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

The early/late Television split is almost as important to the band’s mythology as the discovery of the club. Decades later you’ll find partisans still facing off. If they preferred Television with Hell, they would rather hear early bootlegs and rougher arrangements than the finished versions on
Marquee Moon
. To them, the album might as well have come from a different band. Others will tell you that Television only benefitted from Fred Smith’s more subtle and supple bass. If
Marquee Moon
’s story can’t be told without covering the Hell/Verlaine fallout, this should only remind us that creation myths also serve to explain the emergence of good and evil, gods and devils, heroes and villains. They outline rituals for preserving the purity of such categories and reinforcing tribal identity. In
Please Kill Me
, Verlaine and his consort Patti Smith come off as devils in disguise.

And then there are the alternate accounts that make Television
and
Legs McNeil the villains while valorizing New York’s earlier glitter scene as punk’s true fountainhead. The notion that CBGB’s founding marked glitter’s grave still gets a rise out of those who emphasize the continuity between the Mercer Arts Center and the later scene. This camp complains that back when CB’s was still Hilly’s on the Bowery, the club’s acts included glitter pioneers Eric Emerson and the Magic Tramps and the transgendered drag artist Wayne (later Jayne) County, whose backing bands included Queen Elizabeth, the Electric Chairs, and the Backstreet Boys. “Queen Elizabeth actually played CBGB’s four months before Television,” Jayne County complained in 2005. “I love Television, but enough of this shit, give Jayne credit!”
¹⁸
Fair enough. If we want to understand the mythology that consolidated around Television, perhaps we’ll have to ask not just what that story’s longevity means, but also what other possible pasts the myth obscures, and how those historical alternatives might relate to the music that eventually became
Marquee Moon
.

CBGB’s significance in our own day derives from a desire to preserve the authenticity of New York’s East side neighborhoods, long a stand-in for the possibility of artistic subculture itself, or perhaps for the spark of authentic rebellion at the heart of rock ‘n’ roll. (Consider, though, that we’re twice as far removed from the mid-’70s as the downtown bands were from the birth of rock ‘n’ roll in the ’50s.) But anxieties about downtown’s decline or rock’s relevance bring up yet another purpose served by avant-garde origin myths: the preservation of community by excluding late arrivals. Such a posture ironically represses CBGB’s own role as vanguard of Bowery gentrification. In the 1980s, Karen Kristal, Hilly’s ex-wife, proudly rebroadcasted NYPD opinion “that CBGB has done more than anything else to clean up the area and bring safety.”
¹⁹
But to others these transformations already heralded the traditional neighborhood’s death: Richard Hell wasn’t on the East Side because his “folks have just pulled in from Puerto Rico,” wrote the critic Vivien Goldman in 1977. He’s “one of the new generation of artist types flocking to low-rent areas, a process which will inevitably result in the rents slowly rising, the scabrous tenements being tarted up till the immigrant families can’t afford it any more.”
²⁰
In our century, nostalgia not for displaced immigrants but for displaced bohemians has worn itself thin in the mass production of CBGB’s paraphernalia. In 1976 bohemian nostalgists already told stories about a time at CBGB’s before limousines delivered celebrity slummers onto the scene. Part of the bohemian legacy, of course, is mourning and memorializing an authentic past, as is recognizing the “elusiveness of authentic experience.”
²¹
To many fans,
Marquee Moon
serves just such a function, perhaps more than ever.

The authentic past eludes us precisely because we ritually sacrifice memory to create mythical accounts of origins — and endings. When Television reunited in 1992 to record a third album, at least one bemused interviewer sat by while the band had it out over the details of their own legend. Verlaine took issue with the way Lloyd had recounted their breakup for over a decade:

Memory isn’t infallible. Myths settle into lives of their own. Collaboratively produced, they lay claim on originality, authorship, and agency. Television lasted, in its original run, from 1973 to 1978. CBGB’s had a longer life, but still died an early death in 2006. (At 33, it was the same age as the crucified Christ, as Patti Smith noted at the time.) The club was replaced by a John Varvatos boutique that tries in its own way to preserve the rock club’s feel — down to preserving original graffiti — while hocking $3500 rocker jackets. In this century, the consensus myth of CBGB’s origins doesn’t require a villain from within: gentrification has usurped that role. Awnings will come and go. But pilgrims will continue to worship at the intersection of Bowery and Bleecker. They’ll close their eyes and imagine a different entrance at number 315. Then they’ll cue up a favorite album, adjust their headphones, and wander south, toward Chinatown, tracing an earlier generation’s movements through tight toy nights.

