival (see Lou Reed’s Transformer and...Cabaret,) “glitter” (both indebted to queer culture,) and the garage rock revival spurred by Lenny Kaye’s Nuggets compilation. The New York Dolls existed at an intersection of all of this, but that’s a story for another day!
Tom and Richard struggled to break into this scene at first. They worked at various book stores to stay afloat. Their first band, the Neon Boys, fell apart after they couldn’t find a competent rhythm guitarist. But, as rock-and-roll myth always seems to have it, Television came together under the most unlikely of circumstances.
Tom and Richard land a hail-Mary audition at the Reno Sweeney supper club in October of 1973. Who happened to be there? Warhol associate (and the guys’ boss at the Cinemabilia,) Terry Ork. He thought himself something of a svengali. He offered to manage the guys, buy their gear, give them a rehearsal space, the whole nine yards. (They bombed the audition, by the way.) Terry throws in this guitarist he met at Max’s Kansas City as a bonus: Richard Lloyd. Tom and Richard call up their old drummer from their Delaware days, Billy Ficca, and the original lineup of Television is born. About the so-simple-it's-stupid name, Lloyd said,
“It’s always there. It’s so there that you lose your consciousness about it. ‘Television’ just seemed to fit that bill ’cause it’s something that’s in every home in America. It’s so obtrusive, it’s unobtrusive.”
quoted from: Clinton Heylin, From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock (2005 ed.)
Even after solidifying their lineup and basically setting up Ork Records for Terry, Television had an extended personality crisis. Judging from what few early recordings of theirs that we have, it took a solid minute for them to find their sound. They had their look down first: thrift store clothes, safety pins, and ripped shirts. They filtered the DIY aesthetic through the faintest whispers of the 1950s revival that smacked the mainstream in the eighties – and Malcom McLaren totally stole the look from Richard Hell. Television did it as a deliberate rejection of the revolting excess rock-and-roll had become.
“We were really unique. There was not another rock & roll band with short hair. There was not another rock & roll band with torn clothes. Everybody was still wearing glitter and women’s clothes.”
quoted from: Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: An Uncensored Oral History of Punk (1996 ed.)
To complete their anti-glam transformation, Tom and Richard took stage names. Tommy Miller and Ricky Meyers are such glam rock names. They needed something with edge. But it had to have smarts, too; they came from the underground poetry scene, after all. Inspiration struck in the spring of 1974, when Christopher Hampton staged Total Eclipse; a play about Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. History will say they were...roommates. Tom Miller changed his name to Tom Verlaine. Richard Meyer became Richard Hell, after Rimbaud’s A Season In Hell. Tom recounted to Nick Kent:
“We just felt that we had to change our names in order to make a mark – though mostly it was done just for fun, now I recall. Richard had already chosen his name – Hell as much for the sound as for its implications.”
quoted from: Bryan Waterman, 33 1/3: Marquee Moon (2011.)
Verlaine and Hell weren’t lovers like Verlaine and Rimbaud were, but their matchy-matchy names locked them in as a pair. These two were a package deal, never one without the other. Surely that won’t age like milk! As our heroes quite possibly took rock-and-roll’s first recorded instance of punk names, two major events shaped the Lower East Side scene. In August of 1973, the Mercer Arts Center collapsed...literally. The hottest club in town, Max’s Kansas City, closed for renovations in late 1974. Their respective scenes were conveniently pushed into the arms of CBGB.
“As the band played on you could hear the whack of the pool cues hitting the balls, the saluki barking, bottles klinking, and the sound of a scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.”
quoted from: Patti Smith, Just Kids: Illustrated Edition (2018.)
In reality, there were drunk winos pissing outside and Hilly’s dog shitting everywhere.
CBGB was opened for “Country, Blue-Grass, & Blues,” if you can believe it. Owner Hilly Krystal was convinced it’d be the next big thing. But that’s just about the only cosmic thing about this place. If the Lower East Side was a shithole, that intersection of Bleecker and Bowery was somehow even worse. Cab drivers refused to go there. Thus, kids would have to drive themselves and risk having their cars set on fire, or go on foot and risk getting mugged.
