Television

I'm embarked on a personal writing adventure at the moment on Temporary Fandoms a wonderful listening group on Facebook if you're interested in that kind of thing. My first curation. A week long exploration of Television, a band that I have long adored and obsessed over since I first discovered them when I was 18. Here's my first piece. I'll post the rest over the coming week from Monday.

TELEVISION IMMERSION

'When I was a teenager in the Sixties, there was a period for a couple of years when the music was really the network of news for teenagers, where you defied the lives and conventions of the grown-ups and talked to each other over the airwaves about what life was really like and what it felt like to be alive. We wanted to bring that back, so part of the principle was that we were going to reinvent ourselves to be our own ideal picture of what we were like on the inside... We were really angry and we were really laughing too.' 

Richard Hell

'I like thinking of myself as invisible.' 

Tom Verlaine

'I don't wanna grow up. There's too much contradiction.'

Friction, Television

When my application to join Temporary Fandoms was approved a couple of years back, I almost immediately found myself scrolling through the list of groups and artists that had been already been covered before I arrived, trying to work out exactly what I'd stumbled into  Many of the bands you might expect, (the usual suspects), had already been done. Velvets, Beatles, Bowie, Roxy, Beefheart, even The Fall. Twice apparently. Very interesting anyhow. Sounded like my kind of people.

There seemed to be one immediate major omission that stood out to my eyes pretty much instantly, as someone naturally drawn to these kind of social communities for obsessives. TELEVISION!!!  Where were TELEVISION? Not the electrical broadcasting device we're all familiar with, but the American guitar band of the mid to late Seventies. Originally, four slim young men named Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Richard Lloyd and Billy Ficca, who appeared suddenly before bar owner Hilly Kristal in late 1974 and demanded to play at his rundown club venue in downtown Manhattan. Even if they had to set up the stage themselves, which they eventually did. Reputedly. Kristal relented, somewhat reluctantly, and history was duly made.   

Television, are a band more shrouded in mystery and enigma than almost any you can think of, but it's generally accepted that they were the first notable band to play at CBGB's. That scuzzy dive* on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the Bowery, which came to be most immediately associated with the mid-Seventies musical and cultural explosion of New York Punk. This in turn, gave us, in addition to Television,  and hold your breath for this bit - Patti Smith, The Ramones, Blondie, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, Suicide, Talking Heads, Mink DeVille, Dead Boys, The Cramps, Tuff Darts, Miamis, The Shirts the No Wave bands and numerous other scruffy, no hoper notables. But Television were there first, according to all reliable sources, and they're owed a debt. For that alone..

In order to fully appreciate Television (if you care to do so), you really need to appreciate the culture which they emerged from. New York in the Late Sixties and Seventies is one of the most intriguing  moments and experiences of the Twentieth Century for me. The one which first Richard Hell and then Tom Verlaine escaped to after high school in Delaware, in order to become the people they wanted to  be. Chasing down the spirit of the 19th Century poets, writers and artists they revered so much. Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Huysmans. de Lautreamont, de Nerval. Also Paul Verlaine, Rimbaud's partner in crime and poetry, whose surname Tom Miller took in homage. Tom Meyers did something similar with Rimbaud by renaming himself  Hell in tribute to Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer /  Seasons in Hell.  New York was a beacon of light, and escape for souls like Verlaine and Hell, a possibility to become the artists they wished to be. Theirs, is a remarkable story in itself. I'll come back to it later.

 Revolutionary Russia, Twenties Paris, Weimar Germany, Left Bank Existentialist Paris, Swinging Sixties London. Prague Spring in 1968 or New York in the early Seventies.. Given a choice, and I know it's hardly likely, I'd personally go for a table at CBGB's most nights between 1974 and 1977. In addition to all of the players I mentioned above, you'd get writers, journalists, poets, film makers, artists, drug dealers, prostitutes, groupies. The occasional average Joe. You might spot Lou Reed, Andy Warhol, William Burroughs, Nicholas Ray, David Bowie, or Robert Mapplethorpe at a neighbouring table on any given night. It was some place. The likes of which is not likely to be repeated. 

