I know why people complain about Tom Verlaine's angst-ridden voice, but fuck that, I haven't had such intense pleasure from a new release since I got into Layla three months after it came out, and this took about fifteen seconds. The lyrics, which are in a demotic-philosophical mode ("I was listening/listening to the rain/I was hearing/hearing something else"), would carry this record alone; so would the guitar playing, as lyrical and piercing as Clapton or Garcia but totally unlike either. Yes, you bet it rocks. And no, I didn't believe they'd be able to do it on record because I thought this band's excitement was all in the live raveups. Turns out that's about a third of it. A+ -- R. ChristgauTV signed to Elektra and released Marquee Moon, produced by Andy Johns, in 1977. A tendency to "jam" onstage caused detractors (and, paradoxically, British fans) to refer to them as the Grateful Dead of punk, but it was the distinctive two-guitar interplay (along with Verlaine's nails-on-chalkboard vocals) that set them apart. Verlaine's staccato singing in songs like "Prove It" and "Friction" is impressive, and the long workout on the title track showed a willingness to break away from the solidifying traditions of their more selfconscious contemporaries. -- Trouser Press
Along with Blondie and the Ramones, Television achieved their initial notoriety while playing in the same place (an esophagus of a bar called CBGB, in lower Manhattan), and have been lumped together with other habitués of this joint as purveyors of "punk rock." In their self-consciousness and liberal open-mindedness, these bands are as punky as Fonzie; that is, not at all.
Marquee Moon, Television's debut album, is more interesting, audacious and unsettling than either Blondie's eponymous debut album or the Ramones' Leave Home. Leader Tom Verlaine wrote all the songs, coproduced with Andy Johns, plays lead guitar in a harrowingly mesmerizing stream-of-nightmare style and sings all his verses like an intelligent chicken being strangled: clearly, he dominates this quartet. Television is his vehicle for the portrayal of an arid, despairing sensibility, musically rendered by loud, stark repetitive guitar riffs that build in every one of Marquee Moon's eight songs to nearly out-of-control climaxes. The songs often concern concepts or inanimate objects -- "Friction," "Elevation," "Venus (de Milo, that is) -- and when pressed Verlaine even opts for the mechanical over the natural: in the title song, he doesn't think that a movie marquee glows like the moon; he feels that the moon resonates with the same evocative force as a movie marquee.
When one can make out the lyrics, they often prove to be only non sequiturs, or phrases that fit metrically but express little, or puffy aphorisms or chants. (The chorus of "Prove It" repeats, to a delightful sprung-reggae beat: "Prove it/ Just the facts/ The confidential" a few times.)
All this could serve to distance or repel us, and taken with Verlaine's guitar solos, which flirt with an improvisational formlessness, cold easily bore. But he structures his compositions around these spooky, spare riffs, and they stick to the back of your skull. On Marquee Moon, Verlaine becomes all that much better for a new commercial impulse that gives his music its catchy, if slashing, hook.
Television treks across the same cluttered, hostile terrain as bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, but the times may be on the side of Verlaine: we have been prepared for Television's harsh subway sound by a grudging, after-the-fact-of-their-careers acceptance of those older bands. -- Ken Tucker, RS
Somewhat mysteriously, Television was the most widely touted band to emerge from the New York New Wave. But Marquee Moon showed the group as the exclusive project of guitarist Tom Verlaine, an interesting Jerry Garcia-influenced guitarist who lacked melodic ideas or any emotional sensibility. -- Dave Marsh, 1983 RS Record Guide
It should be mysterious to no one why Television was so widely touted. What does mystify me is how Marsh could think Verlaine "lacked melodic ideas" or that Television was his "exclusive project" (Richard Lloyd!!).
The second edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide was published in 1983. Like the first edition, it was edited by Dave Marsh and John Swenson. Though Marsh, in the first lines of his introduction, purports that this second edition is "virtually a new book," in fact, there was actually quite a bit of overlap between the two guides. At least half of the entries in the second edition are more or less identical to the ones in the first, though in some cases the ratings have changed. Marsh's entry for the band Television, for example, was unchanged, but he downgraded the band's classic debut, Marquee Moon (along with Adventure), from three to two stars.