You’ve probably heard the story of Tom and/or Richard Hell stumbling upon the bar as Hilly hung the iconic CBGB awning, or how they supposedly convinced Hilly to put on “new music” shows. You’ve also probably heard the myth that Tom and Richard built the CBGB’s stage. Like the aforementioned movie-script fantasies, this is also false. The stage was built by Eric Emerson and Sesu Coleman of the Tramps, the actual first band to play the club. You’ve also heard the myth of Richard Hell’s “PLEASE KILL ME” shirt – there’s a whole book named after it. But Hell never wore it!! He did make it, but he chickened out and put Richard Lloyd in it! CBGB’s grand re-opening in March of 1974 set the stage for Television’s first extended “residency.” In the early days, the CBGB’s audience was mostly the town drunks and other bands. Lenny Kaye remembered,
“It was the same twenty-five or thirty-five people in the audience, and you would get up onstage and play, then go offstage and hang out and watch your friends play. Everybody had a sense of the destination, but the fact that this destination was so improbable allowed you to develop at your own speed.”
quoted from: Kembrew McLeod, The Downtown Pop Underground (2018.)
The CBGB crowd was populated by The Stilettos, fronted by an ex-Max’s waitress, this laughably bad band with matching haircuts who couldn’t play any of their instruments (surely they won’t get far,) and the poet laureate of punk.
Patti Smith was a freaking institution on the New York arts scene at this point. She arrived in New York in the “Summer of Love,” smack between Richard’s arrival in 1966 and Tom’s in ’68. She obviously loved Rimbaud, so she instantly picked up on what Tom was putting down. They promptly struck up a romance...or, more accurately, a love triangle between Tom, Patti, and Allen Lanier of Blue Oyster Cult! She wrote “We Three” about it, Tom wrote “I’m Gonna Find You” about her.
This (ahem) entanglement was beneficial for both rock-and-Rimbaud-loving parties. Patti hyped up Television whenever she could, writing glowing reviews for the various publications she contributed to. The romantic tales she spun certainly bolstered Television’s image. In turn, Tom helped Patti get on the CBGB’s stage and cut her first single, “Hey Joe.”
Of all the big personalities swirling around the Lower East Side in 1974, Clinton Heylin determines Television were the “first band to provide New York’s post-Mercers scene with focus.” This little scene makes enough noise in the UK music press (we can thank Nick Kent for this) to pique the interest of Island Records A&R guy Richard Williams.
Williams was brought to CBGB to see Blondie, but he came away wanting Television instead. He brought Brian Eno along to produce in hopes of swaying the guys, as if he wasn't busy enough in '74!
Clearly the guys had the songs down. “Prove It” changed very little from demo to album version, and “Venus” might even have a better groove here. But the session was a shitshow. The engineer only knew how to record salsa music! And Tom was with how demos sounded. “...the guitars sounded like the Ventures; except not as good – the Ventures at least sounded warm and wet and (we sounded) cold and dry – very brittle with no persona.” He was set on producing Television himself, despite having zero experience in a studio besides this! So he turned Island Records down, as well as Eno’s bestie Robert Fripp’s label, EG.
About here we come to the falling-out between Hell and Verlaine. To this day, you will find Richard Hell fans online who call Verlaine a snake, and Verlaine fans who say Richard Hell was a no-good junkie. It’s like the Robbie Robertson fans vs. Levon Helm fans, right? I have absolutely no interest in getting in the middle of your debate because both of you are right! As great of a text as it is, I feel Please Kill Me stoked the flames. It’s a fun read, but I have no interest in a whole chapter about Dee Dee Ramone and Richard scoring drugs!