You might find yourself treading on dogshit. being accosted, or offered heroin in the filthiest toilets you've ever been in or sampling the chili which Stiv Bators, the Dead Boys singer apparently used to wank off in. Sorry, there's no other way of putting it. You might also find yourself in some incredible conversation, shoot pool with Dee Dee Ramone, or just hear some utterly mind blowing music, years before the rest of the world got to do so, and have one of the best nights of your entire life.

I've listened to so many CBGB's records now, since Marquee Moon opened this particular portal for me when I bought it in 1984 at eighteen on R.E.M's recommendation, (such a generous band that one). Read so many articles and books, and been to the place itself twice, where I saw a few 'going nowhere' bands play in the venue before it closed. I also bought a CBGB T-Shirt on my first visit in 1998 that I'm strangely unwilling to part with and bin, even 25 years after its purchase. I'm not quite sure what led to this reluctance on my part, except perhaps an unwillingness to let go of something that had meant so much to me in my late teens, throughout my twenties and actually ever since. Something I've never actually fully attempted to express until now.

Television are a pivotal band in my life but I'd say they're also one in the history of the whole of Rock & Roll in many ways. Pivotal, in the respect that they appeared at a time when it was time for a fresh way of looking at things. They looked backwards as well as forwards. They've been incredibly influential since they split. In fact their influence is almost impossible to measure. I wouldn't even bother to list names but to give one example. The Edge's guitar would sound nothing whatsoever like it did without the influence of Verlaine and Lloyd. For the record, I have no problem with the sound of The Edge's guitar even though I can't stand U2. Bono has always been and remains my only problem with that band.

 Back to Television. Most of all they were the sound of beautifully orchestrated and arranged guitars, some of the best Rock guitars I've ever heard or will ever hear. Those were mostly the work of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. Hell initially attempted rudimentarily to anchor that sound on bass but once that was deemed inadequate by Verlaine (and Hell was virtually obliged to leave), Fred Smith was persuaded to abandon Blondie and supply the musicianship that Tom had been looking for. Drummer Billy Ficca was also an incredibly interesting player. As we'll hear over the coming days

What I find most fascinating about Television is that they're not, definitely not, all about the music. They're just as much about a mode or way of living. Just as much about immersing yourself in modal jazz or obscure French Symbolist poetry in your teenage years as wanting to be a Rock Star in the conventional sense. Much more so actually, which is probably why they never 'made it' in the conventional sense.

There was one obvious way of tackling this immersion. By just talking about and listening through to the three studio albums that they released. 1977's Marquee Moon. The following year's Adventure. Finally the unexpected self-titled record that they put out in 1992 during a short lived reformation that no-one really anticipated. 

But I don't think that would tell the whole story of this remarkable band. So on Monday we're going to consider the Hell years by listening to the sessions produced in 1975 for Island Records produced by Brian Eno. Many of these songs, but not all of them, ended up on Marquee Moon, one of the most highly revered and celebrated debut Rock albums of all.

Then, given the hallowed tones that many who saw them at CBGB's speak of them, I though it might be worthwhile doing a live record on Thursday after Adventure and Television to see if we can see what the fuss about witnessing them live was all about. So, Television in a week.

I'm well aware that not everybody will experience the complete awe that I always do when I listen to the band's records. I've played their stuff to many down the years and often received utterly indifferent shrugs in response. I sit opposite a Damned fan at work. who completely despises them and we've had exactly the same conversation many times over the years. But I'd also expect them to go down really well with others, given the kind of group this is. Anyhow. Should be fun. Oh, and try to be kind. My first immersion.

Monday; The Eno Sessions

Tuesday: Marquee Moon (1997)

Wednesday: Adventure (1978)

Thursday: The Blow Up

Friday: Television (1992)

(all are available on Spotify except the Eno Sessions, which you can hear on YouTube)

.* You're pretty much obliged to call CBGB's 'a scuzzy dive' whenever you refer to it.