1
Wolcott (1977).

2
Krauss (1981: p. 53).

3
Kozak (1988: p. 13).

4
Kozak (1988: p. 13).

5
Kristal, “The History of CBGB & OMFUG.”

6
Gholson (1976).

7
Murray (1978).

8
Heylin (1993: p. 321).

9
“Tom Verlaine” (1995).

10
McNeil and McCain (1996: p. 169).

11
Hell (1980).

12
Hasted (2005).

13
“Endurance: The Richard Lloyd Interview” (2007).

14
Black (1985).

15
Fletcher (2009: p. 342).

16
Hasted (2005).

17
Heylin (1993: pp. 351, 275).

18
Nobakht (2005: p. 73); Holmstrom (2007).

19
Kozak (1988: p. 3).

20
Goldman (1977).

21
Bradshaw (2010: p. 158).

22
Hibbert (1992).

Marquee Moon
is a quintessential album of the New York night. In its lower Manhattan landscape — largely desolate — darkness resounds with sirens, clangs, revving engines, the subway’s rattling tracks. The album has a literary landscape, too, filled (contrary to myths of self-creation) with echoes of New York’s long bohemian traditions, celebrations of freedoms found in the city’s dark patches and forgotten corners. Television joins a parade of writers and artists, from Walt Whitman to Hart Crane, Marcel Duchamp to Jackson Pollack, Frank O’Hara and Allen Ginsberg to the band’s contemporary, Jim Carroll, along with musicians working in jazz traditions, all of whom contribute to an artistic mode we call the urban pastoral. If ancient Greek pastorals celebrated the virtues of country life (personal freedom, repose, delight in nature, escape from social conventions), Television’s debut album echoes dozens of urban predecessors in the conviction that these qualities are even more intense in cities, where they rub up against opposite extremes of degradation, claustrophobia, and the excessively unnatural.
²³
Marquee Moon
’s very title combines urban and pastoral imagery, suggesting the kind of night sky only visible above the neon glare of city-dwellers’ assault on the dark. By implication the marquee, not the actual moon, sets the album’s mood.

The album’s title also suggests that sensory experience will be of prime importance to these eight songs. What can we see by the light of a marquee moon? What will be revealed on
Marquee Moon
’s grooves? If its songs reverberate with an urban soundscape and echo artistic forerunners, they abound with references to other senses — and sensory derangement — in general: vision and blindness; flashes of transcendental revelation; dizzying heights; the smell of a seaport. When Verlaine sings “My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves” he’s not just suggesting that his nighttime wanderings are filtered through “some new kind of drug”: he’s recognizing general conditions of corporeality and consciousness. Hyperconsciousness, even: the album is full of hesitations, pauses, periods of waiting — sometimes for several minutes — while the music builds and then recedes, like a tide pulled by lunar gravity. So much time to think. If these hesitations seem nervous they also allow for delayed gratification.

From the beginning, Television’s New York nocturne has frequently been compared to the Velvet Underground’s a decade earlier, but Verlaine’s reportage fundamentally differs from Lou Reed’s. Reed is a realist. Think of the detachment with which he narrates “Heroin,” or the way “Walk on the Wild Side” captures specific details of Max’s Kansas City’s backroom scene. Reed draws on older literary genres like the flâneur’s voyeuristic slice of urban life. By contrast, Verlaine sings from within experience, narrating consciousness or confusion more than reporting specific details of what he sees. Each song, he’s said, “is like a little moment of discovery or releasing something or being in a certain time or place and having a certain understanding of something.”
²⁴
Or, as Peter Laughner of the Cleveland bands Rocket from the Tombs and Pere Ubu put it, Verlaine “takes experience and abstracts it, not to the point of obscurity, but to the point of suggestion,” so it’s not restricted to “Verlaine’s experience per se.”
²⁵
Identifiable landmarks are few in Television songs, as are references to specific people, though the album hints at both. In this way, Verlaine’s writing differs from the dominant strains of New York’s poetry scene — Beats and New York School, followers of Ginsberg and O’Hara, respectively — when he and Richard Hell and Patti Smith all arrived in the late ’60s, ready to write. But like the downtown scene’s conceptual artists and poets, Television aimed to bring their audience along for the ride, allowing them vicariously to witness the process of a song’s unfolding, to fill in spaces or gaps with their own perceptions, to contribute to the meaning being made in acts of imaginary circumambulation of a dreamy urban night.