To get to the root of what happened, you have to understand the scene at time. There were still a lot of lingering Warhol devotees; hung up on superstars, the image. Richard had a vision for Television with the ripped clothes and all. Punk is a performance, you’re acting out delinquency and youth. Richard Hell is a character too, after all, so it wasn’t about Hell rejecting an image. If Tom was in charge of the brunt force of songwriting, Hell was in charge of the look. But Tom started to resent anything that distracted from the music. This new song in the set, “Marquee Moon,” would mark the split in where they wanted Television to go. This thing was getting up to seven, eight, nine, ten minutes long. This wasn’t Hell’s jam. While both guys loved the Stooges – this was the lone thing the New York punk scene had in common, it seems – Tom didn’t want to do Stooges-like songs. Hell appreciated the arty side of of it all, but he didn’t want an arty sound. He felt they needed to play gritty music to back their smarts up. This friction...oh god. Of course. Friction! Was what made early Television interesting.
Their sets started with a 70-30 split of Verlaine and Hell songs, and the guys singing lead 50-50. Over their residencies in the fall of 1974, Hell’s songs were slowly weeded from the set.
The timing of the band’s destabilization couldn’t have been worse. The CBGB’s scene took off in 1975. With Television out on their first tour, the club stage was quite literally wide open for the Ramones to get their shit together. Once they did, they were unstoppable. Today your love, tomorrow the world! As if from a sixties dream, Bob Dylan reappeared in the city amid his messy separation from Sara. He saw Patti Smith at the Bitter End and invited her on the Rolling Thunder Revue. She turned him down to record Horses with John Cale – Tom would play guitar on “Break It Up.” Fed up with being sidelined, Richard Hell left the band in April. He took all his Television songs with him to play with ex-New York Doll Johnny Thunders as the Heartbreakers (no, not those ones) and as Richard Hell and the Voidoids.
So what did Television do? They poached Fred Smith from Blondie, of course! Mind you, this was right after the Patti Smith Group wooed their guitarist Ivan Kral away, and the Heartbreakers nearly snagged Chris Stein! No wonder Debbie Harry had beef in Please Kill Me. These motherfuckers nearly scrapped her band for parts!!
Television came back from tour to CBGB’s Unsigned Artists Festival. They recorded debut single “Little Johnny Jewel” and nearly lost Richard Lloyd for it. “Torn Curtain” debuted at Mother’s, “See No Evil” and “Guiding Light” were in the set list by early 1976. They cut a new set of demos with Allen Lanier. Sire Records offered a contract, but Television said no on the grounds of a too-small advance. Atlantic were interested but they said no, and I’m honestly not sure why they asked in the first place because they didn’t “get” Television at all. Clive Davis wanted them for Arista, but he backed out for fear of competition with Patti Smith. Finally, in July of 1976, the nation’s bicentennial, at the same time as the Live at CBGB’s compilation, and going on two years after the Eno demos, Television accepted a deal with Elektra Records. It was facilitated by – who else? – Danny Fields.
Elektra agreed to Tom’s stipulation of producing Television, on one condition: he had to have an engineer in the room who actually knew what he was doing. He chose the Rolling Stones’ go-to, Andy Johns, for his work on Goats’ Head Soup. Andy wasn’t impressed.
“My first impression was that they couldn’t play and couldn’t sing and the music was very bizarre.”
quoted from: Bryan Waterman, 33 1/3: Marquee Moon (2011.)
Having also worked with Led Zeppelin, Andy assumed Billy wanted to be mic’d like John Bonham. The guys showed up on day one to all these microphones on Billy’s kit and said hell no, they liked how he recorded guitars. They didn’t want the drums to compete. For Johns, it just did not compute. “He kept going, ‘Oh, it's a New York thing. Like a Velvets, New York thing.’ You know, sort of like, ‘Oh you want to sound bad!’” Above all, Television’s objective with Marquee Moon was to capture their live sound. Lloyd explained the communication breakdown to Tape Op:
“I think he was used to being involved with bands that were three sheets to the wind as part of their philosophy. And then he came down and we were really interested in the vision about sounding like us. I think that threw him. Plus we picked this place that he was aghast at because the board had no EQ.”
quoted from: Larry Crane, “Richard Lloyd: From Television to Matthew Sweet.” Tape Op.
(The place in question was A&R Studios, the same place the Ramones recorded their debut.) The guys did make some compromises; Andy turned Tom and Lloyd onto overdubbing their guitars. Marquee Moon was recorded in three weeks according to Waterman, six according to Lloyd, beginning in November of 1976.
