Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (2 page)

It’s the closest thing New York punk — and by extension all of punk, post-punk, new wave, college, alternative, and indie rock — has to an origin myth: A couple kids in their early twenties walk south on the Bowery through New York’s Lower East Side on a spring afternoon in 1974, just as the owner of a club at the intersection of Bleecker Street — a Hell’s Angels dive called Hilly’s — climbs a ladder to hang a new awning for his venue. He’s renaming the place CBGB & OMFUG, which, he tells the passers-by, stands for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues, and Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers. They tell him that’s exactly what they play — along with a few originals — and somehow manage to get a date out of him. Of course they’re lying, but for their first night they round up friends and buy enough drinks that they land a regular string of Sundays. On stage, they wear ripped T-shirts, short hair. Noisy songs, bastard children of ’60s basement sounds: raw, angular, amateurish. Rough as hell. The owner thinks they’re terrible, but audiences trickle in. By mid-summer more new bands turn up. Some of these will become famous. But this band, Television, was first on the scene. And CBGB — or CBGB’s or CB’s, to its habitués, as if it belonged to someone named CB instead of to a guy named Hilly — would become world famous as the birthplace of punk.

This origin myth, which settled quickly into a more or less permanent form, started turning up in profile pieces on Television in 1976, just as “punk” and CBGB’s itself sparked mainstream media attention and just as Television was finally signing a contract for its debut album. When
Marquee Moon
was released in February 1977, fans and critics listened to it primarily in relation to what was already being called CBGB’s “mythology” or its “annals,” as if the club were as old and storied as the famous Marquee in London, where the Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, and Bowie had all cut their chops. Writing in the national publication
Hit Parader
in early 1977, James Wolcott (who’d already analyzed “the rise of punk rock” in the
Village
Voice
) describes yellowed CBGB’s mementoes tacked to his “albino-white walls”: the moment was fading, just three years in. For Wolcott, the myth was already established: “[T]here literally would be no CBGB scene in New York if it weren’t for Television,” he writes. “[I]t was [Tom] Verlaine and [Richard] Lloyd who originally conned — I mean persuaded — Hilly Kristal to let a rock band play there, and TV played when the bar was nothing but dog dung, broken bottles, and reeling, vomiting winos.”
¹

Appearing in almost four decades’ worth of articles, popular histories, memoirs, and band biographies, this founding narrative functions as avant-garde origin stories most often do: as a “parable of absolute self creation,” presenting the underground movement as self-generated, a clean break from whatever came before.
²
The narrative cuts off cultural memory and obscures influence. Even histories that trace New York punk to earlier sounds — Detroit bands like the Stooges or the MC5, New York underground acts like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls — still manage to portray Television and CBGB’s springing, like conjoined twins, from the broken glass and needle-strewn streets of an economically depressed lower Manhattan in that second summer of Watergate.

Of course it’s tempting just to print that legend and move on. Legend counts for something after all. But the closer you look at where this story comes from and how it became commonplace, minor variations become meaningful. Verlaine and Lloyd both started telling the origin story just prior to
Marquee Moon
’s release, though Lloyd’s renditions have been canonized in the competing sacred histories of New York punk, Clinton Heylin’s
From the Velvets to the Voidoids
(1993), and Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s
Please Kill Me
(1996), as well as in the only book-length history of CBGB’s, Roman Kozak’s long out-of-print
This Ain’t No Disco
(1987). Lloyd’s storytelling is detailed, dramatic, and chuck-full of dialogue, as if these stories have always existed in narrative form. Here he is in the mid-1980s:

Take a closer look at what this quote reveals. For one, it already contains clichés, as suggested by Lloyd’s repetition of the stepladder detail at the start. More importantly, though, Lloyd ventriloquizes Verlaine to make Hilly seem foolish: A hick! Opening a country bar on the Bowery! By contrast, Television’s members are trickster heroes, wily enough to win the gig. Success was secured when their manager, Terry Ork, bought “enough drinks by himself to set the place up. By God,” Lloyd exclaims, “Hilly was making money.”
⁴

Compare Lloyd’s account with Kristal’s, from CBGB’s website: “I was on a ladder in front of the club fixing the awning in place, when I looked down to notice three scruffy dudes in torn jeans and T shirts looking up at me inquisitively.”
⁵
That would be Verlaine, Lloyd, and Richard Hell, three-fourths of the band. Hilly’s inclusion of Hell makes you wonder: did Lloyd’s memory lapse in the omission, or has Hell been squeezed out of the story as well as the band? In 1976, when Lloyd first put his version in print, he also gave only himself and Verlaine the credit.
⁶
Hilly, by contrast, downplays Television’s role in favor of his own as impresario, scenemaker, gruff but loving patriarch. He’d managed the famed Village Vanguard jazz club, for God’s sake. He’d opened his bar on the Bowery because artists and musicians were already flocking to cheap east side apartments and loft spaces in nearby SoHo. Hilly’s earliest versions of the story, in fact, directly refute the band’s: “Television were
not
the first” on the scene, he insisted, they were just “the first to be successful. Actually, it was Terry Ork who badgered me into having Television back time and time again, because they were so god-awful when they started.”
⁷

