Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (8 page)

In some ways, Wayne County’s appearance at Hilly’s and CB’s suggests the clubs weren’t as odd a presence on the Bowery as some later accounts would indicate. The nearby theaters, the legacy of an older vaudeville district, occasionally featured drag shows, but the Bowery had an even longer-standing entertainment culture. In the nineteenth century it had been Broadway’s working-class shadow, running from Cooper Square south to the notorious Five Points. The Bowery Theatre, near Canal Street, catered to rowdy antebellum audiences who liked their theater rough and loud; the famed Bowery B’hoys, who would later lend their name — if not its spelling — to the silver screen’s Dead End Kids, made the Bowery a fashionable working-class promenade, a stage on which they parodied aristocratic affectations. When the gentry invaded the neighborhood in the 1840s, taking over working-class leisure gardens and erecting a fancy-pants opera house at Astor Place, local butchers and B’hoys rebelled, staging a riot that brought out the National Guard and ended in civilian bloodshed. Half a century later, an estimated 25,000 men lived in Bowery missions and welfare hotels. Through the middle of the twentieth century the Third Avenue El ran along the Bowery, casting a permanent shadow on sidewalks along either side. One result: the Bowery remained the domain of the down-and-out for 150 years. In CB’s early days, the walls next to the stage featured oversized portraits of nineteenth-century Bowery burlesquers, an homage to the street’s pop cultural legacy.

Hilly’s primary clientele in the early ’70s was as uneven as the neighborhood’s reputation. In addition to some stray drag performers from the Bouwerie Lane across the street, he’d poured drinks mostly for members of the Hell’s Angels, whose HQ was nearby, and residents of the Palace and other adjacent flophouses. “I ran it for a while as a derelict bar,” Kristal later recalled, “and bums would be lining up at eight in the morning, when I opened the doors.”
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And though the neighborhood had supported upperclass slummers of one sort or another since the middle of the last century, there was nothing mainstream about its appeal. Drivers locked doors when bums offered to wash windows at intersections: in his 1973 novel
Great Jones Street
, about a Dylanesque rock star who holes up downtown to escape his celebrity status, Don DeLillo describes the Bowery as full of these “wild men with rags.”
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Invariably, early press on CBGB’s stressed the club’s undesirable location. It was a district even cab-drivers avoided, stripped-out cars on the sidestreets and trash-can fires on corners at night. Then again, the kids who came to CB’s by and large came on foot. And though “[a]nybody who passed 315 Bowery after ten o’clock in the evening risked getting a knife in the back,” as Karen Kristal remembered about the early days,
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the danger lent street cred to a self-consciously underground movement.

Although Hilly had run
Times
listings using the name CBGB as early as the summer of ’73, journalists have traditionally followed his lead in dating the name-change to December of that year. But with the new awning Verlaine and company had see him hang a few months later, Hilly threw an official grand re-opening in March of ’74, only a few weeks before Television’s first show there. His opening night, Wednesday the 20th, featured ridiculously cheap drink specials, followed by three nights of the Con-Fullam Band, a bluegrass act from Maine. The next week he advertised three nights of Elly Greenberg’s country blues over a smaller, innocuous listing for Sunday: “ROCK Concert TELEVISION March 31.” Another ad for the first show, paid for by Ork, foregrounds a photo of the band and also lists the “fancy guitar pickin’s [
sic
]” of Erik Frandsen.

Television’s first Sunday shows may or may not have attracted enough patrons to allow Hilly to make money from the bar, but they did lead to a confluence of interests and talents that would be significant to Television’s — and the scene’s — development. Ork, Hell, and Verlaine brought friends from Cinemabilia, including their fellow employee Rob Duprey, who would go on to form Mumps and would later play drums with Iggy Pop. Ork also drew on his Max’s connections, and Hell worked literary circles. The biggest payoff came on the third Sunday of Television’s residency, when Hell succeeded in getting his friends Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye to drop by and see his new band.

