Television: Marquee Moon (1977)

(Elektra)

!!! A+ RECORDING !!!

Far beyond the CBGB context driving its creation, those history-textbook notions of New York punk rock's origins, the life stories of Patti Smith and Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and whoever else, Marquee Moon is as much now as ever a shining star of an album, because its artful evocation of something surprisingly tangible is so absolutely universal and permanent. What matters over thirty years later is that this is the most nocturnal music a white rock band's likely ever recorded, a distinct explosion of youthful naivete wandering the brightly lit, probably wet streets alone or falling sideways laughing with a friend from many stages. Despite the spectacular level of influence Marquee Moon has had on all interesting guitar pop since, its squawks and fiery undercurrent the impetus for the vast majority of indie and alternative rock of the '80s and beyond, it really only makes sense when the tide of adulthood's swarming around you and you feel an introspective artifact of your own youth, stepping just out of time, cackling and observing.

Here's one such scenario: I bought this on CD because other bands claimed it as an influence; all I initially remembered as teenage screwup was Tom Verlaine's voice and the length and quiet (or loud) power of the title track. Then one day long after I'd fallen victim to guitars and Eddie Cochran, I put it in and it suddenly fell into place. The movement began, the eyes closed, and the world of this record built itself around me. I never looked back; it reminded me of the Nick Cave sequence in Wings of Desire, when a roomful of people are totally at the mercy of the beauty in something as outwardly ordinary as a rock band playing rock songs. I felt I was standing in front of them and dancing, an alien concept to me at the time. Like Pet Sounds, the record has managed to magnify in meaning and utility to me since then; always, whatever is happening, Marquee Moon seems almost supernaturally suited: listening to it in the dark with my girlfriend or dancing to it in a nightclub and deciding it would play at my funeral or playing it from a stage at a DJing gig or most of all just wandering around a city in the middle of the night realizing this slightly woozy nuttiness was what "Venus" and "Marquee Moon" were about.

But back on that one night when I'd worked overtime at my first job, prepping a grocery store perishables department for a visit from the president of the company, suddenly the opening chords of "See No Evil" were something to worship, and suddenly the entire song seemed to be harmonious in nature, harsh and angular to be sure, but beautiful and perfect.

I'm not trying to make this about me. Everybody has these moments. I remember Remain in Light as being a situation -- here not at all ideal, I was sitting on my bed staring at the back of the CD case the first time I paid close attention to it -- wherein I found myself stupefied by the music's simultaneous darkness and vibrance. With Marquee Moon, it was that feeling you have when you immediately know that something has finally revealed itself to you, that you are entering an experience that never will be duplicated. I knew I would never be forgetting any of these songs again, I knew I instantly loved it more than almost any other collection of songs I'd heard. It was so potent that for a while -- and still at times -- I wanted to carry it with me everywhere, even to work when I had shifts alone.

Lester Bangs accused Television of sounding like the Grateful Dead, but Television is hardly a jam band -- their music is modeled more on jazz than blues, and more on rock & roll than anything. They are genuine punk rockers but their music is introspective and poetic, loud and boisterous but not obnoxious. They favor power over impact, and they are about a total lack of discomfort when confronted with utter beauty and utter obscurity.

"Venus" is one of the finest songs ever written. It envelops you with its sly humor, Verlaine's typically surreal lyrics expressing things that go beyond human vocabulary, falling over himself in inarticulate awe and passion. Verlaine and Richard Lloyd's guitars create tapestries of emotion and conflict; the rhythm section, drummer Billy Ficca and bassist Fred Smith, gives the band its new-wave fervor, driving the music along with a propulsive, unrelenting beat. "DIDJA FEEL LOW? Not at all." This is a hundred mile per hour drive, lights everywhere, complicated but focused and penetrating.

On to "Friction," and by this time I was hanging on Verlaine's every vocal tic. His voice and his words made all the sense in the world to me. The paranoid backwoods rhythm guitar line, Ficca's astonishing percussion, and "I knew it musta been... SOME BIIIIG SETUP." No band could ever stand up to this one for sheer interplay. At one break, Verlaine spells "f-r-i-c-t-i-o-n," emphasizing every beat with his guitar, and Ficca is right behind him. Scripted or not, this is enough to hang you upside down. Verlaine understands drama but he also steers clear of the overbearing stupidity of macho rock vocalists. You never feel like he's a god, but you do know he's something far out there. He thrives on perversity, minimalism, lack of explanation, on baffling you via seduction. "You complain of my DICK... tion."

The title track, stabbing guitar tones gradually canceled out by gently weaving guitar symphonics among the most beautiful ever put down in ths format, indeed captures the eponymous urban imagery, but more importantly sheer joy and confusion, the motifs of the album and Television's output at large. There's nothing alien about it, it's a warm and inviting song as penetrative as it may be. It is a freight train that comes slowly and leaves many times, never entirely. Everything about it is gleeful; the band stuns at every turn, and "then the CADILLAC, IT PULLED BACK IN THE GRAVEYARD / ME, I GOT OUT AGAIN." This music does not function in any normal way. It shuffles around you and you choose to involve yourself, and once you do it's as if nothing else exists. It demands attention; it is not wallpaper. All eleven minutes of "Marquee Moon" are emotionally exhilarating; they're playing you as much as their instruments. When it explodes into its beautiful coda, you are reeling.

Then side two. A pair of stirring ballads sandwiched by paranoid, chilling nightmares. "Elevation" is the hangover from "Marquee Moon," its pained vocals and strangled strings awash with regret, even fear. "Elevation, DON'T GO TO MY HEAD." And the song that closes the album, "Torn Curtain," is for sheer displacement and misery a close match for Remain in Light's final track, "The Overload." It is meant to leave your world stirred and blackened.

"Guiding Light" and "Prove It" are so wonderful they nearly make you forget much of Side One, the former a gutwrenching ballad, the latter a majestic rock & roll song with a stab of "Stand by Me" and doo wop. "Guiding Light" is incredibly similar to the works of Verlaine collaborator Patti Smith, and as in Smith's work, the minimalistic instrumentation -- guitar, piano, bass, drums, all blaring quietly -- is scraped down to its core so that not a note is wasted, every last one weighed down with feeling. And "Prove It" is, like "Venus," completely charged and in truth indescribable; it's propelled, earthly heaven ("Chirp chrip... BIRDS!!!"), with Verlaine's guitar and a wounding solo a glimpse into the abyss, but all the while, that reliable '50s pastiche rhythm is still there, faintly.

These eight songs hang together as a mysterious, orgasmic bit of rock & roll gothic mystique that, when you're finally prepared for it, no longer seems so mystical. It grabs you and doesn't let go, and you submit to its every move. It's quite a legacy; if they never recorded anything else, Television would be legendary. Marquee Moon may not change your life, and I tend to be skeptical of any pop culture item that is charged with changing lives, but it certainly changed something in me that night, and something gets stirred way down there, my heart or my stomach or something like that, when I hear any given note from it. If the era of the Album begins in 1967 with Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, then I have to name this as its peak.

[Originally posted elsewhere in 2004.]