I. The Music
When Tom Miller and Richard Meyers left Virginia for New York City, it's unlikely either young artist understood the influence they both would have on music in the coming decade and even into the next century. Sharing a love of 19th Century French poetry and the Velvet Underground, they were drawn to New York as a Mecca for cultural extremes. For a time, street level rock and roll had left its heart in San Francisco, where the hippie ethos attracted a massive youth migration and the majority of media attention, and further south in Los Angeles, where artists like Buffalo Springfield, The Byrds, and the Flying Burrito Brothers were invoking the muse of the folk-rock and country-rock that would come to dominate the early '70s. New York had the Velvet Underground, and then The New York Dolls. But the New York City experienced by Miller and Meyers was ripe for something new. And Miller and Meyers provided.
Richard Meyers would spike his hair and tear his clothes and change his name to Richard Hell, perhaps a nod to Rimbaud's A Season In Hell, a bible of nihilistic rebellion. As Richard Hell he would coin the term "Blank Generation" and give birth to the look and sound of '70s Punk. His message was clear: "If you just amass the courage that is necessary, you can completely invent yourself. You can be your own hero, and once everybody is their own hero, then everybody is gonna be able to communicate with each other on a real basis rather than a hand-me-down set of societal standards." The vision was anarchic and utopian. Hell was looking for a new Paradise.
Punk aesthetics, like most aesthetic paradigms, points to a broader world view: Rules and manners and customs and laws have come to obscure the truth rather than protect it. The punk vision calls for a razing of the past in order to have a direct experience of reality. And this vision has as its corollary what Hell calls "the self-conscious twisted aestheticism of the French 19th Century," especially the absinthe-drenched duo Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud.
Sex Pistols impresario Macolm McLaren openly cites Hell as his model for the "look" of British Punk. "I just thought Richard Hell was incredible," McLaren has said, "This look, this image of this guy, this spiky hair, everything about it -- there was no question that I'd take it back to London. By being inspired by it, I was going to imitate it and transform it into something more English." Not long after McLaren's return to England and his assembling of the band that would become the Sex Pistols, an anglicized version of Hell's rebellion erupted as a street level revolution called Punk Rock.
Tom Miller, on the other hand, would cultivate invisibility as "a very advantageous way to live," invent a new kind of psychedelia, and change his name to Tom Verlaine, adopting the surname of French symbolist poet Paul Verlaine, whose style is more fastidious and formal than the confrontational madness of Rimbaud. Certainly a Verlaine line like "The solitary soul is heart-sick with a vile ennui" spoke inspirations to the young namesake. Though perhaps Tom Verlaine is more closely aesthetically akin to the great forbear of the fin-de-siecle bohemian scene Charles Baudelaire. It is Baudelaire who describes "The tenebrous Empire of imperishable things," an apt epithet for Tom Verlaine's unusual music, music which has a ghostly yearning to be human and is composed of a complex geometry. The predominant adventure in a Television jam is the search for a unified field, wherein the boundaries between sounds grow indistinct and then vanish, revealing a shadowy oneness, a tonal -- not atonal -- SOUND, true interactive improvisation, not just virtuoso soloists wailing over a vamping groove.
This arrival at elegance did not come right away. The early version of the band -- the Neon Boys, with Richard Hell on a bass he could hardly play -- was raucous and raunchy. The scene that would eventually invade CBGBs was called at the time "street rock" before the "Punk" moniker took hold, according to CBGBs owner Hilly Kristal, and when the Neon Boys renamed themselves Television, they became the first "street rock" band to play in the legendary Bowery club originally dedicated to country, bluegrass and blues exclusively. Their live shows attracted immediate attention. Future cohort Patti Smith was the first to write an enthusiastic review, in the October 1974 issue of Rock Scene. Her assessment is ecstatic:
"Their lyrics are as suggestive as a horny boy at the drive in. Sexual energy is suppressed on TV but is the main ingredient of Television. They got the certain style. The careless way of dressing like high school 1963. The way they pulse equal doses of poetry and pinball. Their strange way of walking . . . They came together with nothing but a few second-hand guitars and the need to bleed. Dead end kids. But they got this pact called friendship. They fight for each other so you get this sexy feel of heterosexual alchemy when they play. They play real live. Dives, clubs, anywhere at all. They play undulating rhythm like ocean. They play pissed off, psychotic reaction. They play like they got knife fight in the alley after the set. They play like they make it with chicks. They play like they're in space but still can dig the immediate charge and contact of lighting a match."