Smith’s arrival at the club is clearly the most fortuitous event of Television’s and CBGB’s early phase — and of her early career as well. Smith has narrated the scene consistently for over three decades: how she knew Hell through the poet Andrew Wylie, whose book Hell had published; how she talked Lenny Kaye into heading downtown to CB’s following a press screening of
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones
. Her biographer describes her as arriving in her best Baudelaire: “a boy’s back suit, crisp white dress shirt, skinny tie,”
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but Smith recalls wearing “a black velvet Victorian dress with a white collar.”
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Either way, she was dressed to meet peers who also wanted to bridge poetry and rock. She and Kaye had spent the last few months rehearsing as a trio with a new pianist, Richard Sohl, in order to make an earnest stab at performing as an electric cabaret ensemble, if not quite yet a full-fledged rock act.

When they came to CBGB’s to see Television, Smith’s group had just come off a five-night, two-sets-per-night run at Reno Sweeney opening for Warhol star Holly Woodlawn. Andy himself had shown up one night; his
Interview
magazine had profiled Smith the previous October.
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In the spring of ’74 Smith was on the rise, turning up in London rock magazines for her relationship with Allen Lanier, to whose Long Island band, Blue Öyster Cult, she’d contributed some lyrics.
Melody Maker
had referred to her as “a poet who appears at New York rock clubs,” and Nick Kent in
NME
already dubbed her “the remarkable N.Y. poetess.”
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But it was Television’s raw set, together with images of the Stones’ 1972 tour in her head, that made her sense something big was about to give. What Smith found, when she arrived on the Bowery in April 1974, would lift her from the outer orbit of the nostalgic cabaret circuit and help to establish her own sense of vocation as a rock star. As Smith would describe it, Television was nothing short of rock ‘n’ roll Messiahs.

Together Smith and Hell would be Television’s and CBGB’s earliest and most influential mythologizers, and Smith would outlast Hell as a booster for the band. Ork later told Legs McNeil that Patti had come up to him after her first Television show and said, “I want him. I want Tom Verlaine. He has such an Egon Schiele look.”
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(Schiele’s paintings featured lanky, often nude and sexually suggestive figures, who do bear a remarkable similarity to Verlaine’s body type.) For the next three years she worked behind the scenes to ensure the success of Television and CBGB’s, with all the fervor of a missionary, even as she crafted her own rock poetess persona in full public view.

Television fit right into a narrative Smith had already been crafting in her criticism. Like John the Baptist wandering through the wilderness, she’d both prophesied and searched the stars for signs of revolution. In the March 1973 issue of
Creem
, Smith called for a “dirtier,” more “old school” form of rock than she saw around her; she thought it might be “coming down and we got to be alert to feel it happening. something new and totally ecstatic.”
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Her sense of pending revolt may have been influenced by the Dolls, but she seemed less than satisfied with glitter’s vaudeville groove. “I really felt that was it, what I was hoping for,” she later said of her first time hearing Television: “[T]o see people approach things in a different way with a street ethic but also their full mental faculties.”
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To this day she narrates the moment as portentous: “Tom Verlaine had definitely read
A Season in Hell
,” she writes in her 2010 memoir
Just Kids.
“As the band played on you could hear the whack of the pool cue hitting the balls, the saluki [Hilly’s dog] barking, bottles clinking, the sounds of a scene emerging. Though no one knew it, the stars were aligning, the angels were calling.”
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If Smith recognized Television as Ginsbergian “angel-headed hipsters,” that revelation was relatively exclusive in 1974. Press on Television’s earliest gigs is slim. In April they registered on the radar of the year-old
SoHo Weekly News
, which for the better part of a decade competed with the
Voice
in covering the downtown scene. (Its early distribution plan was to have employees stand outside Max’s and hand papers to the crowd at closing time.) Writing about the first string of Sunday shows, Josh Feigenbaum mistakenly refers to the band as Television Set, yet offers valuable insight into their formative stages. Feigenbaum compares them to Hamburg-era Beatles: “disjointed black leather jacketed and bad,” turning out “the kind of music you might hear coming out of some poor bastard’s recreation room in suburban Long Island, loud, out of tune and pretentious as hell.” If the Dolls hadn’t been playing the Bottom Line the same night, Feigenbaum wrote, “the place would have been packed to the rafters.” And even though Television had room to grow, their attitude compensated. “[F]or all of their musical ineptness,” he wrote, the band

Television liked the line so much they used it on fliers and ads for future gigs. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect nutshell for what would before long be called punk: do-it-yourself, back-to-basics rock that sloughed off the water-logged carcass corporate rock had become.

