FOUR GUYS WITH A PASSION

Source: Zig Zag (June 1977)

by Paul Kendall



"De la musique avant toute chose", quoth Paul Verlaine in Art Poetique. A hundred years later, his namesake Tom and his cohorts in Television can only agree with him.

"The Ice Kings Of Rock", announces the board outside the Hammersmith Odeon, "Bar and Refreshments". DJ Supreme Andy Dinkley has thought up that first bit as an introduction to Television on their first UK tour, and Tom Verlaine isn't particularly happy with it. He reckons, not unreasonably, that there's a lot more warmth in Television and their music than that title, and the public image it reflects, gives them credit for.

Listen to songs like 'Guiding Light' and 'Torn Curtain', or to Fred Smith's fluid, melodic bass playing, or to some of the gorgeous interplay between Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd... there's plenty of warmth there, if one interprets warmth as the desire to communicate rather than keep aloof.

Or take Verlaine himself. He might stand out from the herd with his long, uncomfortably angular frame, taut and sallow features, and abnormally large hands, but really - apart from the fact that he's one hell of a songwriter, and probably the most excitingly individual guitarist to emerge from the seventies thus far - he seems to be a regular, normal guy...friendly, eager to laugh and anxious to be thought well of.

Unfortunately, thanks to certain facets of the glut of publicity that Television have received this year, being thought well of isn't something that Verlaine can guarantee. What with the endeavours of former Television bassist Richard Hell to besmirch his old buddy's name, and then that bit of furor in L.A. when Verlaine supposedly forbade the Damned to play on their bill, he has managed to acquire a reputation as something of an ego-centric genius, difficult to work with and quite ready to trample his own grandma underfoot to achieve his aims.

Verlaine, not surprisingly, is only too happy to give his side of the story. The Damned situation first:

"I don't know nothing about that, man. Our policy is that we always want to play with an American group, which is why Blondie are over here with us. It's nothing against the English, or the French or even the Moroccans, it's just that none of the other bands in New York make any money either, and we like to be able to help them out. I don't know what happened with The Damned. It goes through so many different channels, from the manager to the booker to the club owner...I don't have time to get involved in those politics".

In fact Verlaine's...umm...lack of respect for what he terms the "sub-Ramones" qualities of yer average punk ensemble is well known, although he will put up with being termed New Wave.

"I don't mind New Wave", because with the band that are coming out of New York, some of them can play and some of them can't, but there definitely is something new about them...there's an electricity about them that doesn't exist in bands coming out of any other part of America. I'm not crazy about all of them, and I don't listen to their records, but I have to admit that there's a certain kind of energy cities have."

Television and the rest of the New Wave - especially the staunchly minimalist Brits - make strange bedfellows, though. Verlaine especially is very conscious of his cultural heritage, and Television's determination to expand on, rather than reject the traditional values seems to have disappointed some people who saw them on the tour.

"I tell you what," Verlaine suddenly bursts out when the subject of Television's low onstage profile is raised, "Some band over here ruined it for audience reaction with this shit about breaking up chairs and trying to get a riot started.

"When we were at Hammersmith, we could feel the audience being held back. At Manchester there was none of that crap...the audience immediately stood up and came down the front. There was no interest in doing any damage...there's no lift in it, no fun in it. But now all the theatre owners in London are scared out of their minds that they're going to get their theatres wrecked. Seven monsters by every aisle...that's fucking disgusting. A band that has to rely on that sort of incitement must be lacking something naturally, in my opinion."

And so on to the other controversy that has distracted attention away from where it should be...on Television's endlessly inventive music. I refer, of course, to the Richard Hell did-he-fall-or-was-he-pushed drama, which has been bandies to and for ever since Hell left Television in March '75.

"I never suggested nothing," asserts Verlaine, "But I had already played with another bass player. I don't know whether he got the drift of it or not, but I wanted to see what it was like. It was Fred Smith, as a matter of fact...I invited him down one night just to fool around, because another friend of mine had been talking to him and he said how much he liked our material, because he'd been playing on the same bill as us a couple of times. Fred's a real fluid kind of bass player, you can even tell that on 'Little Johnny Jewel'...if you listen to the fills in the guitar solo there, he's doing a lot of neat stuff.

"Let me tell you what happened...and I really hope you print this. When Richard Hell left the band he was doing all kinds of heavy drugs, and at that same time Nick Kent was in New York and moved in with him for a couple of weeks. Richard at that time was super-bitter about any involvements he'd had with me, and he totally broke off our friendship. I didn't have anything against him when he left the band. I was still willing to spend time with him, because I like the guy a lot...he's my best friend. But all of a sudden there was no communication.

"Then Terry Ork told me that this guy was living with Richard, and I said, 'well who's Nick Kent?', and he said, 'some writer from some paper'. Nick Kent was living in New York for at least a month, and at least a week at Richard's house, and he never came over to talk to me. So whatever Richard told him is, like, all this garbage that came out of bitterness.

