Television - The New Wave Aliens

New York, in the mid-Seventies, is the laboratory of new wave. In the underground temple of Cbgb's, Patti Smith, Ramones and Television set the audience alight with a new sound that lays the groundwork for punk and perhaps changes the course of rock history forever. Drawing on the decadent masters Velvet Underground, these New York pioneers graft onto the traditional song form a series of sonic variations that express the neuroses and alienation of a new generation, suspended between the shattered myths of the Sixties and the anticonformist urge of the punk era. Of this quartet, the last to deliver their debut album are none other than Tom Verlaine's Television (born Thomas Miller), a spaced-out, swan-necked guitarist with a passion for decadent poetry (hence his stage name) and a past as a dockworker and bookshop clerk. Besides Verlaine, the band features Bill Ficca, Richard Lloyd and Fred Smith: a thoroughly respectable ensemble that also catches the attention of Brian Eno, who's on the lookout for new talent.

Preceded by the single "Little Johnny Jewel", released on the independent label Ork, their debut album for Elektra arrives: Marquee Moon (1977). The record, an absolute masterpiece of the entire new wave movement, is a poignant revisiting of old underground psychedelia, a mosaic of dissonant accompaniments and disorienting solos, both built on the monotonous repetition of the same phrase and on variations in timbre. The songs are marked above all by Verlaine's extraordinary guitar lines. Blues-based grooves, irresistible riffs rich with arpeggios, feedback, tremolos and glissandos, bizarre, vaguely jazzy solos that also nod to certain Eastern flavors effectively reinvent the use of the electric guitar in rock music, right in the thick of the punk era, when guitar solos had been banned outright.
Patti Smith, who shared both romantic and artistic ties with the Television frontman, once said of him: "The sound of Tom Verlaine's guitar makes you think of the cry of a thousand birds." Verlaine's guitar indeed sounds acidic, shrill, disorienting, matching the guttural tones of his hallucinated android vocals.
Thus come the ungainly (and memorable) folk-rock of "Venus", with its razor-sharp guitar phrasing and a bassline wrapped in smooth harmonies, a delicious chorus and dazzling percussion touches; the disjointed sweetness of the ballad "Elevation", built on a highly distinctive bassline intertwined with aching guitar arpeggios; and the mechanical pulse of the icy "See No Evil". These are flashes of a vibrant, lyrical rock that manages to convey both jolts of neurosis and a sense of resigned desolation. And then there are the two long jams of "Marquee Moon" and "Torn Curtain", unsettling descents into the human psyche painted in dark, sickly hues. The title track, a marvelous "lunar" suite, is a sprawling sequence of circular art rock that loses itself in hypnotic effect with progressive-rock echoes. Above all, it's a chilling demonstration of what Verlaine's guitar is capable of: unsettling and evocative (that famous "cry of a thousand birds" praised by Patti Smith), but also obsessive and draining, leading the listener down a winding, subtly cerebral path. "Torn Curtain", on the other hand, is an electric, blues-tinged ride, an acidic serenade that alternates the tender shores of organ and piano with the drums' urgency, depicting a long night relentlessly settling over the world. The track also highlights the support provided by Fred Smith on bass and Billy Ficca on drums, both invaluable in the arrangements as well.

These are alienated, desolate jams, descendants of Coltrane's free jazz and the psychedelia of the Grateful Dead, dragging themselves majestically through endless agonies. Verlaine's strangled voice occasionally recalls Patti Smith's, but is even more tense and neurotic, while his singing could be considered a "sophisticated" variant of Lou Reed's perverse spoken delivery. Television's dazed rock is simply the flip side of that same urban desolation, that same fear of the future recounted by Pere Ubu on "Modern Dance" and by bands like Devo and Ultravox: a crucial step in the construction of a new musical genre, new wave, which would prove to be among the most fertile of the following decade. Marquee Moon would win over critics worldwide, but at home it sells poorly. John Rockwell of Rolling Stone would write: "Television were too jarring and anachronistic (almost like raw-nerved Byrds) to achieve success."
Verlaine and co. would instead become huge in England, significantly influencing the shift toward the more desolate forms of new wave found in Joy Division, Echo & The Bunnymen, Cure, Siouxsie and The Banshees, Smiths and many others. And Television's legacy would remain essential in the decades that followed too, as shown by Smog, Interpol and many more.

