Television

(Skin mags were another handy boondocks music resource; some of xgau's contributions are on his site.)

https://aquariumdrunkard.com/2018/02/08/richard-lloyd-the-aquarium-drunkard-interview/

Guy I know is playing bass with Richard Lloyd but unfortunately I am going to have to miss the show.

when is it?

Tomorrow at Bowery Ballroom. Tonight in New Haven.

bowery electric, i think you mean. he's also playing for free at the hoboken arts festival in may. (as are dream syndicate.)

his latest record rosedale is pretty good. you need to suspend disbelief, a little bit -- he has embraced his terrible vocals to a point where they almost become a feature. the songs are tightly wound and well constructed with some almost stonesy layering of guitars in spots. billy ficca plays on most of the tracks, chris frantz on a couple. there's one where ficca channels his inner mitch mitchell.

ooh did not know about ficca being on there!! Is he in the live band that's playing tonight?

No, this guy: https://www.codenycmag.com/kevin-tooley

ficca and fred smith must be very chill dudes to have put up with the two television guitarists over the decades

Indeed.

And yes the correct venue is The Bowery Electric.

fred smith on stage certainly appears to be the chillest of all chill dudes, the ne plus ultra of chill

I even like Rosedale, his last solo album, kinda has a basic rock 'n' roll edge that reminds me of late Hendrix and, on some cuts, ZZ Top if they'd been junkies in the Bowery in 1977. Quite credible album.

― eddhurt, Monday, February 5, 2018 7:31 PM (two years ago) bookmarkflaglink

does anybody know how i can hear this ? i really really really want to hear this.

i got my copy by mail from him.

ah okay. just emailed him via his website. hopefully will get a response.

well, richard doesn't have any copies and he's unwilling to allow me to pay for files or a burned CD.

the search continues !

Wait, you emailed Richard? I thought you emailed eddhurt.

yeah. i don't have edd's email. do you think he would send me files ?

try him via ilx, but be sure to incl. your email addy; ilx doesn't allow direct replies via ilx screen names (in my experience, anyway)

thanks will do

Yeah, and maybe check if there's anything he might wanna trade.

I love the part in "Venus" where Richard Hell is telling Verlaine "let's dress up like cops - think of what we could do" and Verlaine chickens out, seems perfect for those two

Agreed, it's such a joyful line.

The 1992 reunion album, my first Television purchase, still sounds fantastic. I love Verlaine's affected, archaic lyrics ("Sisters rejoice in a B-minor chord / With wildly impassioned delight") and the way the guitar interplay complements or mocks'em.

I like Tom Verlaine's Dreamtime probably as much as Marquee Moon, and more than Adventure.

I was looking for my LPs of Adventure and Dreamtime recently and couldn't find them, sadly. Perhaps I foolishly sold them at one point. Anyway, the s/t was my first TV purchase too and all three albums + Dreamtime are incredibly solid.

I listen to the s/t Television more than the other two. Verlaine's aging fun nice-guy with jitters all around. Album sounds like a sunny winter day, blindingly bright windows and snow.

The 1992 reunion album, my first Television purchase, still sounds fantastic. I love Verlaine's affected, archaic lyrics ("Sisters rejoice in a B-minor chord / With wildly impassioned delight") and the way the guitar interplay complements or mocks'em.

I've been meaning to revisit this. I couldn't get into it the first time I tried it, but I'll probably just buy a cheap copy (there's tons for a few bucks) and play it on a stereo and give it a real chance. I think there's a good chance I'll come around to it, because I've grown to love three or four of Verlaine's solo albums as well as some choice cuts beyond that.

Anyone see Television in recent years? I've been reluctant to go because I'm so used to hearing the classic bootlegs from the '70s that I have a feeling it'll be hard to shake those expectations.

I saw them in 2014, it was notable that I'd never seen a live act that ran the gamut from absolutely gripping to completely uninvolving (during a long, long unreleased instrumental). I also remember Verlaine making fun of a woman in the front who was apparently complaining.

Flash light is my favorite Tom solo album and my third favorite thing he did after MM and the 1992 s/t

Yeah.. Same.

I did feel a bit disappointed by s/t when it came out, but I did get the cd and tracked down "The Miller's tale" and like it much better now.

(got the cd etc a few years ago etc)

I'm guessing that somewhere on this thread, someone has posted Television's appearance on Later, two numbers from about the time of the release of the third album. If not, definitely worth hunting down on Youtube - really great performances, and at that point things seemed relatively genial between TV and RL.