Despite the substantial overlap between the two books, the second edition of the record guide is arguably even worse than the first one, primarily because Dave Marsh seems to have exercised even more control this time around. Marsh notes in the introduction that the new edition provides an opportunity to "revise and correct reviews that were inadequate or inaccurate in the earlier addition" by "rewriting ourselves or reassigning the material in question to another reviewer." A few of the more egregious entries in the first edition are amended - for example, Richard Hell is now proclaimed to be a "true poet" and Blank Generation a five star album, while Pere Ubu's Dave Thomas is "the funniest man in rock" and Dub Housing is upgraded from one to four stars. In most cases, though, the writer "reassigned" to an artist is Marsh himself, and almost invariably he is more negative than the previous reviewer.
One more aside about Tom Verlaine: There was actually a separate entry for Verlaine in the 1983 guide, written by Brian Cullman. Cullman rated both of Tom Verlaine's solo albums four stars, and was about as enthusiastic about Tom Verlaine as Marsh was dismissive of Television. In other words, the takeaway from the 1983 guide is that Marquee Moon is far inferior to Verlaine's solo work, though I'm sure that no one that contributed to the guide actually held that opinion.
Marquee Moon was #130 on RS's 500 greatest albums list. -- schmidtt, Rolling Stone's 500 Worst Reviews of All Time
Cut the crap, junior, he sez and put the hyperbole on ice.
I concur thus. Sometimes it takes but one record -- one cocksure magical statement -- to cold-cock all the crapola and all-purpose wheatchaff mix ‘n’ match, to set the whole schmear straight and get the current state of play down down down to stand or fall in one, dignified granite-hard focus.
Such statements, are precious indeed.
Marquee Moon, the first legitimate album release from Manhattan combo Television however, is one: a 24-carat inspired and totally individualist creation which calls the shots on all the glib media pigeon-holing that’s taken place predating its appearance; a work that at once makes a laughing stock of those ignorant clowns, who have filed the band’s work under the cretinous banner of “Punk-rock” or “Velvet Underground off-shoot freneticism” or even (closer to home, maybe, but still way off the bulls-eye) “teeth-grinding psychotic rock” (‘Sister Ray’ and assorted sonic in-laws). First things first.
This, Television’s first album is a record most adamantly, 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 with a whole new slant on dynamics, chord structures centred around a totally invigorating passionate application to the vision of centre-pin mastermind Tom Verlaine.
Two years have now elapsed since the first rave notices drifted over the hotline from down in the Bowery. Photos, principally those snapped when the mighty Richard Hell was in the band, backed up the gobbledegook but the music -- well, somehow no-one really got to grips with defining that side of things so that each report carried with it a thumbnail sketch of what the listener could divine from the maelstrom. Influences were flung at the reader, most omni-touted being guitarist mastermind Verlaine’s supposed immense debt to one Louis Reed circa White Heat/White Light which meant teeth-gnashing ostrich gee-tar glissando and whining hyena vocals. You get the picture.
Above all, one presumed Television to be the aural epitome of junk-sick boys straight off the E.S.T. funny farm -- psychotic reactions/narcotic contractions. Hell split the scene mid-75 taking his black widow spider physique and blue-print anthem for the Blank Generation, leaving ex-buddy-boy Tom Verlaine to call all dem shots, abetted by fellow guitarist and all purpose West Coast pin-up boy Richard Lloyd, a most unconventional new wave jazz-orientated drummer, name of Billy Ficca -- plus Hell’s replacement, the less visually imposing but more musically adept Fred Smith.
It’s been a good two years now since Television got those first drooling raves -- two long years which led one at times to believe that Verlaine’s musical visions would never truly find solace encased within the glinting sheen of black vinyl. The situation wasn’t helped in the slightest by Island Records sending over Brian Eno and Richard Williams to invigilate over a premature session back in ‘75, the combination of the band’s possible immaturity and Eno and Williams’ understanding of what was needed to flesh out the songs recorded, resulting in the taping of four or five horrendously flat skeletal performances which gave absolutely no indication regarding the band’s potential.
Following that snafu, Verlaine became, how you say, more than a little high-handed and downright eccentric in his dealings with other record companies and potential middle-man adversaries to the point where even those who quite desperately wished to sign him threw up their arms in despair of ever achieving such an end.
Reports filtering through the grapevine made Verlaine’s behaviour seem like that of a madman. Even when the ink had dried on the contract Joe Smith signed with the band for Elektra Records late last year; Verlaine was apparently still so overwhelmed with paranoia that he activated a policy of never properly enunciating the lyrics to unrecorded songs in performance for fear that plagiarists might steal his lyrics before they’d been set to wax.