The specifics of New York’s Lower East Side poetry scene were probably not known to two kids named Richard Meyers and Tom Miller, runaways in 1966 from the Sanford School, a private prep nestled outside Wilmington, Delaware. But they knew that poets gathered in New York: Ginsberg, O’Hara, Dylan, LeRoi Jones, and others they probably hadn’t even heard of. So when they showed up in New York eighteen months apart, in 1966 and 1968, they told a story about themselves that they’d run away from reform school, bound to write. Sanford had more comforts than the fugitives let on, but their parents
had
sent them there to keep them out of trouble. Both were obviously bright but not quite cut for traditional schooling, and Sanford wouldn’t work out for either. Meyers had already been suspended once, for getting high on morning glory seeds, and the story they told of their escape from school had a distinct Beat ring to it: They stole some money from Miller’s parents and headed west, first for Washington, DC, and then for Lexington, Kentucky, where Meyers had grown up and still had friends. From there: south, Florida-bound. Somewhere in Alabama they were arrested for setting fire to the field they were camping in, possibly in retribution for being harassed by rednecks. Busted, Meyers returned to his mother in Virginia but left for New York as soon as he had the cash. Miller finished high school, then flirted with college in South Carolina and Pennsylvania before dropping out and heading to find Meyers.
²⁶
He would later say that he’d faked a suicide attempt to avoid Vietnam.
²⁷
Meyers also convinced a military shrink that it would be in the army’s interest not to draft him.
²⁸
In New York, they worked bookstore jobs and sought out the writers and musicians they admired.

These biographical details emerge from press releases and press accounts dating from 1974–1977, stories bound up with the birth of Television, the band Meyers and Miller eventually founded together. By then, of course, they had changed their names to Hell and Verlaine. And if they colored things a little, who could blame them? The possibility for self-invention was half of New York’s appeal. The Lower East Side, for young bohemians, was like a stage. Poets dressed like cowboys, strutting the streets of this urban frontier.
²⁹
Meanwhile, the descendents of immigrant Italians, Jews, Slavs, and Puerto Ricans sheltered their children from speed freaks and a few stray hippies invading their tenements.
³⁰
To the south and west, artists had begun to inhabit the near-abandoned Cast-iron District, a West Side neighborhood once filled with factories and warehouses, renamed SoHo in 1968.
³¹

For at least a century, geographic density and low rents had made these neighborhoods conducive to artistic collaboration and cultural cross-pollination. By the time Meyers and Miller arrived, New York had witnessed several bohemian scenes in succession: As early as Herman Melville’s 1852 novel
Pierre
you’ll find references to “miscellaneous, bread-and-cheese adventurers, and ambiguously professional nondescripts in very genteel but shabby black.” Walt Whitman was a regular at a bar called Pfaff’s at Broadway and Bleecker, a meeting ground for writers, artists, and actors who published their own literary rags. An 1872 guidebook describes this neighborhood as belonging to “long-haired, queerly dressed” artists who live in attics. By 1900, provincial bohemians joined slumming Ivy Leaguers in what were still predominantly immigrant ghettos. In 1917, as the United States prepared to enter the Great War, the French painter Marcel Duchamp, who helped introduce New York to modern art, stood atop the Washington Square arch and declared Greenwich Village an independent republic of the mind.