But Verlaine never felt entirely comfortable in the role of post-punk guru: "I don't much care about having influenced later generations," he once said. "But something funny did happen once. I was in London, and a guy stopped me on the street saying: 'There's Lloyd Cole here, he wants your autograph!' But I didn't even know who he was... In the end, I signed a few old Television records for him."

In 1978, after touring with Peter Gabriel, Television release their second album, Adventure (1978), which marks a softening of their restless rock sound. The overall tone becomes dreamier and more psychedelic, as revealed by tracks such as "Carried Away", "Glory", "Days" and "The Dream's Dream", a blend of Doors-like lysergic visions, gentle West Coast-style songs and decadent Velvet Underground ballads. The exception is "Foxhole", a dirty blues-rock number that owes much to the Stooges. Critical and commercial success follows, but Television split up at the end of the year "on a night of a full moon, like Moby Grape."

Verlaine goes on to a solidly respectable solo career (Tom Verlaine, Cover, Flashlight), which moves him further and further away from the early neo-punk fervor and toward a more intimate, elegiac form of rock. A trajectory, in the end, not unlike that of his fellow traveler Patti Smith. In 1992, surprisingly, Verlaine reforms the band, but the self-titled Television, which attempts to embrace new Eastern and "transcendent" tendencies, fails to live up to expectations and permanently closes the book on one of the bands that best captured urban unease and neurosis in the history of rock.

In 2006 Tom Verlaine returns with Songs And Other Things. Songs that, regardless of their actual artistic merit, are inevitably sought out, studied and brushed in a distinctly "Verlaine" manner. Respectable tracks include the (instrumental) prelude "A Parade In Littleton", a soul-lounge piece that's almost a refinement of Durutti Column's impressionistic vignette-making, or the aching chords of "Blue Light" (though not well blended with the vocals), or the Move-like power-pop refrain of "From Her Fingers", or finally "The Earth Is In The Sky". In the opening "Heavenly Charm" and "Orbit", however, a dark mood emerges that strays too far from Verlaine's singing, whispered and almost timid, and from his cross-genre arranging instincts (electrified blues gloom, almost like slowed-down horror-punk, tribal and restless rhythms, neurotic solos).
The same issue seems to afflict "Nice Actress", too monotone despite a fine guitar-psych coda, and "Documentary", an off-beat track delivered with a swinging gait. Aside from "All Weirded Out", another classic Verlaine sound (here more Television than ever, just listen to "Friction" to believe it), there's "Lovebird Asylum Seeker", which reminds us that the artist is still capable of perfectly blending vocal line and accompaniment, backing it all with bittersweet chords ending in a melancholic refrain, and "A Stroll", a placid serenade with alternating moonlit guitar harmonies. "Shingaling" is syncopated-drum r'n'b with a Tamla-style flavor, which over time becomes an ethereal-psychedelic poem (almost space-rock) and showcases fine guitar jamming in several sections, interspersed with Verlaine's usual dark vocals.
The album, which sits alongside "Around" (Thrill Jockey, 2006), the record covering his other, instrumental-guitar dimension, is primarily concerned with splitting the mood as evenly as possible between metaphysical guitar solos (often too sidelined) and conventional song form. One might end up greeting this album as a somewhat strained compendium of his career: worth revisiting his past albums and drawing the necessary comparisons. It contains a majority of slow, subdued tracks, let down by a crude mix, and a scattered handful (undoubtedly the "other things") of refined, cheerfully varied psych-pop, not least the vaguely classical instrumental sequence closing out the acoustic "Peace Piece". The late Verlaine, singer and mentor, never oversteps, not even when cementing the basic riffs.

On January 28, 2023 comes the news that chills every fan: after a brief illness, Tom Verlaine passed away at 73 in New York, surrounded by his closest friends. He leaves behind an enormous void, but also one of the most fertile and influential musical legacies of his era.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Songs And Other Things")

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