A month later Patti Smith’s first piece about the band appeared, also in
SoHo Weekly News
. That fall a revision of this piece, suggesting collaboration with band members, would appear in
Rock Scene
, but the original channels her gut reaction and lays out the key elements of the band’s mythology. Above all, Smith emphasizes sex appeal: “Confused sexual energy makes young guys so desirable,” she writes. “Their careless way of dressing; Their strange way of walking; filled with so much longing.” She sets the stage, too, by minutely describing CBGB’s itself, which she incorrectly locates as “a dark little soho bar” with a “Lousy P.A., long nervous dogs running random, women smoking french cigarettes and mostly boys on the prowl hanging by a thread waiting for Television to tune up.”
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Smith also repeatedly mentions the band’s apparent insanity, another attempt to locate them in Beat or longer Romantic literary traditions. She highlights their cover of “Psychotic Reaction,” calls their music “maniac,” and quotes some “non-believers” in the audience who suggest they look like “escapees from some mental ward.” One early Monday morning following a midnight gig, someone told her they were “just too insane but me,” she concludes, “I heard this funny flapping of wings, and the wild boys the wild boys the wild boys … just smiled.”
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These last lines reference Burroughs’s 1971 novel
The Wild Boys
, on whose protagonist she would later model her character Johnny in the song “Land,” just as Television would the eponymous hero of its first single, “Little Johnny Jewel”: the unsupervised adolescent male, dangerous and sexual and beautiful, traveling through a violent, apocalyptic landscape. In spite of her rigorous attention to their heterosexual posturing, the final line queers them in her most overt effort to make them Romantic outlaws, a tradition inspired not just by Beats but by a form of “antisocial innocence” that Hell, like Smith, derived from Rimbaud.
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Television’s association with Smith was mutually beneficial. Her cult status turned a spotlight on the band, and especially on Tom, who launched a relationship with her in spite of the fact that she was living with Allen Lanier. Smith’s doo wop-inspired “We Three,” eventually released on her 1978 album,
Easter
, depicted her simultaneous relationships with both musicians. Its opening lines invoke both CBGB’s and Verlaine: “Every Sunday I will go down to the bar / and leave him the guitar,” she crooned. He reciprocated with one of his best early songs, “I’m Gonna Find You,” a bluesy slow-boiler about a lover with “shiny dirty black hair” and “clothes they just don’t make anymore,” which transforms into a murderous revenge ballad after she leaves him. Smith’s shows were already being reviewed in national publications —
Creem
reviewed one of the Reno Sweeney gigs — and in September she performed with Sam Shepard in a revival of
Cowboy Mouth
. “I started makin’ my move when all the rock stars died,” she told one interviewer. “Jimi and Janis and Jim Morrison. It just blew my mind, because I’m so hero-oriented. I just felt total loss. And then I realized it was time for me.”
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Verlaine helped give her older poems a rock ‘n’ roll makeover.

By summer’s end, Smith and Verlaine were “definitely a twosome,” and had been dubbed, in a gossip column Danny Fields had started writing for
SoHo Weekly News
, “the Downtown Couple of the Year thus far.”
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Patti showed up at one show with a bouquet of flowers, marching through the crowd to place them at Verlaine’s feet.
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She and Tom danced to the Who’s “Call Me Lightning” on the club’s jukebox.
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When Debbie Harry caught them making out in the alley behind the joint, Verlaine blushed and Patti told her to fuck off. (“But then again, Patti didn’t really ever talk to me much,” Harry would add, telling the story years later, after Blondie had made it big.
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