Television

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.

Like a predecessor to 00s Sonic Youth.

― Sequel to Sadness (Sund4r), Tuesday, August 3, 2021 12:02 PM

uhh, yeah. or maybe exactly where all of their ideas came from. jfc.

that was completely awesome and i'm pretty surprised to see there's been no official release of any live material from that era. seems like a no-brainer, but what do i know i'm a stupid asshole.

anything adventure or adventure-related is also very awesome.

That Lloyd interview in Seattle can be depressing. Another excerpt:

Do you view Marquee Moon as an albatross or the gift that keeps on giving?
Both. For Tom, it’s more of an albatross than it is for me. When I left the band in 2007, Television hadn’t put out a record since 1992 and had written eight songs in that whole time. Tom would start a song and he had no lyrics and he didn’t want to sing and he didn’t want to tour and he didn’t want to do this or that. I had a studio where we could have made a reasonably good-sounding record for free. But he didn’t want to use it, and he kept making excuses, even though he would come over and we would spend hours testing microphones. We both had quite a collection of microphones.

So I have an eight-song demo, but with no lyrics. But they sound great.

What’s going to happen to those eight songs?
Nothing.

They’re just going to remain unreleased?
[Voice shifting into high-pitched tone of resignation] Yeeeaaaah, that’s probably the way it’s going to be. Because they’re not my sole property. I can’t just release them as a bootleg.

Xposts
Live At The Academy is an official (if poorly distributed) live release documenting the tour following the s/t and it is great

About words from the front
The title song is one my favorite things he ever did and one of my all time favorite guitar solos by anyone. But the rest of the record gives me problems. And the title song is on The Miller’s Tale so I just listen to it there.

it's cluttered

One issue I have with Adventure and the s/t is that Lloyd doesn’t stand out so much on the albums - not just in terms of the solos but all those melodic parts on MM that I don’t think people realise it’s him and not Verlaine

Whether or not that was a conscious thing from Verlaine I don’t know

I think there's plenty of Lloyd on "Adventure"? There's an awful lot of Verlaine too, of course - including on keyboards.

How do Verlaine, etc, make a living day-to-day? I can't imagine the residuals on even MM amount to much.

Lloyd said here that Verlaine is wealthy but he himself needs to supplement his income by teaching guitar: https://www.thestranger.com/blogs/slog/2015/09/09/22834379/ex-television-guitarist-richard-lloyd-on-tom-verlaine-hendrix-music-biz-corruption-and-much-more

that's a fantastic interview

lloyd's book is worth reading. he is a weirdo but it is easy to separate the real stuff from the bs. i had always assumed andy johns was the hero of the sound on marquee moon, but the book makes clear it was verlaine & lloyd. verlaine heatedly talked the producer out of a big drum sound and lloyd added all that double-tracking. lloyd's description of seeing the allmans at the fillmore east made me feel like i was there.

thanks sund4r!

I find it hard to believe Verlaine is "wealthy." Perhaps Lloyd has a different idea of wealthy.