Bandsplain - Television with Evan Laffer

Episode Date: August 31, 2023

Arguably the band to start the CBGBs scene paving the way for the Ramones, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie and more, was a band called Television. One of the most innovative bands of the early New York "punk" scene, Television were there and then they weren’t and then like 15 years later, they were again. Their influence casts a long shadow, and the music continues to  influence artists today. Press play to find out why Television didn’t become their own sort of Grateful Dead. Follow Evan Laffer on Twitter @EvanLaffer Listen to songs we detail in the episode HERE Host: Yasi Salek Guest: Evan Laffer Producer: Jesse Miller-Gordon Audio Editor: Adrian Bridges Additional Production Supervision: Justin Sayles Theme Song: Bethany Cosentino Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, it's your boy Johnny Bananas, and I'm going to be covering a brand new season of the Challenge USA on CBS that, of course, I will be completely dominating on my podcast, death taxes, and bananas on the Ringer reality TV podcast. Head over that feed and follow us on Spotify, so you never miss an episode. What's with this band anyway? I don't get it. Can you please explain? way like band's plane Hello and welcome to bandsplain

I am your host Yossi Sallick This is a show where I invite an expert guest on To help me explain a cult band or iconic artist Today's episode is about the band television If you've never heard television Yes, you probably have if you've ever gone to a bar with a DJ And then you're like, God, this song has been on for a really long time And then you notice the DJ is like in the bathroom

It's this song So you know it You guys, my guest today, one half of the esteemed and beloved podcasting duo, The Jokerman, Evan Evans. Evan, it's occurred to me that I don't know your actual real last name because I just call you Evan Evans because that's what your Twitter name is. And I genuinely thought that was your name. Nowadays, if you just have a certain name, a handle, that just becomes your last name if you want it to be. Well, you seem to be misleading people into that. It's not like it's like you can't blame the other people.

You set it up as if it was your first and last name, and we're only going to assume that that's what it is. My at is just my actual name. Okay, well, that's a little too much investigation. I am being misleading. It's wrong of me to do that. So, yeah, that's not really it, but it's my podcasting stage name, I guess. I see.

Okay. So your real last name is Laffer. That's right. That's a really funny last name. I think it's very serious. It's not spelled like laugh, like ha ha. It's spelled different from that. But it sounds like it.

Yeah, no, it does. Would you say that you're the funnier joker man? I would say I'm the one who talks probably more often. I interrupt more. And I think overall, over time, that does translate to more jokes per episode, more funny things said. Sure. But also probably more annoying things said, more wrong things. So, you know.

Right. I mean, that's the Bans Blaine way, so you're in the right place. Before we get started, I need to air a grievance with you. Evan Evans, you did attend my holiday party this past year. And I need to get to the bottom of why after you left. And I know it was you because you were sitting in the same spot for a long time on my couch, playing with some candy canes. And after you left, there was literally a ground into my couch at least one. one to two full entire candy canes made into dust and literally pushed into the fibers of my

couch. Who raised you? And what the fuck were you doing at my house? Well, I think I was invited, but, uh, I don't know, that's not what I mean. What were you actually doing in my house on my couch with the candy canes? I was, I was, uh, sort of eating a candy cane, uh, playfully. And I think I, I, I wasn't the only one. And so that's very convenient for me, because I can actually just tell you that someone else did it, which is true. Oh, sure. Sure. I'm sure they did.

And if it wasn't them, it was just an accident completely. It just had nothing to do with anything. In fact, it was probably already there. First of all, it definitely was not already there. I definitely do not sit and grind. I don't even eat candy can't eat candy games when I'm a mutant. And secondly, I feel like you were waging an active podcast war. That was my takeaway.

Well, that was phase one. There were other things that went wrong in your life after that point that I didn't take credit for, but you can assume that it was me. That was the Joker, man. They were behind it. Yeah. Okay. Well, now that we've cleared that up, let's get started. Tell me why you care deeply about television. Well, I think that kind of goes to the same question of why I care deeply about like Bob Dylan or Lou Reed or the Velvet Underground, John Cale, any of these groups. Well, you know, that's a factor, I guess. Yes, that's why. No, there's more to it, actually. I think it's because they were just a really incredibly important band to me at a certain time. And then as I grew older and kind of got some more bearings with context of what happens in the chronology of rock's development, it became pretty clear to me that that thing that I felt when I first heard them,

that like this is really novel. There's something really special about this. That that also happened to everyone who heard them when they first came out with music and we're first playing. And it's because they do represent this thing. We always talk on Joker Men about how there's kind of evidence always that these things are connected. Like the first recordings that came out of Lou Reed and John Kale just strumming on like a four track, they're playing Bob Dylan type stuff.

If there's a harmonica, it sounds like busking in a coffee house directly influenced by Dylan. There's even a Dylan cover. So you can kind of track, like, there's no Velvet Underground without Bob Dylan from that indirect kind of lineage happening. And I think television represents an evolution in rock music where a lot of what Dylan did and the Velvet Underground did is, being applied not just to the lyrics, but also more to the actual music itself, to the way that rock music is being played. Like, lyrics have become more mature. There's all these poetic possibilities that have been laid out, and then television

come in and show that there can be poetic potential with even just the way that the instruments play with each other. So what I'm hearing is you like television because you're obsessed with Bob Dylan and they're in the lineage of Bob Dylan in some way. I think everything is and I'm just kind of interested to see what that means. And it doesn't mean that I'm trying to always trace it back to like Bob Dylan is the best. It's more like how he happened to be the first to do certain things. And then it's always interesting to see where other people took those things and ran with them in. certain directions. And I think that television is a really important example of that.

Let's take it from the top of an Evans. We're going to start with Tom Verlaine, who was born Thomas Joseph Miller in Denville, New Jersey on December 13th, 1949. Well, Tom Verlain is a Sagittarius, which, if you know anything about astrology, it does kind of check out. I would have pegged him a little more for a Capricorn because he seems a little, you know, Capricorny, but Saj makes sense. Maybe he's a Capricorn rising. It's perhaps. We'll never know. That's what I am. I'm a Sagittarius Capricorn rising. Oh, that's why you think he might be because you feel a kinship.

Well, because you thought he might be. He was born to a Lithuanian father and a Polish mother, which absolutely checks out in that man's face. A thing that I feel like no one talks about, or maybe a lot of people talk about it and I'm not paying attention, is that Tom Berlin had a twin brother. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. John Peter Miller, who, I mean, it's getting ahead, but he kind of got swallowed up by heroin addiction. And I think he died of related causes when he was like 34. Just a little fact for you.

Tom Miller began studying piano in an early age. He then switched to saxophone because he heard a Stan Getz or John Coltrane or maybe both record. And he got really inspired by jazz saxophonists. Did you know this? I did know that he was really into jazz. And I think I did know that he was interested in like Coltrane and stuff, like more out there jazz. And then he got into guitar. He said the first rock song that really knocked him out was 19th Nervous Breakdown.

because that seemed to me like Coltrane a lot, a real barrage of sound. And this kid gave me a silver tone guitar and I started playing that. I liked Dylan at the time. That's for you. It was like a Sears and Roebuck $14 acoustic guitar. He liked Dylan. I mean, was there a lot on offer at the time? Do you know what I think about a lot where I'm like, I'm not discounting anything about how influential these people were.

But then you think back and you're like, what were your operative? Well, yeah, that's true. On the other hand, there was such a, it was so new that when somebody did something different, it was like fully a new world every time they did that. Dylan just was pretty good at it, I think. Pretty good at coming up with stuff that felt new. Okay. Well, he liked you, Dylan.

And then his family sent him and his twin brother John, who no one ever talks about, to the Sanford Prep School, a private boarding school in Delaware. John was a jock and Tom was into writing and poetry. And that's where he met Richard Myers. Richard Lester Myers. Lester. Did you know his middle name was Lester? No, I didn't know his middle name was Lester.

That is just kind of a great and fitting kind of sleazy, rock guy name. There's a lot of examples of that through history. Well, he was born October 2nd, 1949, Richard Hale, a Libra, in Lexington, Kentucky. His father, Ernest Myers, was an experimental psychologist researching animal behavior. Both his parents were grad students in psychology at Columbia University, two smarties. And they moved to Kentucky because his dad got a job teaching at the University of Kentucky, but he died when Richard was seven.

And then him and his little sister, Bebitt, were raised by his mother. There was this quote, we talked about this offline. You've also read Richard Hell's autobiography. I dreamed I was a very clean tramp. He said something in it where he said, I grew up thinking men worked best in wandering small teams, usually two men. You needed someone to conspire with, someone to help you maintain the nerve to carry out your ideas. Someone to know what you were thinking.

Otherwise, your thinking didn't really exist. Someone who had the qualities you wanted, maybe, too, and that you could acquire to some degree by association. Yeah. I thought this was very profound, given the relationship that ends up developing between him and Tom Verlaine. And I don't know, and this is getting way ahead, but I don't know that Tom Verlaine felt the same way. Yeah. I think that what he said there is really profound as well and not just even in the context of the band. But yeah, it's in the context of romantic relationships too.

It's interesting, right? I was thinking that, though. I was like, oh, this is pre the era where people thought about romantic relationships as like a partnership. They didn't view, like, especially men, I don't think viewed that they were going to find that, like, oh, I'm going to like learn from and share my ideas with my wife. Like, that just wasn't the vibe. Yeah, maybe not. It's a apt, though. I mean, I think that now that has come up because it's a more, maybe.

it's a more realistic way of viewing things. It's kind of like, it just seems true to me anyway, that what he says there is a real thing, that you kind of need, people need somebody to, just to be a witness even to an idea. And then maybe that can be all it takes to actually do something. It's just like our podcast duo, actually. But you're right to bring up that thing of does the other person feel the same way? Because, you know, and I are pretty different when we do our show. I'll say that. We're different people, very different types. You feel Ian could easily forge on without you? I didn't say that. I said that, but I would say that what we bring to it is totally different. And I think that we do have something of that relationship

of needing to work off of each other, at least to keep it going the way it has, which we like. Yeah, I think it's a very real thing, especially in creative endeavors. I mean, I wouldn't have been able to do this without producer Dylan. May she rest in peace. Again, she's not dead. Yes, our mutual friend, Dylan, yes, producer Dylan. She's still producer Dylan. Wherever she is, she's producing something and she's producer Dylan.

But yeah, we needed that creative partnership. I definitely didn't. I can't speak for producer Dylan. But it is very funny because Richard Hill was really talking about growing up watching, like, the Three Musketeers and like the Mickey Mouse Club. that gave him that profound insight. So he was like kind of a bad kid. He almost got expelled from a private school that he got a scholarship to for sleeping in a car

overnight with a girl. I know. And then his mom made him paint their entire house, the exterior. But she was like, okay, but you can listen to music while you do it. And he revealed that he had a portable record player and he owned three records. The Rolling Stones Now.

Bringing it all back home by your friend Bob Dylan. Close personal friend. John is in a basement mixing up the medicine. I'm on a pavement. Thinking about the government. And kinks size by the kinks. That's a good three records, I think. It's a pretty good.

If you're only going to have three records, it's a pretty good starting place. Richard Hale said, it seems unlikely, but seven or eight years later when I started having a band myself, those three records, the first I ever owned and the only ones I owned for some time, still held true as what excited me in music for being fast, aggressive, and scornful, but complicated and full of feelings. Yeah. Those three bands in particular feel like a really great trio for a young man to, like, kind of get a sense of the lay of the land with that kind of music. Because the kinks are funny and kind of quirky. They're quirked up.

On the sauce. Yeah. And so on. The HP brown sauce. such as the case may be. And then you have the Rolling Stones, which are just, you know, they're like the actual bad boys, like doing actual bad thing, like, you know, fucking and so on.

I'm sure they did other stuff besides fucking, but, you know, that's like their main focus. That was their bread and butter. That was really that was the value proposition of the Rolling Stones. Yeah, and it took them very far. And then you have Bob Dylan, who I think does a little bit of both and says that he does in a very kind of a, oblique way.

People's quirked up, horned up, and... Horned up. Yes. And I guess he's the secret third thing, which is, you know, just having Semetic charm or whatever. Semetic charm, gorge. Okay. So then he gets sent off to Sanford as well, and he meets Tom. He said, I'd become close friends that fall with a guy I'd only known a little, but the previous year, Tom Miller.

The thing that brought us together at school and would keep us together for most of the coming seven or eight years was as negative as it was positive. We were both inner-oriented people who didn't respect convention and who fell apart from others. We also shared tastes for certain kinds of writing and music and shared a real anti-humor. Tom was a real wild card at Sanford. First, he was a day student, not a border, so he was less well-known. He was quiet and tense, but he made a lot of ghostly jokes. Most of the world seemed incomprehensibly weird to him, and he was a day student. was susceptible to all kinds of irrational explanations for that, from things like flying saucers

to extreme conspiracy theories to obscure religious mysticism. He's just like me for real. He knew that those beliefs or suspicions would seem crazy to a lot of people, and that's part of the reason he was so private. He's not just like me for real. I'd be talking about that shit to whoever will listen in a public forum on the podcast. The same, yeah. I like that. So they were drawn to each other because they were both weirdos, basically. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like it. So they run away from school together. They have these, like, grand visions, right?

Like, we're going to seek adventure. We're going to be poets. First step is we run away. And we're going to go and, I don't know, live in a shack and write poetry or whatever. They get arrested in Alabama during this runaway for arson and vandalism. Now, here's what Tom Verlaine said about them in high school. We weren't even good friends. I'd always just hang around his room.

And one night he was like, wouldn't it be great to take off across that field there and not come back? And I said, yeah, let's do it. And he said, really? And I said, yeah. Well, you know, that's the basis of a kind of friendship is just sometimes your friend, I guess, is just the one that it's exactly what he was saying earlier. Like, you just spur each other on with like a crazy idea. Like, I don't think either of them would have done that alone. Right.

Well, I don't think Tom Relay wouldn't even come up with the idea. Yeah. Well, we'll talk about that later. I think there's a song in the record that really adjunct. dresses that particular dynamic. Yeah, we're going to, we'll get into it. But I thought that was a bit rude of Tom Berlin, to be honest, but that's fine. We weren't even good friends.

Okay, rude. Richard Hell does not finish high school after his arrest. He basically makes a deal with his mom. I think that he's like, if I earn $100, I can not go back to high school and move to New York. That's like $900 in today's money, which he does by working at a newsstand that specialized in porn getting paid a dollar 25 an hour but tom went back to high school he said he got voted most unknown in my class i don't know if he's joking but that's really funny oh that's a joke for sure but i i love it right i mean he's so unique looking you have to imagine the people were like oh

fucking weird like looking guy walking around handsome a lot of people i would say he's handsome but he's he's very he's odd looking he's very distinctive yeah there's a funny bit of text in the beginning of television where Richard Hell describes him as like Mr. America of skeletons or something, which I was like, that's like such a perfect descriptor. Wow. Yeah. That's pretty much what he looks like. Yeah.

What was the bad guy in He-Man? Do you remember the bad guy in Heman? Skeletor. Yeah. He looks like Skeletor, but if Skeletor was like a hot pin-up man. Okay. So Richard Hell, Still Miller, Lester, moves up to New York City the day after Christmas, 1966 because he is on a bus and he's going to become a poet.

Okay? This is something I found very interesting. In general, I always find it really just something that my brain likes to chew on that there was a long period of time where being a poet or a writer was truly the coolest thing you could be. It was cooler than being a musician. It was so heralded. People really sought this to do.

And then a lot of these people, I don't want to say they're failed poets. I don't even know what it looks like to be a successful poet to TBQH at that point. But a lot of them sort of get swept up into being musicians. That's not what they were trying to do. And it does have some sort of precedent with Bob Dylan, right? Well, in a way, I mean, I think that it's more like Dylan, I think, was first and foremost wanted to be a folk singer. Originally he wanted just to become Woody Guthrie, and so he went to New York and did that. Like, he literally just met Woody Guthrie, took his place in the culture, sang just like him, and then went from there.

But then there was this sort of torch passing from the beat poets that I think clearly influences Dylan, and he becomes much more poetically minded while still having this really strong. grounding in folk and American music. But for them, like, television, or I mean, the nascent television, I always thought it was really interesting that they didn't go into it with a musical ideal first. Yeah. I mean, I think, again, that was really common.

Patty Smith was like that. Jim Morrison was like that. These people set out to be poets. Or, I mean, for Patty Smith, several different disciplines, I think she also wanted to draw and paint, right? Anyways, just brought it up. Richard Hull in New York, he meets a fellow young poet, David Giannini. And David Giannini sort of convinces him to move to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

I don't really know what happened. Someone told them Santa Fe is cool. And they were like, cool. They blew off to Santa Fe. And then they started this, like, press called the Genesis Grasp. And they would publish this, it's like a magazine, basically. The funniest part of that for me was just I wanted to deliver the detail that they did solicit a submission poem from Allen Ginsberg only to then turn around and reject it. And Alan Ginsburg was mad.

Who rejected it? Richard Helen, uh, David Giannini. They were like, actually it wasn't up to our standards. Well, that's bold. These motherfucking 19 year olds. But that's what 19 year olds do and are good at is, you know, being like that. Yeah, like that. Okay, so he picks up and moves back to New York.

He was not long for Santa Fe. He was published. You know, Richard Hell wasn't a failed poet, really, honestly. He got his poems into this New Directions annual, which New Directions, I think, was like a very cool publishing house, right? I can't remember who the guy was who did it, but I know Richard really admired him. And he submitted his poems and they got picked to be in the annual. So he's doing okay. I mean, from a poet clout perspective, which is, you know, the currency of poets, really.

Sure. I don't think that failed poet is just a funny term because it's redundant. Right. But yes, yeah. Okay. So now it's 1969 and Tom moves to New York. They're reunited. They're the best of friends again.

Not if you ask Tom probably. He'd be like, I didn't know that guy that well. but they hung out all day, all night. Richard Hill said, he had a great sensibility. By the time we were reunited in New York, he liked free jazz like Albert Eiler and Eric Golfi and poetry that resembled it,

like Kerouac's Mexico City Blues, in its disregard for boundaries and its spontaneity and desperation and spiritual desire and humor. He liked obsessive outsiders, artists whose works were made along patterns you could feel were viscerally, materially connected to the true wacky

or hidden reality, because the works were made of the mind substance of people who couldn't help themselves because they were driven to create, even if unskilled by orthodox standards. I thought that was really interesting. The next sentence, which I didn't quote down word for word, but essentially says he also was really drawn to people that were extremely technically proficient, which that to me makes a lot of sense. It almost sounds to me like maybe Tom Verlaine was really drawn to that first kind of person,

because that's who he wanted to be. But maybe deep down, he's more of the kind of person who is devoted to being good and technically proficient. I don't say that as a diss at all, of course. And he was totally a creative guy. But he clearly supervalued skill and precision and being good in technical terms, you know? Yeah, yeah. That is a really remarkable combo.

and it's a really great combo to have. That sounds like success to me right there, just to those two qualities in somebody. It's like really caring about the proficiency and having this deep awareness of the necessity for some kind of poetic understanding of the world or the secret or hidden reality comment there. There's something about the way that the band ends up

that feels like the product of both those things, like absolutely. Right. I think we'll get into it more and more as we go on. I do think like however much those two things are in or out of whack, not really the right word, maybe, just like varying levels of them will produce work that is different to different people's tastes. Like this is very giving Steely Dan, babe, and for me, I'm a huge no thanks on that.

Do you know what I'm saying? No. I don't understand. You're no thanks on Steely Dan? I do understand that it's good. Do you know what I mean? I don't think it's like bad music. It's just not for me.

It doesn't have the thing that I like. I don't want to interrupt you and get into this whole. That's a can of worms. We're going to get into it throughout the entirety of this episode because this is sort of the value proposition of television, especially once we get rid of Richard Hell, which the thing that I like is the Richard Hellness of it all. And I think we're going to get into that. But you'll see what I'm saying. Okay.

I think you'll see what I'm saying about Steely Tan. We're not doing that here today. Not today, babe. Even just a little bit? Not on my watch. They're funny. That's the thing about them. Secretly funny.

I know I opened the door, but I'm closing it. Richard Hill said right away, we began spending most of our spare time together. Our mentalities got intermixed. When we didn't have girlfriends, we'd be together for days on end, except when we were at work. We shared apartments for short periods. But even when we had our own places, half the time, one of us would find himself the others so late at night that the visitor would just crash on the floor. People thought we were brothers. So I'm just saying, these motherfuckers were close.

They were besties. BFF. They take a brief relationship hiatus. And this is very much a relationship. While Richard dates Patty Muka, I think is how you pronounce it, Muccia, who was in the process of becoming the ex-wife of Klaus Oldenberg. In the process of becoming the ex-wife. Yeah.

Correct. Yeah. And then when they break up, they become best buddies again. And that's when they start collaborating not on music, but on poetry. They start writing literal, collaborative poetry. Like, they would sit up in the house with a quart of beer or a fresh scooped pint of vanilla ice cream from Gem Spa and pass the typewriter back and forth. Beer or ice cream? Yeah, I don't think it was both. Budget. But I thought that was very sweet and cute. And this does eventually yield a book of poems, which you can buy right now

on Amazon.com for, I think, $1,100 a first edition. It was called Want to Go Out and they credited it to Teresa Stern, a fake person. This is much later. I'm getting a little ahead. This was in 71. Have you seen the picture of Teresa Stern? No. So what they did was they took photos.

They had a portrait taken of each of them in the exact same place and, like, framing. And then they superimposed them. And they're both wearing a long black wig. And they superimposed them to make a woman that was the two of them. I'm looking at now, yeah. Yeah. That's amazing. Honestly, really fucking cool.

The cover rocks. I've got to get this. $1,100, babe. It's a mirror. You are. It's, you know, $1,200. $1,200. It's the Jokerman, Patreon,

since must afford you. Well, we can take a hit for it, maybe. There's one other thing that I became really obsessed with during my research of this story, which is the idea of self-mythologizing. because, well, I think it's quite obvious why, but there's multiple stories about how almost everything in this story leading up to Markey Moon, the album happens. There's not much else that is worth, I think, getting to the weeds about story-wise, the band, music-wise, for sure, but not story-wise.

And you see that the people that were most successful at building their own myth, their stories tend to prevail. This is very interesting to me in the case of like Patty Smith, for example. It was maybe the best at self-mythologizing. Yeah, she's pro at it. She turned it into a vocation. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing.