In 1978, when Kristal gave this quote to London’s
New Musical Express
, Verlaine had already distanced himself from the original CB’s scene; Hilly’s feelings seem a little sore. Then, within months of the
NME
article, Television would call it quits, having toured briefly in support of its second album,
Adventure
. And Verlaine, who’d asserted Television’s claim as CBGB’s founders, insisted there had never
really
been a scene at all: “Newspapers were making it into a scene,” he said, “but to me it was just a club we played for three years.”
⁸

Marquee Moon
emerged in part from Verlaine’s ambivalence on this point. He wanted credit for starting a scene he feared would box him in, and as a result Television’s debut both grows and departs from the downtown scene, marked by entry and exit in specific ways. A monument to the beginning and the ending of the scene’s founding era, the album, like the band, has been understood from its time to our own as intimately linked to the story of a broader movement, including the story’s emergence in international print, in some cases before the music had even made it across the pond. Taking seriously Lester Bangs’s comment that one of punk’s birthplaces was the international media, I’ve chosen to write about
Marquee Moon
in that context, as emerging from a dialogue between the music and the way the band was portrayed in print.

As should already be clear, any punk origin story will inevitably betray some idea about who deserves credit for heroic acts of avant-garde self-creation. Even among the accounts told by Television’s members, disparities abound. Verlaine tells one version where he’s accompanied not by band mates but by a ragtime-playing buddy named Alan Ostlund.
⁹
Hell would claim that
he’d
been scouting out venues to replace the Mercer Arts Center, a key site on the underground until the building collapsed a few months before Hilly renamed his Bowery club.
¹⁰
Hell would also argue his status as punk founder had been robbed, both by his exit from Television in early 1975 and by the London pop svengali and haberdasher Malcolm McLaren, who blatantly ripped off his style to create the Sex Pistols.
¹¹
This alternative account eventually morphed into a version of the origin story featuring Hell solo: “Exactly because [CBGB’s] was an unprepossessing dive that stank from the piss of the winos upstairs,” the London
Independent
wrote in 2008, “Hell had discovered a place where punk could germinate uncontaminated by outside interest.”
¹²
And Hell’s not alone in taking or getting credit for a role in the story that typically goes to Verlaine. Lloyd recently exclaimed to one interviewer: “CBGBs is the most famous rock ‘n’ roll club to have ever existed and I fucking created it!”
¹³

These attempts to secure credit aren’t limited to individuals: Joey Ramone on occasion made the specious claim that the Ramones were first on the CB’s scene.
¹⁴
But the fact that so many punk heroes came from one dive bar also underscores the importance of community to the scene’s start. As Blondie’s Clem Burke puts it, CB’s bands “were also the audience. In the beginning it was this little microcosm of hip culture that no one else knew about.”
¹⁵
Hell concurs: “At CBGB’s, we imagined our own world into being, because we didn’t feel comfortable in the existing one. It was a place you could go to every night and feel like you belonged. And that’s because it flowered out of our own brains.”
¹⁶
In Kristal’s
New York Times
obit in 2007, Jon Pareles promotes this communal ethos by crediting Patti Smith along with Verlaine for stumbling onto Hilly’s bar while on their way to William Burroughs’s “Bunker,” the converted YMCA at 222 Bowery where the Beat icon lived in the 1970s. Though this account can’t possibly be accurate — Smith and Verlaine wouldn’t meet until Television had already started playing the club — the invocation of Burroughs as the scene’s spiritual godfather is something Smith has frequently cited herself, linking CB’s punks to downtown predecessors, the Beats. So much for self-creation.

Marquee Moon
doesn’t trumpet its own origins. It seems, in fact, out of time, perpetually new, like a dispatch from rock’s future. It nonetheless emerged from and plays into this desire to mark new beginnings. As Heylin argues, the Television of
Marquee Moon
was quite a different band than the one that first played CBGB’s in March 1974, but he still lists
Marquee Moon
as one of American punk’s four “most enduring landmarks.” (The others are Patti Smith’s
Horses
, Pere Ubu’s
The Modern Dance
, and Richard Hell and the Voidoids’
Blank Generation
.) Moreover, he deems
Marquee Moon
“probably the most dramatic debut of any American rock band.”
¹⁷
This album has, from its release, sent rock historians scrambling to situate it, in spite of the fact that its audience has never been as broad as it deserves. One of the paradoxes of Television’s trajectory is that mainstream success might have prevented the band’s preeminence in critical estimations: its cult status buttresses the album’s claims on authenticity and originality.

In cementing Television’s centrality to punk’s origins, no text plays as significant a role as McNeil and McCain’s
Please Kill Me
, in spite of the fact that, compared to Heylin’s history, it devotes more attention to sex and drugs than to the revolutionary music.
Please Kill Me
, which takes its very title from a legendary T-shirt Hell designed and Lloyd wore on stage, offers a wistful glance at a gritty pre-AIDS ’70s New York rock scene. It has two clear agendas where Television’s concerned: First, it argues that Television laid foundations for American punk well before the Sex Pistols were a glint in McLaren’s eye. Second, it makes Hell the scene’s unsung hero. Hell’s heroism is defined not simply against McLaren’s thievery, but also against Verlaine’s desire for complete control of Television, which resulted in Hell’s departure.