"Nick Kent is the guy who prints, hearsay, total hearsay. He also printed this stuff from a guy who's said a million times that he's out to get me, and who'll say anything that's going to make me look bad. I'm not talking about the album review, I'm talking about that so-called interview which was like all reversed answers that I gave him to questions. I don't have any respect for Nick Kent as a person. Anybody that prints gossip about somebody, and then sees them and still prints gossip...I mean, I did everything I could to straighten out that stuff, I spent an hour talking to him, and it still came out as...he's sick. He gets this fantasy idea about somebody and won't let go, even if you confront him face-to-face about it. He just has these ideas that are not going to change."

'Nuff said...all I can offer is that during the hour or so I spent with him, Verlaine showed no signs of the acute paranoia or consuming arrogance that have been attributed to him in the past. Self-assurance yes, and indignation when he felt passionately about something (which also gives the lie to that "Ice Kings" hokum), but that's not at all the same thing...is it?

Anyway, I don't quite see what the big fuss is about. A heavy doper who can't play so good isn't exactly the greatest asset for a band with Television's musical aspirations, so why does Verlaine keep getting portrayed as such a rotter because he took the obvious action to remedy the situation?

Before we leave the Verlaine/Hell split - or at least the more acrimonious side of it - there is another rumour to clear up.Sometimes after Verlaine arrived in New York, joining his old school chum Mr Hell, who had been there for about a year, they decided to change their names from Miller and Myers respectively to their current, more colourful, alternatives. It's been suggested that the duo, in the best Zimmerman/Dylan fashion, then attempted to create exotic new pasts to match the evocativeness of their monikers.

"Oh no," Verlaine protests, "it was more like just something that everybody in New York was doing at the time. It was just some kind of way of disassociating yourself from your own past, a way to be something that you want to be, and part of that entailed changing your name. It's just a way of being yourself, really. You didn't have any choice in your name when you were born, so you realise that, and then figure that maybe you do have a choice."

Verlaine denies, however, that his particular choice of name has any special significance..."That's just a name I liked. There were other names that were Germanic that I liked too, but that one was the one I liked best. It jut happened to be French."

But there are parallels with the French symbolist, even if the new Verlaine is keen to play them down. The lifestyle of abject poverty and artistic freedom that he appears to have chosen is similar to that of Paul Verlaine, while latter's precept of "de la musique avant toute chose...pas la Couleur, rien que la nuance" is sympathised with by the former, and reflected in the shadowy allusive lyrics to Television's songs.

When Verlaine moved to New York, and for the first couple of years of his residence there, he was actually more of a writer than a musician, although he had been in bands before then, having taken up the guitar at the age of 16 after trying out on piano and saxophone.

"I was especially into saxophone players then...jazz guys like John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. I played sax for maybe two years, but I never really played it well, because I was eager for expression before I'd got the technique right.

"When I learned guitar I had a group with Billy Ficca, but we only played a graduation party or something. They threw stuff at us. We wheeled the other guitar player out in a wheelchair, but we were serious about what we were doing. We were actually doing more complicated stuff than we're doing now. We were doing these really long pieces...not like Yes or anything but they had a lot of changes in them."

Verlaine and Ficca later rejoined forces when Verlaine and Hell formed The Neon Boys in 1971, summoning Ficca from Boston to occupy the drum stool. That line-up lasted just long enough to have a few rehearsals and make some rought tapes before financial difficulties (i.e. an inability even to pay for rehearsal time) forced them to pack up.

A year later the same trio, with Richard Lloyd coming in as second guitarist, were back together as Television and staking a claim to immortality as the first band to play at CBGBs.

"There weren't even any other bands around then, apart from the leftovers from the New York Dolls...bands like Teenage Lust. I was just complaining to a friends that there was no place for an unrecorded band to play in New York, because even Max's at that time was taking acts through the record companies. So he suggested that we find a bar with a cabaret license where we could play once a week, which is what we did. The club owner, this guy Hilly, liked us although we weren't really any good - we were ragged and our equipment was ragged - but he gave us every Sunday night. The Ramones came along about five months after that, and then about a year after that there was a whole mass of bands."

Television got noticed in their CBGBs days. Firstly by Malcolm McLaren, who had been in New York looking after The Dolls, and was duly impressed by Hell and Verlaine's unintentionally impoverished charisma, returning to London to create the 'pauper chic' that the Pistols have since passed on as the uniform of the punk people. And secondly by Island's A&R man, Richard Williams.

"He had heard the band in New York on his way to California once, and he called up and said he wanted to do a demo. I said 'Great', and just before he came over, he said he wanted to bring over this guy Eno, who was apparently really good in the studio as far as technology and all that jazz goes. He probably is, but I think he had a certain sound in mind for us which probably just didn't work out. It's an interesting tape, but I don't let anybody hear it, because I don't like it."

Television put down ten tracks in four night with Eno, but with Verlaine refusing to repeat the partnership, Island's interest apparently waned. Two months later Hell was on the way out, Fred Smith was on the way in, and Television were on the way up.