Ranking

Marquee Moon
Television
Adventure
Cover
Flash Light
Tom Verlaine
Words from the Front
Dreamtime

I've never connected w/Dreamtime, despite its acclaim. Gonna listen to it again on my walk this morning.

Incredible live too so would definitely rank The Old Waldorf and Blow Up as pretty necessary.
& I think pretty much any of the live sets from 1978.
Probably from the previous couple of years too

nu-tv is frustrating in concert. verlaine's guitar tone still glistens, and the other two long-timers are great. the new guy is a pro, almost to a fault. he mimics lloyd's lines and guitar sound extremely well, shaving off the rough edges. his leads are professional and dull. there's a sense of him punching the clock. when they introduce new tunes there's always *something* there, but they sound unfinished. the only one that seems to have lingered in the setlist -- "persia"? -- has been getting longer, less finished-sounding, and less tolerable as the years goes on.

If we’re including live recordings (let’s say officially released only, in order to maintain sanity) then:
MM
s/t 1992
Waldorf
Flash Light
Miller’s Tale live disc
Live At The Academy
Adventure
Miller’s Tale compilation disc
Tom Verlaine s/t
Songs And Other Things
Dreamtime
Warm And Cool
The Blow Up
Cover
Around
Words From The Front
The Wonder

As a side note, I love all of these albums except WftF and The Wonder. And the line for “I love every single track on these albums” falls between Tom s/t and Songs And Other Things. (If he released a live recording from the SaOT tour and it was on par with the show I saw, that’d take the #6 spot).

Glad to see the s/t so high.

s/t is a nice piece of work, even though lloyd calls it "television lite" in his memoir. they fleshed out those songs nicely in concert too. lloyd really got a chance to shine.

Can't remember even listening to that one, rectifying that now.

"August" from The Wonder may be my favourite Verlaine song ever, I don't suppose anyone else likes it as much.

After Marquee Moon and Adventure, I picked up "The Miller's Tale", which blew me away but I was satisfied. Then there was a reissue of "Tom Verlaine" and "Dreamtime", so I picked those up and love them to pieces. Then sometime later I thought I should get "Words From The Front", underrated in this current discussion I think it's just a notch below the first two. Then "Cover" was reissued a couple of years ago and I grabbed that, at which point I realized I didn't have the self-titled Television album so I got that and also discovered there was a promo-only EP released at the same time with some unique tracks. So now it feels inevitable that I'll wind up with Tom's entire output! His work has just slowly creeped up in my esteem, year after year.

Cover might be my favorite solo album: goofy, lyrical. Those crap drum machines help.

Hard to find, is that French promo disc

nothing to add here, except that television fucking smashes. perfect rock music.

s/t is a nice piece of work, even though lloyd calls it "television lite" in his memoir. they fleshed out those songs nicely in concert too. lloyd really got a chance to shine.

I looked this up, and found this excerpt and this response in an interview pre-dating his memoir:

On that third record, any time it came to record my parts, Tom would say, “I hear the amp buzzing. Could you please look into that?” Often, he would turn it down, until it was barely audible. So that nothing rustled, nothing moved. For me, that third record was Television-lite. It has a beautiful, nice sound. But it’s not rock’n’roll...What happened next, though, was we began playing live again. That’s where the real power came out. Songs that sounded tiny on that record really blossomed to life. (my emphasis)

He thinks he has super-human hearing. He hears stuff that's not there or that doesn't matter in rock and roll. He has us playing on one. The Capitol record, the third eponymous album that came out in 1992, has great songs on it: "1880" and "Call Mr. Lee," which is a tour de force for me. I don't think they can play that one live, because replicating my parts is beyond Jimmy Rip's talent. But it's like Television lite. And I'm a rocker.

With that in mind, are there any great bootlegs of those early reunion shows where the self-titled album's songs did indeed "blossomed to life"?

Also, I love Cover, but it's pretty shitty how that's never gotten a good digital release - all the CD's are messed up in some way, with the most recent one finally showing the entire album with no missing tracks or truncated cuts only to be undermined by shitty sound quality.

holy shit this version of "1880 or So":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhDI0HN9HH0

Ah, I've seen that one before. Like a predecessor to 00s Sonic Youth.

the Live at the Waldorf versions of the Adventure stuff is so much better than the album

Absolutely, those songs generally sounded much better on the accompanying tour, although hearing those live recordings later on did make me appreciate Adventure a lot more.