I love Just Kids. But it's really funny because you read Just Kids and you're like, wow, this Earth Angel, incredibly benevolent, wonderful woman who is. And then you read other accounts. Like from other people who's working out. From other people of like from the 70s. And they're like, that woman was a fucking bitch to me. She was so mean.

She was so smart. Which everyone is everything. I'm not making any judgments on Patty Smith. She was obviously an incredible artist and a huge fan. But it is so interesting the power of self-mithologizing, especially now. I think it really struck me because now we all do it every day. I mean, unless you're like one of a Luddite who doesn't use social media, which is fine, but that's a few and far between, you know?

If you use social media at all, you are self-mothologizing. That's just what that is. Yeah. Anyways, all that to say, here's how they started a band, three stories. One is, Tom wanted to start a band. So he told Richard, let's start a band, I'll teach you bass. The other is Richard wanted to start a band. So Richard said, Tom, let's start a band.

You already play guitar. You're out here strumming that thing all day and night. Let's fucking start a band. I'll learn bass. There's a third one where the whole idea of the band came from Terry Ork, who haven't met yet, but we will shortly, who then threw Richard Lloyd in the mix. Three stories.

Regardless, what we can all agree on, I think, is at the very least, Tom and Richard went to see the New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center. The New York Dolls was the band. That made them feel like, well, we can do this. That's right. What do you think about that experience? I'm sure you've come across something like this a lot on Band's plane is the moment that an artist sees another.

artists and goes, well, I can fucking do that. Yeah. In England, it was the Sex Pistols. There's like 18 different bands that started. But the New York Dolls inspired the Sex Pistols. So it's like you can really trace a lot of it back to the New York Dolls because they were doing something, I don't want to say wrong, because that takes away the intention. But it's almost like they were doing like glam rock, but just like ugly,

dirty. Do you know what I mean? And I can see how that to Too Young, Beat Nicky, New York poet wannabes was like appealing, especially to Richard Hell, who I think through and through was a punk, you know, like he was really inspired by the energy of something like that. Tom Verlain never talked about it. He didn't like the New York Dolls. So I don't know if that inspired him musically, but at the very least it lit a fire under one of them. And if we're judging by who came and said, let's go run away, it probably, the story probably is more likely that Richard Hell said, let's start a band. That phenomenon right there, that, I mean, I'm speculating. That's all we do here. But it could be that the thing of seeing the New York

dolls hit them both in a way that was different, but motivating. Like for Tom Verland, maybe it was like, yeah, these fucking people, which I mean, I've felt that for sure. Oh, is that why you started your podcast because I listen to bands plan and you were like, this is trash, I can do way better than that. And then you came and ground a fucking candy can into my couch on top of it? Well, you know, yes. Yes and no. I was also a musician. I was more thinking about that. I was in a band and I've been in that position of like this, oh my God, like, this is what's, this is what people are coming to see. And then on the other hand, there's like, oh, like, this is pretty good. Like, I have to do this now. Like, there's, like, come on, this can't

be the only one. You can like a band and then still feel that sort of, it can be a healthy, positive sense of competition or, or wanting to join the stream of things. Or it can, be like this negative, but also healthy competition of like, well, I can't let this fucking pass. The only, the last word. I think it kind of does boil down to like what you value, right? Like, for example, like Richard Hell, much like myself, has had no known skills or abilities in the musical realm, but was like, well, they're not doing, they're not fucking Jimmy Hendricks

over here. You know what I could do that. Like, and then you get inspired by that. But what they have is that thing of wanting to be poets. And I think more and more I'm coming to see what the evolution of rock music is as being like, the people who make the biggest leaps often are the people who are not necessarily the most technically innovative, but they know that they can do something innovative with the writing or a combination of the writing and the music. And you can infinitely add something to that.

Or they have a bitch in their ear telling them that they can. can. I'm serious. I genuinely, I'm here to protect Richard Hell at all costs. I genuinely feel that his value in this story is underplayed. And I don't know that if left to his own devices, Tom Verlaine would have been as ambitious to, it's not that he wouldn't have been as talented or creative. Those were innate. Those were going to be. We might never have heard anything, though. Do you know what I mean? He might have been a successful poet who was never heard from, which is often the case. I mean, that's... He might have been a, he'd been a talented musician that made a bunch of songs no one ever heard.

He was writing songs. Exactly. But he was just playing them in little fucking, you know, open mic nights. Or just privately and never sharing that. I mean, there's so many artists who will never hear about. And then they, you know, they just literally got lost to time. But, yeah, there needs to be that, there is something of that social, that sense of competition that I think is actually healthy.

Like moving to New York is a sign that both of them had some of that going on. Sure, totally. You don't fucking move to New York if you're not interested in being part of the conversation. Totally. No, totally. Okay. So Richard said that up until we went to see the dolls, Tom would take his acoustic guitar to a hoot-nanny night to some club in the West Village once every couple of months. It was the most he would do.

He didn't pursue anything very hard here, but he did write some songs. I don't know how many, five or six. After seeing the dolls, I kept pressing Tom to get together a band instead of just this acoustic hoot-nanny stuff, an electric band. And he would just stall and prevaricate and nothing ever happened. And I don't remember how exactly it came about, but finally he sat down and showed me how simple bass playing was for rock and roll. I thought it took some skill to play a musical instrument, and I didn't have any, just like me for real. But he showed me and that sealed it. That was the beginning of the band, because Tom already knew this drummer from Delaware, Billy Fika.

Billy Fika, yeah. Amazing. So it was his friend from high school. school or eighth grade or something. So we started rehearsing together. Billy comes to New York and they start sort of doing this band, right? And they call it the neon boys. Love comes in spurts. Yeah. I don't know what they're talking about there. I thought it was interesting. Richard Hell said that, like I said before, Tom didn't like the New York Dolls, he liked Jonathan Richmond and the modern lovers more. Tom liked Jonathan Richmond. That's what

Richard Hill said. Wow, I mean, that's interesting. I can relate. Do you see that play out somehow in his songwriting? That's an interesting question. I think that maybe just in the spirit of it, of being some kind of a roving troubadour, and in the poetic aspect of it, they're all into the sort of ideal of just someone strumming their songs, singing these songs. I'll think more about that. That's interesting. It is sort of also spiritually interesting because Jonathan Richman was also, I think, kind of a known goody two shoes who was also sort of a dictator. And that is kind of what Tom Verlaine ended up as, you know, for lack of better terms. Like he swore off all drugs and wasn't really a drinker and wanted things exactly his way. He just smoked. Yeah, he blasted six for sure.

Okay. So Billy Fika, born February 15, 1915, Aquarius, did not do much self-mothology. either, but I'll tell you this much. He was, he was a drummer, jazz trained, I believe. So they had this neon voice. They put an ad in the village voice. They're looking for a rhythm guitarist. They said, narcissistic rhythm guitarist wanted minimal talent, okay. They said, that's great. Yeah. Doug Colvin auditioned. You probably know him better by his name, D.D. Ramon. I do know him better by that name. Yeah. He could only play bar chords, and he, like, couldn't play what they wanted him to play. And they were like, we said minimal talent,

but like you literally can't, can't do this. So you've got to get out of here. D.D. said later, Tom Verland and Richard Hell were very calculating, grown-up, determined people. Everyone else was just kind of blundering into everything, but they were different. I thought they were beatniks. Yeah. He was right. Chris Stein from Blondie also auditioned. He was not yet from Blondie. Richard Hell said probably the problem with Chris was that he was too mellow and had hippie hair and wore glasses. I always liked him, though. He wasn't a narcissist enough?

I don't think he, I mean, Richard L. is nothing if not a vibe curator, and that is an extremely underrated job in a band. And he was like, we're absolutely not having this guy with hippie hair and a glasses in our fucking band. Get out of here. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. That's a vibe curator is important.

And it's also interesting that he didn't stick around. I mean, and still the band had a, well, we'll get into their vibe. We'll get into it. Yeah. Did they? Okay. they record some songs in some guy's basement in Queens. Hot dog, poor circulation and tramp.

These were Tom's songs. Love comes in spurts. That's all I know right now. The music was written by Tom, but Richard Hell wrote the lyrics because Richard Hell didn't know how to write music and then high heel wheels. Here's what Tom Verlian said. I called up Billy in Delaware and he came to New York, but we couldn't find a guitar player or a bass player. So I told Hell that there was nothing to playing bass. You just go bump, bump, which was my idea at the time, which has sense changed.

Once you get into it, that gets kind of limited. We rehearsed a lot for a few months and made some tapes that were real awful. I really liked Richard, but I couldn't stand his vocals. Of course, he couldn't stand hearing from me that I don't like your vocals. And then Billy got fed up, so we kind of broke up. So that's how the young boys ended. Billy packed up, went back to Delaware. Tomberling goes back to playing, you know, his little guitar, the little open magnets or whatever.

Okay. Richard Hall starts working at a place called Cinemabilia. and it is managed by a man named Terry Ork. My favorite fact about Terry Ork is that he called everyone dog. Like DOG or DAWG? Well, I didn't. It just, it wasn't, I mean, he called him. It was out loud, so I don't know what he was thinking in his mind.

But it's very like Randy Jackson. Like, that's going to be a no from me dog. I really appreciate this detail that he calls everyone dog. It's probably early on in the development of calling people dog. That's what I'm saying. He was fucking ahead of the dog calling game. So Richard Lloyd was living with Terry Ork. Enter Richard Lloyd, yeah.

Richard Lloyd, the actual most interesting person alive. Not enough people to talk about this. You know Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell were like, no, we're weirdos. And then this guy was like, hold my beer. His autobiography is really, it's something. It's a hoot. It's incredible. It's called Everything is combustible.

It's out of print, but you can find it. Okay, so Richard Lloyd, born October 5th, 1951, also a Libra in Pittsburgh. He moved to Greenwich Village in New York as a kid, maybe middle school. He went to Stuyvesant High School, and he becomes really good friends with this guy, Velvet Turner. Velvert Turner. So, Velvet Turner is friends with Jimmy Hendricks. Yeah, he's heard of him.

Somehow. This was his friend from school. They were the same age. They were like 15, 16. And he was actually Jimmy Hendricks's only ever protege who Jimmy would teach guitar to. And Richard and him become best friends. And so by proxy, Richard starts learning guitar from Jimmy Hendricks through Velvert. So Velvort would come back from his lesson with Jimmy and then teach Richard everything that he was taught, which is so interesting.

Yeah, direct, just basically as close as you can get from direct lessons. or about techniques. Yeah, it's really incredible. Also, there's an incredible story in his autobiography about how one time Jimmy Hendricks punched him in the face three times after a show because he, like, misunderstood and thought that Richard Lloyd was patronizing him, and then he, like, apologized profusely and held his hands in his hands and said, I'm so sorry. Wow.

Like, you want to talk about, like, a gradation. Like, Tom Verlaine was absolutely not out in these streets in any way, shape, or form unless someone sort of took him out in these streets. Richard Hell was kind of out in these streets. He was trying to get in the sauce. Richard Lloyd was of these streets. Swimming in the sauce. He was swimming in the fucking sauce, babe.

He also was like institutionalized several times as a teenager before he even graduated high school. He was given electroshock therapy. Just like Lou Reed. Yes, he says it to it. And I think he says one time they talked about it, but they were both brown out drunk, so they don't really remember exactly what they talked about. Brown out drunk. That's what he said.

Those were his words. That's a really good way to put it. Yeah. here's just one brief thing about Richard Lloyd from the iconic journalist Charles M. Young. In my entire life, I've met one person, a paranoid schizophrenic who was crazier than Richard Lloyd. And I never encountered anyone who was a bigger pain in the ass. He has also one of the best electric guitar players I ever heard, and he's one of the smartest people I ever talked to. That checks out.

Yeah. So anyways, at the time, Richard had sort of bounced around. He had left New York, had gone to Boston, he'd gone to L.A., he's hanging around rock stars. He has some, like, crazy stories about Keith Moon. And, like, he's just kind of like, not a male groupie because he wasn't having sex with people really yet. But he was just up in the spaces. He was hanging around in the scene. So he had met Lee Childers in L.A.

And Lee Childers was sort of like scenester of Max's Kansas City and New York. And so when he comes back to New York, he meets up with him. And that's where he meets Terry Ork at Max's because Terry Ork worked for Andy Warhol. Oh. Yeah. Right. There was like a sort of a thing where like maybe Terry Ork had, his job was like print. Screen printing in the factory.

Yes. Yes. But there was some like shenanigans or like accusations that perhaps he stole a couple of them and sold them off book. Yeah. I don't know if that's true or not. I'm just reporting the shenanigans surrounding the Warhol factory? That's right. Couldn't possible. So Richard Lloyd is living with Danny Fields.

And Danny Fields was like, you can live here for two weeks, but then you have to mother fucking go, bitch. And he was like, okay. And then Terry Ork was like, well, I have an extra room. You can live with me. I'll pay for everything. And you just have to give me your company and sometimes share drugs. Okay. Pretty good deal.

Do you not agree? I think that sounds fair. Terry Ork was gay. So I think perhaps he imagined there would be. be something else. But according to Richard Lloyd, there was not a something else. There was also this amazing thing that Richard Lloyd said, which was at the time, that's what I provided in a relationship. Me. No money, no effort, no work, but you did get me. I would go up to girls in a bar and I would say, God, I'm in love with you. Do you want to take me home and I'll just live with you? You know,

I won't pay the rent. I'll keep my own hours. I'll do what I want to do, but you'll have me around. and I had a lot of takers. Yeah, he, by at least his own word, and the book makes it seem like he got like, fuck you amounts of pussy. Obsessed, he was gorgeous. I mean, he was a very pretty guy. He was very good looking. Also, that confidence, fuck being a poet.

You coming up and be like, what you get, babe, is me. He is a poet, clearly. I mean, that book, the book is one of the better autobiography that I've ever read. It's really beautifully written. He must be some kind of poet. His, I want to say canvas, but you know what I mean? His typewriter was life. His ultimate poem was his life.

His canvas was women. Yeah. I'm sure. And anyways, he moves right in. And then because Terry Ork knows Richard Hell, Richard Hell is like Tom, they're still called their normal names, whatever. He's like, Tom's playing 15 minutes at this place. And you should come.

And Terry Ork was like, oh, and Richard Lloyd would just sit in the house all day and play guitar. He was always playing guitar. He was very good at guitar. He'd be like, oh, come with me. I think you might, maybe we could, like, talk to these guys. Like, Terry Ork really wanted, he was really inspired by Andy Warhol and Andy Warhol's patronage of the Velvet Underground. He wanted his own version of that. What I say, everything's connected.

Well, yeah, of course. Of course. This whole show is built on that. So he is thinking Richard Lloyd is going to be the nucleus of that. But Richard Lloyd was kind of like, well, I don't know. And then they go see Tom Berlaine play his couple of little songs. I think one of the songs was Venus de Milo. Richard Lloyd said there was no doubt in my mind that this person had something both strange and recognizable.

I had been close enough to successful artists and rock stars to recognize the chemistry of that elusive it. And Tom had it. That's coming from a guy who was in the presence of one. James Hendricks. James Hendricks. Straight. And again, according to his body biography, many other famous rock stars, I do think Tom probably had it.

And I think his it was a thing that we talked about, I can't remember what episode it was, but this idea of negative charisma, I think that's something that Tom Berlaine also had. Like, Kurt Cobain had it. Do you know what I mean? It's a little bit different than like, like Richard Hell had normal charisma. Like, look at me, charm, shine. Tom Verlaine's there's like a certain thing I made this term up feel free to use it but I think it fits where it's like it's this strange thing where you are really compelled by their inwardness sure sure it's like a black hole that I totally get what you mean because yeah traditional charisma is like to be Freudian it's like phallic it's masculine it's like totally introducing asserting something that then people are like well I'm I want to take this in, you know.

And then you don't have to go that. Yeah, the opposite, the more the, the dark, mysterious, negative charisma, that can manifest many ways. But I think that it's the type of thing where you are compelled to investigate. You're compelled to look into, inward, into some kind of a crack or avoid or what have you. Yeah. And they'll never give you what you want. Yeah.

neither of them can really ever give you what you want but it's like this thing where I can either get close to the thing or I can try to get into it and figure out what's going on there's really no way it is just that simple it like I won't beat around Bush it's like actually is sort of like a masculine versus feminine principle in in kinds of attraction really and that's that is what he has he's he's so insular that like when he's up there singing, and it really feels, because it is not in his nature to do that. You're seeing, like, the private thing be public. Yeah.

There's a lot of, I think, pretty famous frontmen who have this specific kind of charisma. But it's rare than the other kind. Kirk Cobain's the prototype. I mean, that's the archetype. Yeah, Kurt Cobain. That's, I mean, that's a really crazy example. many people have said this. I think that it comes up in that there's like a Mark Fisher thing about this, about how the sort of paradoxical position of Kirk Cobain where he's forced to be the traditional kind of charismatic, but that's not his nature. And he's kind of, that really kind of weighed on him, it seems. Well, yeah, and he never really was. He was withholding. And that's sort of what drew people in, you know?

Anyways, that's what Richard Lloyd saw, I think. Terry Ork said this. Tom Verlaine was a bright boy, very learned, but there was some tightness within him. He was just so tightly wound. He was always concerned about men coming on to him. I mean, he was pretty, but I think he really didn't know what life was about. He had just a crude experience from books. It was all read and not lived. He was very naive in a lot of ways, as opposed to Richard Hell, who had both feet in the ooze.

The ooze. Quirked up in the sauce. Hell was definitely the one thinking in subversive terms. Hell was the one who always had the most awareness of what the text was trying to denote. Hell was a boulevard surrealist, groping for the breakthrough, the one grasping for liberation. Yeah. Isn't that such a beautiful way to say that? I love that.

That's from Please Kill Me. That's really well put. Really well put. Anyways. So Terry brings Richard Lloyd to them. He's like, he's a great guitar player. He could be a rhythm guitar player. They audition with him.

They're like, it's great. They get Billy Fika back on the horn. Poor Billy Fika packs back up from Delaware, comes back, and they start earnestly as television. According to Richard Hell, it was when Richard Lloyd was added to the band that the problems between him and Tom Verlaine started. He said, rehearsals were parties and cell meetings and cathartic releases. They were about expressing a spirit and attitude as much as about detailing musical parts. the attitude and the music were inseparable. I'm just going to go ahead and say, I think Tom Berlin would have violently disagreed with him. It would have been like, no, babe, actually, rehearsals when we practice the song, so we get good at it.

Yeah, yeah. And you don't even do that here or on your own, and it's really causing me a headache. Anyways, so Richard Hell said, I wasn't a bass player, even in strictly musical terms. I was a singer and a songwriter who, for convenience, played the song's baselines. In the Neon Boys, this worked. But once another guitar player was added, the power shifted to Verlaine, and he liked that. Lloyd was a stray dog, following Verlaine for his chance. He was a smart enough guitar player to recognize his dependence on Tom.

Tom created all the guitar parts. Lloyd was a sycophant who'd throw a tantrum and whine and pout up to the point where there might really be a crisis and then revert to his default submission to Tom. I've always felt about Richard Lloyd that he kind of seems like a weird case, because he has the mentality and temperament of a bassist, but happens to be one of the most virtuosic and crazily talented and creative guitar players there are. But he seems like really happy just being like he would like being in that position. To me, it's giving like Adrian Bellew.

Like he's just a virtuoso guitar player, but he has anything to say, which is very often that's a great place for that person. They're going to play you a ripping. I mean, they probably have something. I don't hear things in guitar solos. Yes, he has musically something to say, right? But he's not trying to express an idea in the classic sense of like, I'm making a song and I'm going to sing it.

So this is a perfect spot for him, it seems like to me. Richard Hell obviously had some issues with Tom Verlaine. And it's probably easy to put it somewhere besides, you know what I mean? Well, it's the John Kale and Lou Reed dynamic. it took to a major degree. It's like Tom is like John Kale and Richard is like Lou Reed in a way. They're like, there's the more classically trained or like, I mean, totally not type A. But like of the two of them, Richard Hell is like a writer.

Yeah. And yeah. He's quirked up in the sauce. No, but also I think, you know, if I had to speculate here and be again, once again, Tom Verland has very, he's not spoken a lot about this kind of stuff. There's interviews and there's some stuff, but he didn't write a book. He didn't go on a press store. It wasn't really his thing.

He was kind of a private person. But if we go with the theory that we're sort of working out here that like you needed a witness, right? Well, now you have two, babe. You don't need the other one as much. Do you know what I mean? And so the power or the need for Richard Hell, Wayne. Yeah. Yeah. There's if, I mean, it's not like Tom Verlaine is without ideas, poetic ideas. Clearly he has them. And when you've got the addition of a talent who can articulate and back up your ideas with this incredible. And even add to them. Yeah. And, yeah, embellish them, make them feel more real than you ever thought possible. It is just, I think, the case of two strong poetic dispositions that. It's two front men, really. You can't. have two frontmen in a band. You just can't.

And I think that Richard Lloyd, his style just suits Verlaine more than it would have suited Richard Hell. Sure. Yeah. I mean, they don't think they liked each other. I mean, Richard Lloyd says in his autobiography that Richard Hell treated him like an insect, which is sort of backed up by that statement that he made in his own auto. Just the girlies are fighting, babe, in the autobiographies. Okay. I don't know around when this happens, but they cut their hair also. Okay. The hair was But neon boys, they had long hair. Not Richard Lloyd. Richard Lloyd always looked like a mental patient and had, I think, around this time, like short bleached hair.

But both Richard Howell and Tom Berlaine had long sort of, you know, rolling stonesy hair. And here's what Richard Hell said. This is incredible. This is what I'm talking about when I say a Bible curator. I arrived at the haircut by analysis. Rock and roll had two main innovative hairstyles so far. The Elvis Ducktail and the Beatles' Bull Cut. I tried to figure out what they signify it and what they had in common, at what made them work.

Elvis's more or less had already existed. Its power was in its southern underclass hoodlum origin, along with the reverse machismo of the way it required so much attention to maintain and in that way screamed a vanity. And the shock of that suddenly being splashed as glamorous and successful onto the front pages of national music magazines. when before it had been limited to mugshots of truck drivers, bootleggers, and petty thieves. The Beatles' haircut, on the other hand, had been created by the band. It said two interesting, conflicting things. One was innocence and youthful charm, since it was the hairstyle typical of five-year-olds. And two was perversion, transgression, and defiance, since among adults, only girls or bohemian freaks and artists wore their hair that long.