The only number he dared to sing close to the microphone at this point was ‘Little Johnny Jewel’, the one-off cult single of ‘76, a bizarre morsel of highly sinister nonsense verse shaped around a quite remarkably lop-sided riff/dynamic which set off visions (at least to this listener’s ears) of an aural equivalent to the visuals used in the German impressionist cinema meisterwerk Dr Caligari’s Cabinet, spliced in half (the track took up both sides of a 45 -- labelled Parts 1 and 2) by a guitar solo which bore a distinct resemblance to, well, yes to Country Joe and The Fish. Their first album you know. The guitar pitch was exactly the same as that utilized by Barry Melton; fluid, mercury-like.
That’s the thing about Television you’ve first got to come to terms with. Forget all that “New York sound” stuff. For starters, this music is the total antithesis of the Ramones, say, and all those minimalist aggregates. To call it Punk Rock is rather like describing Dostoevsky as a short-story writer. This music itself is remarkably sophisticated, unworthy of even being paralleled to that of the original Velvet Underground whose combined instrumental finesse was practically a joke compared to what Verlaine and co. are cooking up here. Each song is tirelessly conceived and arranged for maximum impact -- the point where decent parallels really need to be made with the best West Coast groups. Early Love spring to mind, The Byrds’ cataclysmic ‘Eight Miles High’ period, a soupcon even of the Doors’ mondo predilections plus the very cream of a whole plethora of those psychedelic-punk bands that only Lenny Kaye knows about. Above all though the sound belongs most indubitably to Television, and the appearance of Marquee Moon at a time when rock is so hopelessly lost within the labyrinth of its own basic inconsequentiality that actual musical content has come to take a firm back-seat to “attitude” and all that word is supposed to signify is to these ears little short of revolutionary.
My opening gambit about the album providing a real focus for the current state of rock bears a relevance simply because here at last is a band whose vision is centred quite rigidly within their music -- not, say, in some half-baked notion of political manifesto-mongery with that trusty, thoroughly reactionary three chord back-drop to keep the whole scam buoyant. Verlaine’s appearance is simply as exciting as any other major innovator’s to the sphere of rock -- like Hendrix, Barrett, Dylan -- and, yeah, Christ knows I’m tossing up some true-blue heavies here but Goddammit I refuse to repent right now because this record just damn excites me so much.
To the facts then -- recorded in A & R Studios, New York, produced by Verlaine himself, with engineer Andy Johns keeping a watchful eye on the board and gaining co-production credits, the album lasts roughly three quarters of an hour and contains eight songs, most of which have been recorded in demo form at least twice (the Eno debacle to begin with, followed a year later by a reported superbly produced demo tape courtesy of the Blue Oyster Cult’s Alan Lanier, which, at a guess, clinched the band’s Elektra deal) and have been performed live innumerable times. The wait was been worthwhile because the refining process instigated by those hesitant years has sculpted the songs into the masterpieces that are here present for all to peruse.
Side one makes no bones about making its presence felt, kicking off with the full-bodied thrust of ‘See No Evil’. Guitars, bass and drums are strung together fitting tight as a glove clenched into a fist punching metal rivets of sound with the same manic abandon that typified the elegant ferocity of Love’s early drive. There is a real passion here -- no half-baked metal cut and thrust -- each beat reverberates to the base of the skull, with Verlaine’s voice a unique ostrich-like pitch that might just start to grate on the senses (a la his ex-sweetheart one P. Smith) were it not so perfectly mixed into the grain of the rhythm. The chorus / climax is irresistible anyway -- Verlaine crooning “I understand destructive urges / They seem so imperfect … I see … I see no e-v-i-i-l-l.”
The next song is truly something else. ‘(The arms of) Venus De Milo’ is already a classic among those who’ve heard it even though it has only now been recorded. It’s simply one of the most beautiful songs I’ve ever heard; the only other known work I can think of to parallel it with is Dylan’s ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ -- yup, it’s that exceptional. Only with Television’s twin guitar filigree weaving round the melody it sounds like some dream synthesis of Dylan himself backed by the Byrds circa ‘65. It’s really damn hard to convey just how gorgeous this song is -- the performance, -- all these incredible touches like the call-and-response Lou Reed parody. The song itself is like Dylan’s ‘Tambourine’, a vignette of a sort dealing wiih a dream-like quasi-hallucigenic state of ephiphany. “You know it’s all like some new kind of drug / My senses are hot and my hands are like gloves! … Broadway looks so medieval like a flap from so many pages … As I fell sideways laughing with a friend from many stages.”
