Free Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) by Bryan Waterman

Acknowledgments
     
    T hanks above all to Stephanie Smith-Waterman, whose patience, love, and support made this book — and make anything else I do — possible. Thanks also to Anna, Molly, and Charlie for going without a dad far too often in the last six months. I’m grateful to David Barker for taking on the project and waiting patiently for the results, and to Cyrus Patell, partner in New York literary crimes, for reactions to multiple drafts. Sean Nortz provided invaluable research/library assistance, especially at the very beginning and the very end. The librarians at Fales Library and Special Collections at NYU deserve many thanks, especially Marvin Taylor, who has assembled the world’s premier collection of materials related to New York’s Downtown Scene, 1974–1984. Thanks also to Lisa Darms, Senior Archivist at Fales, for timely help with images, and to Bobst Library’s Interlibrary Loan staff. I am indebted to two Television fans I’ve never met: Keith Allison, for his Television website The Wonder, which collects a large number of articles about the band, some of which I wasn’t able to track down elsewhere; and Phil Obbard, for maintaining the Marquee Moon Mailing List, whose archived discussions cover every conceivable aspect of the band and this album. My friend Jason Connolly first gave me the itch to write for this series. Jason Gross of the online magazine Perfect Sound Forever helped me track down the photo of Richard Lloyd in the famous Please Kill Me T-Shirt. Special thanks to Michael Carlucci, Richard Hell, and Andy Schwartz for permission to reproduce the images I wanted. All material from the Richard Hell Papers is quoted by permission. I have been carried along, whether or not they knew it, by friends in the downtown NYC blogosphere — Tim Broun of Stupefaction, EV Grieve, and Alex Smith of Flaming Pablum. Bryan Kuntz (aka NYCDreamin) of the blog This Ain’t the Summer of Love helped me in attempts to track down arcane bits of info. My brother, Nathan, helped me scour the Web for bootlegs I didn’t already own. Jim Rader, author of my favorite piece on early Television, has been a generous correspondent. I’ve also benefited from conversations with Daniel Kane, whose work on the LES’s interstitial scenes is inspirational. My students in Writing New York and Downtown Scenes helped me think through several ideas that made their way here, as did friends at The Great Whatsit. Special thanks for many conversations about music to Sacha Jones, Derick Melander, and Linda Perkins, my fellow members of the original Record Club New York.

Prelude
     
    Obviously what was going on here was the earliest germinal stage of the late-Seventies American punk rock scene, which eventually exploded in three places: New York, London, and the international communications media .
    — Lester Bangs, on the early CBGB’s scene, in Blondie (1980)
     
     
    The first album I ever paid for with my own money was an LP born in the waning days — some would say the death throes — of CBGB’s first generation: Blondie’s Parallel Lines , released in the fall of 1978, a few months after Television’s sophomore album, Adventure . I would have been eight or nine years old. I lived in a rural, cedar-ringed town in the mountains of northern Arizona, and would not have heard of Blondie for several more years if it hadn’t been for my uncle, living in the metropolitan Phoenix area, who received the record in the mail as part of an LP club and, as a devout listener of George Thorogood and Ted Nugent, had no interest in Debbie Harry and her black-and-white-striped mod squad. To me, though, the cover seemed stunning, otherworldy, and I gladly forked over his asking price of 25 cents. In retrospect I’d like to think it was a defining moment in my musical development, the moment I could no longer abide my parents’ Carpenters and Bee Gees and Neil Sedaka records that had defined my Seventies (which is to say, my life) to