I thought of what the haircut of my child had had been, and it was super short, stiff, almost, military butch or crew cut that had gone ragged because kids don't like going to barbers. When that patchy raggedness was exaggerated to the degree I exaggerated it, it expressed defiance and criminality too. For one thing, a guy like that doesn't have an office job. So he really fucking thought about it, babe. And this also made me think, it's like, again, this like varying degrees, right? Tom Verlaine is like not even preoccupied with this kind of stuff.

Like he is not thinking about it. Richard Hell is overthinking it, but it works, right? He's, he's, uh, visionary. He's, he's, he's, he's, he's,

he's, , he just, he just fucking, cut that weird fucking shit off, fucking mental patient style, bleached it, looked cool as hell,

was, he didn't sit down and, like, make a chart and a fucking PowerPoint presentation about it. He just was. It's a very, and almost like you, it's just such an interesting trio of people. Again,

I don't know a lot about Billy Fika. Well, he's just a great drummer and really creative. And we'll talk more about that later. But, no, I mean, there's a reason why Richard Hell is often credited as the sort of forefather of the punk aesthetic. And it's not just the hair thing, but that's an incredible description and rationale behind the hair thing. It's like it would take cultural critics much, much longer decades later to make that kind of connection about why that is. And I don't know that it's even been said as concise. is that.

I know. It's so beautiful. He also did the ripped clothes with clothes pins and stuff. I mean, there's, the exaggeration of it is what makes him such a visionary, like a maverick thinker in that way. And the dynamic between him, like him hating or not getting along with Lloyd, it is funny just in context. But it seems like Richard Lloyd, he reminds me of sort of the, Dean Moriarty character, like the one who doesn't, he's not a writer. He doesn't, like, actually sit down and have a discipline.

He just is the thing. He embodies something. He is the art. Yeah. It is kind of great that we have the third perspective. I don't want to say third, the second perspective, because Tom Berlian didn't offer really much of a perspective. But, I mean, you do self-mythologized by not speaking also.

You know what I mean? That's another way of self-mythologizing because you kind of puts you in a position of being like, well, I'm the one who doesn't gossip. I'm the one who doesn't stoop to that level. I'm the one who doesn't talk about things. You know, you can't help, but it's still, you know, not saying something is still saying something. Yeah.

Well, he could be the type that is the weird, a rare type that's just as, just as much life as art, you know, not really like the astete who's like contextualizing everything, but he does it in that private way. Or you might be like the Don Draper who's like, I don't think about you. I feel bad for you. I don't think about you at all. Yeah, maybe. He's maybe a bit of both.

He's hard to know, so it's hard to say. They also, obviously, around this time, chose their new names. Because they were still going by Tom Miller and Richard Myers. And Richard Hell, obviously, it was like, these are fucking stupid dorky names. We can't have these names. And so he chose for himself Richard Hell. That's a Rimbaud reference because he was. obsessed with Rimbaud.

So season in hell. Season in hell. And then they went, according to Richard Hell, they went through a bunch of names for Tom. And Richard Hell is the one that thought using the name of a 19th century French poet would be good. He suggested Gautier. But then he immediately realized that wouldn't work because there would be problems with pronunciation. And then Tom came back with Verlaine, which sounded perfect. It is really interesting because Paul Verlaine was Rimbaud's lover, famously.

They also hated each other, and one of them shot at each other. Is this right? Was it Rembo that shot Paul Verlain or the other way around? I can't remember. I don't know. I wasn't there. Literally shot at each other. So, again, fortuitous and interesting foreshadowing around the names that they chose,

people that were intimate and very connected who then came to hate each other. Yeah. Two poets. Two poets. The funny thing that I didn't realize was that Richard Hell really tried to make Richard Lloyd change his name, too, because he was like, there can't be two Richards. I'm Richard. And Richard Lloyd was like,

bitch, I'm Richard. Like, you already changed your last name. Fucking change your first name too. What the fuck do I care? I don't give a shit. I'm paraphrasing. And basically, he said, no. I'm not doing that.

Sorry. There's two Richards now. I was really interested in this new name thing because I've been deeply preoccupied with the idea of nominative determinism. Do you know about this? Well, I do, but tell the listeners at home what it means. It's this theory that your name sort of sets the course of your life or helps shape your fate or destiny. There's really funny examples, right, where, like, there would be, like, the headmaster of a school and his name is McMasters.

It's like that kind of thing, you know what I mean? Yeah. Or all the characters in Arthur Miller plays, like Loman or, as the case may be. Yeah, they're always like kind of referencing their place in the world. Or a lot of dentists are named Dennis. Yeah. I'm serious. It's this kind of stuff.

Evan Evans means. Evan Evans, exactly. But I was just thinking that. I was like, oh, if that's true, then changing your name is a way of sort of like taking control of your own destiny, right? Zimmerman, Bob Dylan. Right. Sure.

Of course, the original. But it's the same thing. And they probably, he kind of made that idea popular. Sure. I don't know when that came out, but. It's genius. And Richard Hell is far and away one of the best names of all time. Yes.

As is Tom Verlaine. Tom Verlaine is good. Richard Hell. Damn, that one hits. Tom Verlain sounds like it could be your real name. Yeah. Okay. Now we're television.

They went through a bunch of names. Apparently they played for two weeks under the name Gugu. Interesting. Mm-hmm. How'd they land on television? Television. Richard Hell had a list of 30 names. He was very drunk and he was like going through all of them.

And then he sort of liked television because it was tell a vision, right? I know that you know this because I listened to at least half of your episode about Tomberlane. With Dean Wareham. With Dean Wareham. Shout out Galaxy 500. But I think he did a mistake because he then hand delivered to Tom Verlain a band name that was now his new initials. TV. Yeah.

And Tom Blaine was like, yeah, that sounds like. good. To me, to me, that sounds good. To me, I know why you're good. Yeah. I didn't think about that. But it's, it's true. It is TV, Tomberlane. And television happens to also, so to speak, great name. Because it's television, like, tell a vision. Sure. It's television as like beyond, beyond vision. Like tele being. Yeah. Yeah. Vision through something. It's, sure. Yeah. It's, it's just, it's just works. And it has a very modern. ring to it feels like if they didn't do it some other band would have and it would have been cool at any point probably it feels like to me it's like naming your band now instagram but maybe i'm wrong yeah maybe it's something like that i wasn't really a brand name but you know that was the that was the view of television at the time was that it was the opiate of the masses right and it was this sort of like only like only pedestrian people watch television It was not a cool, it was not like an elevated thing, the television.

Well, it's a great also. It means that it could be anything. I mean, there was this idea of attention being placed on it and it also can lead you anywhere. You're right, babe. Okay, so they practice in Terry Ork's loft and they're writing songs. They're doing stuff. They brought some of those songs. So March 2nd, 1974, television has their debut show at the townhouse theater.

Terry Ork, their patron, rents out the place. And most of the audience did not buy tickets they were invited. However, it was still full. Richard Hell made a poster, and it used quotes from people who had allegedly seen them play at Terry Ork's loft. Okay, so here are the people. Scott Cohen from Interview Magazine, his quote was, killers, sharp as tax. They made me cry. Wow.

I think he actually had seen them. He's the only one. The second one was They're finally here in full pathological innocence color, skin, guitars, love and spurtes eat the light, infant terrible. Does I you say that?

Enfantelible and a fucking hour. Enfant terrible is how we would say it in French but in English it'd be fine to say it as Enfant terrible. Enfant terrible. That was from Danny Fields who had not seen them

but was so tickled by their bravada that they would ask him for a quote knowing that he had never seen them, that he was like, oh, they must be really good. And so he gave this quote. And then the last one was, four cats with a passion. Nicholas Ray, the director of Rubble Without a Cause, who had seen them but was blackout wasted and didn't remember anything about it, but was like, okay, I'll just say something.

Four cats with a passion. That's right. These are some guys, and they do play guitars. They do what they do, and they seem to enjoy it. So that was the poster. But, again, shows Richard Helms. hell's brilliance of marketing from the beginning. He's like, let me put some cool, known people on the fire touting our excellence. Yeah. I mean, the connection or the existence of Warhol

at this point shouldn't be understood it either because it's like there's some people who caught on to what that meant and how you could use all that. And then there's people who just didn't. This is a post-exploding plastic inevitable world where it's like, you know, the velvets had been marketed in this artful way. And it really seems like he, Richard Hell, like, that was not lost on him. No. In the Velvitts had stopped playing maybe about four years ago,

I think, right? You would know better in 1970. Yeah, at that point. I mean, Lou Reed was no longer. So it was the Lou Reed. Because I just wrote down they stopped playing. So maybe it's just they stopped playing with Lou Reed in 1970. And then no one cared anymore. Well, yeah, Mo Tucker was no longer. Maybe she was.

Who is then the fuck in the band that anyone gives a shit about? What is this band? Fucking Minuto. We don't need to see them without these two people. Well, in my opinion, you know, the band during that later period is not as interesting. But moving on. So they play this show. They have multiple television screens on stage, again, Richard Hell's vision. They were all playing different channels.

And one was hooked up to a porta pack of a man who would walk around the theater shooting them in the audience. This is a really fucking brilliant. for 1974. A porta pack. Yeah, like he was literally just filming and it was feeding into one of the TVs. This is like pretty fucking... Yeah, well, it's a... Revolutionary for 1970.

Like, really brilliant idea of like a set design. It's like the exploding plastic inevitable shows, but it's been way better because it's like that was projecting onto this band, which they were like use... Like, you know, this band is like a canvas. Yeah, yeah. But he's, clearly he gets that that, that shouldn't be the case. It should be that like, we're the event and there's some other thing. If you get bored, you're, you know, mitigates boredom pretty permanently.

Just fucking cool, too. It's a cool thing to look at, like a band playing in front of a bunch of TV screens. It's cool. Yeah. Lou Reed would later copy this concept, adding fuel to the fire that Tom Verlaine had that he thought everyone was copying him, but that's getting ahead. And talking heads, just the aesthetic, the sort of vibe of the, that they'll later kind of get really into doing shit like that.

The TV thing, though, in the 80s was just everybody did it. That was such a thing in the 80s. That was just like the thing of the 80s. Although you're right, Tom Burland also thought the Talking Heads copied him, but we'll get to that as well. The Talking Heads copied everybody. Are we going to fight about the Talking Heads right now? No.

They were inspired by world music. I mean, they were inspired by everybody. One of the bad things about this show is that, afterwards, Richard Hell was like, oh my God, that was the fucking best. Wasn't that amazing? I was so invigorated. And Tom Verlaine was like, that was fucking shit. That was trash.

We suck. Why? I think both could be true, again, depending on what you were going for. Like, for Richard Hell, it was like an incredibly electric, energetic, like, vibe of a night. Like, they had a vibe. And was the music played note perfect and accurately and cleanly? The answer is probably no. And don't think Tom really like that.

Also, he very famously hated how much Richard Hell and Richard Lloyd jumped around. He did not want them to move. Yeah, he's right about that, I think. Oh, it's super punk of you, bro, you fucking cop. What are you, a narque? Like, let people jump around. It's a music show. Well, yes and no.

It's not the chamber orchestra. they're both right and they can't both be right at the same time though in the same band not in the same band exactly yeah so tom called it a real disaster is what he called it but that's fine here's how CBGBs or if you like country bluegrass blues and other music for uplifting gormandizers came into play again multiple stories but some combination of tom berlane richard Lloyd and richard hell were walking back from rehearsal and they spotted cbgb and they saw Hillie, Hilly Gristall, the purveyor of CBGB, outside

on a ladder doing something with the sign. They were like, what goes on here? And they're like, oh, it's a live music media. They're like, let us play. And he was like, we only do country bluegrass and blues and uplifting music for Gormandizers. And they were like, well, we kind of, our music is kind of like that.

It's like the ladder. Yeah. It's kind of uplifting music for Gorman Dizers or other music for uplifting gormandizers or whatever. Basically, that's part of the story. The other part is that Terry Ork went down there and convinced Hilly because he was like, listen, let them play on a Sunday. You don't make money at the bar from drinks. I'll pay the difference. Wow. It was a patron, babe. It was a Medici, basically. God bless him. And so this is how they get

their first Sunday. I do want to clear something up because I do feel like there's a big mythology that television was the first punk and cool band to play at CBGB's and that's actually not true. Oh. Well, Jane County's band had played there multiple times, Queen Elizabeth, and they were obviously a subversive and cool band. There was another band that had played there that Richard Lloyd mentions in his autobiography. But mainly the Jane County thing, because it is funny that they just erased, like, her whole contribution and her cool band. And that was obviously kind of punk. You know what I mean?

But anyways. They were the first to be given that moniker or that term of art. Well, no one was called punk yet, but do you know what I mean? Like, it was like... Yeah, I mean, that there was some precedent. They weren't the first non-country band to play, which I think is how it's always sort of like... There was some other people in that space. Loosen the lid for them.

Yes. It isn't interesting. I didn't realize that for a long time, actually, even after this first show, CBGB's remained Wednesday, the Saturday was just country music and poetry night on Wednesday night. And they would only stick these bands on Sunday nights. They also wanted to do the same thing that the New York Dolls had done, which is play the same place on the same day to build up a crowd, which is what they had done at the Mercer, whatever the fuck that place is called, that they eventually collapsed by playing it. That's another story. So March 31st, 1974, that's the first television show at CBGB's. It goes well.

People come. Bears are sold. Perhaps Terry Ork bought a lot of beers. We'll never know. And Hilly's like, okay, you can play on Sundays here. Here's what the band bio said. Tom Verlaine. Guitar vocals music lyrics.

Facts unknown. Richard Hell. Bass vocals lyrics. Chip on shoulder. Mama's boy. No personality. High school dropout. Mean.

Richard Lloyd. Guitar vocals. Bleach blonde mental institutions male prostitute suicide attempts. Billy Fika. Man, they did Billy Fika dirty. Drums. Blues bands in Philadelphia.

doesn't talk much. Friendly. That's amazing. Friendly. What if you were in this cool band that was all about being stylized and the only thing they wrote about you in the bio was friendly?

At least he's not mean. Your self-mythologizing point of view is given a lot of red meat by this. This is great. That's amazing. It's incredible. Here's what Richard Hall wrote

to go on the show poster. Are you ready? Strap in. This is long. Horses gallop in from all sides, rising in the air as they converge. The guy in the torn blue suit is whispering, please kill me. We'll get to please kill me. Verlaine rolls out of bed, rubbing his eyes for the third time in two hours.

The bleach blonde takes another pill and smiles sweetly. Billy flicks on the TV. The galloping horses meet in the air. Tears are streaming down. Television appears through the horses. No injuries, except the screen has developed leaks where the boys put their cigarettes out. A distant sound of almost human laughter can be heard as the characters grow new lungs after dozing off during their successful attempt to swim the channels. He's a poet, bitch. Don't you ever fucking forget it?

Yeah, well, you know about the liner notes to a certain other record. Bob Dylan's bringing it all back home. Guess what? I don't know one fucking dick about the liner notes to Bob Dylan's bringing it back home. I'll just read a little bit of it for content. So that album, the liner notes of that are like, quote, I'm standing there watching the parade slash feeling combination of sleepy John Estes, Jane Mansfield, Humphry Bogart, Mortimer Snurred, Murph, the Smurf, and so forth, slash erotic hitchhiker wearing Japanese blanket.

Gets my attention by asking, didn't he see that the hoot nanny down in Portaer to Mexico, I say, no, you must be mistaken. I happen to be one of the Supremes. He then rips off his blanket and suddenly becomes a middle-aged dream. drugist for a district attorney. He starts screaming at me. You're the one. You're the one that's been causing all of them riots in Vietnam. Whatever, you get the idea. My hat is off to you for somehow shoehorning in the liner notes from a Bob Dylan album into the cell. I barely had to shoehorn it in. Richard Hell's just copying that shit. He's doing that, whatever that is, you know, this kind of

speed-addled... Right. Free associative. Yeah. Yeah. Which is totally self-mythological. It's pretty cool. It works. When it works, it works. I don't know who's reading the flyer that closely, or the show poster, but it's on there. If you're hot and you do that at the right moment, then like... If you're hot and you do almost anything at the right moment, this is a theory I've been working on my whole life that you really can get away with a lot of your hot. Yeah, yeah. But, you know, being hot and having this in you is like, you're going to run into more opportunities, probably, than someone who's just hot.

And their other talents are of the body, which ages and dies. Definitely in the 70s. I think if you did this now, people would be like, shut the fuck up. I'm a fucking corny loser. Anyways. Perhaps. The Please Kill Me of it all, iconically the name of Legs McNeil's book about punk, Richard Hell made a T-shirt that said, Please Kill Me with a...

Yeah, crosshairs. Yeah, like a bull's eye, yeah, on it. But he said he was too afraid to wear it, actually. So he's not the one that wore it. You know who wore it? Richard Lloyd, not afraid of anything. He was like, I gave me that shit, I'll put it on, and give a shit. That's great.

So, iconic thing, associated with television. The first songs that they would play in these Sunday nights at CBGVs were love comes in spurts, blank generation. Yeah, great song. Great song. Based on the old novelty song by Rod McCune called The Beat Generation, which went as follows, I belong to the Beat Generation. I don't let anything trouble my mind. I belong to the Beat Generation, and everything's going just fine.

Let anything trouble my mind. I belong to the B generation. God damn. We could talk about that for an hour. Great song. Heart on Love, Venus de Milo, High Hill Wheels, Bluebird, and Enfant Terrible. Didn't they play fire engine by the 13th floor elevators sometimes? They had a couple of covers as well, yes.

Yeah, and can't get no satisfaction. Yes, correct. They apparently started fighting on stage from like show one. Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine. Uh-uh. Tom Verlaine would be like, can you fucking play the goddamn notes correctly, basically? Richard Hell would be like, who cares? Yeah, he's like, look at them.

They're out there. They're loving it. Exactly. He's like, it's fun. The third Sunday night, two special guests are in the building. Patty Smith and Lenny K. Patty Smith was friends with Richard Hell. I don't really exactly can tell you how did they work together.

Was it the Strand? And I know Richard Hull was going to publish a book of her poetry because they had a mutual friend, this poet, Andrew Wiley. Anyways, they're there. Patty is very inspired. As is her want. That is what she does. Yes. I think she'd only recently started doing any sort of musical stuff with her poetry or kind of making it into more of a music than a live poetry.

But more importantly, she was also deeply smitten with Tomberlay. thought he looked like an Egon Shilay painting, which he does. Yes, he does. I think it was February 10th, 1971. So just before this, she had done her first public poetry performance with Lenny K. doing guitar. So she, very importantly, reviews the show in the Soho News. So they're getting press.

Have you ever read this review? Let's hear it. It's extremely horny. Oh. Somewhere in the 50s, Billy Lee Riley was slicking brill cream and burgl. boys all over the USA were resting Les Pauls on their hip and scrubbing them like sex. That's the opening line. Those boys got real short hair, totally naked faces, and the lead Tom Verlaine has the most

beautiful neck and rock and roll, real swan-like, the kind of neck you want to strangle. He strolls up to the mic and draws, got a count five number for you, takes a swan dive, and the boys launch into psychotic reaction. The music is originally maniac. Television's wings are a little twisted, but the way they play is nearly perfect, creating infinite space, throbbing you over and over like sex. and sexy sexy as hell with songs like hard on love. Anyways, the whole thing is basically just like,

I'd like to fuck Tom Verlaine. But it's a good, it's a good review. She's a great writer. She's got, yeah, she's not wrong. I'll say that. No, she's not wrong. I think Richard Hell is a bit more libidinal than Tom Verlaine. But he might be more erotic.

He's more beautiful. Like, sensually compelling, whereas, like, you know, Richard, Richard Hell is, like, kind of the, uh, The love comes in sports. Yeah, I mean, you write that song. So, Patty and Tom start dating. Patty is also still dating and perhaps living with Alan Lanier of the Blue Oyster called it this time. Poor guy, I guess.

She later wrote a song about this. It's called We Three and it is on the album Easter. Richard Hall said, I wasn't upset when Patty started going out with Tom, except that it made me nervous to have Tom do anything that was going to boost his ego further. Ha, ha, ha. Because it was getting pretty dicey. The ha-ha-ha is in the quote. That was the main.

Tom thought he was a big deal when he started going out with Patty. But I never hung out with them. That was when I couldn't be around Tom. I was just hating him. That was from Please Kill Me. Yeah. Well, Patty is an interesting case. Really landmark figure in gassing people up and boosting people, convincing people to self-mythologize, doing that work for others.

And kind of making this trade. off of like, I scratch your back and you scratch mine as far as that goes. It seems like she's pretty into the self-mythologizing game and it works out. She mythologizes all over the place and everybody gets mythologized. That's right. I mean, kind of iconic, honestly, you don't see it happen a lot where it's not just that the woman is providing the service of muse and uplifting and mythologizing, but is also an artist in her own right and has that respect and does it for herself as well, you know? It's kind of a rare combination.

Usually it's one or the other. Curator of vibes in her own right, for sure. 100%. And savvy. People can, I think, be really hard on someone like that. And there's definitely criticisms of her that I've encountered that are like really dismissive of her, like as that being kind of the reason why. she's just like a kind of flatterer hangar on.

Right. Again, not for the feminism to reenter my body at such an inopportune time, but they don't say that about Richard Howell, for example, who did basically exactly the same thing. Different, but it's also not like what she did is unimportant. It's crucial that there be people, I mean, Terry Ork is someone like this too. I mean, there's people who need a scene, needs there to be people who witness it from some kind perspective that's not directly within it. Like, but, but gets it. And Patty Smith, you know, to her credit is compelled to create stuff as well. Like she, she really wants everything,

real lust for life. Yeah. I mean, I think she's a unique case in the sense that she was everything, you know, she was a journalist and she was a poet and she was a musician and she was making art and she was in the play and she was, you know, she was just really doing all of the stuff. And by all accounts, I mean, she had regular charisma, like the good kind of the charisma charisma. Yeah. Yeah. Couldn't deny it. She's bold.

And, you know, that thing of wanting to be, of being a poet and critic, which, I mean, to some degree I can relate to for sure. That is an odd combination. Did you just compare yourself to Patty Smith? Yeah, sure. I have no qualms with comparing myself to Patty Smith. She compared herself all the time to everyone every day. Like, that's how she. but that's how she made herself in career.

Yeah. I think she was great, me personally. Obviously, she's done a bit more for the culture than I have at this point. You have time. I mean, she had already done way more by the time she was your age. I'll say that much. Yeah. And produced several albums of iconic and long-lasting music work.