‘Friction’ is probably the most readily accessible track from this album simply because, with its fairly anarchic, quasi-Velvets feel plus (all important) Verlaine’s most pungent methedrine guitar fret-board slaughter, here it’ll represent the kind of thing all those weaned on the hype and legend without hearing one note from Television will be expecting. It’s good, no more, no less -- bearing distinct cross-breeding with the manic slant sited on ‘Johnny Jewel’ without the latter’s insidiousness. ‘Friction’ is just that -- throwaway lyrics -- “diction/Friction” etc. -- those kind of throwaway rhymes, vicious instrumentation and a perfect climax which has Verlaine Vengefully spelling out the title “F-R-I-C-T-I-O-N” slashing his guitar for punctuation.
It’s down to the album’s title track to provide the side’s twin feat with ‘Venus De Milo’. Conceived at a time when rock tracks lasting over ten minutes are somewhere sunk deep below the subterranean depths of contempt, ‘Marquee Moon’ is as riveting a piece of music as I’ve heard since the halcyon days of… oh, God knows too many years have elapsed.
Everything about this piece is startling, from what can only be described as a kind of futuristic on-beat (i.e. reggae though you’d have to listen damn hard to catch it) built on Verlaine’s steely rhythm chopping against Lloyd’s intoxicating counterpoint. Slowly a story unfurls -- a typically surreal Verlaine ghost story -- involving Cadillacs pulling up in graveyards and disembodied arms beckoning the singer to get in while “lightning struck itself” and various twilight loony rejects from King Lear (that last bit’s my own fight of fancy, by the way) babbling crazy retorts to equally crazy questions. The lyrics mean little, I would guess by themselves, but as a scenario for the music here they become utterly compelling.
The song’s structure is practically unlike anything I’ve ever heard before. It transforms from a strident two chord construction to a breathtakingly beautiful chord progression which acts as a motif/climax for the narrative until the music takes over altogether. The band build on some weird Eastern modal scales not unlike those used in the extended improvised break of Fairport Convention’s ‘A Sailor’s Life’ on Unhalfbricking. The guitar solo -- either Lloyd or Verlaine -- even bears exactly the same tone as Richard Thompson’s. The instrumentation reaches a dazzling frenzied peak before dispersing into tiny droplets of electricity and Verlaine concludes his ghostly narrative as the song ends with that majestic minor chord motif.
‘Marquee Moon’ is the perfect place to draw attention to the band’s musical assets. Individually each player is superb -- not in the stereotyped sense of one who has spent hour upon hour over the record player dutifully apeing solo, riffs, embellishments but in that of only a precious few units -- Can is the only band that spring to mind here at the moment. Each player has striven to create his own style. Verlaine’s guitar solos take the feed-back sonic “accidents” that Lou Reed fell upon in his most fruitful period and has fashioned a whole style utilizing also, if I’m not mistaken, the staggeringly innovative Jim McGuinn staccato free-form runs spotlit on the hideously underrated Fifth Dimension album (which no one, McGuinn included, has ever bothered to develop).
He takes these potentially cataclysmic ideas and rigorously shapes them into a potential total redefinition of the electric guitar. As far as I’m concerned, as of this moment, Verlaine is probably the most exciting electric lead guitar player barring only Neil Young. As it is, Verlaine’s solo constructions are always unconventional, forever delving into new areas, never satisfied with referring back to formulas. Patti Smith once told me, by the way, that Verlaine religiously spends 12 hours a day practising his guitar playing in his room to Pablo Casals records.
Richard Lloyd is the perfect foil for Verlaine. Another fine musician, his more fluid conventional pitching and manic rhythm work is the perfect complimentary force and his contribution demands to be recognised for the power it possesses. Bassist Smith is always in there holding down the undertow of the music. He emerges only when his presence is required -- yet again, a superb player but next to Verlaine, it’s drummer Billy Ficca, visually the least impressive of all members standing -- aside the likes of cherub-faced Lloyd and super-aesthetic Verlaine, who truly astonishes. Basically a jazz drummer, Ficca’s adoption of Television’s majestic musical mutations as flesh-to-be-pulsed-out makes his pyrotechnics quite unique. Delicate but firm, he seems to be using every portion of his kit most of the time without ever being over-bearing. As one who knows little or nothing, about drumming, I can only express a quiet awe at the inventiveness behind his technique
Individual accolades apart, the band’s main clout lays in their ability to function as one and perhaps the best demonstration of this can be found in ‘Elevation’, side two’s opening gambit and, with ‘Venus’, probably this record’s most immediately suitable choice for a single. Layer upon layer of gentle boulevard guitar makes itself manifest until Lloyd holds the finger-picked melody together and Verlaine sings in that by now well accustomed hyena croon. The song again is beautiful, proudly contagious with a chorus that lodges itself in your subconscious like a bullet in the skull -- “Elevation don’t go to my head” repeated thrice until on the third line a latent ghost-like voice transmutes “Elevation” into “Television”. Guitars cascade in and out of the mix so perfectly.
