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

on the music I had grown up with in the ’80s, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the sounds and music mythology of earlier eras. The bands that dominated my music listening in the ’90s — the whole American Pixies-and-Pavement-inspired indie scene — were name-checking Television the same way my post-punk idols had.
    In spite of the fact that CBGB’s logo has become as ubiquitous as Journey songs at a wedding dance, the club’s location at 315 Bowery given over to high-end retailers who want to cash in on rock chic and four decades of neighborhood hipness, Television remains not just a cult band but a cool kids’ cult band. Television still separates sheep from goats, righteous rock snobs from Philistines. I don’t remember the first time I listened to Marquee Moon , but I do remember my first conversations about Television, with my friend Shelley in her Brooklyn apartment, before I moved to New York. Shelley oozes cool, cuts through crap with razor-sharp observations and, as anyone who’s ever received a mix-tape from her knows, can work a 90-minute freeform mix like few others. Shelley called me out once long ago for not having taken Adventure seriously enough. She was right: Wanna hear where American college rock came from? Listen to “Days.” It will make you question your early devotion to REM. And Adventure was supposed to be a sophomore slump.
    If Television’s story in the ’70s was a continual effort to break out of the New York scene it helped to found, the fact that its records remained underground following its four-year flirtation with fame meant that it would always be the province of in-groups, those who transmitted secret knowledge from one rock underground to another via record-store recommendations, fanzines, mix-tapes, college radio shows, and podcasts, all transmitted with a kind of Masonic solemnity. Television lends itself to the genre of secret history: its members were mythologizing the band before it was even born, which means more often than not its story gets told in fits of nostalgia for a club and a neighborhood scene and a glorious moment in rock ‘n’ roll that no longer exists. In aiming to present a cultural history of that scene, 1973–1978, using Television and the music on and leading up to Marquee Moon as windows onto that world, I aim less to recycle these myths than to ask how and why this music was produced when it was, and what purposes it served for those who created it and continue to find so much meaning in it.
    Some portions of what follows will be familiar to the thousands who still fixate on this scene: the recognizable names CBGB’s spawned, the infighting between Television’s members, the aborted early sessions with Brian Eno, Richard Hell’s acrimonious departure from the band. But my approach here is less a rock journalist’s than that of a literary and cultural historian with an archival bent and an eye for details that don’t quite fit the standard story. My biggest motivation in writing this book is to offer a more carefully documented reception history than you’ll find in the gossipy books on the scene that, if given the chance, go for sensation over substance, let alone discussion of the music itself. I’m interested, rather, in how tradition forms and fractures, in the origins of sounds that seemed so new when Tom Verlaine started warbling for audiences, or when he and Richard Lloyd first aimed dueling guitar lines at one another like lightning striking itself.

Introduction
     

Coda
     
    Village lore had it that whenever you spotted [Tom] Verlaine in daylight, it was a good omen.
    — James Wolcott, The Catsitters: A Novel (2009)
     
     
    Over the next dozen years, Verlaine released half a dozen solo records, some of which sold better than Television’s albums initially had, all of which deserve larger audiences than they’ve enjoyed, but none of which made him a household name. Marquee Moon , like The Velvet Underground and Nico , enjoyed