Phthursday Musings: Marquee Musings

Tom Verlaine, frontman for the band Television, passed away Saturday at age 73. The Times obituary is out there, as is the Guardian obituary. You might be most interested though in Patti Smith’s tribute in The New Yorker.

Television released their first album, Marquee Moon, in February 1977. In my immediate peer group, there is consensus that this is one of the pinnacle rock albums of all time. It is legitimately possible that no single other album would achieve that consensus.

For an album that’s difficult to classify, which didn’t really sell all that well, from a band which broke up after only two albums, to be heralded in this way says a lot - and not just about the album itself. It also says a lot about the way music gets to us, about the realm we inhabit when that music does get to us.

This being META-SPIEL, these being Musings, I’m going to mostly talk around the album and around its primary creator.

There was a time when I could tell you - more or less - when and where I purchased every single CD I own. That time is long gone.

When did I come into possession of Marquee Moon? My best guess is that I was in my mid-20s. Even though I was a college radio music director and I heard and bought a wild amount of music through that time, that did not involve much going back and buying music from 20 years earlier. There were constantly new things, and those new things might trigger other purchases from the same artists, but not stuff going farther back. There was so much wonderful new stuff coming out during that time, who needed to drift into the past?

It was after grad school, then, that I bought albums like The Smiths’ The Queen Is Dead, and collections like The Comsat Angels’ It’s History. And so I think it was at that time I got my hands on Marquee Moon. I don’t remember exactly why, though my hunch is, it was one of those albums I was “supposed to own” and I was finally getting around to it.

I’ve written about the canon many times before. What on earth passes as something we’re “supposed to own” and does its inclusion on that list really mean it’s worthy of such? Is the idea of the canon actually breaking down today, because it has traditionally been so thoroughly white, so narrowly prescribed? Or is that not the right way to think of it - is the canon still very much alive in concept, but morphing, while also dodging the notion that we must own all of it? For example, when I was in my mid-20s, nobody was actively saying that we should all own all of the peak Stevie Wonder records. Today, though, if I were going to go out and “fill my collection” with what’s “supposed to be there”, I’d probably be starting with Songs in the Key of Life, and you would be too.

Television was part of the famed - nay, cherished - New York City punk scene based around CBGB’s in the late ‘70s. This was the home base for the likes of Blondie and the Ramones and the Talking Heads and so many more. (Have you ever thought about how truly strange it is that the Talking Heads are still played on classic rock radio?) By all accounts I’ve ever read it was an incredibly exciting place and time, except of course that by all accounts I’ve ever read, New York City in the ‘70s was an absolute dump where no sane person would want to be.

Years later we connect to these cultural touchpoints through the way we listen to and talk about the music that endures. Motown of the late ‘60s. Seattle of the early ‘90s. New York has always been outsized though, has always had its own way of hyping itself, through the Times and through Saturday Night Live and through just being the loudest voice in the American room for over a century. The NYC scene of the late ‘70s might or might not have been the most wonderful place to be, but the nature of the legacy NYC hype machine guarantees its exalted memory will endure even when all of its participants are gone.

Is that still possible today, from New York or from anywhere else? Or does the 24/7 news cycle make it impossible? Is our appetite for fables of destruction and reconstruction overridden unsustainable for the actual endurance of a new Motown, a new Seattle? Or is it too that we don’t really have to imagine these places, because any time anything happens, it’s going to be in our face? Joe Posnanski has talked about how the mythical nature of baseball is undermined when you can go see every pitch on demand. Is it any different with music, with any other notion of modern culture?

Marquee Moon is not for everyone. It’s dense (except when it’s not) and it’s experimental (except when it’s not) and it’s punk (except that it’s not at all).

It is guitar rock. It is not heavy metal, it is not rhythm and blues, it is not a dozen other things which you might at first associate with the words “guitar rock”. It is music led by the electric guitar, and it is rock music, and maybe we can say any number of other things but we have to start with those two realities, and accept that we can go so many places from there.

I am, ultimately, a devotee of guitar rock. What’s my preferred music? Guitar. Rock. Not heavy metal - though I generally like heavy metal. Not rhythm and blues - though I usually like rhythm and blues. It is the electric guitar, and the rock, those two things in some sort of essence, being hauled to various places, often with some sort of deep lyrics over the top, but not necessarily. It does not all have to be exceptionally loud (though often this is good) and it does not all have to be performed by virtuosos (though it often helps when guitar rock is performed by excellent guitarists!)

I can’t really think of other bands which released albums which sound quite like Marquee Moon, but I can absolutely think of bands which released albums which inherit from it in some other way. Sonic Youth is an obvious example. Pavement is another. Look at Tom Verlaine here; does he not strike as a template for Thurston Moore or Stephen Malkmus?

When I wrote of my “immediate peer group” at the opening here, another way of phrasing that might have been, the first six or so people with whom I’d be likely to talk music.

This was one of the cases where that necessarily included my father. Unlike the rest of the people I talked with, he’d actually gotten Marquee Moon when it first came out, and, as it so happened, he’d seen Television live in 1976 or 1977 at the Stardust Lounge in Rockford. He estimates the crowd size at less than 30. The whole notion seems perfectly logical and absolutely preposterous all at once.

Some 30 years later, I was fortunate to also see Television live. My friend Armando and I saw them in New York City, outdoors at Central Park, in June 2007. Not quite the kind of dark and grimy club they cut their teeth in.

Weirdly, according to my log, that was the only show I saw in the entirety of 2007. This was - and still is - very unlike me to just not go to shows for so long. What’s even weirder is, it was the year I had moved to Chicago, so it should have been easier than ever to get to a concert!

Every so often I think about the idea of going to shows, if and when I’m truly going to slow down. I didn’t make it out to many in 2022 by my typical numbers, but I think that’ll rebound this year. I’ve already been to, or have bought tickets for, six shows in the first six months of the year.

I’m not sure what the right word is - something between calmed and soothed and balanced and satisfied - maybe there’s not a word for it and I need to make one up. Here goes: quoolm. When I don’t get out to shows for a while, I’m just not quite right. But when I do get out, and it goes well, I am quoolmed.

It is that way with music generally. I will go long stretches just not listening to a lot of music in a lot of spaces and frankly it’s not good for my well-being. When I am more proactive, more conscientious, well, I am also quoolmed. I just feel steadier.

After hearing about Tom Verlaine, it so happened it was a late Saturday afternoon, an unusual time when I could turn the stereo up. I found Marquee Moon to be as awe-inspiring as ever. I also found it quoolming.

It doesn’t have to be guitar rock to do that, but guitar rock is usually the way it goes. It is weird to be quoolmed by something that can be very noisy, even discordant. But that’s how I think of the world as a whole: it is a noisy and discordant planet, filled with broad patches of calm and quiet. I guess I like a lot of my music to exhibit the same dichotomy.

Television live on Jools Holland’s show in 1992, performing “1880 Or So”:

Live (audio only) from Mother’s in NYC 1975, a noisy “Marquee Moon”:

Really, though, if you haven’t and you’re at all inclined, go carve out an hour when you’re not doing anything else, and put Marquee Moon on, and just appreciate it. Perfect albums are hard to come by and deserve to be heard in their entirety.