‘Guiding Light’ is reflective, stridently poetic -- a hymn for aesthetes -- which, complete with piano, reminds me slightly of Procol Harum in excelsis. ‘Prove It’, the following track, is another potential single. Verlaine as an asthmatic ostrich-voice Sam Spade “This case … this case I’ve been working on so long” and of course that chorus which I still can’t hesitate quoting -- “Prove it/Just the facts/Confidential”. From Chandler, Television move to Hitchcock -- at least for the title of the last song on this album: ‘Torn Curtain’ is one of Verlaine’s most recent creations -- a most melancholy composition again reminiscent in part of a Procol Harum song although the timbre of Verlaine’s voice is the very antithesis of Gary Booker’s world weary tones. A song of grievous circumstances (as with so many of Verlaine’s lyrics); the facts -- cause and effect -- remain enigmatically sheltered from the listener. The structure is indeed strange, like some Bavarian funeral march with Verlaine’s vocals at their most yearning. The song is compelling though I couldn’t think of a single number written in the rock idiom I could possibly compare it to.
So that’s it. Marquee Moon, released mid-February in America and probably the beginning of March here. I think it’s a work of genius and had Charlie Murray not done that whole number about “first albums this good being pretty damn hard to come across” with Patti Smith’s Horses last year then I would have pulled the same stunt for this one. Suffice to say -- oh listen, it’s released on Elektra, right, and it reminded me, just how great that label used to be. I mean, this is Elektra’s best record since… Strange Days. And (apres moi, le deluge, kiddo) I reckon Tom Verlaine’s probably the single most important rock singer/songwriter/guitarist of his kind since Syd Barrett, which is my credibility probably blown for the rest of the year. But still…
If this review needs to state anything in big bold, black type it’s simply this. Marquee Moon is an album for everyone whatever their musical creeds and/or quirks. Don’t let any other critic put you off with jive turkey terms like ‘avant-garde’ or ‘New York psycho-rock’. This music is passionate, full-blooded, dazzlingly well crafted, brilliantly conceived and totally accessible to anyone who (like myself) has been yearning for a band with the vision to break on through into new dimensions of sonic overdrive and the sheer ability to back it up. Listening to this album reminds me of the ecstatic passion I received when I first heard ‘Eight Miles High’ and ‘Happenings Ten Years Ago’ -- before terms like progressive/art rock became synonymous with baulking pretensions and clumsy, crude syntheses of opposite forms.
In a year’s time, when all the current three-chord golden boys have fallen from grace right into the pit to become a parody ofPrivate Eye’s apeing of moron rock bands -- Spiggy Topes and The Turds Live at the Roxy -- Tom Verlaine and Television will be out there hanging fire, cruising meteorite-like with their fretboards pointed directly at the music of the spheres. Prove it? They’ve already done it right here with this their first album. All you’ve got to do is listen and levitate along with it. -- Nick Kent, NME
Television were the least commercially successful major band to come out of the punk scene they helped to create at CBGB's. However, their finest hour, Marquee Moon, was as good, if not better, than contemporary seminal works such as Patti Smith's Horses (both of the albums sported a Robert Mapplethorpe front cover) and Talking Heads' debut.
After being shopped around to various labels, Television signed with Elektra in 1976 for their debut. The band was operating without original bassist Richard Hell, who left the group to start the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunder. Bassist Fred Smith was a most fitting replacement, but his greatest contribution was in introducing Tom Verlaine to Andy Johns (Glyn Johns' brother), who knew enough not to tinker with the blurry jazz-punk sound honed at CBGB's.
The result was a guitar album like no other. Turning away from the bluesy sound that had dominated rock guitar since the 1960s, Television created a work that in its own way is every bit as sweeping as Led Zeppelin's finest offerings. Starting with the churning "See No Evil," Verlaine and Richard Lloyd tangle their stinging leads into spiraling celebrations of urban grime and street culture. The 11-minute title track led some to draw comparisons with hippie bands, but there was no flower power -- just power -- to be found in "Prove It" and "Guiding Light."
Marquee Moon received a lukewarm response from the public but was hailed by critics, including New Musical Express's Nick Kent, who enthused that "the songs are some of the greatest ever." -- Jim Harrington, 1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die