The first step was the 'Little Johnny Jewel' single, recorded on August 19th 1975 (the date is in the matrix number Ork 81975) and erroneously described in their press biog as a bootleg.

"We decided to put out a record, because we'd found out we could do it real cheap, and we'd saved up a little money from our live jobs that we could do something with. So Patti Smith's drummer Jay Dee had a little four track machine which we put up in our rehearsal space, and we cut it one night and had it printed up the next week.

"Terry Ork was out best friend..I wouldn't exactly say he was our manager, but he bought us equopment and at one time when we needed it he would buy us dinners. So we decided to name the record after him, because we figured he might want to start a label and keep it going if it did well...which is exactly what happened. Since then we've lost track of how many 'Johnny Jewel's sold, but there's money there...we owe Terry money, anyway."

Seven and a half minutes of raw power, 'Little Johnny Jewel' simmers and bubbles before reaching boiling point with Verlaine's lengthy solo on the second side, and the number is still bery much one of the highlights of the Television live set.

By this stage in the game the record companies, having hung back on the brink, waiting for someone else to be the first to dive in and sign one of the new Big Apple bands, were furiously splashing about trying to grab their piece of the market, and Television inevitably attracted a lot of business interest. Verlaine, however, was cautious about signing himself into the sort of trouble that so many other artists have experienced down the years, and although not asking for ludicrous sums of money, he was apparently asking for fairly stringent safeguards of Television's freedom of movement.

One of the record company's feelers did result in some definite action, though, when Allen Lanier, the Blue Oyster Cult's keyboard player, produced some demos for Arista.

"Clive Davis had made us an offer and...I don't know what was going on, there were various companies making bids...but I think Allen went up to him and said, 'You haven't really heard this band, you should hear what they sound like when they're produced'. He knew Clive from when Clive had been at Columbia, and he persuaded him to let us do the demo.

"We did about five songs in two nights, working 14 hours a night. We did 'Torn Curtain', a song called 'I Don't Care', a version of 'Guiding Light' and a song called 'Mi Amore', which we do occasionally as an encore...maybe there was something else, I don't remember. It came out a lot nice, it was a much warmer sound thatn Eno got. It was different from the album because we were working in a different kind of studio...not a better one but one with a different sound. But the arrangements were really similar."

Three months later Television had signed on the dotted line, not with Arista (thwarting Clive Davis' plans to rule the world) but with Elektra, and soon afterwards they were back in the studio, accompanied this time by Andy Johns.

"That was my idea," Verlaine recalls. "I talked with maybe four or five different guys - Ken Scott, John Wood, some others - but there's an attitude about producers now. First of all, some of them are asking so much money now that they're going to price themselves right out of the market. I know one guy who wants $25,000 for one record, and he himself has only produced one gold record in the last eight years.

"But the thing about Andy is, he's our age, about 27 or 28, and he's a real easy-going guy and a real fun guy. He's also not uptight about studios and he's not overly technical. The main record that I saw his name on that I liked was 'Goat's Head Soup'. Fred Smith played me that record, and we thought it had some great sounds on it, so we looked to see who engineered it, and we got Andy in."

What they came out with, some six weeks later, was an album of epic proportions, exploding once and for all the myth that the CBGBs coterie (although Verleine, who hangs out very little when he's not actually playing, wouldn't appreciate such a classification) can't play properly. The FVerlaine/Lloyd guitar axis has been honed to razor sharpness over their years together, with Lloyd's more concventional work perfectly complementing the aural splinters coming off his leader's guitar. Billy Ficca's drumming has been praised fully elsewhere, and it's hard to imagine anyone else adequately matching the spiral explorations of the guitarists, while Fred Smith provides an under-rated (bassists always are, unless they try to play like lead guitarists) but gloriously rich bedrock.

The astounding thing is that much of the music is so simple at root. Many of their instrumental forays are based on two or three chords, yet the intricacy and imagination of the arrangements almost completely disguide the fact.

And Verlaine's voice...hardly what could be described as a good voice, or even a strong voice - especially on stage where it tends to wander just a little - but a voice that positively reeks of character as he delivers his strangely emotive lyrics full of references to night and water.

"Actually, I noticed that when the lyrics are typed up. I am basically a night person...New York is a much pleasanter place at night, especially in the Summer when it's so hot and the air quality is regarded as unsatisfactory for human life. Seriously - they have it on the radio every day that the air quality if unsatisfactory by so many degrees. I've never had air conditioning, so I've tended to stay up all night, because there aren't so many cars fouling up the air.

"I don't know where the water comes from...I didn't even notice it. There are two rivers that run round Manhattan, but I never really look at them because they're filled with garbage and they really stink. I don't think it comes from things I've read either. It's just like an element...one of the four elements that alchmists talk about. Water's a way of feeling, fire is a way of feeling...basic ways of experience, I think."

Which is about as much as he's prepared to say about his writing. But who needs to say more when the albums itself speaks more eloquently on its own behalf than anyone else ever could. Quite simply, if you haven't at least heard it, you don't know where rock'n'roll has come to in 1977.