Waterman said, “Making sense of Verlaine’s lyrics has always been a bit of a dangerous proposition: their obscurity is a good part of Television’s mystique...you might have already formed phrases of your own to fill in where you couldn’t make out what Verlaine was saying.” Tom’s writing is intentionally open-ended, with lots of double-entendres, sound-alikes, and puns. Lloyd likened it to “say(ing) five words and mean(ing) the sixth.” Ever shifty about where his songs came from and what they meant, Verlaine said each song “is like a little moment of discovery or releasing something or being in a certain time or place and having a certain understanding of something.” This is a head-scratcher, I know. Let’s break it down. Little moments of discovery: youth. You become a person between the ages of 12 and 18. Then you come into your own between 18 and 25, when your frontal lobe is done cooking. You change more in these years than any other time in your life.Releasing something: catharsis, or releasing pent-up energy. Youth is unsettled. Young people have a lot of energy, and fewer places to transmute it as they grow up. Being in a certain time or place: the Lower East Side in the mid-1970s. A gritty, apocalyptic playground where anything goes, and a tiny artistic haven. I’ll admit, having a certain understanding of something still throws me. But there’s this saying that “teenagers know something children don’t and adults forget.”
To be clear: Television don’t sound remotely “punk.” Any modicum of that left with Richard Hell. But for the ethos and feel Tom described (and we translated,) Television fall somewhere in the punk family tree.
Every great coming-of-age film opens with an “I want.” I want to study literature, but I’m captain of the football team. I want to leave my small town for the big city. I want to get the girl. I want, I want. What does Tom want? He’s not sure at first. But he knows, “What I want, I want now/And it’s a lot more than anyhow.”
See No Evil is the energetic opener Marquee Moon needs. This is their “I want” song, all their wants rolled up into a tight three-minutes-and-change. It establishes the core Television sound; those overdubbed, interlocking Lloyd and Verlaine guitars over the rhythm part. Like Phil Manzanera used oodles of guitar tones on Taking Tiger Mountain (By Strategy,) the guys will use their full library of sound on Marquee Moon; from sparkly to Stonesy grit. Tom asserts he knows everything in the way young people do – it’s interesting to note he was 26. Punk is a performance of adolescence, after all! He wants to fly a fountain, jump a mountain, and he truly believes he can. “I understand all destructive urges,” he asserts. “I get ideas, I get a notion.” I love the way he delivers “I get ideas” like we should be so lucky to hear one of his secrets of the universe. A big-bang idea, even if it’ll never work; like his “boat made out of ocean.” The chorus ties a tight knot. “I see,” “I see no...” Instead of completing the trio by singing “I see no evil,” Tom keeps it to the last word. He knows that’s all he needs to land it. Under choruses of “I see no!” and Tom milking that “eviiiiil” for all it’s worth, our guy and his girl take off into the night to chase after whatever big things they want. “I’m going crazy with the one I love,” “I keep on dancing with the one I love.” But the 26-year-old maturity comes in. It’s not just all about you. “You control the feelings of the one you love,” you can feed their fire. Youthful optimism prevails; a together-we-can-conquer everything attitude. “You pull down the future with the one you love.”
Venus was Television’s signature song, around since the Neon Boys days. I prefer it done faster like on the Eno demos, but the melodic lead guitar line is present on the album version and that’s the song’s strongest asset. Of all the texts I read for this review, none were willing to acknowledge that Tom and Patti Smith shared a voice! She clearly favored Jim Morrison and had her Jersey accent, he sounds more like a camp Mick Jagger, but they peacock the same way! They shared the same inflections, vibrato, and nasally affect. It’s especially apparent on “Venus.” If “See No Evil” is Television’s “I want” song, “Venus” is stepping out into the big wide world for the first time and feeling raw as you stumble. “The world so thin between my bones and skin.” When you’re young, you feel like you’re on an island. No one has ever been where you are or felt the things you feel – until you meet someone else who feels everything you do. “There stood another person who was a little surprised/To be face-to-face with a world so alive.” It’s a fucking revelation. The call-and-response chorus is so much fun; I can’t help but picture the guys as the T-Birds from Grease. “I fell.” “Didja feel low?” “No.” “Huh??” Why not? The punchline of the song, all Tom’s sense of humor: “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo.”