Yes. Yeah. She recorded her first single, Hey Joe, around this time, with the song poem, Piss Factory on the, side and Tom Verlaine helped her do it and played guitar on it. What's the point in having a boyfriend who can play guitar if they don't play guitar on your first Evanage? Literally, what's the point? Okay, so from the spring of 1974 to the spring of 1975, television is playing at CBGBs all the time. Like you said, the scene is building around them,

ish. About five months after their first show, the Ramones show up. They're added sort of into the mix. They play with television a lot. Somewhere in here, and I couldn't find an exact date, and the only person that revealed it was Richard Lloyd, they ditch Terry Ork and take on Patty's manager. Who is? This woman named Jane Friedman, her company was Wartoke Concern. I don't know when it happens. It definitely happens before they get signed and before Richard Hell leaves the group and all this stuff. But anyway, somewhere in here. Now, so five months after the first television show, the Ramones turn up, the stilettos were playing. I think the steles might have also played before television. That might have been one of the bands. The stilettos are the band that

became blondie. It was kind of a girl group with Chris Stein, and then it was just Debbie Herring and Christine, and it became blonde. The Talking Heads showed up about a year after the first television show and the Dead Boys, like a year after that. So this is all sort of building up. And like I said, Tom thought David Byrne stole his vocal style and that the talking heads were a cheesy version of television. I don't see that at all. I don't, I don't, I would never even compare the two. It wouldn't even occur to me that the two bands have anything in common besides if they played shows together at CBGBs. Very different. And if you are paying attention to anything like that.

Just spiritually, everything about them is different. Yeah, yeah. So then Patty Smith group starts playing at CB's also. And it was sort of an idea like, oh, they should play with television. That's cool. Like come play with television. We have the same manager. and they just blow up.

They became the most popular band at CBGVs, was Patty Smith group, the biggest one. What year was that? Was that around horses? Pre-horses. This is even pre-them getting signed. Okay. Yeah.

I don't have the exact timeline, correct? Because it's impossible to tell from these people's autobiographies and Wikipedia is not up to date, but I'm giving you the gist. It's about right. So by winter of 74 or 75, Richard Hell said that Verlane is fully shutting him out, right?

He's cutting his song from the set. He, again, yelling at him and Richard Lloyd, please stop jumping around, stand exactly still, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to stand in the middle, all this stuff. Now, an Island Records, ANR comes in and asks them to cut a demo with Brian Eno. Brian Eno, that's right. Yeah. You've heard this. Richard Hale said that Tom Verlaine wouldn't let them record any of his songs, which is part of the reason he ended up leaving the band. Anyways, neither here nor there. Verlaine did not like working with Eno. Is that correct? Can you speak? to that a little bit. Well, they did not fucking use it. And I think that this is a really important

point for this band. Because what this band ends up becoming and what that album ends up being is this is where Tom Verlaine's like genius, his version of vibe curation comes into play, which is an anti-vive curation. He doesn't want to just accumulate vibes. And Brian Eno, obviously is like all about overlaying vibes. He's like, we're all stocked up on vibes here. He wants to give as much as he can, as much color and flare as he can to every moment. And I think that Tom Verlaine, to his credit,

noticed that, like, we don't need that. Like, what we do is interesting enough, deep enough, strong enough to stand still on stage. And as that pertains to recording, it's like to not throw a bunch of shit on, to not affect it, not like make make get creative in post. Right.

He didn't want him to pull one of those fucking oblique strategy cards and be like, what if we made it weird here? No, yeah. It's, I think that he really like had confidence and he was right to have faith. What if you play that backward? Yeah, exactly.

And that's as cool. Like, it sounds like that'd be amazing, you know, and television. But it's like for the same reason that Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine isn't actually a great combo to work with. It's like he has.

his idea of it. It's just more spare. It gives more credit to the essential parts. I'll tell you something. You're right. But also, Tom Berlaine, he's not a group project doer. This is a thing about Tomberlain. There's not another person in this conversation that we're going to say is going to work here. Not another auteur, if you will. Yeah, he is an atoller. That's what I'm saying. So he's not working with. He said, you know what, Brian, Peter George, St. John, Labaptiste, Della Sol, you know, it's not going to work for me, bitch. Cuba movie. It's a no for me, dog.

It's a no for me, dog, basically. He said it more nicely. He said his ideas were incompatible with mine. It's kind of crazy because they, I wouldn't want to sign them, but have, you know, make the album and Tom Rulain was like, absolutely the fuck not. Okay. Great choice. I mean, I really bold. I love that.

Yeah, I listen the demo. It is sort of like dull sounding. There's something about it that's like, it ain't hidden. It's a demo. It's like Brian, he knows probably sitting here and be like, you know what, motherfucker? I would have made it good. If you'd given me fucking five minutes, you freak, fucking Mr. America of skeletons. Definitely would have been good, but not good in the way that like they could have been and were and are.

Well, don't worry because it just took five more minutes and then he found the talking heads and they had a very fruitful and creative relationship. He didn't need television. and he got really rich from it. So Brian Eno's doing just fine. Love Brian Eno. Can't say enough about him, but... It didn't work here.

Interestingly, interview magazine reported on this, and they said, Eno just produced a very high-priced demo tape for Island Records who are frothing to sign them up. But until now, they've been Manhattan's most closely guarded secret. They have a large cult following who wear ripped clothes like Relayed in Hell and flocked to their concerts. Pretty sick. Very sick. Also, did you know that Blank Generation directly influenced the sex pistol song Pretty Vacent? Like Malcolm McLaren literally went to the sex pistols and was like write a song like this,

and so they wrote Pretty vacant. Yeah, I did know that there was some kind of direct connection between them. Malcolm McLaren was a little obsessed with Richard Hall. Well, this goes directly, that's that direct line from Richard Howell to the punk aesthetic as we know it, like the early punk aesthetics of rip clothes and safety pins and spiky hair and so forth. Like, I might have been a little zeitgeisty because when I was researching the clash, I did see that Sid Vish is very early on was also using safety pins, literally just to hold his pants together. This is the aesthetic of poverty mixed with the aesthetic of, fuck you, I don't care. I'm just holding together with safety pins.

Yeah, emphasizing it, like making it into a... Exactly. Malcolm McLaren, like I said, he loved Richard Hell. He had taken over creative direction of the New York Dolls or management or whatever, both at this point. And he invites television to open for the New York Dolls. on March 7th, 8th, and 9th, 1975, at the Little Hippodrome Ballroom. They do that, and then they do a residency with Patty Smith Group at CBGPs. This is the residency that Clive Davis shows up and is like, yes, I will sign, I will sign you.

Patty Smith group, but really just Patty Smith. So she has a huge record deal before television, which a win for feminism, just kidding. but probably didn't make Tom Verland very happy. I'm speculating. I don't know. He never said anything about it, but I can't imagine he was like cool. Maybe. Richard Hull quits right around this time, late March.

Other time lends have it in mid-April. It doesn't matter. He quits. He's like, fuck you. I'm done with you. You didn't use my songs in the demo. Keep telling me to stand still. You're mean.

I'm over this. Johnny Thunders and the New York Dolls drummer, Jerry Nolan, had left the dolls, and they call him up. and they're like, do you want to start a band with us? And that's the heartbreakers. And we're not going to talk any further about that because that could take on forever, but just know that that's what happens to Richard Hell. He goes on to be in the heartbreakers briefly and then the rest of the Richard Hell career.

Chinese Rocks was written by D.D. Ramon. Did you know that? I did not know that. Isn't that crazy? This whole scene is so incestuous. Not in a bad way. Like in a French movie way? I love to say it, but this is my Marvel Cinematic Universe.

Yeah, of course. There's no reason to be interested in any of that shit if you even develop a casual interest in this stuff. It's all so, like, deeply connected in ways that, like, you'll fully be stringing up red string in your own room. Exactly. Like a beautiful mind. You get it. We are the same. Yeah.

Richard Lloyd said something really profound in his autobiography. He said, Tom and Richard had this thing between them that in hindsight, I call universal contempt. That is, the two of them felt that they were the special two, and that other people were nothing but insects bothering them. I received some of that treatment. Before we went on stage, Tom blows nose, then tilt his head back and demand that I look up his nose to check if it was clean. He was neurotic about it,

but I now realized that it was so he could look down his nose at me. I don't know about that last part being true, but that sounds paranoid. But it is an interesting insight that he, was that aesthetic. Come on. Tom Berlin's aesthetically minded, too. It's not like he's just...

I think it is a bit of a power play to make your bandmates look up your nose holes to make sure there's no boogers. I don't even know if it's a power play to him as much as just like a demonstration of a kind of general attitude that doesn't include you. Like he's just kind of like... I don't think about you. He doesn't even have to say, I don't think about it. It's like the one up of it's even beyond the I don't think about you.

It's just not responding. It's like... Just, you know, I just need you to, just, can you tell me if this physical thing is happening? Okay, cool. I'm really sad, producer Dylan's not here anymore because I would be like, well, now you have to look up my nose before we go on every recording. Yeah. And I just, just to see her reaction. Producer Jesse, you will be looking up my notes.

New job responsibility just dropped. Just kidding. My nose is always perfectly clean and there's nothing to look for. Here's what happens after Richard Hell leaves. They replace him with Fred Smith, who. who was the basest of Blondie. They just took it. They just took Fred Smith away from Blondie.

They were like, that's ours now. Okay. Poached him. Tom Verlind said, I didn't try to talk Richard into staying when he left because I knew we needed a really good bass player. A friend, bitch. So we got Fred Smith and he's real solid.

He said, I didn't try to stop him because I knew actually what we needed was a good bass player. Oh, he's right. He's right. He's, okay, fine. He's right. But Richard. hell got them so far. I'm really sorry.

I will lay down in the fucking traffic for this. No Richard hell, no aesthetic. No tell. Yeah. There would be no CBGB's show. There would be no audience because no one would fucking have cared. Yeah. No, you're right. And I know. He is

also, as much as he's punk, he's also proto-grunge and anything that is related to that which I know is your bread and butter. That's right. Now you're speaking of my language. not, I mean, there's really nothing that Grunge attempted to do that wasn't already in the wheelhouse of one Richard Hell at this period. He would have done all of it, and he would have been just as useful and dynamic in that decade in that scenario as he was here. That's true.

Probably more appreciated, too. I think so. But this is like a really interesting inflection point where that's been set up. There's like clout built up. And to, Tom Verlaine's credit as unfortunate as it might seem to, you know, how much we love Richard Hell. It's like this is where Tom Verlaine feels comfortable to something forward is his own that is not related to anything and that's not trying to seem like part of a zeitgeist necessarily, or if it is, it's a very subtle expression of that. And that's what television and their herself will end up looking like and coming from. No, listen, of course.

He had a vision, and his vision was one in which the base was played properly, and I do not fault him at all for being like, see you a bitch, don't want the door hit you on your way out because I have shit to do. I'm just simply pointing out that I don't know that in the grand, I don't think about you at all. I don't know that it ever dawned on him that there would be no marquee moon in the way that we experienced it without the contributions of Richard Hell in thrusting them into the center of that zeitgeist. Totally. That's the same dynamic in many ways as Lou Reed and Andy Warhol

that split, where it's like Warhol puts everything he has in play to get the Velvet Underground noticed and respected. And then Lou Reed decides he doesn't need that anymore. because he's taken what he can get. But there's also a thing of, like, outgrowing something and having the courage to strike out on your own, even if it means kind of seemingly betraying the person who got you to that point. I think it was best for both of them, though. Richard Hell was not going to be in that kind of band.

It wasn't his vibe. Playing Generation is one of my favorite songs of all time. Every time I put it on, it brings me a great deal of joy. Yeah, it's amazing. The vocal delivery, just the poppiness. And I'm like, that couldn't have existed anywhere within the television universe as we understand it now. But it was able to exist joyfully in Richard Hell and the Voidoids. So it's like it worked for everyone.

Like he got to do what he was really meant to do as well on this earth, which was absolutely not a fucking 12 and a half minute song with three guitar solos in it. Joyfully. Yeah. That's true. That's, yeah. Here's what Debbie Harry said about Fred Smith joining television. Fred Smith fucking quit blondie. I was pissed.

I was pissed at all of them, all of television, all of the Patty Smith group, and Patty and Fred. I was pissed at Patty because she talked Fred into joining television. Yeah. The girlies are fighting. Feminism at its finest. There's only ever room for one woman at any given point in any given scene. You know the rules. Richard Hall on his part was like, oh, we were going to publish your books on Dot Press, my press, Patty and Tom.

Now we're not bitch. Deal with it. I don't think he said that verbatim. But, okay, now we finally have come. We are now finally going to put out a piece of recorded music. Little Johnny Jewel. Really underrated. I have to say, I think, Controversh, a pin.

I think Marky Moon is overrated as a song. And I think Little Johnny Jule is underrated as a song. It's my pin. Interesting take. That's it. That's what I said, but I said. That's it. That's sort of controversial. But Little Johnny Jewel is a really good song. It's a really good song.

It's cool. You know, what's funny is it has a lot more in common with late television than it does early television. Which is probably why I like it so much because I told you this offline and you were like, what the fuck bitch? That's not exactly what you said, but I felt the energy from you, which is that the third television album is my favorite television album. I just found it hard to believe because I didn't think. anybody knew it that well. I mean, I'm saying as of now, you know, like... I'm sure you listen.

Yeah. I mean, I listen to it today, and I mean, we'll get into it later. But there's something about that that this song really feels so much closer to and a lot closer to other Tom Verlain's solo stuff. It's a little bit smaller, more intimate in a way. This is the fall of 1975 when they put this out. They put it out on work records, quote unquote. That's not a real thing.

They self-released it. I just called it Ork Records to honor Terry Ork. Numero Group put out a big box called the Ork Records collection. It has a lot of this stuff, all of it. You have it in your house. I don't. I mean, I'm not that type of guy. Our Patreon isn't like popping off that hard where I can just be like buying box.

That's willy-nilly. I would think they would send it to you as a esteemed member of the music podcast community. Perhaps they should. If you're listening, Numero Group, Bangar Line. My favorite is that they continue to send me boxes of vinyl records, and I do not own a record player. You should send them directly to me. No, I will keep them. I like them as artifacts, but it just makes me laugh every time where I'm like, I'm like that meme of the guy in the corner of the party.

They don't know. They don't know. They don't know. I'm simply observing them, admiring them as art objects. Exactly. Whatever. Next time I have a boyfriend, he will come with a record player. That's how it works. Each boyfriend comes with a record player and it's always going to be better than the one I have, so whatever.

Yeah, I wonder if my ex has a record player currently. It's not for us to do. It's not for us to have. It's not our job. We should point out that Little Johnny Jewell, which does have the lyric, he's just trying to tell a vision. Right. He had no decision. He's just trying to tell a vision.

Little Johnny Jewel is seven minutes and six seconds. and Markey Moon is 11, almost 11 minutes. So in your estimation, Marky Moon is better. In my estimation, Johnny and Jewel, because I don't think, you know that you ain't got any songs where you need to be doing all that? I don't know that. There are no songs that anyone needs to be doing all that

as far as I'm concerned, which I know is going to spark heated debate and a million messages from men to me and my DMs that I will not open or care about. What do you mean by that, doing all that? You mean just like having that solo? Like being 11 minutes long. I don't know.

I think that there's something to be said for having a song that's long enough to zone the fuck out to. We'll get to it. We'll get there. Seven minutes or whatever we just said it was, little Johnny seven minutes, six seconds is too long for a seven inch. For one side. And so what they did was they split it. A side and B side is a little Johnny Jule. Parts one and two, yeah.

You went to your house to put this on. and in the middle of the song, you have to turn it over. Yeah. Bold. Tom Verlaine was like, they were like, what if you shortened it? And he was like, no, heart. No heart. No, thank you.

No, thanks. And this is why Richard Lloyd almost off the band, like I said earlier, because he was like, this is not the right choice for a single. We should not put this out. Here's what Tom Berlaine said about Little Johnny Jule. Back then, back in the time of Little Johnny Jule that he was written, this character that he's writing about, they knew what they had to do to get through the day. there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores,

what job to take, what work to do, but not Johnny. For him, it's all right there. It's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for. Johnny Jule was a character of a famous book. This is the review that the Village Voice wrote about their single. Television, one of New York's best underground bands, has released a single, Little Johnny Juel Parts 1 and 2, which is characteristically dynamic and spooky. Tom Varlane sings as if a knife were being held to his throat. The record doesn't capture Verlaine's Texas chainsaw intensity. His live performances are thick with tension, but its dissolute aura isn't easy to shake off. It's a good time for us to talk about Tom Verlaine's singing voice. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about it? I think it's interesting to describe it as having, being like a knife

at his throat or whatever they said. It's because it does have a kind of choked quality. singing despite some kind of tension or against his will under duress and that offers a lot of drama I think to the way he sings maybe the duress was richard hell dancing too much right next to him it's it's everything that's going on in that guy's head about what the world is I think it's it seems like for tom verlane it seems to be someone with a lot of ideas some which are very scary and odd about the way the world is that the way he sings kind of reflects that. Like he's he's singing despite this very hard and strange understanding of the atmosphere into which he's singing, if that makes some kind of sense.

Like it's sort of defiant in some way, but like you're not sure what he's like defying. It just sounds like he's kind of. rebelling against something odd that you don't quite know what it is. Would you say it's a good voice? It's a good voice for a band. It's got a lot of personality and atmosphere. Right. Yeah.

Like David Byrne. Or Bob Dylan. Or Bob Dylan famously. Can't sing. Can't, yeah, all my favorite singers couldn't sing. It made me think because I just thought about how we were talking about Blank Generation and how joyful that song is. So you don't ever really hear a lot of joy in Tom Berlin.

in singing. There's a lot of other stuff going on, and it's very captivating, but never joy. Here's something about it that I was thinking about today, is that the, especially in the last record, this really comes to the forefront. But there's a, this song too, being much like having something of that quality of the last record. There's like a conspiratorial tone of like imparting, like it's being whispered in a secret way. Like it is kind of letting you in on something. that there is a character to it of that which means that when he goes big, you know, relative to what he usually does or what he does here, that's pretty irresistible.

Maybe that goes back to what Richard Hall was saying about his persona being sort of like preoccupied with his insane conspiracy theories about how the world works and sort of not wanting to share them. And maybe his songs are his way of sharing them, but he's still a little hesitant to share them publicly because he knows they're going to It's like screaming a secret for the first time and you're kind of not sure how it's going to land, but you're just kind of, it comes with all the energy that went into screaming it in the first place. That's a good way to put it.

Apparently, this single was also for whatever reason reviewed by Penthouse, which caused a flurry of orders to come in. So they sold really well. Can you imagine a world in which like a print publication? A print publication semi-nudy mag is getting people to buy television. fucking albums. We used to be a proper country is what I would say to that. Yeah, we were on our way to something. We were so close. Okay, so there is a long piece in NME in March of 1976 in which Nick Kent comes and writes a scene report about New York. Vibe informant. Vibe informant, exactly, a spy, if you will. He talks about everybody, but here's what he said about, it's Goss. He's doing Goss.

But there were already problems creeping into the proceedings, all centering themselves on Verlaine's predictions for the kind of rampant, paranoid egotmania that Brian Ferry only dreams of wielding. Television suddenly became Verlaine's band. He was the musician, quote unquote, the more prolific composer, the face. Plus, he was Patty Smith's current sweetheart. They were the couple, with photos of them intensely staring into the limpid pools of each other's eyes, appearing in magazines like rocks. The captions always referred to this heady romantic consummation of two rock geniuses. Hell simply had to go. First, Verlaine decided to drop all his old school pals songs from the television repertoire.

And then when Hell was informed by his new boss to cut out all the onstage leaping about, like, make with the frozen to the spot, glazed eyes, feet cemented to the floor act, Richard Mann. He was left with no choice but to quit the band he once helped to initiate. television don't look so hot in photos now. The band on stage looked dazed and distant, stationary, staring out blankly, while locals even claim that sets have veered more towards a heated but often obtuse, quasi-jazz, feel of late. Verlaine holds the center of stage intoning. Verlaine is still a damn fine songwriter, of course, the early songs, the punk Chandler-esque

prove it, the arms of Venus de Milo, hard on love. They sound even better than ever, even if they're one recording, and independently press single, Little Jimmy Jewel, this is a typo in enemy, sounds pretty awful. Verlaine, if he can control his tyrannical urges, will be a major force in the new 70s rock, even if his visions are often too esoterically conceived and cramped by the composer's predilection for strange poetry. If he can't, he'll just have to contend himself with being an obscure twilight legend groomed in the Sid Barrett school. We could, we should have just read this and not done the whole episode. I can't believe how well, listen.

That shit is. First of all, can you believe that that was journalism? But secondly, he conveniently does not reveal that he had come to New York to do the scene report and was sent straight to Richard Hell's apartment to score dope. I forgot to mention by the end of Richard Hell's tenure in television, he had developed, you know, a fondness for heroin, as had Richard Lloyd. So it wasn't the reason that he was kicked out of the band, or that he left or whatever, but they were doing quite a bit. him, Richard Lloyd, and Terry Ork were doing a little heroin, a little bit of heroin. And Nick Kent, apparently, was also doing a little bit of heroin, allegedly, because he was sent to Richard Hull to score and ended up staying with him.

So that's why this piece is suspiciously written in a very anti-Tom Verlaine stance, because he got all his information from his buddy that he was staying at doing heroin with. But it's amazing that it was that way, because it, I, I did not know about the existence of a piece that gave the other side. It seems like this is a unique example of that perspective being honored in print. Oh, no, Nick Kent does it a lot. We'll get into it. Nick Kent was a little obsessed with television.

That's interesting. But it's cool that you hear that aspect of it because everything else, yeah, seems to be like doe-eyed, like, oh, look how beautiful that couple. Yeah, there's like fucking. So that comes out. I'll tell you what, Tom Berlin didn't like it. And they do mention at the end of that piece, the strange fact is that television have yet to secure a concrete record company deal. So television make more demos.

They're like, let's fucking do this. We need to get signed. They give their new demos to Clive Davis at Arista. The demo had torn curtain, I don't care, guiding light, and oh me a moray. That's the song that Richard Lloyd wanted to be the single. I don't know that one. I'm a shame to say. I mean, neither baby I couldn't find it.