Television had their detractors too, to be sure. In a punk milieu that denounced guitar solos as an unbearable abscess of the hippie bourgeoisie, the twin guitar explorations of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd earned them an unflattering reputation as "the Grateful Dead of Punk." Consorting with the enemy, in other words. Fiery critic Lester Bangs most vividly represents this dissenting view:
"Going to see Television at CBGB's is like being in church, and it's particularly uncomfortable stalling in the lead pew because it hurts to tell such a nice guy as Tom Verlaine that the 'improvisations' of his band sound like the fucking Grateful Dead, latemodern-exploratory Pink Floyd, even the Duane Allman Brothers et al., just a bunch of cats who didn't know how to improvise playing scales basically if you wanna get right down to it."
But for the most part Television received glowing acceptance in a scene that was growing and changing and beginning to garner media attention and now included bands like Blondie, The Ramones, Patti Smith Group, Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, and others. After Richard Hell left the band to form The Heartbreakers and then the influential proto-punk band The Voidoids, Television took on bassist Fred Smith and began creating the soundscapes that would lead to the landmark album Marquee Moon. They moved forward with a new precision and increasing telepathy, more and more often reaching the unified field.
II. The Lyrics
"I probably spent six times the amount of time on the lyrics than I did on the music back then," says Tom Verlaine of the mid-'70s, and yet it is the music, especially the guitar pyrotechnics of Verlaine and Lloyd, that usually dominate the discourse on Television and on Verlaine's songs. Given his interest in symbolist poetry and his nom d'art, one shouldn't be surprised to find, upon paying attention, that Verlaine's lyrics subscribe to the same aesthetic as the music and are very much part of the unified field. Images of journeys, both at sea and aloft, abound as do patterns of mergence. "There all is beauty, ardency, / Passion, rest, and luxury," promises Baudelaire, summoning the pilgrim to an elusive "Paradise of furtive pleasures." And Verlaine follows, bearing with him a haunted modernity and a method of expression that could, unlike that of the 19th-century poets he admired, be plugged into an electric current and turned up really really loud.
The idea of the unified field grows out of the deeper philosophical concept of a non-dualistic universe, wherein the conscious and the unconscious are partners in a total awareness, self and other, day and night, male and female, good and evil, all opposites in fact, are equally interdependent cells of the Organism. The fallen world is the world of separation and opposition. The search for Paradise is a longing for the return to perfect unity. In Tom Verlaine's world-picture, the search for Paradise is more like the realization that unity is already happening, and it's just a matter of seeing it embedded in the mundane activities of the species, the circumstances of everyday life, connections that are deeply intertwined. The banality of bliss.
But it is a realization that must be made without judgment, without obsessing on frailties and petty shortcomings. In the first Television single "Little Johnny Jewel," Verlaine sings, "He has no decision / He's just trying to tell a vision." The ambiguous use of "decision" conjures an image of the naive artist, not without his pretensions of course, determined to be heard. But "having no decision" also signals a refusal to admit boundaries and distinctions; there is no longer an "either/or," this or that. The concept of a "crossroads" is unknown to a character like Johnny Jewel. The fluidity of consciousness and unconsciousness is reflected in the lines "He half-asleep at night" and "He wake up dreaming." And journeys of mind-ascent are referenced in Johnny having the "sensation of flight," and then running down to the airport. It's all about finding a place to "tell a vision."