When I read that, I went, “...huh. It's been a while and I might be mixing her up for another Venus, but…doesn’t Venus de Milo notably not have arms?”
Sure enough!
This is a downside of growing up. When you fall, there’s no one to catch you. You have to catch yourself. And sometimes when you fall in love, there are no arms to catch you and you fall flat on your face! This is the first time on the record I’m appreciating Fred’s bass playing, and I hear some tasteful keys too.
Friction is the most obvious point of Television’s sixties lineage. My alarm bells were ringing all over the place! The core riff was lifted from the blues; again, a little Stonesy. I hear exactly what Tom carried over from Goats’ Head Soup specifically. In the post-Exile On Main St hangover, the Stones played with more open song structures; not turning into a jam band by any means, but the best way I can describe it is “musical spaghetti squash.” It’s mush, but you can make something out of it. (And I say this as an ardent Goats’ Head Soupdefender!) There aren’t flashy key changes or overt virtuoso noodling. Tom and Richard do go there with their extended solos, and Tom uses some of their vocabulary in his frizzy trips down the fretboard. But they’re not being flashy about it like guys in their satin shirts. This is how sixties garage bands moved their absolute bulldozers of singles. Television’s structures are open, but constructed around the one riff.
“Friction” seems to tip its hat to “Psychotic Reaction”’s famous “And it feels like this!” (insert freakout here) with their own “I’ll give you a depiction.” I also hear phased, affected, hazy accents. The lyrics are in the vein of Neon Boys songs with such astute titles as...“Love Comes In Spurts.” It’s a song about being horny. “DICK-tion,” a “snake shedding its skin.” What is youth if not being weird and horny and clumsily going about it? Little jokes are stitched into music too. Note the mechanical sound effect after, “My eyes are like telescopes.” Again, what is punk if not performing adolescence? If Joey Ramone singing “I don’t wanna grow up” didn’t hammer it home already, let me spell it out for you. For a generation of young adults grappling with a piss-poor economy, fuel crisis, and conflict with Iran (time truly is a flat circle,) punk longed to return to a time before adult responsibilities. Being a grown-up is fucking complicated. Tom sings at his grown age, “Well, I don’t wanna grow up/There’s too much contradiction.”
My biggest qualm with Marquee Moon is its sequencing. Yes, “See No Evil” and “Venus” make sense back-to-back. But why is the title track closing side one? We could at least give it the second-to-last spot, like “Land of 1000 Dances” on Horses. This is a ten-minute song, people! This is a grand finale! Instead, Marquee Moon follows “Friction,” which would’ve been a great side one closer. Even “Torn Curtain” could’ve slotted in here. I don’t know. I’ve always loved talking alternate sequencing.
Like it marked the schism between Verlaine and Hell, the title track is really where Television divert from punk in sound. Could you imagine a ten-minute Ramones song? Hell no. I adore them, but that sounds like torture! A ten-minute Patti Smith song though, that’s much more probable. The Patti Smith Group and Television are alike in the senses that, yes, their singers clearly borrowed from each other, and they were more open to opening their song structures and seeing where things go. For example, the solo at 3:00 reminds me of a line Stephen Stills might’ve played on “Bluebird.” Don’t believe me? Listen to the extended raga version.