It might be somewhere, but... I'll have listened to it by the time this airs. So apparently Clive Davis loved the demo and did offer them a contract. And then they were like, oh, just kidding, no. Because they didn't want to be in direct competition with Patty on the same label. I presume that might have come from the management. I really don't know. Also in March of 76, Tom and Patty break up, basically, because that's when she meets Fred Sonic Smith.

And that's, it's over for the other host because that's the love of her life. and she never dates anyone else again. It's over between us. It's over between us. Sire tried to sign them, who had already signed the Ramones and the Talking Heads, Seymour Stein, the ledge. But they said no, because apparently, according to Richard Lloyd, the contracts weren't very good.

But I thought it was really interesting because I wanted to bring this up to you. Apparently Seymour Stein told Richard Lloyd, television would be the grateful dead of the future. And I'm like, finally, one fucking person saw it that way. because that is how I experienced television a little bit more in that vein than in any vein of whatever the fuck is happening at CBGBs, even if we talk about talking heads who are still spiritually punk. Television is not spiritually punk, not except for Richard Hell putting a couple of haircuts and some name changes and then leaving. Musically, not really.

I mean, we'll get into it. There's a few instances on Marky Moon that I was like, okay, I hear a little remnant here or there. But that's not the vibe. The vibe is. Marky Moon is not punk. Was there another punk band that anyone looked at and was like you're going to be the Grateful Dead? No, I mean, I think that the reason for that probably comes from just the situation that was developing.

I do understand that comparison only in the context of it probably did seem that way, given that people were showing up organically to see this band. This band has virtuosic guitar moments. 11-minute song. Yeah, long songs. Jazz drummer. Yeah, the band really has no interest in being any one thing. They're able to take on various things at any time.

There's this ambition they've got that, like, they could be the band for the moment by making these songs that feel bigger than any one subject. And the dead does that in a way. But it's funny that they say that because it seems like I don't think anybody would have said that if it weren't for the, the buzz that was just, like, generated by Richard Hell and his savvy and his vision. See, I disagree.

I think that Seymour Stein was actually really, like, tapped into something. Because, like, I think he saw what their shows were like. Not just the fervent audience, but the actual, like, vibe. You know what I mean? No, I do know. I mean, just imagine being in that darkened room watching them play

a let 12 men. minute version. You know what I mean? Like, I think he, because he's at, you're at C.B's and you're seeing the talking heads. You're seeing the Ramones who are playing literally a minute and a half long songs. You're seeing Blondie who's basically playing disco punk or whatever. And then you're experiencing this fucking shit. And you're like, but I just found an interesting that nobody else said it, you know, like. Well, that's the highest compliment anyone could give. I mean, really saying something at that moment saying, this is the grateful dead of the future. Like, what was it like walking it back? Like, what does that mean?

That is saying that this is something everyone will love and it'll be smarter. I don't know that everyone loves the Grateful Dead, but okay, good. I mean, a huge amount of people. Like, a big, a swath of people will. He basically was saying, like, you're going to play forever and people will follow you. And that it will be something that is deeper and more precise than what that is. And less commercially successful. Because the Grateful Dead was a lot of things, but they were not commercially successful in the traditional sense, right?

They were on the radio. They weren't. Yeah, but he didn't know that. when he said that, I think him saying that at the time is just like a really utopian and beautiful idea. Like, wouldn't it be great if that was the case? I think you probably knew Marky Moon wasn't going to on the radio, but who knows? At that point, who knows what's going to happen? The 70s was the Wild West if they would play a something fucking long-guess.

Nobody knew Blondie would be on the radio at that point. You're right. You're right. Yeah, it's the Wild West. Blondie did laugh really. That was the end of that quote that I didn't read. She laughed really hard about Pritzpeth. She was like, ha ha, Betty fucking regrets it. She literally said that.

Well. Because you know what? Blondie got rich. Yeah. Yeah. And Blondie's beloved. More importantly, they made a lot of money when television did not. There is that story, which I mentioned to you, which was in the book by Richard Lloyd, where television is touring through Eastern Europe or something.

It was England. But yeah. With Blondie? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I forget where it was. It's snowing. They're in a van.

And they hear the cars come on the radio. And Tom Verlaine is crestfallen and has this moment of, well, like, well, fuck. Like they did it. They made a commercial version of television. We're done. Well, he could have done it too, baby. If he had just cut little Johnny Jule down from fucking seven minutes to five or three. Okay.

They said no desire. Anyways, grateful to the comment aside. and they end up signing to Electra, thanks in part to Danny Field, setting up a private night at CBGB's with them playing for the label as president and this woman Karen Berg who signed them the end of the summer in 1976. According to Richard Lloyd, Tom Berlaine asked to be signed just himself. No. That's what Lloyd said, and again, I'm simply saying what he said. I don't know what's the facts. Grant assault.

Yes, but Electra was like, no. And so the whole band is signed. And they were signed to quite a few, I believe, albums that they did not end up producing. Before we get to the album, I just have to tell you about this really funny thing, which is that, did you know that Tom Verlaine had like an ongoing beef with Lester Bings? Who didn't? This is like so funny. Okay. So Lester Bings, perhaps more, you know, aesthetically minded like myself, he loved the Ramones and punk and he didn't.

I like talking heads, but he kind of thought talking heads and television sucked. He was always like, that's not punk. You know what I mean? You know, he had his opinions. He apparently thought television shows with their worshipful fans were church-like. Grateful Dead. Yeah. Grateful Dead.

He said this to Richard Meltzer, fellow iconic critic. Everybody had been telling me for three years, they're the new Velvet Underground, you know? And I mean, they reminded me so much of the Grateful Dead. Just boring solos, endless laborious climbing up in the scales, then, get to the top and there'd be a moment of silence and everybody in the crowd would go berserk applauding. So he didn't like it. And then I guess they had a weird dinner and Verlaine, I guess, you know, understandably was like, you don't like my band, like you're weird, fuck you.

And Lester Bangs is like, who gives the fuck what I think of your fucking band? Let's just be friends. And Tom Verlaine was, I don't think he ever said anything. He's probably just standoffish because he's Tom Verlain. And that's just how he is. And Bings did not like it. And then he later heard from Peter Loeffner that Tom Verlaine had said he didn't think Lester Bings would ever make it in New York City. And then that was over for Bings.

He was like, fuck you. You're dead to me, bitch. And he said, he told Richard Meltzer that they'd pass each other in the streets for years. And he would, Tom Verlain would always pretend he doesn't see me, you know. He's a weird snob. And then in 1979, they asked Tom Verlaine about this. And he goes, I don't know if I'd recognize him. I only met him like twice.

Full Don Draper. I don't think about him. I don't know him. I don't know him. I don't think about him at all. He said I don't know her. I wouldn't recognize his face. Great and beautiful gowns.

Great gown. Beautiful. Great gowns. Yeah. The way that he is in that situation is also like, you know, as as bitchy as it is, it's also the reason why he's great. Bob Dylan, I'll bring it back. You know, you got me on this show. You put me on.

I'm going to make Bob Dylan things. I knew you were going to talk about. Dylan says something about destiny. It's something you know about yourself and never really tell anyone because to tell someone is kind of to put it at risk of being dissolved or managed away from you, taken out of your hands. I'm paraphrasing. I think that that thing that earlier we were talking about, you know, Tom Verlaine had it.

He knew he had it. And the reason why he was such a pill so bitchy and dismissive, it would seem in various scenarios, is because he knew it too and that he was being protective of it. Do you agree with that sentiment that you have to not reveal what you think about yourself and your destiny because it can be taken away from you? I think that's a really interesting way to think. And I don't agree. I don't think anyone can take anything. away from you. It's the same thing that I talked about. I don't know what the other episode was,

but Jane's Inix maybe. When people say they copied me, which was a bit of a Tomberlane thing to say, I don't think anyone can copy you. And I think when you say it, it's weird and kind of losery, to be honest, because if someone can take something of yours and make it their own that easily, then it wasn't that good or it wasn't that yours. So like, it's truly not a thing. But I only pointed out because I think there is a certain personality type that does believe that, does believe their thing can be taken away from them. I guess what I believe is somewhere in between these things. I think that there is some truth to that.

Like, what if I start the Joker Woman mindset? The Joker Woman podcast is my third podcast. That would be fine. I'll say that for the Jokerman mindset idea, it's just that it's some kind of artistic optimism is at the root of that. I don't know. It's just, it's this thing. that if you say it directly, you're risking it not being believed. And it's more of, I think that

maybe what Dylan leaves unsaid and what Tom Verlaine leaves unsaid in that kind of thing, is that if you do divulge your inner ideas, your dream about what you can do, you risk any of your own insecurities flaring up by what people say, and then that can destroy it. That is a really, that is a better way of understanding it. It's not like someone will take it. It's just that like you might destroy it yourself. You might throw it away because you stop believing in it. Right.

In some ways, you know, it's, it's an antisocial to be that way, but I think it explains a lot of antisocial behavior by artists because calls they make decisions they do are like, you know, Lou Reed leaving Warhol. That's like a classic example. It's just like I can't be in someone's shadow or else the publicity might throw something in my direction that makes me not feel like I know what I'm doing anymore. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, we're signed bitch, so we're going to make an album.

We're making a record album. Yeah. Well, Evan Evans. we've reached 1977. Let me paint you a little picture of what's going on in 1977 musically. This is the year that the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack is dominating the charts.

Shout off the BeeGs. Also Fleetwood Mac's Rumors. Billy Joel, the Stranger. Foreigner, self-titled. Kansas. Are you a Kansas fan? Am I a Kansas fan? That's right. You heard me.

I don't think so. These all sound like they're all albums that you just see like the default record store albums pack. Like these albums all were printed one billion times. And that's why even today you go into a record store and you see a ton of all of these. Yeah, they were the highest selling albums of 1977. That's why you see them. But specifically that year, like I feel like this. This was a huge year for just certain records that forever stuck around.

Like, even other years, I don't know that Fleetwood Mac's rumors. It's like glitter. Like, it got everywhere and it stuck around everywhere. There's always copies of it everywhere. We're just a few short moments away from the disco collapsing the record industry. So we're still in the shining light of things selling. Other maybe not bestselling albums, but notable for our causes. Obviously, sex pistols.

never mind the bullocks kind of an important album Talking Heads 77 Sort of important Your friends Steely Dan My friends Yeah sure I don't know if Tom Verlaine was listening to any Steely Dan but

We can never know It's doubtful but I bet he and Donald Fagan We're both into some of the same jazz Maybe that's probably as far as it goes though And Bob Dylan Of course Of course Marky Moon comes out February 8th, 1977 on Elektra.

It's produced by Andy Johns. So basically, Electra promised Tomberling he could produce the album, but only if he's assisted by someone. So he chooses or they help him choose Andy Johns, who was more of an engineer. I think that was by design so that there wasn't like two cooks in the kitchen trying to produce. Andy Johns was the younger brother of Glyn Johns, who had worked just like on a few Beatles and stones. albums and Andy had assisted on those also Led Zeppelin Moth the Hoopold I think the whole thing of it was that Tom Berlaine really liked how Goatshead soup sounded and really Andy had worked on that I love that album that's like my favorite stones album you and tom berlaine that's cool Andy Johns had never heard of

television and his God-given life when he was given this this job he said my first impression was that they couldn't play and they couldn't sing and the music was very bizarre. Couldn't play. Listen, I'm simply reporting the news. I know, I know. I'm talking to him. Andy Johns was also a known drunk and while he was actually quite a good producer apparently, according to Richard Lloyd and various other sources, he did good job micing things and stuff. He would sit in the control room and then just drink a bottle of wine to himself and apparently turned down the playback to zero. So, yeah, I wasn't even hearing them.

He was just, like, enjoying his drunken stupor. And then they would, like, catch him. And he'd be like, oh, no, what? I'm listening. You start turning some knobs. He's like twittles. King shit, honestly. Which is fine, because Tomberlane didn't want, I don't think him to do much past

that. In the studio, they wrote two new songs or recorded, two new songs. I'm not really sure when they wrote them. Guiding Light and Torn Curtain. But then the rest were older. Here's a fun fact I want to tell you. about the solos, which you probably already know because you read Richard Lloyd's book, but they split them 60-40. That was sort of the deal. And there were certain keys that would go to Tom

and certain keys that would go to Richard Lloyd. He said, for instance, Tom did not like playing lead in the key of G. So I got those songs, C-no-evil, for instance, or psychotic reaction, both in the key of G, as well as some of the songs in the key of C. Tom liked to solo in D. And we split the key of E pretty much evenly. That's an interesting way to divide the labor. It's all French to me, but, but, um. Yeah, well, I'm not a musician. You said you played in a band.

So you lied. I played drums and, you know, fake my, I was the Richard Hell type of musician, you know, in the band. Just vibes, you know, talented at vibes. Like one, one might, you know, be charitable enough to say. But not, not like, I don't know from keys and, uh, signatures and whatever. Sure. Well, that's how they did it.

So guitar center, aficionados, you're welcome. I gave you that information. Here's what Tom Verlian said about the theme of the album. The songs are usually about someone who's both outside a situation and inside it at the same time. Verlaine shrugs. It's some kind of way of life. That feels true. I think we can all agree that they are songs.

Well, I think that that specific description of them, that does feel very, very apt for at least a couple of the songs I can think of off the top of my head. Right. We'll go song by song because this is probably an important one. But before we get there, I just want to tell you the album's packaging was designed by art director Tony Lane. However, the front cover photo, it was shot by Robert Mauplethorpe, best friend of Patty Smith had shot the cover of horses. Maplethorpe gave them contact prints, right, to like pick which one they liked. Richard Lloyd took the band's favorite shot from the contact prints to a

print shop in Times Square and asked for color photocopies so that he can give it to the bands they could all look at it. And then he being Richard Lloyd asked the guy at the copy shop, hey, can you actually just print more of those but just like turn the knobs with your eyes closed while you're copying them? And that is how we got the altered photo that Maple Thork took with the weird colors. and it actually is so different, I think, that according to Richard Lloyd, that the copyright is up for debate as to who owns it. Yeah, the way it looks is obviously not like another of Maplesorp's photos. Sure. It looks all fucked up.

But it's great. It has a very... I love it. I love it's very... It's one of the greatest album covers. I agree. This is very funny. There was an interview with Robert Maplesorp and New York Rocker.

And part of the guy was like, but he's a very interesting guy. Isn't he, Tom Verlaine? Robert Mablethorpe goes, I guess. And the guy goes, I thought it was a real pity Richard Hell left television. I think a lot of people did. Do you know him? He was interesting because he was so sort of energetic. He had a crazy face and stuff.

And I just understood that they had horrible arguments and he'd basically been forced out. Robert said, I would think that was probably it because Tom probably wants it all for himself. Victor said, Victor's the interviewer. Are these other people in the group interesting? Robert. Maybe the one on his left. The others are very nice, but they're completely... When the album cover was picked out, it was the other boy who came up with him in shows. The other boy. I just thought that was kind of funny. Tom Verlain's interesting, I guess. Incredible. Incredible. Incredible answer. Okay. Let's talk about the songs. Cino Evil, a gorgeous opener, honestly, fun song, and a respectable four minutes long.

Yeah, it's hefty, but not too much. It's a little bit more than a stick. standard three-minute bop, but it doesn't feel like it's too long. It's just a perfect. It's maybe one of the greatest openers of a rock album. It's a good song. It's fun. I like that it sets the ocean imagery going that pretty much doesn't end throughout the album. This one has, I get ideas, I get an ocean. I want a nice little boat made out of ocean. There's more ocean imagery that you pick up on throughout the whole record. Yes. I don't just pick up on it. It's there. I'll give you the, I'll give you the lines. I've not always focused on the aquatic side. Oh, I really, really jumped out at me.

I do, I mean, obviously the album is very like urban dark of night downtown New York, you know, whatever. But there's a whole other undercurrent, if you'll allow me to say. That is oceanic and about water. Even a moon, right? A moon, controls the ocean. The tides. That's right. It feels like a regular rock song, like a kind of barn burner. A barn burner? You know, like just kind of a big hard rocking jam, whatever. But it, the lyrics, I mean, are not typical at all. I mean, I want a boat made out of ocean. I want to fly a fountain. I mean, the first line is great. It's what I want. I want now. And it's a whole lot more than anyhow. What I want I want now is an incredible opening lyric. And it's a whole lot more

than, in quotes, anyhow. Like, it's just kind of setting up that this is a libidinal, intense song, but it is absolutely not going to be standard fair, even if it feels like akin to something like that the stones might do. It's beyond that. And then, of course, I see no evil being the main refrain, it already sets up with the first song that there's this beyond space that the rest of the album is going to take place in. Tomberlin really likes a lyric that's like, I want a nice little boat made out of ocean, like a little clever wink wink. It's like the same as like falling into the arms of Venus to Milo.

She doesn't have arms, right? You can't really have a boat made out of ocean because how would that work? You know, it's like a, it's a cleverness. I don't know how to say it. It's like a poetic double negative. big fan of that too. It's like cyclical or circular. It sort of cancels itself out while also being somehow making sense. Venus stimulus arguably one of the most famous television songs, right? Like, I guess after Marky Moon. Yeah, definitely. I think so. What do you think this song is

about? Well, first of all, I just think it's one of the most gorgeous songs. I think it's their best song, basically. I just love the lyrics. I mean, the imagery that it gives you at the very beginning, very Dylan-esque, I mean, you can take a drink. It's exactly the thing he was saying. It's like being within it and without in a situation. He's like actively talking about being part of this experience with this social world and then articulates how it feels totally groundless and he feels kind of lost within it with the idea, the image of the arms. I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo.

It's like falling into this nothingness, but it's also like beautiful in a way. That's the main idea. And then the arc of the song is kind of like coming to terms with getting yourself out of that, getting yourself out of that place that feels like you're floating. Evan Evans. Have you done psychedelic drugs? Of course. Because it feels like you're missing a little thing here that is so obviously, to me,

the premise of the song. I mean, he says like some new kind of drug. So, I mean, you could think of it as like a drug song. The way he talks about stuff does feel very like acid trippy, you know. tight toy night street so bright the world was so thin between my bones and skin those are just fucking great lyrics and my hands are like gloves my senses are sharp my hands are like gloves who amongst us hasn't done a little bit of mushrooms look down at their hands and been like what the fuck are these things if you've ever done psychedelics in new york city it's a particular

kind of thing an interesting place to do that and uh there is some just really vivid sense of that in this song. And then there's sort of the arc with the idea of, and Richard, Richard said, why don't we dress up like cops, think of what we could do, but something said, you'd better not. That's right. He's still a fucking goody tishes even when he's on drugs. And then those background things of, and I felt, did you feel low and huh?

Or not. And then, huh? That's like. so good. Goofy. It's so good. It was like so surprising the first time I heard that. It did not expect there to be like a Muppet chorus like behind him. The original version of it, or like an early version I was listening to earlier and sent you. Yes. It was just less impactful. It seemed less surrounding. It was less vibey. Yeah. But less vibey, less about the lyric. It sounded more like Roxy music or like an Eno song. Like pop, glam, Eno.

No. Because if you must know, I was forced at the hand of Evan Evans to download MP3s onto my computer, which is a male trait and a male activity. And I didn't want to do it, but it was the only way to listen to them. So now I have them all downloaded onto my laptop. Yeah, a compilation called, I think it's called The Season in Hell. It is, yeah. And it's just a ton of early rehearsal recordings with mostly songs that didn't end up on the record.

We'll put the link in my newsletter whenever I had dained to send it out. but it was really enlightening to listen to those early versions of the song. Some, some I liked a little better. Yeah, I mean, it's a personal preference thing, but I think it really does give some of a sense of perspective to what the record ends up being versus what this band was before. The whole idea that they were produced at all for this recording is kind of misleading. Because it's really much more like the Steve-el.

Beanie school of like engineering. He was an engineer. Yeah, he set up the mics. I don't think he had really anything to do with the sound of the album past that. But I do think I ever seem to recall in the book, the Richard Lloyd book, that he talks about the producer saying something like, well, you know, just being baffled that they didn't want any reverb, that they didn't want any kind of effects. Yeah, he basically said, I think it was the drums, too.

He wanted the drums to be really big. And Tom Verland was like, we're a guitar. band, the drums are there for support. We want to, like, highlight the guitars. But they did do overdubbing. Yeah. But it's not, it's not a record that is about effects. It's all there already. And it's so much about just the interplay between these musicians and, like, the actual rhythms and melodies that seem to be, like, referencing what the lyrics are doing. I think that's the biggest deal for me about what they do here. You feel like the music supports the lyrics like really directly?

Yeah, yeah. It really feels like the melodies, they're cradling around the lyrics in a way that feels it's not like that thing where so much rock music, which can be really great, you know, of like someone singing defiantly over this like roaring band. It's this feeling that every part of this group is very, delicately intertwining with itself. And the guitar interplay does that. But more importantly, more interestingly, I think it's the way that the lyrics reflect that

and that just the mood, the vibe, the tone of everything being really delicately honed for the lyric, you know, while having some muscle too. I feel like friction is maybe the most like remnantly punk song on there. What do you think? Yeah. I would say so. It's also kind of the sexiest one. I mean, it's definitely overt. But of course, just like anything else they do, it's it's it's overtly sexy in a way that also features the fucking line. How does a snake get out of its skin? Here's a depiction. Oh, stop this head motion, set the sails, you know. Like, it's just, it is not standard fair.

What about you complain about my dick, shun? I think that's pretty. Yeah. It's pretty overt. It does make me laugh every time, though, I like it. It's funny. The part with that, how does a snake get out of its skin? And then here's a depiction leading into the guitar solo.

That's what you're talking about. That's exactly the lyrics, the imagery, like, syncing up perfectly with the way it sounds. This song doesn't feel slightly out of place to you on the rest of the album, though? It does in a sense, but I think that it's kind of an important thing to include on the record. I mean, when we talk about what the remnants of like the actual punkiness are, it's a testament to how refined the record ends up as a finished product, because it does almost feel like Ceno Evil and Friction are a little bit out of place.

Right. That's because everything else kind of reaches this new stage of it's just not related to that early version of the band anymore. That sort of thrashy, like, CBGB vibe. It really is much more composed feeling. But friction and Sino Evil, especially friction, they have this kind of like, yeah, really strong libidinal energy that I think is really good to have. have on something like this because it it keeps you interested. I mean, it shows that this is not as heady as it might get. It's always going to still be kind of rooted in desire and like street level, real life,

real feelings, and it can still be kind of hot and volatile. Yeah. I think that's just like a pacing issue too. Those are paced differently. I think the whole album is pre-libidinal. I mean, there's like an undercurrent of sex that flows through the whole thing. Speaking of, let's talk about Marky Moon. I have a controversial opinion about Marky Moon, and I'm just going to say it.