The collection of songs that comprise Marquee Moon gather Verlaine's non-dualistic vision into a cohesive scripture. Embodied in the questioning of morality, which Verlaine explores in the album's opening foray "See No Evil," is an unwillingness to accept the traditional separation of right and wrong. The chorus, which admits, "I understand all . . . destructive urges . . . It seems so perfect . . . I see no evil . . .," reveals Verlaine at his punkiest. Later in the song, the repeated phrase, "Pull down the future with the one you love," evokes both punk nihilism but also a kind of clairvoyant glimpse of things to come, an anarchic utopia, where the song's persona can boast, "I'm running wild with the one I love," and "I'm running wild with the one-eyed ones," an image that implies two brands of outlaw, pirates and Cyclopes and all the mythic misadventures they connote. Also in the song is the ongoing reminder of fluidity and flow, as in "I want a nice little boat made out of ocean," the virtual mergence of the manmade vehicle for travel and nature itself, subject and object blurred into oneness. "Don't say unconscious," we are warned, "No don't say doom," as if to assure those who are hip to the simultaneity of all things that alpha state and beta state are all part of one great big wave called consciousness.
"Venus" works as a kind of thesis for the album. With the fracturing of the Classical, represented here by the armless goddess in all her disfigured antiquity, the world becomes a figment, looking "so good between my bones and skin," and yet, in this unified field where the natural and the symbolic find identical expression, the realest experiences feel almost unreal or hallucinatory, "like some new kind of drug" that somehow conjures a Broadway that "looked so medieval." And so the protagonist must embrace the unembraceable, accept being "face to face with a world so alive" and duped into believing in some bogus illusion at the same time. As equally true and false as the arms of Venus De Milo. This will be an album rapt in the beauty of contradictions.
"I don't wanna grow up / There's too much contradiction," sings Verlaine in "Friction." Childhood is the soul's Eden, a perfect place that came before the curse of discernment, where God is the fugitive ventriloquist. But this voice grooves on separation and opposing forces: "You give me friction / But I dig friction." It's the source of the orgasm that returns us to oneness. "My eyes are like telescopes / I see it all backwards," he laments, out of guilt or regret or neither. He wants back to that unified field.
The album's centerpiece, the title track, is a model of musical and lyrical recursiveness. The twining guitar rhythms going around and around like a double helix touch upon themselves and each other in the same way the words tell of darkness doubling and lightning striking itself. The gravitational unity of "life in the hive" allows dual impulses -- "the kiss of death, the embrace of life" -- to coexist without being paradox-laced. It enables the mind to engage the surface truth and the deeper reality with the same devout attention: "I was listening, listening to the rain / I was hearing, hearing something else."
In "Prove It," the pervasive water imagery becomes a sea of consciousness, the holy alliance of id, ego, and superego aswim in memory and aspiration. The visceral dankness, the confused identity, the conscience that's desperate for evidence all combine in a singular mindset. From the infantile "first you creep" to the adolescent "then you leap," it's all a continuum of consciousness, and "you're in so deep you could write the Book," the final necessary submergence. "It's just mental," Tom Verlaine once said of his own music, and in this song a disembodied ghostliness drives the persona ever inward, back upon itself, all the way inside the mind, so that "the world is just a feeling you undertook." You have so wallowed in abstraction that you have lost your "sense of human," a near total retreat into the realm of ideas. But the unified field beckons.
Marquee Moon concludes with the trembling at the veil of the temple. "Torn Curtain giving me the glance," Verlaine says, a peek at the path back to Paradise, a glimpse into the inner sanctum, the holiest of holies: nostalgic childhood melancholy. "Torn curtain reveals another play / Torn Curtain, such an expose!," sings the priestly voice. The rending of the veil, the ending of the separation between the physical and the spiritual, the eternal and the temporal, the ideal and the material, brings about a desire to destroy the tyranny of nostalgia, the illusion of a past happiness, so that one might live wholly in the present moment as it is. But apocalypse isn't easy. The regress into romantic nostalgia -- "Tears, tears. Years, years" -- acknowledges the frailty of human spiritual progress. We are the product of our relapses.
"The immensity of music seizes me like the Sea!," proclaims Baudelaire, and part of that immensity is its ability to include words in its symphony, to communicate by sound and texture and thought all together as a unified field. Rejected by the punks as being too meandering and ponderous and rejected by mainstream ears for being too punky and weird, Television occupies a netherspace in the history of rock and roll, their obscurity as remarkable as their widespread influence over the music that would follow in their wake. The languid spaces are seductive indeed, fodder for freeform mind-flight, but Tom Verlaine, like all true artists, is always doing more than one thing at a time. Amid the overwhelming depths of Television's guitar explorations it's far too easy to forget that Tom Verlaine wrote words too.
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