“Marquee Moon” is a wonderful, bordering on legendary at this point (give it five more years) guitar song; built around the two-note trill and Fred’s two-note bassline. But don’t count out the piano in there! There’s always a pretty, glossy element to a Television song. What is the “marquee moon”? If we’re speaking in literal terms, probably a Blue Moon sign. Jokes aside, it’s the only “moonlight” you’ve got in a light-polluted city. You can forget about stars. Where adventurers of the past used constellations to navigate, these young conquerors use the street signs. Tom would never really say what his songs were “about,” “Marquee Moon” included. He did specify this one was “aural cinema.” The music tells the story; with points of tension and release, the several-minutes-long triple-stomp that the whole band plays on, and the beautiful break at 8:47. I hate to use a buzzword, but it truly is ethereal. The lyrics are something of a movie, too. Our main character is lured out into that dark, “ominous” night, where he encounters a man at the train tracks – the crossroads. He gives sage advice: be wise. Count your blessings. Walk the middle path. Like a certain horse-man once said, “Balance on the biggest wave and race towards an early grave.” “Don’t you be so happy/And for heaven’s sake, don’t you be so sad.” Our narrator is up by a car full of no-gooders and dumped in a graveyard. “Marquee Moon” is very loosely about facing your own mortality.
“Life in the hive puckered up my night,
A kiss of death, the embrace of life.
There I stand ’neath the marquee moon...
I ain’t waiting.”
It’s interesting to note that this is where the original version of the song fades out. I own the Rhino Records pressing from 2022. Though the label lists a 9:58 run time, I have the full 10:43 “Marquee Moon,” and it potentially saves our narrator’s life! Tom closes the song with a repeat of the first verse. The gentle, twinkling finale is such a nod to the Doors. “This is the end...”
You know, listening to Marquee Moon makes The Strokes a lot less exciting. It’s a bummer. And I know it’s silly, but Is This It affects my enjoyment of Marquee Moon at times. Elevation is first and foremost affected by its poor placement in the sequencing. This is just not a side two opener! That’s so clearly “Prove It!” This isn’t Tom’s strongest songwriting either; there are no lines that cut quite like “I ain’t waiting.” But I will say the lead guitar after the hook is catchy, and this is a strong showing for Billy on drums; especially at the final verse.
Guiding Light was one of the newer songs on Television’s set list, along with “See No Evil.” While every Television song has at least one pretty element to offset Tom’s sometimes-whiney voice, this song is just gorgeous. Delicate drumming focused on the cymbals, deliberate piano chords, keys, bass with lots of space between the notes, and a gentle rocking, chiming guitar. This is a gorgeous moment for the dubbing Andy Johns talked the guys into. It gets a slight rock-and-roll edge with the rhythm strokes. I know people are divided on Television’s downtempo songs. Given my favorite of theirs is “Carried Away,” you can guess which side I’m on! The lyric is credited to both guitarists. The narrator questions his place in the world, “Do I belong to the night?” He’s lost his love. “Darling, darling, do we part like the seas?” He’s wandering, searching for his guiding light. Lloyd’s solo is simple, but tears right into the song; appropriately wistful and anthemic.
Prove It is another song the Strokes absolutely ripped off. Like, come on. Julian blatantly lifted Tom’s affect on “Case closed.” for the ending of “Hard To Explain.” (And I can’t even be mad about it, “Hard To Explain” is one of the greatest songs of all-time.) “Prove It” is the more enjoyable of the songs that built the Strokes, and it’s all for Tom’s attitude. He cries, “Prove it!” Sneers, “Just the fffffacts!” And mutters, “The confidential.” He gets well enough cred for his innovations on the Jazzmaster and all, this is one of my favorite solos of his. But Tom was a performer too! He adopted different voices and constantly moved in and out of talk-singing to play different characters.
The drum fill kicking off “Torn Curtain” is just an extended version of the fill from the Stooges’ “Dirt.” Billy Ficca, you aren’t slick! I don’t love this as the closer, but I like the hammed-up melodrama. It connects Television to the cabaret lineage of the Lower East Side. “Torn curtain reveals another play, Torn curtain, such an expose.” It’s deliberately theatrical. The piano and the rest of the stately arrangement doesn’t feel serious. It feels like parody. Cries of “Tears! Tears!” are like the actor dramatically dabbing his face with a hanky. You can’t help but chuckle. It’s an interesting ending to an album that started so strong, you just can’t argue with side one of this thing.
