Tonight’s selections from Television’s debut album, Marquee Moon. Originally published May 2022.
They came, rewrote the book on guitar rock and then split up, leaving only a pair of seminal new wave records behind as proof they had ever existed at all. The brainchild of Tom Verlaine (Miller) and Richard Hell (whose crucial role in the band was actually over before its recording career got under way), Television was a revolutionary force on New York’s Bowery circuit in the mid-’70s, an unprecedented amalgam of the Velvet Underground’s primal scream, Bob Dylan’s esoteric detachment, Roky Erickson’s brain-spasm pop and John Coltrane’s high-wire improvisation. Influenced by, and in turn influential on, Suicide, Talking Heads, Patti Smith and David Bowie (and countless others), Television threw punk’s disdain for guitar jamming back in the face of those who didn’t realize that the form could still be mined for nail-biting excitement and high rock’n’roll art.
Live, they were the ultimate garage band with pretensions, but on record they achieved a polish that added genuine strength. Evolving from the Neon Boys, Television initially consisted of Verlaine (guitar/vocals), Richard Lloyd (guitar), Billy Ficca (drums) and Hell (bass). Hell left to form the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, and ex-Blondie bassist Fred Smith (not the MC5 one) took over his slot. Thus constituted (and less inclined toward collapse), Television recorded “Little Johnny Jewel,” a privately pressed single which many regard as a turning point for the whole New York underground rock scene.
Elektra signed Television and released Marquee Moon, which was produced by Andy Johns, in 1977. A tendency to “jam” onstage caused detractors (and, paradoxically, British fans) to view them as the Grateful Dead of punk, but it was the distinctive two-guitar interplay (along with Verlaine’s nails-on-a-chalkboard vocals) that set them apart. The staccato singing in “Prove It” and “Friction” is impressive, and the long, extraordinarily dramatic workout on the title track showed a willingness to break away from the solidifying traditions of more self-conscious contemporaries. — Trouser Press
See No Evil
So you say you want a revolution? Two rearguard beatniks banded together on the anything-goes streets of Manhattan in the early ’70s, at the height of its post-apocalyptic glamour, when taxi cabs hated to venture below 14th Street but the see-and-be-seen crowd couldn’t resist it.
Those who came from elsewhere came to define the scene. Richard Meyers and Tom Miller were two gifted reprobates who fled to New York from a well-to-do Delaware boarding school. They knocked around the stylish wilderness of the Lower East Side and the more civilized clubs and coffee houses of Greenwich Village. Grasping at the potential for the full-scale reinvention that New York had provided Robert Zimmerman [Bob Dylan] roughly a decade previous, they changed their surnames to Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine in an unsubtle nod to the 19th-century French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine. Those two had engaged in a tumultuous, tormented love affair rife with overweening passion, disastrous emotional reversals, and eventual gun violence. This was all forensically recorded in Rimbaud’s 1873 bloodletting A Season in Hell—the antidote to anyone who imagines that the concept of oversharing is an invention of the modern age.
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 [New York] 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. — The Ringer
Friction
Another early CBGB’s and Max’s stalwart was Patti Smith who had a soaring talent matched with a relentless drive that propelled her to be everywhere all at once. She performed for and wrote with playwright Sam Shepard, roomed with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, recited her poetry with the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, wrote songs for Blue Öyster Cult and took a turn in rock journalism writing for Rolling Stone and Creem. Like Verlaine, she was inspired by the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, and this passion helped unite them both romantically and professionally.
Smith championed Television as the real deal; authenticity in the face of a penchant of style over substance. After experiencing Television live at CBGB’s she wrote, “As the band played on you could hear the whack of pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki [Hilly’s dog] barking, bottles clinking, the sound of the scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.” — Classic Album Sundays
Marquee Moon
WHO’S TALKING TO WHO?
Jimmy Kimmel: Miley Cyrus, Cameron Crowe, Rufus Wainwright
Jimmy Fallon: Walton Goggins, Natalia Dyer, Fran Lebowitz, Oz Pearlman
Stephen Colbert: Jen Psaki, "Weird Al" Yankovic
Seth Meyers: Joel Edgerton, Elle Fanning, Edgar Wright (R 11/11/25)
Comics Unleashed: Beth Stelling, Alonzo Bodden, Steve Trevino, Jamie Lissow
Watch What Happens Live: Rep. Robert Garcia, Kyle Richards
The Daily Show: Ken Casey, host Jordan Klepper
