Post by petrolino on Nov 22, 2020 0:54:39 GMT
Deconstructing 'Marquee Moon' [10:40] by Television
{ ~ My All-Time Favourite Punk Song (Track 4 On My All-Time Favourite Punk Album) }
'April Fool' - Patti Smith & Tom Verlaine
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Composition
'"Marquee Moon" is the title track from American rock band Television's first album, Marquee Moon. It was written by Tom Verlaine.
Each of the song's three verses begins with a double-stopped guitar intro before Billy Ficca's drums come in, and after the second chorus Richard Lloyd plays a brief guitar solo. After the third chorus, there is a longer solo by Tom Verlaine, based on a jazz-like mixolydian scale, that lasts for the entire second half of the song. On the original vinyl edition of the album, the song faded out just short of ten minutes, but the CD reissues have included the full 10:40 of the take. In concert, the band has sometimes extended the song to as long as fifteen minutes.'
- Wikipedia
Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine, Billy Ficca & Richard Lloyd
Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca & Fred Smith
Pastel Rainbow Keyboard
Nels Cline & The Fender Jazzmaster : 'My Life In Five Riffs'
{ 'Turn Turn Turn' (The Byrds)
'Happening Ten Years Ago' (Yardbirds)
'Manic Depression' (Jimi Hendrix Experience)
'Marquee Moon' (Television)
'West Germany' (Minutemen) }
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Musical Differences
"Richard Lloyd's new memoir 'Everything is Combustible: Television, CBGB's, and Five Decades of Rock and Roll', is a curious book. In sixty-nine loosely linked, non chronological vignettes, Lloyd moves from recounting a fiercely interior, self-aware, and precocious childhood toward his wandering, drug- and alcohol-soaked twenties, up to the present day (Lloyd, with a backslide or two, has been clean and sober since the mid-1980s). In an oddly childlike tone, he writes about his favorite guitarists, lots, and lots of sex, lots, and lots of drug use (cresting with a crippling heroin addiction in the early 1980s), and his recording and touring career as a founding member of Television and as a solo artist and session musician.
In the prologue, Lloyd makes an interesting distinction between autobiography and memoir, insisting that he's composing the latter, which allows writers to wander among life's events, untethered to chronology, and to "understand [themselves] a bit and to share their lives from the inside." Yet for the most part, Lloyd observes, with detachment, his life's worth of sensual, pharmaceutical, and artistic adventures in the world's "lunatic asylum"—occasionally floating theories on spirituality, mysticism, Dharma energy, and psychology, especially in the book's ponderous final pages—with nary a note of self-reflection. We shouldn't necessarily expect deep character excavation in rock star memoirs, but we can hope for some measure of stock-taking, of wisdom or perspective arriving with the long view. For the most part, Lloyd seems uninterested in that; rather, Everything is Combustible reads like a dispassionate diary, closer in tone to Walter Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseilles" than to a revealing memoir.
That said, the book's juicy as hell. In the late-60s in Los Angeles, Lloyd palled around with the idiosyncratic guitarist and performer Velvert Turner, a protege of Jimi Hendrix's from whom Lloyd claims to have learned tricks on the guitar. For a time in the mid-70s he hung with Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, the latter of whom invited Lloyd down to Jamaica with him on a whim. Alcoholism and drug abuse permeates the book, and the extent of Lloyd's recreational drinking and drugging is astonishing; that he's alive is a remarkable testament to, as he sees it, his stamina, native curiosity in the expanding limits of body-testing, luck, and prayer. Lloyd's other major preoccupation in the book, sex, is mostly of the mid- and late-70s one-off variety, much of it emotionally engaging for Lloyd, a lot of it degrading and tawdry, and sometimes mean-spirited, for both parties. There's a funny scene involving Keith Moon in a tux, and a great revelation that Joey Ramone wrote his early Ramones songs on a guitar with only two strings. Lloyd gets digs in at his fellow band mates, particularly Tom Verlaine, whom he barely tolerates, endeavors to correct one or three errors in others' memoirs of the era and scene, and details the up-and-down recordings sessions of Television's three albums (Marquee Moon, Adventure, and Television) all with an innocent, wide-eyed view of the wonder of the world and the strange people doing strange, sometimes weird, sometimes tragic, often funny things on it."