To recap: the “punk” we think of, a rough-and-ready sound, didn’t come from Television. None of the CBGB’s bands sounded like each other! Television were in a unique position. Turning down so many record deals gave them more time than their peers to iron out a sound. They were a tight ensemble, very well-rehearsed. It shows in their compositions: they could pull counterpoints and odd melodies out of the bag that twin guitars could create really exciting things with. Each of the guys had their own influences. Tom clearly loved the Thirteenth Floor Elevators and the Stones. (I keep reading critics trying to bend his guitar lines into his appreciation of Coltrane and Albert Ayler. They’re lying to you. They sound nothing like free jazz!) Lloyd loved Jeff Beck. Fred Smith was a firmly grounded bassist, and Billy only played strictly what served the song. They could improvise and extend, but they were no nonsense. They’re certainly inspired, but never derivative. Truly forward-thinking while lightly referencing the past. That’s the kind of album I like.
Listening to Marquee Moon in 2026, coming on 25 years after the Strokes’ Is This It, is an interesting landscape to navigate. This sound was so commodified in the 2000s. I remember it well. This was the “cool kid” music I grew up idolizing; the super-clean, tight, bright guitars. The punchy drums. Lyrics sang with attitude, by a slightly whiny-sounding guy in thrift store jeans and a bowling shirt. Having heard this sound played to death, I struggle to love it. But I won’t go as far as Chris Dahlen for Pitchfork, who likened it to something “on a classic rock station wedged between Steve Miller and Skynyrd.” Judging by the fact that I have every individual Marquee Moon song on at least one playlist of mine, I do love Marquee Moon, and I 100% appreciate what this did for that amorphous thing called “indie rock.” I feel like a broken record saying this after last week’s Enofest, but it’s true. This album was so forward-thinking, it’s kind of nuts. Andy Johns did a great job making this classic recording for Television. You could record a sound-alike today and almost get away with it.
Listening to Marquee Moon is like watching a classic film and finding it tropey, then having to remind yourself, “No this isn’t tropey. This is where the trope came from in the first place.”
Personal favorites: “See No Evil,” “Venus,” “Friction,” “Marquee Moon,” “Guiding Light,” “Prove It”
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Crane, Larry. “Richard Lloyd: From Television to Matthew Sweet.” Tape Op. https://tapeop.com/interviews/56/richard-lloyd
Dahlen, Chris. “Marquee Moon/Adventure.” Pitchfork, 12/9/2003. https://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/11853-marquee-moon-adventure/
Heylin, Clinton. From The Velvets To The Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2005 ed.
McNeil, Legs, and Gillian McCain. Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk. New York: Penguin Books, 1996 ed.
McLeod, Kembrew. The Downtown Pop Underground. New York: Abrams Press, 2018.
Smith, Patti. Just Kids: Illustrated Edition. New York: Ecco Press, 2018.
Waterman, Bryan. 33 1/3: Marquee Moon. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011.
Wilcox, Tyler. “Invisible Hits: When Eno Met Television.” Pitchfork, 3/21/2014. https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/263-invisible-hits-when-eno-met-television/
Great analysis. I bought the album years ago because it has the guy (Llyod) who played on Matthew Sweet's Girlfriend. I had dismissed it as pale Talking Heads. I realize it's much better than that (and pre-dates the Talking Heads). I was 16 in 1988 when I starting to obsess about music, branching out from Top 40 and had to rely on word of mouth, Rolling Stone record guides and liner notes. I mostly skipped over 70's punk and focused on the 60s and the late 80s/90s. Like the "punks" however, Nuggets was a bible for me once I heard it (I had the luxury of the 4-cd Rhino version) and I too was obsessed with The Velvets. I really…
As you pointed out, Abby, you couldn't remake it today because everyone would think you were ripping off "This Is It." I once heard Bonnie Rait say that, "Purple Haze made me want to change my jeans." I feel this way about hearing Marquee Moon for the first time. I discovered this song not through Classic Rock, but in the most 21st Century Way possible: reading about the "500 Greatest Songs of the 70s" on Pitchfork. The song is "Purple Haze" filtered through the lens of Watergate and the late 70s. This song or record shouldn't be this amazing or life changing, but somehow it all works. Excellent review as always, Abby.
Eno(squared) AND Television in back 2 back weeks ?
There IS a Buddha !!
🥰🥰🥰