It's too fucking long. It's too long. Wrap it up, bitch. We don't need it to be this long. Yeah, that would be a controversial opinion about Marky Moon. That's why I said what I said. Am I supposed to defend it now? No, I don't know.

This is just simply my opinion. I might stand alone, and that's fine. Others, you know, perhaps would counter that with saying that it's not every day you have guitar soloing that is this good. Literally, thank fucking God. I didn't say this long. Is it this good? No, but what I heard. I know.

Well, I think that it does approach that issue that, or an issue that I have with some like classical music. I think that's what you're experiencing. You mean like Chopin classical? Is that like? Yeah. Yeah, no, like capital C classical music. Like, a lot of the time when I'm listening to that or hear it, I have the problem of being like, how am I supposed to keep track of all these little, discreet little moments and like it keeps developing and it gets so curly cute and like,

I can't even feel like it just feels like what am I supposed to be imagining a fucking battle, like horses jumping over shit for 20 minutes right now? Yeah. But with this, I find it's like, I. can get into it for the reason that there's lyrics to set it up and it I think has a little bit more of a, I'm just more enticed to like actually stay with that soloing, which I think has some really cool moments. Awesome.

To each their own. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not going to tell you that you need to listen to a 10 minute and 38 second song. Of which six minutes is guitar solos. I made that up. But that sounds kind of actually. accurate actually. It does sound true. I didn't sit and time it, but I'm probably not too far off.

But boy, I mean, it's, it's a major song. I mean, I can't, I can't lay off that easy. It is major. You're right. The beginning of it, the way that the parts come in together, that's so unlike just, you know, one, two, three, four, let's go into the song. It's so, it's like clockwork. It's just like all these little things fit together perfectly and resolve perfectly. You can tell they spent a lot of time figuring out how that would happen. And there's no tricks. It's just kind of choreographed and structured, built in this really artful way.

I mean, the lyrics are incredible. I would never disagree with that. That's not even up for debate. I mean, I remember how the darkness doubled. Incredible. Lightning struck itself is another one of those Tomberlandisms. We're like, you know, you thought you were real clever with that one, buddy boy, huh? Well, you know, that's like the meanest thing you could say to a poet, I guess, is like, oh, you thought you snapped, huh?

Yeah. You thought you were really that bitch with that one, huh? Lightning struck itself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kind of is, it kind of is, though. I mean, I think it works pretty well. It has my favorite line, which I almost wanted to have been my senior quote, I think, in high school.

Yeah, the look here junior, the don't you be so happy and for heaven's sake, don't you be so sad. That's so good. What did you choose in lieu of that one? More cringe, but even more apt for this. It was actually an excerpt of like this sort of haiku from Mexico City Blues by Jack Oh my God. Not the Karowak excerpt haiku in the senior. Well, yeah.

Your book in the year 2010 or whatever it was that you graduated. Yeah, yeah. Mine was Blink 182. Sorry about it. That's just fucking cool. What was your quote? School life, it was a woken dream. It's from the song Carousel.

Real ones know. Markey Moon was apparently supposed to be 20 verses long. That's what talks. Tomberlain told Caroline Coon and Melody Maker, he used to do it on acoustic guitar and it had 20 verses. Like a folk song. I guess so. Like a Bob Dylan song. Like fucking Desolation Row.

It's incredible. The skill that you have to bring up every single thing back. You know, we are talking about fucking Marky Moon here. Uh-huh. But Marky Moon, like what other song is this like? That is something I want to bring up. It's like, what other artist is this like? Yeah, I guess nothing.

I mean, if there are ones, I'm not deeply familiar with them because that's not my milieu. Guitar solo-driven music has never been my milieu. Well, even just rock lyrics from that perspective. Right. This is really, it seems to me, like, so indebted to Dylan. Right. I spoke to the man down at the tracks. It's like, you know, one, $11 bills.

I only got 10 or whatever. I might be biased because I just spent a long time. time reading the Talking Heads lyrics. But I do feel like the talking head's lyrics are also sort of surrealist, except they're just funnier. They have like a lighter sense of humor to them than perhaps what's happening here. That's not a indictment. It's simply an observation. But they're also sort of based in this like bizarreo poetic take on the world and particularly urban life, you know. Yeah, I think early on the talking heads were a little bit more consciously like that. Their songs were about, I mean, even just down to the title,

it was like more songs about buildings and food. And over time, I think, like by the time they're doing burning down the house, and whatever, it's like, it seems like it is the thing that they say is the way that Byrne often wrote, which is kind of doing gibberish and then listening back to it, kind of transpose and like thinking about what those sounds. sound like and making up words that fit into that phrasing. I know Markey Moon is one of the most iconic songs of all time, and I do get the best part of it, which is the really stuck in my head

because they do it a thousand times in the song. And it's a, do no, no, no, no, no. What a song title and album title, too, Marquis Moon? Yeah, it's good. So it is the last track of Side 1, and then Side 2 begins with elevation. The only note I wrote to myself here is Tom sounds so sad here. This song, I think if it was played on an acoustic guitar, would sound really sad. Like, it really, it's buoyed a little bit and brought up with those drums, which are, I mean, the song has like some pep and some spirit to it, a little bit of an edge too.

But kind of has this mournful tone. Yeah. But it's not all more. Like, this song has definitely a feeling of fighting against one's own sense of pride or something, like elevation. Yeah, maybe the ego that Richard Hell spoke of. Yeah, elevation, don't go to my head. This thing of, yeah, or not wanting to get your hopes up too high. And so there is this kind of internal conflict that the song brings up, which goes again to that, that theme of being inside a situation.

and wondering about it as it's happening, sort of seeing it from like an astral plane while you're also just like doing whatever it is. And then in Marky Moon, the title track, you've got that quote about, don't you be so happy, and for heaven's sake, don't be so sad.

It's that even, that too, is kind of, he's talking about, it's like an emo record, but it's a really weird one. Like it's very oblique and, odd one, but it's kind of like that.

It feels for me a little distant to be an emo record. I feel like emo records tend to be more viscerally, obviously emotional, you know. Yeah, I mean, it's like the emo record of a guy's real hard to read. But he's, he's, it seems like he's feeling it. Right, right. What about guiding light? This one is like their sort of religious sounding song. I mean, ocean imagery alert, babe.

Darling, darling, do we part? part like the seas, the roaring shells, the drifting of the leaves. It's really gorgeous. It's a love song, I guess, or devotional. It's a sad love song about parting, right? I don't love the song, I'll be honest with you. It's not my favorite on the record, but I do think it's nice that it's here in a way. It sounds really 70s to me, for sure.

Would you say that they seem of their time and other, like overall, though? Yeah. It doesn't sound like the 70s so much, as much as other records do for the reason that they had that, like, total restraint. Like, we're not going to do these things just because we can now. And often that's... You make studio tricks. Yeah. I mean, on like the Jokerman show, we, you know, have slog through and then found, like, enjoyment in the slog of going through records.

that sound so chintzy and rinky-dink and dated and overwrought from the 80s and 70s. The 80s is particularly painful. I mean, Empire Burlesque by Bob Dylan is like the most infamous example of that. But even then, you know, there's things to love about it in some way. But there's this syndrome of so many artists thinking, you know, maybe not feeling confident in the moment and then adopting studio. methods because it's like, you know, maybe on some level a cover for a lack of self-assurance. And so it's a real confident move that they just keep it so clean. I don't think Tom Verlaine lacks for confidence.

No, no. I want to talk about Prove-It because Prove-It is a very odd song to me. And I like it. It's like a bizarro doo-wop song that's like underwater and slow, like it's a chopped and screwed do-op song or something? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. Which shows up later, too. I feel like he has an affinity for that. Oh, yeah. They all

did. All those people did. All those people? Yeah, like all the, just rockers around this time. Like, suicide is fucking doo-op music. And Martin Rev has, like, several records, one record that's all little do-op songs. Well, I mean, the Ramones

are literally, you know, just extremely sped up. But It was always kind of going on. So they do it in this kind of funny noir way or something. Guess what else is in the song? What? Ocean imagery, water. The cave, the waves.

Yeah, yeah. The smell of water would resume. See, it's all over. I didn't pick up on that. I'm kind of shocked. That's a good catch. Some poet you are of an album. Yeah, I know.

I didn't even notice the album was all wet. I think there's some. Something about the idea that it's like a detective story. This case is closed, confidential. There's all this kind of, and he has, again, that's like a me-assie, P-I-A-Vy. Yeah, exactly. He really is into that kind of like shadowy streets after dark,

kind of absurdist detective vibe. I mean, which was, I assume, again, I was not there, the vibe of downtown New York in the 70s is that it was. was sort of this fun house of darkness and fear and crime and, you know, nefarious activity. But he seems to give it a little bit of, like, really leaning on the fun house aspect. I think that's a part of Tom Verlaine's sensibility that shows up again and again in varying degrees. Like, he really loves this kind of cartoonish thing. He's like Donald Duck walking around in a trench coat.

this song. Donald Duck walking around at a trench coat. Prove it? Yeah. This case is closed. It's pretty silly, but he seems to be having a good time. This case is closed. I love this song. It's really unique.

I'm sorry, and I'm just going to say it. The only note I wrote down for Torn Curtain is Jesus Christ truly wrap this shit up, babe. Yeah. Let's get to it. Let's fucking finish it. It's like they needed to put more songs on here, and they're like, what about that one? which was apparently one they wrote in the studio.

So maybe they were just like, okay, I was just probably one more here. Yeah. I think the reason why you'd say, wrap it the fuck up is because this is a really lugubrious fucking ballad that is like really gothic and long.

It's six minutes long. And it's kind of dreary. The whole thing is really... You're correct. Everything you're saying is correct. It's like, like, Castlevania. Like sort of just like spooky. castle music and it drags. It's dirge-like.

You're really selling it. I think that people that haven't heard are like, oh my God, can I hear that? Yeah, I mean, I think that it is like maybe the most unique song on the record. It really feels like what other song is like this is kind of a strange vibe. This is so far from like, let's get a few guys on the stage with some guitars and drums and bang out some songs. This is a very material. meticulously composed song that has zero fun, basically, and a lot of atmosphere. And that is something that they'll play with for the rest of their career. And I mean, all through the record that exists, but you get all that and almost no real rocking on torn curtain.

And it ends the record on the kind of downer note. A bummer note. Bummer note. Yeah. Do you feel like there is a whole swath of television fans who perhaps are not so much fans of the actual album, but of the vibe of television in which in their mind television was this cool CBGB's band that they associate with the other cool CBGB's band, and they may be, when pressed, might be like. I think that maybe it's something, at least for me, I can say that it was.

sort of the opposite, but the reason why I thought they were cool is because they were not, they were like not like every other band, but they kind of represent something about the potential to take whatever that is and go beyond it. I think some people do not get on board with what this band represents in that way, and other people do. And there's a real cutoff. Like, some people just, they are not interested in whatever this leads to. They're like, where's the fucking rock songs? And a whole lot of other people, I think, were noticing and I think they're proof positive that that scene didn't just have to end with, you know, it's not just about the party

and that night. It's about creating something that really, shoots for something a bit more delicate, profound, difficult, all that jazz. And I guess I'm the snob who's like, you know, I was like, yeah, I'm intrigued by the latter. Sure. I can see that. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about how they benefited from the cultural placement that was sort of at the hands primarily of Richard Hell and just CBGBs. But I think they also suffered from it, right? Because then you have all these people coming to the record expecting punk, because that's sort of how they were positioned. And it's definitely not a punk album.

Yeah, but I think that when pedantic types, you know, step in and say, actually, you know, they were like one of the first bands to be called punk. It is kind of, it's revisionist history to a of people, but it's actually just the facts that early on, there were people in that scene who didn't only see it as a kind of aesthetic that went so far. There was always people who were a deeper kind of artistic creative force within that scene. It's just, that's not easy to market. That's not easy to reproduce. Sure. But putting safety pins and spiking your hair up, is. So that version of punk becomes prevalent and what everyone knows. They outgrew something within that scene. But that is also punk. I mean, I don't want to like get too caught up in the

weeds like the taxonomy of what's punk and once not. And I think it's taken all and all sorts of shapes and forms. There's some sort of spirit to it. And I get what you're saying. I think the stance in terms of behaving. within the rules of things is probably kind of punk of Tom Berlin, right? I'm not going to shorten Markey Moon. I'm not going to put this drum stuff on because you said so. But I think like maybe viscerally in the music, I don't totally hear that same thing.

I don't think Tomberland would have said so either. They asked him in ZigZag magazine the next year. They were like, when you first came over here last year, the whole new wave thing was obviously right in the middle of its path to destruction. And you and Blondie and the Ramones and talking head. were the first bands that came. Did you ever really feel any affinity to any of those bands? And Tom Berlin said, I don't feel any affinity to any band.

Yeah. I iconic major. He said, I don't care about any other band. Even members of his own band at times. Period. I just thought that was really funny. Yeah. I mean, that's just, they're just artists.

They're not punks in the way that everyone thinks about punk. and if that's not what punk is, I mean, I don't know. It just, to me, it's just, I'm more interested always in, like, the ones who are just doing what they do. I think they suffered a lot from the time they came out, too. It's like Richard Lloyd said in his autobiography, and I thought this was really interesting, that when Marky Moon came out, they had asked Elektra to send records to college radio. But Elektra was like, no, college radio, Airplay doesn't sell records. And this is pretty ahead of its time, right? This is kind of starts to be more of a thing in the 80s, right?

REM, obviously, is maybe the more pioneers of that becoming a commercially viable avenue. But, you know, they were smart enough to think of it. And according to Lloyd, they were turned down. And they had also asked them, can we print T-shirts and sell merch? And Electra allegedly said, we're not in the business of merchandise. We're in the recording business. Wow. Which was incredibly short-sighted, given what we've experienced.

leading up to today where Saint Laurent or whoever is selling $4,000 Nirvana T-shirts from 1991. So that was a boo-boo on the part of Electrae. But they could have made a lot more money, I assume. Phoebe Bridgers and Mitzky's making

like half a million dollars every day whatever it is. Good for them. Go off quins. Yeah, I mean, good for them. Let's talk about the reviews of Marquis Moun. Robert Criscoll in the Village Voice gave it an A-plus. He said, I know why people complain about Tom Verlaine's angst-ridden voice, but fuck that.

I haven't had such intense pleasure from a new release since I got into Layla three months after it came out, and this took about 15 seconds. Wow. The lyrics, which are in a demotic philosophical mode, would carry this record alone. So would the guitar playing, as lyrical and piercing as Clapton or Garcia, but totally unlike either. Yes, you bet it rocks. And no, I didn't believe they'd be able to do it on record because I thought this band's

excitement was all in live rave-ups. Turns out that's about a third of it. Wow. Glowing review. The rare glowing, positive on-point Crisco review. There was a lot of bands he really liked and a lot that he didn't, but he really liked Marky Moon. And you know what?

He's right about the angst-ridden voice. And this is another thing I wanted to say. Like, it does feel like in some ways, television is a 90s band that just came out in the 70s. When you say they sell the 70s, I'm like, man, if they had just come out maybe in the 90s, this also, I might be getting ahead is why I like the 90s album the best, but neither here nor there. Another review gave a really positive review, but starts out with saying, like, is this, this is not punk. It's indefinable. And it's like, yeah, that's right.

But it still gave it four stars. The enemy review, babe, 3,000 words. I thought you were going to say 3,000 stars. 3,000 strong. It's 3,000 words, Nick Kent, our friend, who had fresh off a year prior printing the story of television's demise in a slightly biased point of view, is now here to spend 3,000 words calling this the best album of the year, magical statement. Really over the top. It's about 1-10th review, 9-10th's just more goss about television and blah, blah, blah, but here's one good paragraph. That's the thing about television you first got to come to terms with. Forget all that New York sound stuff. For starters, this music is the total antithesis of the Ramones, say, and all those minimalist aggregates.

To call it punk rock is rather like describing Dostoevsky as a short story writer. This music itself is remarkably sophisticated, unworthy of even being parallel to that of the original Velvet Underground, whose combined instrumental finesse was practically a joke compared to what Verlaine and company are cooking up here. Each song is tirelessly conceived and arranged for maximum impact, the point where decent parallels really need to be made with the best West Coast groups. Early love spring to mind. People don't talk about love enough.

The birds cataclysmic eight miles high period, a sup con even of the Doors Mondo predilections, plus the very cream of a whole plethora of those psychedelic punk bands that only Lenny K. knows about. Yeah, yeah. Well, he's really onto something there, I think, because when they were first playing shows, they were doing that 13th floor elevators cover. They were onto that kind of more composed, elaborate songwriting style. And he's not wrong when he says that about the Velvet Underground as harsh as that is. It's just it doesn't affect how good they are at all to understand that there's a primitivism to what they do.

Right. But I do think that that's a really astute review and that it does basically get to the something, which is that the way that television is, is it takes that intricacy and craft that is paid, and attention to, like, mood with that, balancing sort of this intricacy with an attention to mood that you do see with those West Coast groups, so to speak,

that they do something with it that is harder and rougher and a little bit more jagged-ed-edged and mysterious that would not have happened in California, probably. So, like, they kind of did take the best stuff from the West Coast and then take what the Velvet Underground did and make something out of it that ends up being, yeah, really sophisticated. Okay.

Well, now it's time for the girlies to fight in the press, babe. The girlies, they are fighting in the press. Nick Kent again. Nick Kent was obsessed with this band. Enemy, March, 1977. Verlaine how pleasant question mark to know Mr. Verlaine. This is the header. Opinionionion, Colin.

Tom Verlaine is a great songwriter, the next seminal rock charismatic, a genius. Opinionionion, colon. Tom Verlaine is an egomaniac, a backstabber, a thankless paranoid. This is the header of the article. He interviews Richard Hull in it in the beginning. And Richard Hull says, Verlaine still openly admits to liking me as a person while he puts down my songs and my playing. I think Verlain's a really great guitar player, a pretty good songwriter,

but I can't stand him. And then he says, I knew, though, from the beginning with Tom that it would probably end that way. Years and years ago when we were dropping acid together, God, it'd get very, very scary. He'd really open up then, and he more or less revealed

that he had this fundamental belief in his absolute inherent superiority to everyone else on this earth. It is really interesting that he says this, given that Richard Lloyd said it about both of them. Yeah, yeah. Do you know what I mean? It's a little bit like the pot call

in the kettle black if we're to believe Richard Lloyd, which it is interesting to have a triangulated third party view where I'm just like, ooh, maybe you guys were like two alike. Yeah, yeah. And when there's this other third person being like, y'all both actually had a bit of security. Again, I'm reminded of Lou Reed and John Kale and just the kind of shit they would sling back and forth

about each other in the press. Just saying, you know, like, oh, he's sort of just wants to be in charge all the time. And it's not really fair. of any of us in the band and the way he quit and made me, he fired me, whatever. And Lou, obviously, being uncharitable all the time. Yeah, they both want to have their own thing.

Yeah. Richard Lloyd's, the shit he said about Tom Verlaine is so crazy. I thought it was pretty interesting, because I feel like if those things stuck with you, they must have been pretty memorable. Do you know what I mean? Like, I mean, there's this one anecdote in the book that all,

I think it's like really funny. They're talking about like they landed somewhere on tour, like in Europe. And this woman greets them and it's like kind of sort of like tour manager help with something. It's like, I'm going to get you all a bunch of nice new clothes. No, she only says it to Tom because Tom says that he lost his clothes or didn't bring them or something. And he doesn't have any money. He doesn't have his credit card. He like, and the girl's like, okay, well, I can front you for them.

And so she buys them all these expensive clothes. And according to Lloyd, he like rubbed his hands together, greedy. like he got one over. And he also said that when they got back, they tried to charge him for the clothes and he was very upset about it and tried not to pay for them. So I don't know if any of this is true. But that was an interesting observation as well. Also, Tom, he wouldn't have luggage. She would just have black trash bags. That's weird. He's so cheap. That's weird. You don't think that's weird. You don't think it's weird to travel with a trash bag of clothes when you're a grown man on your second album. No, that is really weird. But I kind of like, I almost didn't believe it. But, uh,

it could be. I mean, he's an odd guy. There's also Billy Fika who carried a duffel bag full of carrots, according to Richard Lloyd. So maybe Richard Lloyd can't be trusted. I don't know. Are you joking? Are you kidding me? That's also in the book. Apparently Billy Fika was like sort of a health food nut, so he would travel with like granola and carrots and stuff in his bag all the time. He looks like it. I mean, on the cover of the album, he looks like a Jewish summer camp counselor. Okay, see, I'm telling you, I feel like Richard Lloyd is one of those truth tellers, you know what I mean,

where, like, people think they're crazy, but, like, actually, low-key, they're always telling the truth. He's orange on the album cover. I didn't-Ritchard Lloyd says it was because he had, like, a poisoning from eating too much carrots. This happened to Bob Dylan, apparently, or, like, and some are other member of the band. There was some carrot jaundice incident, yeah. It's like bed a carrot tinnitus or something. It's a real thing. You have too many-you-have-a-you-a-a-tuff-call-carits.

You're going to turn orange. Now it seems like Richard Lloyd maybe not the craziest one, you know? He's speaking truth to power. So anyways, back to this enemy article. Tom Verlaine comes to Nick Kent in this article. I was going to ask you about hell. So Nick Kent basically tells him what Richard Hell said about, you know, Verlaine thinking he's talented, but Richard Hell hates him as a person. And Tom Verlaine says, oh, come on now.

He doesn't hate me, whatever he may say. Let's face it, man, when two best friends sort of go separate ways, when that bond is severed, then both parties usually discover feelings about each other that are based on. on hurt on aspects of rejection that often manifest themselves openly in very juvenile ways. And that's not a slide on him. I was probably as bad. But concerning the actual split, it's what I've said all along. And that is, the guy just wasn't a great bass player.

It was great in the beginning when it was just ideas, you know. But when it got down to the real soul, it reached a point on the wire where it didn't make it. Now, I think hell's a sharp guy, a very, very sharp guy with great ideas, man. But technically, he's just not up to it. Not yet anyway. Wow. It was pretty classy. It's pretty classy.