- Joe Bonomo, No Such Thing As Was
In the prologue, Lloyd makes an interesting distinction between autobiography and memoir, insisting that he's composing the latter, which allows writers to wander among life's events, untethered to chronology, and to "understand [themselves] a bit and to share their lives from the inside." Yet for the most part, Lloyd observes, with detachment, his life's worth of sensual, pharmaceutical, and artistic adventures in the world's "lunatic asylum"—occasionally floating theories on spirituality, mysticism, Dharma energy, and psychology, especially in the book's ponderous final pages—with nary a note of self-reflection. We shouldn't necessarily expect deep character excavation in rock star memoirs, but we can hope for some measure of stock-taking, of wisdom or perspective arriving with the long view. For the most part, Lloyd seems uninterested in that; rather, Everything is Combustible reads like a dispassionate diary, closer in tone to Walter Benjamin's "Hashish in Marseilles" than to a revealing memoir.
That said, the book's juicy as hell. In the late-60s in Los Angeles, Lloyd palled around with the idiosyncratic guitarist and performer Velvert Turner, a protege of Jimi Hendrix's from whom Lloyd claims to have learned tricks on the guitar. For a time in the mid-70s he hung with Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, the latter of whom invited Lloyd down to Jamaica with him on a whim. Alcoholism and drug abuse permeates the book, and the extent of Lloyd's recreational drinking and drugging is astonishing; that he's alive is a remarkable testament to, as he sees it, his stamina, native curiosity in the expanding limits of body-testing, luck, and prayer. Lloyd's other major preoccupation in the book, sex, is mostly of the mid- and late-70s one-off variety, much of it emotionally engaging for Lloyd, a lot of it degrading and tawdry, and sometimes mean-spirited, for both parties. There's a funny scene involving Keith Moon in a tux, and a great revelation that Joey Ramone wrote his early Ramones songs on a guitar with only two strings. Lloyd gets digs in at his fellow band mates, particularly Tom Verlaine, whom he barely tolerates, endeavors to correct one or three errors in others' memoirs of the era and scene, and details the up-and-down recordings sessions of Television's three albums (Marquee Moon, Adventure, and Television) all with an innocent, wide-eyed view of the wonder of the world and the strange people doing strange, sometimes weird, sometimes tragic, often funny things on it."
- Joe Bonomo, No Such Thing As Was
"For Tom (Verlaine), 'Marquee Moon' is more of an albatross than it is for me. When I left the band in 2007, Television hadn’t put out a record since 1992 and had written eight songs in that whole time. Tom would start a song and he had no lyrics and he didn’t want to sing and he didn’t want to tour and he didn’t want to do this or that. I had a studio where we could have made a reasonably good-sounding record for free. But he didn’t want to use it, and he kept making excuses, even though he would come over and we would spend hours testing microphones. We both had quite a collection of microphones. So I have an eight-song demo, but with no lyrics. But they sound great."
- Richard Lloyd, The Stranger
- Richard Lloyd, The Stranger
"Television’s debut album, 1977’s Marquee Moon, might have failed to light up the U.S. charts (it never even cracked the Billboard 200), but it turned the heads of critics, who hailed the intricate, fluid and improvisational guitar playing by Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine as a groundbreaking combination of jazz, blues and garage rock. “I knew we were doing something special on that record,” Lloyd says. “It was simple in terms of production, but it was honest music played with heart. I think that’s what’s made it sort of timeless.”
Television called it quits in 1978, and a year later Lloyd released a bracing solo album, Alchemy, but for the next seven years he was beset by personal problems and substance abuse. “I call that my ‘Great Depression period,’” he says matter-of-factly. “It took me a while to get a lot of angst out of my system, but then I came back with Fields of Fire, and I’ve kept going since.”