That declaration renewed itself decade by decade as the neighborhood became synonymous with the idea of artistic and sexual undergrounds. By mid-century, abstract painters and New York School poets congregated at the Cedar Tavern on University Place, wresting the art world away from Paris. The rapid notoriety granted Beat poets in the late ’50s led the
Village
Voice
’s Norman Mailer to rhapsodize about “White Negro” hipsters. With rents rising and Italian Villagers hostile toward an influx of would-be beatniks, writers moved eastward as the ’50s closed.
³²
These successive scenes did not always overlap, nor did they adhere to consistent artistic or political principles, but they retained adjacent downtown neighborhoods as the site of artistic ferment.

In
Lipstick Traces
, his 1989 freewheeling “secret history” of the twentieth century, Greil Marcus unearths a punk archaeology revealing European Dadaists and mid-century Situationists as laying antiauthoritarian groundwork that would eventually crack open to reveal the Sex Pistols. Though Marcus has always shown less interest in New York’s punk scene than in London’s, he could have made a similar case without leaving a few square miles in downtown Manhattan. Right about the time Meyers and Miller were born, a handful of key artists took root downtown who, along with Ginsberg, would serve as presiding spirits over New York’s underground for the next several decades. The composer John Cage moved to the Lower East Side in 1949, already having won notice for early works on prepared piano. In his courses at the New School in the late ’50s and early ’60s he emphasized concept as much as everyday materials in artistic production, unleashing a wave of conceptual and performance art and minimalist music, including the Fluxus movement and likeminded loft artists such as La Monte Young and Yoko Ono. From Cage and his followers, downtown musicians would inherit key artistic tenets that traced to Dada, if not to the earlier French decadents: an impulse to eliminate lines between art and life and high and low culture; a countercultural, anti-bourgeois sensibility; and a playful openness to the unknown, to chance, and to sensory derangement.
³³
It’s not too much of a stretch to trace lines of influence from Television back to Cage — the clear link comes through the Velvet Underground, whose members, especially John Cale, had been influenced by Cage and involved with Young’s downtown minimalist movement. But it’s not necessary to establish such conscious debts: as Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth, a band influenced by Television, put it: “The ‘existence’ of La Monte young was influential” in its own right. “I had no idea what his music sounded like until later [but] it had already changed my world through others.”
³⁴
Even so, Verlaine had encountered Cage’s influence even back in Wilmington, where as a middle schooler he had purchased, for 99 cents each, titles from
Time
’s modern music series, including work by Cage’s friend Morton Feldman. He squirreled himself away in an attic room to listen, “half-asleep and half awake, … a totally great state of mind,” he later wrote in
New York Rocker
.
³⁵
“I played them over and over thinking, ‘What’s gonna happen here?’ Nothing ever occurs in the usual fashion in any of these records. I can’t possibly call it an influence, but it did something in terms of space, maybe.”
³⁶

Cage’s notoriety in the early ’60s coincided with a revival of interest in early twentieth-century Dadaism, and especially in Marcel Duchamp. Another Duchampian, painter and Pop conceptualist Andy Warhol, also moved to Manhattan in 1949, working in commercial illustration until he established his own solo painting career in the early 1960s. Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, introduced him to downtown poetry and performance circles, and though Warhol spent time on these scenes, producing cover art for small poetry journals like Ted Berrigan’s
C
, he made his mark in painting and film. By 1965 he had capitalized on downtown’s conceptual art gospel, making objects from ordinary life marketable in an art economy. Expanding on this concept he assumed the role of star-maker, transforming his hangers-on into “superstars” who became famous for their proximity to him as much as for appearing in his films.

From Whitman to Warhol, the downtown avant-garde perpetuated itself through institutions like cafés, pubs, and playhouses, all friendly to conversation, performance, publication, and mind-altering substances. Beat poets preferred jazz clubs like the Five Spot on Cooper Square or coffee houses like those owned by Mickey Ruskin: the Tenth Street Coffee House (1960) and Café Les Deux Mégots, (1962). These gave way, for poets at least, to the Poetry Project at St. Mark’s Church in the late ’60s. Ruskin also owned a post-Cedar Tavern artists’ bar, The Ninth Circle (1962). From ’65 forward, another Ruskin establishment, Max’s Kansas City, off Union Square, attracted a painter crowd. In 1968, when Warhol moved his studio, the Factory, from midtown to Union Square, he made the back room of Max’s Kansas City
the
social destination for celebrities of all stripes.
³⁷