Following up on my last post about the late, great Tom Verlaine, even when he shared a fleeting moment of discourse with me (if you can even call it that) that rainy night on University Place, as we unwittingly sat side by side in the front window eating our respective slices and watching our neighborhood fill up with water, I knew not to push my luck and try to carry on a conversation with the famously icy icon.
But had I done so, I might have asked him what he thought about the word “Punk.”
Read any of the myriad obits for him in the last day, and you’re bound to see descriptors of Television’s distinctive musical style as “angular,” “lyrical,” “innovative,” all of which, I’d concede, is more or less accurate, if all a bit predictable. Billboard magazine even ran an obit, which I thought was pretty rich, given that Television really never came within squinting distance of vaulting a record onto the pop charts, which is really all Billboard cares about. One outlet referred to the dynamic of Verlaine and fellow string-bender Richard Lloyd as a “combative two-guitar assault,” which kind of made me laugh. Had this writer even heard Television? Despite inarguably being Punk pioneers (there’s a legend about them being the first band outside of the “country, bluegrass, blues” milieu to approach CBGB’s Hilly Kristal about playing the venue, but that may be apocryphal), Television didn’t really make music that bludgeoned its listeners, even at their most aggressive, like on this live recording of “Little Johnny Jewel” below.
There’s another possibly apocryphal anecdote about Television that always comes to mind in that when they were recording their debut LP, Marquee Moon, Verlaine ruffled Lloyd’s feathers by constantly insisting to co-producer/sound engineer Andy Johns that he wanted all the guitars to sound “smaller” and “dryer,” already looking to distance himself from the trajectory so-called “Punk Rock” was headed. It’s for this reason that, to this day, Marquee Moon’s eight songs still sound fresh and completely unlike anything else.
Once again, despite being Punk before Punk was Punk, what made Television a preeminent Punk band was their disdain for tired, staid convention. While original bassist Richard Hell — who split to form the more volatile Voidoids and Heartbreakers well before the recording of Marquee Moon — is credibly regarded as the tonsorial/sartorial blueprint of the “Punk Rocker” (being the first to cut short and spike up his hair and adhere his ripped clothes together with safety pins — more out of necessity than prescient fashion), Television didn’t really look like punks, and they certainly didn’t sound like what the media was spinning as “proper Punk Rock,” at the time. The comparatively mild-mannered Television were never going to deafen you with feedback or be gratuitously prurient. We had the Dead Boys for that.
All this is why I wonder — what did Tom Verlaine think of the term he was saddled with?
Recent Comments