While he’s taken part in sporadic Television reunions, Lloyd’s focus has been on working as a session guitarist while issuing solo albums. His newest, The Countdown, is a fiery collection of snaggle-toothed punk jams (“Whisper,” “So Sad”) and winsome, country-laced rockers (“Just My Heart”) that sport energetic, extended solos. “Each one is completely improvised,” Lloyd notes. “I played them once, but they probably would have sounded the same if I played them 50 times.”
Of the album’s epic, artrock title track, Lloyd says, “I had the riff that begins and ends the song, but that was basically it. I just said to the band, ‘We’re going into the outer limits here.’ So it’s me thinking Hendrix and space travel, and I just let my guitar lead the way. How could I lose?”
Television called it quits in 1978, and a year later Lloyd released a bracing solo album, Alchemy, but for the next seven years he was beset by personal problems and substance abuse. “I call that my ‘Great Depression period,’” he says matter-of-factly. “It took me a while to get a lot of angst out of my system, but then I came back with Fields of Fire, and I’ve kept going since.”
While he’s taken part in sporadic Television reunions, Lloyd’s focus has been on working as a session guitarist while issuing solo albums. His newest, The Countdown, is a fiery collection of snaggle-toothed punk jams (“Whisper,” “So Sad”) and winsome, country-laced rockers (“Just My Heart”) that sport energetic, extended solos. “Each one is completely improvised,” Lloyd notes. “I played them once, but they probably would have sounded the same if I played them 50 times.”
Of the album’s epic, artrock title track, Lloyd says, “I had the riff that begins and ends the song, but that was basically it. I just said to the band, ‘We’re going into the outer limits here.’ So it’s me thinking Hendrix and space travel, and I just let my guitar lead the way. How could I lose?”
- Joe Bosso, Guitar World
'Countdown' - Richard Lloyd
{ • GUITARS Supro Black Holiday, Epiphone Casino, vintage Strat-style model
• AMPS Supro Black Magick and Thunderbolt 1x12 combos, Vox AC30
• EFFECTS Vertex T Drive overdrive, DigiTech FreqOut Frequency Feedback Generator, Dunlop Echoplex Preamp. }
• AMPS Supro Black Magick and Thunderbolt 1x12 combos, Vox AC30
• EFFECTS Vertex T Drive overdrive, DigiTech FreqOut Frequency Feedback Generator, Dunlop Echoplex Preamp. }
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Poets Problem
The poetry collection 'Wanna Go Out' (1973) by Richard Hell & Tom Verlaine is an obscurity and a collector's item that's sought after by punk fans around the globe. For this collection, Verlaine adopted the identity Theresa Stern, a young prostitute working the streets of New York City. Copies of the original publishing are exchanged online for similarly rare punk artefacts and substantial prices.
"The first time we met David Bowie was when we supported him and Iggy Pop [for The Idiot tour in 1977]. We were in awe of him and Iggy right from the get-go. He was always very charming and gentlemanly, but also wary and kind of catty at the same time. I remember we talked about the new wave, and about Tom Verlaine’s hairdo a lot. He was a little sarcastic and derisive of it, but at the same time I thought he was also kind of jealous of the attention the hairdo was getting."
- Chris Stein, The Guardian
- Chris Stein, The Guardian
"Most of my amp, guitar and pedal choices are based on records I have become emotionally attached to. I want to recreate those emotions in my own playing. Television guitarist Tom Verlaine’s clean, angular and outside jazz guitar lines truly inspired me and had me researching his gear and finally hunting down and procuring a ’66 blackface Super Reverb and a pair of Jazzmasters (seafoam green’61 and a transitionyear tobacco ’65). Do I sound like Tom Verlaine? Not even close. Do I love the sound of my ’65 into the Super Reverb? Let’s just say I know that the hair on the back of your neck will stand at attention when I tear into “Marquee Moon.”