That's really thoughtful and honest and not, it doesn't sound like he is putting any kind of stank on it. When he says that, it sounds like he's trying to do the opposite, just to be like really objective. It sounds pretty distant, which, again, must be infuriating if you're the other person. I'm not saying it's a bad thing. I was just saying if like you're hurt and angry about a thing and this person speaking about it really clinically, you can kind of see like where perhaps the, the problems arise. You know what I mean? I know what you mean. It stings to hear something like that. I mean, I really do feel some kinship with Richard Hell in that way. As somebody who's more about concepts and ideas than about like balancing things and organizing everything, you know,

that's, that can be a tough pill to swallow when you reach that point where it's like, I can't actually help here. It's getting too technical. He's better as a producer for this band of some kind. This article also talks about the stuff that we kind of talked about earlier, which was where in Crawdady, they reported that Tom Verlaine called Brian Ferry a plagiarist. Basically, Tom Verlian believed that the tapes of the Brian Eno demos were circulated enough that they got into the hands of Brian Ferry, who then plagiarized his lyrics for the Roxy Music album. I want to know exactly which lyrics he's talking. Siren, I believe, is one of the songs in one ear and straight out of his mouth was a phrase.

This is what they say. And Tom Verland just says, oh, God, that crawdaddy piece was so irresponsible. He doesn't necessarily refute that he says. He still says that Brian Ferry did rip him off and that actually Bowie is much better. He's much more the artist. And then there's the little bit about, you've heard about this. this, that Lou Reed, Lou Reed had a weird habit of taping live shows.

He was an early taper, and he came to a television show, and they knew this about him. So, him and Richard Lloyd came to him in the crowd, and they were like, give us your tape recorder. And he was like, I don't have one with me. And he like takes out. He's like, here, you can have my one tape. And they were like, you have other tapes, give us the tapes.

And they literally took it away from him. He tried to get one over. He really, and they were, Tom Berlin was very paranoid that he was going to tape these, shows and like steal them. Steal the music. This is prior to Marky a moon coming out. I thought that was a very funny story.

It comes up multiple times, so it's a real story. It's in Richard Lloyd's autobiography. It's in Richard Hales. That's the side of Lou Reed that I think a lot of people don't reckon much with is that he's, he was really a kind of all-in-one marketing guy for himself. He was really heavy into just getting the edge, having some kind of, leg up. Oh, well, we learned from the Talking Ants episode that he tried to sign the talking heads to an extremely terrible deal in which he owns all their music. Yeah, yeah. And luckily,

Chris France ran it by a lawyer, family friend who was like, absolutely do not fucking sign this deal, rip it up and throw it out of the trash. Well, you know, he went from, came from the Andy Warhol School of Artist Management, I guess. He did later use the televisions on the stage, so perhaps Tom Verland's paranoia was not for nothing. Yeah, probably not, but, you know, plagiarism, that's a dicey thing to throw out. You know how I feel about it. It's not worth mentioning. Is it good or bad?

Do you like plagiarism? No, not plagiarism. I don't have a pro-plagism stance. I just feel like you'll never win if you're the person pointing a finger and saying that person copied me. That's a losing stance no matter which way it goes. Even if the person absolutely did blatantly copy you, there's no point. Unless you need to make some money off of it in the a la radio headlaw. Adelaire situation and even then it was kind of embarrassing but yeah no it's it gets so tech I mean

I do the bob Dylan podcast so obviously plagiarism is something you know he has a million instances of like written by bob Dylan it's like a song written to like a hundred years ago and it's just like oh he wrote it though yeah famously also it is funny this came up with tom berlane because I think sometimes you're paranoid about the stuff if you do it yourself because Richard Lloyd, did you see this? He said that there was some song that they covered early on. It was a Roki Erickson song.

And Tom Verland, according to Richard Lloyd, changed some of the words so that then the credit and publishing just went to him and they didn't have to pay Rocky Erickson. Yeah, that's... It's a cutthroat biz, babe. It's the way the world works. And yeah, you're totally right

that like, if you're the one being like, hey, hey, it's not fair. It's like, okay, shut up. It just never looks good. I'll just say that. if I was ever going to do a consulting firm where I consulted young artists on what to do, it's never say someone copied you. Yeah.

It's humiliating. And it shows a little bit of a lack of confidence in your version of it. Right. Exactly. A great cover, no matter what it is, even if you're just saying I'm doing a cover of a song, it should be that your version of it stands on its own. Okay. So what happens after Marky Moon comes out is that they go on tour opening for

Peter Gabriel. How do you feel about this pairing? You seem like a guy who has thoughts on Peter Gabriel. I like Peter Gabriel. I think he's real creative and has some big ideas, you know, really like ambitious. It makes sense on paper. Do you think it was a good pairing? I don't know. I mean, I'm not sure like what, going to a Peter Gabriel show in what, 1980s? 77, 78. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, I think, to be like an A&R in person and make that connection would be like, oh, Peter Gabriel, really like boundary pushing, like, cutting edge guy, doing some really interesting things with rock music. I don't know what it would actually have played like, you know, seeing that combo live. I don't know either. I would be curious to know.

I do know that Robert Fripp was on tour with Peter Gabriel in his band at this point. And according to Richard Lloyd, he would come to the television's. dressing room and try to join their band. Can you imagine? He wanted them to be a three guitar band. And Richard was like, sir, we are all stocked up here. I mean, that would really shoot me over the edge. So you're not going to have fucking three guitar solos now.

Marky Moon is now 32 minutes long. Like, I can't deal. And it's fucking Robert Fritt. That is a crazy alternate history thing. So after the Peter Gabriel tour, they're much bigger in England and Europe in general than they are in America. Markey Moon, I think, sold like double in England than it did in America, which is kind of a huge deal, considering that the population of England is quite a bit smaller than the population of America. But they love rock and roll music.

And, you know, you had NME calling it the best album of the year and all of their different rock presses were praising it. So they do really well over there. They go tour with a blondie opening for them. And then they get to work making the next album because contractually they were obligated to make another album within the year. And now it's 1978. I'm going to paint the picture for you. Evan Evans, are you ready? Yeah.

Once again, one of the top selling albums of the year is a soundtrack. It's the soundtrack to Greece. Blondie's parallel lines. Very quickly, Blondie is like, L.O.L. Television, suck my dick. I'm a fucking bestseller. Oh, really? You left our band to join television.

Enjoy it loser. We're rich. Do you know you? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Steve Miller band, Greatest Hits, 1974 to 1978. You already know I had that fucking CD, bitch.

Why? Reality Bites. I'm a joker. I'm a midnight toker. Boston, foreigner. We're creeping towards the 80s, is what I'm saying. Rolling Stone, some girls, the cars aforementioned that made Tomberlien sad. And then in the more interesting, subversive music space, we have Elvis Costello this year's model, Warren Z.

Yvonne, Excitable Boy, Big Stars third, important. Three great records. Bruce Springsteen, Darkness on the edge of town. Four great records. Patty Smith, groups Easter. Peribu, the Modern Dance, great record. A lot of cool stuff is happening in 78 in music. And then a bunch of disco, too, like sheik, Sikh, Sikh, Funkadelic, One Nation under a groove, the Buzzcocks.

Well, let's talk about adventure. Adventure, yes. Television 2. Do you like this one? No. No. Just straight no. I'm never going to, of my own volition, put this on. It's just not my kind of music. You know, that's okay.

I think there's something in Markey Moon that has like a visceralness that's like at the very least close to the spirit of what I like in music that is a little bit missing from this album to me. Well, I see that. I mean, if Markey Moon is the nighttime album, Moon, obviously, black cover, a lot of songs that are about mysterious, shadowy, watery stuff. Adventure is the daytime album. And there's literally a song called Days. There's this kind of just sunny, less complex, less conflicted songs. Can I tell you what Richard Lloyd said about it? Yeah.

Tom's songs no longer faced outward. They had become introverted like an ingrownail. From my perspective, Tom is a crazy maker in the studio. someone who drives me insane with his shenanigans. I did not like adventure as much as Marky Moon because of those silly songs and throwaway lyrics. There was nothing I could do about that. Throwaway lyrics. That's what Richard Lloyd said.

Yeah, well, I think that's pretty harsh, but... Yeah, I think that's pretty harsh. I would say that I get what he's saying, too, about Tom Verlaine being really inward-facing. And I think that if you don't like that about him, it only gets more... hard for you because that's that's the direction it goes. If this was the first television album you heard, what would be your take on television? Would you like it? Would you be like, yes, I want to hear more of this?

I think this sounds like it's their first one. Yeah, I agree with you. Mark K-moon is more sophisticated, for sure. Yeah, it sounds less complex. And yeah, I would like it. But that story about Tom Verlain hearing the cars and thinking, oh, we're fucked, that makes sense when you hear this album. If you'd only heard Marky Moon, that story would have been like, what the hell is he talking about? Like, the cars are not competing with this. But the direction

they're headed and the way that they are on adventure, it is a less effective commercial machine version of the cars in a way. You could see it that way. At the same time, I think there's some really lovely songs on it and some things about it that do have. some of that quality of like investigating a moment, an experience from like the inside and outside and all those other cool things and interesting ways that they write on the first record. This album was produced by John Jansen, who was also mostly just an engineer prior to this. He had worked with Procol Harum Meatloaf, Alice Cooper, and then on some pre-end post-death

Jimmy Hendricks albums. Apparently, Alan Lanier, a blue oyster cult of the Thruple, the Paddy Smith Thrupple, is the one who recommended him. And it was just like, okay, sure. According to Richard Lloyd, Tom wrote most of these songs in the album in the studio. There was other television songs that they had, but they didn't use them on this album. I'll tell you what Tom Verlaine was listening to at the very least around when the album came out. I don't know if it predated while he was making the album, but I think I can give you a sense of what's going on in Tom Verlain's head. He said, right now I'm listening to a lot of really weird stuff.

The soundtrack from the TV show Twilight Zone is one. It's really nifty. All sorts of weird effects. What else? A record of dervish music. Some modern jazz. I listen to Dwayne Eddy quite a lot lately. Then there's this Scotty Moore record on a small label called Delwood.

It just sounds like a jam session album, really. Just nice playing. The group really turned. onto each other. It's all rockabilly stuff. The whole record has a great tone to it. You know what this sounds like to me? Nightmare boyfriend. Night? What do you mean by that? Oh my God. You're just at home and like, babe, the dervish album again? Please for a fuck save. Oh, you mean just what he's playing.

Yeah, that's what I mean. Yeah, yeah. He's like, babe, do you hear the guitar tone on here? And you're like, literally free me from this fucking prison. He, uh, I mean, it's really funny that he mentions the Twilight Zone. The guy loves speculative fiction, sci-fi. Spooky. Yeah, totally. 50s stuff.

I mean, he looks like the Mr. America of Skeletons. Yeah, that's facial determinism. He looks spooky. He truly looks spooky. Does he not? He does, and he thinks spooky. But this record is kind of a sunny version of that. So it has kind of what we call on the other podcast that, like, put it on quality.

this is just a record that you can put on without worrying about what's going to happen. Like in Mixed Company, you can throw this thing on and it's fine. Nobody's going to be like, what the fuck am I listening to? Whereas you, obviously, if someone just threw on Markey Moon, you would be like, oh, come on, turn this off. You specifically, perhaps. No. Maybe. Maybe a little bit.

But, I mean, torn curtain, that's not put it on music. That's fully not. That's turn it the fuck off music if I've ever heard any in my life. Or, you know, like it's dark room solitude, like running mascara music. Evan Evans, are you okay, babe? Do we need to take you to the therapist? I'm fine. But, you know, the times I've enjoyed the song Torn Curtin the most, I was probably

like feeling sort of spooky myself. So we watch. Tell me about this album. Again, it's not bad. It's like doesn't have the m'f, the grab it, grab you by the throat that Marquis Moon does. And it's just sort of like relaxed. It's like a daydreamy record, you know. It's kind of like he was happier when he wrote it.

And that's... He's finally rid of Richard Hell. Yeah, there's none of that tension anymore. I do like Glory quite a bit. I won't know how can you not? I know. It's a fun song. This is the kind of album.

If it had been produced differently, I might like it a lot more. What do you think about the production? It's fine. It's just, you know, again, I'm 90s-pilled. Like, if this had, like, a little fuzziness on a little feedback, a little, I might be, like, super into this album. Oh, yeah. That's a really good point, because I think that the difference between this and

Marky Moon, you know, that we just touched upon is, like, that is such a composition-based album. where like in the same way that a great piece of classical, neoclassical music, whatever, you don't need to do anything to the piano. It's just like the way that you're using these things. The way you're playing it is kind of what is so interesting. And it can be the clean piano. But this record relies less on being like engineered and constructed for each song. It's more standard.

I'm just like produce this shit like Dennis or Jr. Baby, I'm probably all in. I probably listen to this album every day. Or produce it like the cars. And then the cars just went and did that kind of. And then they were like, let's get rid of these ambiguous lyrics and add some more that are. You were just what I needed. Yeah.

But then you got days, which is, I think, an example of like that working pretty well. It's dreamy, you know. It's less a lyrics thing. It's a little bit more ephemeral. Each song doesn't feel like an emotional peak or valley. This song is just vibes. This song is just like looking up at the, like, if I can watch in the clouds roll by. It's called, and it's supposed to be.

It's called days. It's about like, it's low stakes. It's just kind of floats. So, yeah. That also equals boring sometimes. A lot going on during the recording this album, namely Richard Lloyd in and out of the hospital for various drug-related maladies. I believe he had endocarditis at some point. What's that?

It's when you get an infection in the walls of your heart. heart from bad drugs. Not good. It's not good, babe. Richard Lloyd is on drugs, babe. He is absolutely the fuck on drugs. And it takes them a long time to make this album. According to Richard Lloyd, that had nothing to do with him being in the hospital.

It's more that Tom Verland just wanted to take his sweet-ass time. And he also mentioned that the new producer was very serious and not fun like Andy Johns, who was always drunk. Yeah, that's interesting. that like having an actual person who cared in the studio, maybe they felt less pressure to be active in that side of it. They're like themselves, like that it wasn't really in their hands alone.

I'll tell you what. Chris Gow gave this an A-minus, so he still liked it. He said those scandalized by Marquis Moon's wimpoid tendencies are going to try to read this one out of the movement. Wimpoid? That's right. I mean, I think he's pointing out that people were like, this isn't punk, basically. I agree that it's not as urgent or as satisfying, but that's only to say that Mark Himun was a great album, while Adventure is a very good one. The difference is more a function of material than of the new album's relatively clean, calm, reflective mood.

Yeah. The lyrics on Marky Moon were shot through with visionary surprises that never let up. These are comparatively songlike. They're apricus concentrated in hook lines that are surrounded by more quotidian stuff. Quotidian is probably a good word for the album. That's a real awshucks watching the class. Let's go by vibe. Yeah.

Reflective, I think, is the most generous way and probably quietly mulling things over is most of the way that the record feels. Anyway, like carried away, careful days. Those are the songs that stick out to me. Right. I mean, days, I really like. Foxhole, I don't love Foxhole. No? Not really.

It's just like, a war song. Mm-hmm. A song about war. It's like, this song, like, if you played it differently, it would be like an iron. and made-in song. And just add a couple more lines about, like, bullets going through bones or whatever. And then it's, like, you know, run to the hills. You'd play it as in, like, harder drums.

I just, none of this grabs me. Foxwell's kind of like War Pigs or something. War Pigs is a really good song. Oh, it's like a better song, yeah. Right. But, you know, it's just like, war is bad and I don't like it. Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Death and hatred to mankind. Careful, though. If he was saying the other album is like Wimpoid, this is just as Wimpoid, except that it's, it's a little bit more like comical. This is like a joke song. Like the tone of it is goofy. Yeah, even like the singing tone even. This whole album, it makes more sense if you think about it as like it takes that direction of like the Muppet backup vote. vocals on Marky Moon, and it runs with that direction. It's like whatever that kind of silly,

lighter quality of television is, I think Adventure really uses that as the starting point, and that's fine. Do you want to hear my take? Yes. My take is Tomberland did not want to be in television anymore. After Marky Moon, he was like, I'm done with this shit. I don't like you guys, I don't want to do this with you anymore. I'm contractually obligated to do another album right now. I'm going to amuse myself. This album is me amusing myself. And then I'm going to fucking leave because I'm not doing this with you fucking people anymore. Okay.

And that's essentially what did happen. But it does have the vibe of he's amusing himself because he's trying a bunch of different weird things. It's not so heavy, artistically calculated as Markey Moon. It just does seem like he just let his whims take him where they went and made songs out of them. Totally. This is the quote of Tom Berlin that really got me fucking on board, where I was like, you know what, Tom Berlin, you are actually a genius, and I totally get you now.

You're just, you are just very evolved. He said, seriously, the good reviews and the bad reviews both seem like the reviewers express their own personalities more than they express any general truth about the group, which is fine in a way. Yeah, that's a very advanced. This is very profound. I don't know if you've experienced this yet, Evan Evans with Joker Man podcast, but you know how at first you're like

I'm going to read where all these people are saying like I got to get on the Reddit I don't know what everyone's saying and then it's like oh the bad stuff bothers you the good stuff makes you happy and the first conclusion you come to is oh the bad stuff doesn't matter it doesn't matter what they say that's bad

like that's not real but then when you really hit galaxy brain level which me and Tomberlane we're both clearly at then you really are like oh the good stuff doesn't matter either none of it matters I don't think that it's been something with the podcast that I've felt as much because

mostly the people listen to it, they have similar interests as us. So we don't run into that kind of conflict as often. Do you want me to go to your Reddit and read the bad things for you? You have a much bigger podcast. So like you will encounter that. I'm sure have more. But in general, yeah, that principle is totally how I think about life and disappointments in general, of all kinds.

Right. And this is something. that a friend of mine, John Tottenham, we do like episodes about the fall sometimes. And whenever we're talking about Markey Smith, he always really likes to point out that one of the great qualities of Marky Smith is that he would hate people who liked him too. He did not like give people special extra credit because they thought he was great. And it's a, it's a sign of character in a way. There was another artist that we just did a piece on who said something similar who was like, I don't trust these people that like everything that I do.

I don't want that. Yeah, the refusal to stand. I mean, we talk a lot of shit, have historically talked a lot of shit on the British music press and a fandom at large. I love them. They're the funnest. That was the only time journalism was really thriving. You need them. I mean, they actually act as a kind of villain and a kind of champion of the artist because they don't stand.

And that's something I hadn't thought of until you put it that way. But it's good. It's like they care too much, but the artist, even if they say they don't care, you've got to believe that there's somebody who gives a shit to even keep making it, I think, a little bit. Oh, my God, for sure. And listen, let me be clear. Do not stop sending the nice messages. I read them all and they do make me happy.

But I'm just saying conceptually, I realize that they do not inherently affect my value as a human being. or as an podcast artist. I mean, and if you're in a band, you know, when somebody says, oh, this was good, it, to a really good artist, it shouldn't mean like, okay, I'm jotting that down for the next one. Right. You know, a real, an artist who's worth something is going to do what they're going to do anyway. Amen, brother. In the same interview, however, this is Trauser Press.

They ask him, what about Richard Hell's album? Had he heard blank generation, considering the title cut and its author were once part of television. I figured Tom would have been interested. Tom says, I heard a side of it or maybe the whole thing once. I didn't think much of it. There were a lot of old Tom Verland chord changes on it, but I don't care because we're not doing them anymore anyway. I don't say that out of conceit. I just heard it right away.

I don't even think he's aware of it. Anyway, I don't care. I feel the lady doth protest too much. I feel like the lady doth, I don't care too much. Yeah. Yeah. Do you not care, babe? Because I'm not really sure if you didn't care. You'd like, well, I mean, yeah, I've heard it like once.

And yeah, I mean, I did notice that he copied all my court changes, but it's not a really big don't use those anymore. I heard a side or the whole thing. It's like, that's all right, any goodwill we gave him for his measured and thoughtful response in the last interview. I kind of like that, though, because I was like, oh, you're just human in the end. you're not like a you're not above at all buddha you're just like us for real you know yeah he's he's being remarkably petty there but uh it's it's probably true but it's also completely discounting what's good about blank generation literally virtual hell in the voidoids album sounds not even

one scrap like a television album or a tom verlane musical output no to say that there's like to say there's old Tom Verlaine stuff in it, like to even point that out, he even does say, yeah, that it's not like it matters. That's like, why are you saying it? Like, why even bring it up? Well, to my point about what I feel Tom Verlaine was doing with Adventure. Also, Adventure, by the way, takes its name from a track that was not included on the album, but that now you can hear as an outtake, which was not written by Richard Lloyd, but I think Richard Lloyd said he had a pretty outsized solo on it, and he thinks that's why Tom Verlain cut it from the album. That's a real thing that happens. It's messy.

A little too good. A little too much. Don't you dare outshine me, you motherfucker. Not on my own goddamn album. Get out of here. Maybe to no one's surprise in 1978, not long after the album came out. Richard Lloyd said,

I received a phone call from Tom Berlaine. That in itself was unusual because we met at rehearsals or at shows but didn't share a social life outside the band. We were together 24 hours a day on tour, and principally we all got along, eating together, staying in the same hotels, and performing together. So it was a bit odd to get a call from Tom.

He said, I have some bad news to tell you, I'm leaving the band. This is a bit of a shock, but I also felt relieved. I told Tom that I had been thinking of leaving myself, but didn't want to leave the rest of the guys, himself included, in the lurch. I told Tom that instead of him leaving the band, which had simply dissolved the band. We decided that we would play the shows, which we were obligated to play and then go our separate ways. Fred Smith said, everyone wanted the weight of the band off his own shoulders.

Tom especially needed the freedom of being able to use different musicians for different songs. The break of the group was like a breath of fresh air for all of us. Well, tell us old as time. I mean, yeah. Nothing can last forever and so on. Nothing gold can stay. Fred also said that Tom wanted to be a songwriter. He didn't care to be on the road for three quarters of the year.

And Richard loved to tour, which does, is reflected, I think, in both their personalities. Richard's a real diehard rocker. That's a fucking real rocker. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. He comes alive on the stage. He lives for the stage. He lives for rock and roll music.

So there's the last three television shows we're at the bottom line. The audience didn't know they were the last shows, but they're sold out anyways. Great shows. And then it's over. Richard Lloyd, basically because they were contractually obligated for seven more albums or whatever, basically their solo albums took the place of the television albums. Richard Lloyd only made one. I think it was called Alchemy.