Oddly enough, before I was on a Verlaine trip my obsession with Jazzmasters came from guitarists like Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. These mavericks were trying to remove themselves as much as possible from the classic Page, Clapton and Hendrix tones that a plethora of players were trying to shoulder up against. Another thing that I now see clearly is that my infatuation with classic Jazzmaster tones was a blessing for me as well as for other less financially endowed riffmeisters. The Jazzmaster’s doormat reputation had something to do with the slim price tag attached to its extra wide head stock. Heck, that could have been the same reason that threadbare rockers like Renaldo and Mascis’ gravitated towards them."
Oddly enough, before I was on a Verlaine trip my obsession with Jazzmasters came from guitarists like Sonic Youth’s Lee Renaldo and Thurston Moore and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. These mavericks were trying to remove themselves as much as possible from the classic Page, Clapton and Hendrix tones that a plethora of players were trying to shoulder up against. Another thing that I now see clearly is that my infatuation with classic Jazzmaster tones was a blessing for me as well as for other less financially endowed riffmeisters. The Jazzmaster’s doormat reputation had something to do with the slim price tag attached to its extra wide head stock. Heck, that could have been the same reason that threadbare rockers like Renaldo and Mascis’ gravitated towards them."
- Johnsom Cummins, 'The Psychology Of Tone'
"He isn’t just into the french symbolist poets. He’s also into a certain artist/bohemian fashion move forever linked with France. Tom Verlaine has been known to wear berets. He even wears one on the album cover of 'Flash Light'. Dear Lord, he even WEARS THEM ONSTAGE. This clearly demonstrates the kind of admirable indifference to accusations of sartorial pretension that a lesser man couldn’t even begin to contrive."
- Herriot Row, '10 Things I Love About Tom Verlaine'
- Herriot Row, '10 Things I Love About Tom Verlaine'
'The Night' (1976) by Patti Smith & Tom Verlaine
'Warm And Cool' ~ Tom Verlaine
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The Record
"These bands achieved their initial notoriety while playing in the same place (an esophagus of a bar called CBGB, in lower Manhattan) and have been lumped together with other habitués of this joint as purveyors of “punk rock.” In their self-consciousness and liberal open-mindedness, these bands are as punky as Fonzie: that is, not at all.
Blondie is a quintet which juggles genres of fast rock, from a thick, Spector-ish vision of street crime called “X Offender” to a thick, Who-like vision of womanhood called “Rip Her to Shreds.” Blondie is for the most part a playful exploration of Sixties pop interlarded with trendy nihilism. Everything is sung by Deborah Harry, possessor of a bombshell zombie’s voice that can sound dreamily seductive and woodenly Mansonite within the same song. It’s an interesting combination and forces all the songs on Blondie to work on at least two levels: as peppy but rough pop, and as distanced, artless avant-rock. The group’s original material has no trouble yielding to this malleability of meaning since the songs are so broad in theme — the plots of “Kung Fu Girls,” “Rip Her to Shreds” and “The Attack of the Giant Ants” are exactly what their titles suggest: the aural equivalents of tabloid newspapers. Absolutely anything, from joke to political manifesto to hoax, can be ascribed to them. Two things save Blondie’s music from a lack of focus and sincerity. One is producer Richard Gottehrer’s adroit echoing of decade-old pop songs, replete with hooks and innocent melodrama. The other is Deborah Harry’s utter aplomb and involvement throughout: even when she’s portraying a character consummately obnoxious and spaced-out, there is a wink of awareness that is comforting and amusing yet never condescending.
The Ramones’ second album contains 14 songs, all around two minutes long. So did their first. They have lost none of their intensity, and if to “leave home” implies a certain broadening of experience, its main evidence on the new record is an occasional use of harmony and the boys’ discovery of carbona (“Carbona Not Glue”), a substitute for airplane glue in getting high.
The Ramones are as direct and witty as before. They’ve also lost just a pinch of their studied rawness: whether this is a sign of maturity or sellout is a matter for debate. The Ramones make rousing music and damn good jokes, but they’re in a bind: the hard rock of this group is so pure it may be perceived as a freak novelty by an awful lot of people.
Marquee Moon, Television’s debut album, is the most interesting and audacious of this triad, and the most unsettling. Leader Tom Verlaine wrote all the songs, coproduced with Andy Johns, plays lead guitar in a harrowingly mesmerizing stream-of-nightmare style and sings all his verses like an intelligent chicken being strangled: clearly, he dominates this quartet. Television is his vehicle for the portrayal of an arid, despairing sensibility, musically rendered by loud, stark repetitive guitar riffs that build in every one of Marquee Moon‘s eight songs to nearly out-of-control climaxes. The songs often concern concepts or inanimate objects — “Friction,” “Elevation,” “Venus” (de Milo, that is) — and when pressed Verlaine even opts for the mechanical over the natural: in the title song, he doesn’t think that a movie marquee glows like the moon; he feels that the moon resonates with the same evocative force as a movie marquee.
When one can make out the lyrics, they often prove to be only non sequiturs, or phrases that fit metrically but express little, or puffy aphorisms or chants. (The chorus of “Prove It” repeats, to a delightful sprung-reggae beat: “Prove it/Just the facts/The confidential” a few times.)
All this could serve to distance or repel us, and taken with Verlaine’s guitar solos, which flirt with an improvisational formlessness, could easily bore. But he structures his compositions around these spooky, spare riffs, and they stick to the back of your skull. On Marquee Moon, Verlaine becomes all that much better for a new commercial impulse that gives his music its catchy, if slashing, hook.
Television treks across the same cluttered, hostile terrain as bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, but the times may be on the side of Verlaine: we have been prepared for Television’s harsh subway sound by a grudging, after-the-fact-of-their-careers acceptance of those older bands.
At their best, these three bands do indeed have things in common: a lack of pretension plus an abundance of vigor and adventurousness that have obviously been stoked by popular manifestations of print, film and TV: comic books, detective stories, science fiction, westerns and their attendant stock figures — hoods, dicks, cowboys, aliens: heroes, super and anti. Rock has always traded on a certain amount of this spirit — the naming of a band is just as stirring to its members as the sewing of his first cape is to a fresh superhero — but these three bands use this popular art in a way very few rock & rollers have done — with consistency and accuracy. (The Kiss boys read comics and even dress like them, but their secret identities are those of four businessmen dedicated to taking as few risks as possible.) The Dolls did a bangup job on a song like “Bad Detective” but they never approached the sinister precision Tom Verlaine achieves to wrap up the scenario of “Torn Curtain”; “Prove It” is a paean to a never elucidated “case” Detective Tom has “been workin’ on so long.” Blondie owes its moniker no less to its peroxide-soaked lead singer than to the marriage partner of Dagwood Bumstead. But in the wisecracking snipes of Deborah Harry, the band knows damn well it has found an image closer to that of a feminist Marvel Comic for the ears. The brutality and willful cruelty of the Ramones’ music can find its direct antecedent in the films of Samuel Fuller; Joey Ramone writhing out “Commando” is the real soundtrack for Fuller’s yahoo, prowar nose-thumber, Steel Helmet."
Blondie is a quintet which juggles genres of fast rock, from a thick, Spector-ish vision of street crime called “X Offender” to a thick, Who-like vision of womanhood called “Rip Her to Shreds.” Blondie is for the most part a playful exploration of Sixties pop interlarded with trendy nihilism. Everything is sung by Deborah Harry, possessor of a bombshell zombie’s voice that can sound dreamily seductive and woodenly Mansonite within the same song. It’s an interesting combination and forces all the songs on Blondie to work on at least two levels: as peppy but rough pop, and as distanced, artless avant-rock. The group’s original material has no trouble yielding to this malleability of meaning since the songs are so broad in theme — the plots of “Kung Fu Girls,” “Rip Her to Shreds” and “The Attack of the Giant Ants” are exactly what their titles suggest: the aural equivalents of tabloid newspapers. Absolutely anything, from joke to political manifesto to hoax, can be ascribed to them. Two things save Blondie’s music from a lack of focus and sincerity. One is producer Richard Gottehrer’s adroit echoing of decade-old pop songs, replete with hooks and innocent melodrama. The other is Deborah Harry’s utter aplomb and involvement throughout: even when she’s portraying a character consummately obnoxious and spaced-out, there is a wink of awareness that is comforting and amusing yet never condescending.