Does that sound right to you? Yeah, it has that good, the song, Misty Eyes, really good. It's a pretty good album. According to himself, he ruined everything because he was a gnarly junkie and basically showed up to an electorate meeting nodding out and they were like, they like pulled their support of the album. Yeah. Tom Verlaine made a fucking ass ton of solo albums, which we just do not have the time, nor do I have the will. No, there's so many.

But we can talk about some highlights, maybe. We were talking about one earlier. You were listening to Flashlight. Yes. I like Flashlight pretty good. Tom Verlaine is absolutely in his Beret era, which I don't think ends for the rest of his life. Looks sick. Yeah, there's a couple good songs on there.

We both said we like the song that's called Song. Yeah, the song called Song is really good. But my favorite song is The Scientist Writes a Letter. And I think that's after Tom Verlaine died, someone asked Richard Hell what his favorite. Tom's solo song was, and it was that song. It's really a weird song for Tom Verlaine. It's not like any of his other songs. It's really cinematic and narrative-based. It's snowing, and it seems like it's always snowing. I love that song. It's so beautiful. It's really an amazing song.

It feels more in line to me with the later television album than anything else. Yeah, which we must get into. Billy Fika did become the drummer of the waitresses, which I think really fucking cool. Any band would be lucky to have him to. His drumming is really important to the band, and it's so creative, while also never overencumbering it. Like, he's very busy, but because everybody else in the band is really intricate

and doing interesting stuff, and he's so tasteful, he's able to, like, thread the needle in this way that is almost impossible, where everything he does is interesting, and it never feels like too much. There's a great Richard Lurier, story about, I want to say it was the third album where the producer tricks Billy by taking away

one piece of his drum kit at a time saying it's ringing. Do you remember that to try it? He's saying it's ringing? Yeah, he's like, I think the symbol's ringing. I'm just do you need it that much. And he's like, no, it's okay. And he basically takes away four pieces to there's only like three things left and he's forced to play the way he usually plays, but with minimal things. Genius. I love that. I love that story. I'm sure it sounded great. This is how they apparently get back together in 1992. Richard Lloyd said that Tom's manager and his own manager had met at a party. And they had asked each other, oh, what is Tom doing?

What is Richard doing? And both of them were like, not much. So they got Tom and me together. I decided that I would take television to my lawyer, Fred Davis, Clive's son, to try to get us a new record deal. Fred had been planning to shop my demo around, but I figured I could always do that later. Television would be a big paycheck. The money. The money didn't seem motivating much for.

Tom, but it definitely was for Richard. Yeah. I mean, for anybody, you have to make money. You need to live. Obviously, a lot has changed between 1978 and 14 years later in 1992. Yeah. Punk has broken, for example. Grunge has been called grunge.

Correct. It has sort of taken over. 92 is the year that Nirvana's never mind really tackles the chart. So it is really like the heyday of grunge. and REM has become a pretty big band culminated in this big, huge automatic for the people moment. Once again, I love to say it and I'll say it again. No one talks about how a lot of the 90s was just Garth Brooks all over the fucking place. And this year is no exception.

Garth Brooks, the Chase. And the soundtrack to the Bodyguard. And that is also what was happening in 1992. Things have fucking changed, bitch, is all I'm saying. and we all know how much it's changed. I love the self-titled television album. This is crazy to me. I understand.

It might not come as a surprise to any of my listeners and fanbase who are like, well, of course you do because it's 90s and you love everything 90s. Your listeners in fan base are like, what am I doing here? If they've even made it this far, they're like, this woman does not know anything about Bob Dylan and why am I listening to her?

She's just so annoying. Oh, come on. We've done a lot more. than Bob Dylan at this point. Okay. Off top, I like the way Tom Berlaine sings on this album. Yeah, if the thing that we were talking about earlier about, like, Tom Verlaine, his songwriting style on the prior record, getting more and more insular. Yeah. This record, I think, is like the absolute peak of that, because, or the opposite of a peak. Like, what we were talking about before, the black hole, like, inward thing.

Like, it's so obscure and strange. And there's parts where it sounds like he's whispering it to himself. Like, it's really does not sound like a front man. I have no evidence to back this up, okay? But what I'm getting from this album is like television inspired Sonic Youth, right? And then Tom Verlaine turned around and heard the inspired by television Sonic Youth, which then inspired him to make this television album. Because that's kind of what it sounds like to me.

It's possible. I really kind of feel like there's not much on this record that sounds like television. Yeah, that's fine for me, TBH, but. It makes sense. But the first song on it is, I think, by a country mile, the best song on it. Absolute fucking goddamn gorgeous, beautiful banger, 1880 or so. what it's called. 1880 or so is maybe one of the top five best songs television ever wrote.

I think it's fucking amazing. It's just so pretty. And it achieves this, like, mood that, like, I can't even think of another song that does. Because it sounds so effortless. It has a very, like, big star vibe to me or something. Sort of. I don't, vibe.

I'm not talking about musically. It's just, it evokes this sort of, like, nostalgic emotionality. I mean, to me, that it reminds me. like self-titled Velvet Underground album. Like that sort of like pale blue eyes. That kind of mode where it's like really delicate and also not like, it's very confident in that like steady, delicate thing. But yeah, this song does a home run with what they're going for on adventure.

Yes. This is what I mean. Like I'm like, okay, but I didn't like it on adventure, but I like it now that it's 1992 because it sounds more like 1992. And it's a song about like 1880 or so it's kind of, and they're older. There's just something about that combination of factors that it feels like magic. I don't belong to misery. Yeah.

So good. God tear lyric. And the way he delivers it is just like kind of so cool. His voice sounds great. This is a guitar solo in it. Yeah, but I don't mind it because you know why? running time of this song, three minutes, 41 seconds. It's not that I hate guitar solos in and up themselves.

I just feel like they should be deployed sparingly and to be for maximum efficiency. I'm not a purist. Like, I like it when the Smashing Pumpkins do it too, but they're not out here putting out 12-minute-long fucking songs that I don't want to hear the whole thing up. Sure. I do think that it depends on how much I believe in the mood of a song

before they launch into the solo. That version I sent you, I think it was on Jewel's, Holland that they played it. Yeah, so good. There is a really long solo, but it happens to be like really good. It works. This is just the best I can put it. This version of vibe is more my version of vibe than even the Marquis Moot version of Vibe. There's a discomfort in Marquis Moon that I'm like, yeah, I guess we could vibe with this anxiety album. But maybe I just want to vibe over here where it's, I don't belong to Misery a Bibb. I've left Broadway's darkened.

fucking streets and the ghouls and whatever. Now I'm just... Yeah, just floating. And it doesn't have the self-conscious floaty thing of adventure, which I think is to its detriment if we're going to be like harsh on that album. This song is about as good as it gets when it comes to like achieving that kind of you believe that it's disconnected and yet it's not boring. I feel like you're right. And I feel like it's almost like it's a spiritual detachment, right? And I feel like there is a journey of it, whereas like on Marky Moon, I don't think you had it quite down. I think on Marky Moon, it's that quote of, oh, Richard Hell's album, maybe I heard it. I'm not sure. Maybe the whole thing. And maybe he did copy me a bunch,

but I don't care. That's kind of the detachment we're working with. Like, we're trying, you know what I mean? But it's not quite, it's not quite hitting. That's why there's so much darkness and, like, angst and anxiety. You don't have angst if you're detached. Then there's the second one where I feel like we've overcorrected. Now we're in Who Cares land. Too much Who Cares There's too much Who Cares happening on this album and there's nothing to land on. There's nothing to connect to for me personally.

Now we have Goldilocks on the Three Bears did and this album. The first one, I sort of disagree, but I sort of agree. I know what you mean and especially agree about the sort of overcorrection with adventure, but I do think that the magic of Markey Moon is about

literally the, like, forgive me, the friction between wanting to be... Of course. I'm not saying music about discomfort is bad or Marky Moon is bad. I'm just saying if that's what he was setting out to do, this is pre before he maybe hit his sweet spot of the detachment. The music yielded was still great. I don't even know that that's what was intended as much on, like, I think that that was just how it shook out with Marky Moon, but that is like, it's the birth of that quality that I think if you're going to nail down one mood. I mean, it is something, I'm biased because I heard that quote about what the theme was from

Tomberlane, but it does seem to ring true that the theme of the music of television is being within a situation and seeing it from without. And that first record seems to be about the tension and sort of the fractiousness of that. And then the second one is like, yeah, like you just disconnect. This record is really weird because none of the rest of it is like that. It's much more like granular. I think rhyme is a little like that, very viby, a bit talk-singy.

No, it is all like that, but I guess I just mean like 1880 or so feels like it's floating above everything. It feels like... Yeah, it's just, I mean, it's the best song. It's so good. The best song on here. But there's other, Shane, she wrote this while it's totally different, obviously, than 1880 or so. It's a complete shift. I still think that's a really good song. I think they're good. I guess I'm just trying to get down to like what the character of

this record is. It's like, it's sexy. It's lushe. It's libidinal. It's laying back, babe. It's all those things. It's really intimate. It like takes the principles that we've explored in the other records and then really focuses on like, well, what if I apply that kind of perspective to little moments or like weird hypotheticals, like these little things. Quotidian for real. Yeah. I mean, like, what about no glamour for Willie? To me, that's giving a bit of Velvet Underground. Now, what do you think? Like an 80s version of Velvet Undergrow. Well, that's an interesting thing to think about is like, what would have the Velvet Underground been if they'd kept going into the 80s, 90s? I mean, look, I just

think it's great. Beauty Trip is the song I was referencing earlier. That's also sort of a weird doo-wop song. Some really weird lyrics all through this. It's like a lot of, I would describe this whole record as being really heavily anachronistic. Like a lot of these little kind of outdated terms of art or like phrases that are kind of like beat Nikki or like he's like daddy-o almost. Yeah. It's very like. But that was kind of 90s too. Soul Patch fucking beret dark sunglasses guy.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like coming back around and then he kind of is really going into that. there's this real 50s quality to some of that. Yeah, but that was very 90s too, right? It wasn't, don't you feel like that was sort of like a thing of the 90s? It was sort of redux of the 50s. Like, even like some Nirvana songs are that, even though people don't want to talk about.

Some of the best Nirvana songs are just like very Louis Louis, famously, as we know, Kirkabain learned how to play guitar playing Louisly. But these sort of three chord, classically structured rock doo-wopi songs that he just made dirty and grimy. And that made them really. appealing. Yeah, there's, I think, a reappraisal or, like, reclaiming of the aspects of the 50s that are dangerous and mysterious. Again, that sort of noir, sci-fi, Twilight Zone thing that undergirds a lot of what Tomberlaine's imaginative sort of territory is. It demands a kind of a

different sort of focus. These aren't, like, rockers. They're all kind of like, like these odd little exploratory numbers. They're cool. Which I like here. I think it works. It's funny. Richard Lloyd didn't like this one either. He said, I didn't like the recording of the third television record very much. To me, it sounded like television light, where everything is soft and muted. When I had to talk with Tom before recording about potential studios and engineers, he stood up and screamed at me. I'm not going to make a pop record or a rock record. This was disheartening to me. I'm not going to make a rock record. Yeah, that's for sure. He did not.

It's very interesting. Anyways, they only make this album. Yeah. Reuniting. It gets pretty good reviews. I mean, David Frick and Rolling Stone wrote a really glowing review event, gave it four stars. What did Criscoe say? I don't think Criscoe reviewed it in real time, but there is a review that he has on his website.

So I can't tell you if it was at the same time or whatever, but he gave it a B Plus. He said, I prefer the more rocking songful old television, but it's a tribute to Tom Verlain's conceptual restlessness and force of personality that in a world where alternative guitar means making noise or mixing and matching from the used bins. These four veterans have regrouped with a distinct new sonic identity. Drawl, warm-hearted, sophisticated, cryptic, jazzy, and un-jazz-like, they sound like nothing else, except just a little old television, mainly because Verlaine has ignored the Lloyd Cole jokes and refused to alter his voice print. I kind of couldn't say it better than that. He really does nail them. He loves them. I do feel they were a little ahead of that next wave of

the 90s power pop jangle pop that comes in, which is like the posies, Matthew Sweet, who Richard Lloyd plays with. But this album, sort of, to me, fits a little bit sonically in with that, you know? Yeah. But then it's also like nothing like that. It's like the way that it feels so sparse. It's way more weird. Yeah.

It sounds like it's happening in a warehouse at night with no lights on. And Tom Verlaine is weirdly voicembrilene. vulnerable and it sounds like he seems like he must be really comfortable because he's being real weird like the way he is on the last song on Mars when he's just like screaming and then like whispering and I mean you're really familiar with Tom Berlin's solo output. Do you feel that this is much different than what he was doing on the solo albums in the 14 years or do you think that it could almost be another Tom Berlin solo? Like, I don't know, because I haven't spent much time with many of them.

That's the interesting question, because I actually was really asking myself that, you know, like, is it? Because a lot of people say that and I was sort of like, I don't know, like, that it does sound more like a Tom Verlayan album. And it does. But something that it has that's like unique is, I think it is that thing of his comfort level, like, how far he's willing to go. Right. With how weird he gets. it sounds like the stakes are higher for him and maybe that's why he screamed.

I don't want to make a pop or rock record is because it's taking a lot like he maybe didn't communicate it, but you get the sense that he was trying and letting himself and pushing himself to get to a place where he could be accessing some kind of really specific frequency that I don't quite hear on his other solo stuff.

And you do get the sense that there's some kind of like intimate, strange intensity to all of these recordings that does feel different. And maybe it is because he knew this is a television album. Well, I love it personally. And that's it. That's a lost television album. They tour. I mean, they pretty much don't stop touring after this. In 2007, Richard Lloyd leaves the band, but they continue as television playing shows and just not ever making. any new music. Tom Verlaine passed away earlier this year in January, which was very sad. Yeah, it really bummed me up. You brought it back up to my attention because we both really

like the Richard Hell biography. And these are the last pages of his autobiography. And I think it's really meaningful and poignant, given the fact that this is a book about Richard Hill's entire life, right? Not just about television at all. I mean, it goes into all this other stuff that he's done and he's, he was in television for five minutes. But the epilogue of his book is about Tomberlane. So this is what it says. The other night I was walking home from a restaurant when I saw Tom Berlin going through the dollar bins outside a used bookstore. I'll just interject and say I learned from your podcast that famously he loved to do that. And that was a thing he was always doing. I've seen him like three, saw him three separate occasions. Two of those were outside strand bookstore doing exactly this.

So Richard Hilton, I'd been surprised to see him there a few times in recent weeks. Usually I only spot him somewhere once every two or three years. In public, he always holds himself nervously apart from everyone, meeting no eyes, as if he assumes everyone wants to accost him. His head and neck perched like a raggedy, spooked hawk on the high, bulky prospect of his middle-aged body, above the crowds. His eyes self-consciously focused on something in the distance. When I see him on the street, I don't try to get his attention. But this time, I was too curious to let the moment pass.

What was he doing? The books in the dollar bins are as useless as they come. Outdated textbooks, forgotten mass market trash operating manuals. I walked up to him and asked, finding out anything about flying saucers? The last time I'd spoken to him in person, as opposed to a few emails, had been seven or eight years before. Yes, this is the Greek edition, he grinned at me, holding out a Greek language three-volume set of some sort, proffering it theatrically, as if it were a great but fragile and possibly dangerous prize. and he was an animated cartoon like Gumby the way he does. He smiled something else, wide-eyed, going along with the flying saucer stuff.

I replied, I hear Plato came down from Pluto. He continued to smile widely. His teeth looked brown and broken in the nightlight, even worse than mine. He still smokes. And his face was porous and expanded, and his hair coarse gray. I turned away and walked on, shocked. We were like two monsters confiding, but that wasn't what shocked me. It was that my feeling was.

was love. I feel grateful for him and believed in him, and inside myself, I affirmed the way he is impossible and the way it's impossible to like him. It had never been any different. I felt as close to him as I ever did. What else do I have to believe in, but people like him? I'm like him for God's sake. I am him. When Tom spoke to me there outside the bookstore, it was 42 years ago, 1969 and he was 19 years old. We both were. His misshapen, larded, worn flesh somehow just emphasized the purity of the spirit inside. He made a bunch of beautiful recordings too. Who gives a fuck about the worldly achievers, the succeeders at conventional ambitions? If I had died in 1984, at the point this book ends, as can easily have happened, there would have been left such

scant evidence of me that my life would be mostly just a sad cautionary tale. It's by writing a book like this one, that I am redeemed at all. My life is not different for having written this book. My life only comes into being by having been written here. We know that we are constructed of time, not of sequence, and it is impossible to write time, not of sequence, except maybe in poetic flashes. I didn't want to write about a person through time, but about time through a person. It's really beautiful. I mean, there's no better word for it, and that's sort of like a lame way to describe it, but like, what a beautiful love story, you know? And like, I don't know how Tom William felt about it. Like we said, the self-mithologizing, we don't have a lot of it from Tom

Berlin besides his music and, you know, a few errant interview questions here or there, which is not who a person is, obviously. But I really, I've always been very moved by that being Richard Hell's impression that he ends his book on. And this is obviously well before Tom Brilliant passed away. Yeah. It feels like. like it's not specific necessarily to him and Tom Verlaine. It feels like the story of so many bands. It goes back to the thing that we talked about at the beginning, the idea that you need this other person to do your, to make your ideas seem possible to bounce yourself, just to be witnessed and to give each other a sense of potential. That is, you know, the thing that makes any music

happen between more than one person. And I think he just puts such a great, just puts words to that and to the idea of, you know, aging out of that time and then recognizing like it's more about what you did when, when you didn't even know that there was, you know, limited time. It was just those things you did when you made each other feel like that you could. There's this one quote that I discovered a friend. posted this thing and I was like, what the hell? Like, where is this from? Said it's this, this book called Artifact by Richard Hell, published in 1990, but it's no book writings from like 74 to 80, found it in a Paris record shop or whatever.

Like, I don't even know where you can get this thing. But it's this quote that ostensibly Richard Hell chose to include in this little volume, which is, Quote from Tom Relain in 1971, I want to be Felix the Cat shopping for Slinkies. A true weirdo. Because I'm the mythologizer here, I started and ended with Richard Hell, but you can always tell this story in a different way, but this is the way I told it.

Before we fully close out here, of course, the part that you have all been waiting for, Bated Breath, the television fan voices. Let's hear that beautiful, beautiful footage. Television is like. like the ultimate cool kid music. Television to me, especially Marquis Moon, is one of the most important bands

and one of the most important pieces of music, I think of modern music at whole. You can know Blondie and Bowie and Byrne, but knowing and to me actually liking television feels like being a part of a secret underground club. I bought Marky Moon and checked it out, and it immediately blew my mind. It opened up my musical harassed.

It shows what happens when an attitude or an ethos can carry musicality. Marky Moon is like the album, a snapshot of New Wave in New York City during the peak era of CBGB in the 1970s. So when cops wouldn't even go to Bowery and Howells Angels were more like the police than the actual police in the East Village and on the Bowery and Lower East Side. It captures a generation, a feeling, a time that I think a lot of, of people of my generation look to for inspiration. I originally found out about television because my mom showed me Marky Moon when I was first getting into guitar. And I revisited it later when I was in high school and went to see them on their last tour

in Toronto. I hate shreddy, nudely guitar rock like Led Zeppelin and other stuff. But I mean, these guys fucking shred, but they took the blues rock element out of guitar music and made it something completely new, kind of more aligned with. jazz or something. Their style is so punk, but not Ramones or Sex Pistols punk. It shows what happens when you bring poetry and feeling together with music in a way that's a little different to me than traditional songwriting or lyricism. Melodies are timeless and intricate, but played in such an effortless way. To this day, I don't think anybody's come close to sounding like them.

I thought it was so cool. It was such a young and old crowd. It was like OG fans, but also tons of people my age who had discovered them. I think a huge reason why they had so many young fans is because their sound really influenced, like, the new way of an indie sound into the future. To me, they're one of the definitive punk bands, you know, complete innovators when punk wasn't about a specific style of music and was just about inventing a new sound entirely. Their clothing, the way that they talk, the way that they talk, the way. that they played, it's this feeling of I don't give a fuck that I could only find in rap music later on.

Moving, touching. Yes. Very beautiful. Evan Evans, thank you so much for being my guest on this television episode. You can find Evan, whose real name is Laffer on his podcast, Joker Men, which you might be surprised to learn is about Bob Dylan. Well, it's not anymore. Well, that used to be about Bob Dylan and is now about other things because they ran out of

Bob Dylan material. We still do a Bob Dylan podcast. We have a side podcast called Neverending Stories. Oh, with Stephen Hayden, former guests of the pod in front of the pod. Great show. That's right with Stephen Hayden. And it's, you know, the same way people talk about the Grateful Dead and their live career infinitely. We just do that with Bob Dylan and his ever-changing live career. You can check them both out wherever podcasts are available. Thanks again for spending your time with me. Thanks for having me in letting me ramble and ramble and ramble about this band. There's probably people who are like pissed that they weren't the ones to be on for the only episode of bands playing about television because there's way more knowledgeable people.

But I think we did a good job, the two of us together, teaming up. It was God's plan, really. We put the candy cane incident behind us. Come back next week for a new episode of bands playing. Goodbye. If you liked what you heard today, subscribe for more episodes of Bansplaine. Our guest today was Evan Laffer. You can follow him on Twitter at Evan Laffer and check out his podcast, Joker Men.

This episode was produced by Jesse Miller Gordon and edited by Adrian Bridges with help from Justin Sales. Executive producers for Bansplaine are Gina Delvac and me, Yossi Salik. Huge thanks to the television mega fans you heard on this episode. Hemanjusuri, Dustin Pacer, Joseph Ember, and Anna Zukhara. Our gorgeous and catchy theme song was composed and performed by Bethany Costantino and Jennifer Clavin and graciously recorded by Carlos Delagher in Los Angeles, California. Special thanks to our producer emeritus, producer Dylan, aka Dylan Tupper Rupert, and also Casey Simonson, Robert Adler, Leah Edwards, David McDonough, Dana Mearsson, Jessica Hopper, and the K-Drama I'm watching

Celebrity. Come back every Thursday for a new episode of Bandsplain on Spotify or wherever you listen. to podcasts. Okay, am I insane? Do you have an air conditioning on or is that your computer? So what that is is it's the ocean. It's the ocean. Is it? I think so. The ocean have waves in and out. Do you hear that, Jesse? I thought it was my computer, but I don't think so because when I lower my volume, it gets lower.