The Ramones’ second album contains 14 songs, all around two minutes long. So did their first. They have lost none of their intensity, and if to “leave home” implies a certain broadening of experience, its main evidence on the new record is an occasional use of harmony and the boys’ discovery of carbona (“Carbona Not Glue”), a substitute for airplane glue in getting high.
The Ramones are as direct and witty as before. They’ve also lost just a pinch of their studied rawness: whether this is a sign of maturity or sellout is a matter for debate. The Ramones make rousing music and damn good jokes, but they’re in a bind: the hard rock of this group is so pure it may be perceived as a freak novelty by an awful lot of people.
Marquee Moon, Television’s debut album, is the most interesting and audacious of this triad, and the most unsettling. Leader Tom Verlaine wrote all the songs, coproduced with Andy Johns, plays lead guitar in a harrowingly mesmerizing stream-of-nightmare style and sings all his verses like an intelligent chicken being strangled: clearly, he dominates this quartet. Television is his vehicle for the portrayal of an arid, despairing sensibility, musically rendered by loud, stark repetitive guitar riffs that build in every one of Marquee Moon‘s eight songs to nearly out-of-control climaxes. The songs often concern concepts or inanimate objects — “Friction,” “Elevation,” “Venus” (de Milo, that is) — and when pressed Verlaine even opts for the mechanical over the natural: in the title song, he doesn’t think that a movie marquee glows like the moon; he feels that the moon resonates with the same evocative force as a movie marquee.
When one can make out the lyrics, they often prove to be only non sequiturs, or phrases that fit metrically but express little, or puffy aphorisms or chants. (The chorus of “Prove It” repeats, to a delightful sprung-reggae beat: “Prove it/Just the facts/The confidential” a few times.)
All this could serve to distance or repel us, and taken with Verlaine’s guitar solos, which flirt with an improvisational formlessness, could easily bore. But he structures his compositions around these spooky, spare riffs, and they stick to the back of your skull. On Marquee Moon, Verlaine becomes all that much better for a new commercial impulse that gives his music its catchy, if slashing, hook.
Television treks across the same cluttered, hostile terrain as bands like the Velvet Underground and the New York Dolls, but the times may be on the side of Verlaine: we have been prepared for Television’s harsh subway sound by a grudging, after-the-fact-of-their-careers acceptance of those older bands.
At their best, these three bands do indeed have things in common: a lack of pretension plus an abundance of vigor and adventurousness that have obviously been stoked by popular manifestations of print, film and TV: comic books, detective stories, science fiction, westerns and their attendant stock figures — hoods, dicks, cowboys, aliens: heroes, super and anti. Rock has always traded on a certain amount of this spirit — the naming of a band is just as stirring to its members as the sewing of his first cape is to a fresh superhero — but these three bands use this popular art in a way very few rock & rollers have done — with consistency and accuracy. (The Kiss boys read comics and even dress like them, but their secret identities are those of four businessmen dedicated to taking as few risks as possible.) The Dolls did a bangup job on a song like “Bad Detective” but they never approached the sinister precision Tom Verlaine achieves to wrap up the scenario of “Torn Curtain”; “Prove It” is a paean to a never elucidated “case” Detective Tom has “been workin’ on so long.” Blondie owes its moniker no less to its peroxide-soaked lead singer than to the marriage partner of Dagwood Bumstead. But in the wisecracking snipes of Deborah Harry, the band knows damn well it has found an image closer to that of a feminist Marvel Comic for the ears. The brutality and willful cruelty of the Ramones’ music can find its direct antecedent in the films of Samuel Fuller; Joey Ramone writhing out “Commando” is the real soundtrack for Fuller’s yahoo, prowar nose-thumber, Steel Helmet."
- Ken Tucker, Rolling Stone (article published April 7, 1977)
Neon Electro-Punk LED High-Technology Keyboard
'Marquee Moon' - Television
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