TELEVISION: A Season In Hell
Soooo, here’s a compilation I’ve been working on for a while – an overview of the Richard Hell-era of Television, made up of rehearsals, live recordings and demos recorded between early 1974 and March 1975. Consider it a prequel of sorts to Kingdom Come. While the sound quality is rough on some of these tapes, the music is essential. This was a very different band than the one that would go on to record Marquee Moon a few years later – raw enough to make that album sound like Steely Dan by comparison. But if the playing is amateur-ish in places, it’s almost always thrillingly amateurish. And Hell definitely brought elements to the table that were lost once he was gone – a satirical, tongue-in-cheek humor, and his, um, unique bass stylings. He might not have been a very good bassist at this point, but he sure is enthusiastic, and that’s half the battle, isn’t it? I also get the feeling that Hell was the driving conceptual force behind the band at this stage – dig the elaborate and fanciful press release he penned (reprinted in Bryan Waterman’s excellent 33 1/3 volume):
TOM VERLAINE - guitar, vocals, music, lyrics: Facts unknown. RICHARD HELL - bass, vocals, lyrics: Chip on shoulder. Mama’s boy. No personality. Highschool dropout. Mean. RICHARD LLOYD - guitar vocals: bleach-blond - mental institutions - male prostitute - suicide attempts. BILLY FICCA - drums: Blues bands in Philadelphia. Doesn’t talk much. Friendly. TELEVISION’s music fulfills the adolescent desire to fuck the girl you never met because you’ve just been run over by a car. Three minute songs of passion performed by four boys who make James Dean look like Little Nemo. Their sound is made distinctive by Hell’s rare Dan Electro bass, one that pops and grunts like no model presently available, and his unique spare patterns. Add to this Richard Lloyd’s blitzcrieg chop on his vintage Telecaster and Verlaine’s leads alternately psychotic Duane Eddy and Segovia on a ukelele with two strings gone. Verlaine, who uses an old Jazzmaster, when asked about the music said, “I don’t know. It tells the story. Like ‘The Hunch’ by the Robert Charles Quintet, or 'Tornado’ by Dale Hawkins. Those cats could track it down. I’ll tell you the secret.”
Richard Hell, ladies and gentlemen, punk’s first PR man.
Take note! This isn’t a totally comprehensive collection – in particular, interested parties should seek out the Neon Boys EP, Hell, Verlaine and Ficca’s first stab at greatness. There are also a few tracks I left out that are just not that good. But all in all, I think this is what you need when it comes to Richard Hell with Television. Without further ado, the tracklisting:
ORK LOFT REHEARSALS, 1974
1. Fuck Rock and Roll (I’d Rather Read a Book)
2. Horizontal Ascension
3. I’m Gonna Find You
4. I Don’t Care
5. Marquee Moon
1. Fuck Rock and Roll (I’d Rather Read a Book)
2. Horizontal Ascension
3. I’m Gonna Find You
4. I Don’t Care
5. Marquee Moon
MAX’S KANSAS CITY, AUGUST 1974
6. You Rip My Feelings Out
7. Excitement
8. What I Heard
9. Telepathic Valentine
10. Change Your Channels
11. Judy
12. Psychotic Reaction
6. You Rip My Feelings Out
7. Excitement
8. What I Heard
9. Telepathic Valentine
10. Change Your Channels
11. Judy
12. Psychotic Reaction
ENO / WILLIAMS DEMOS, DECEMBER 1974
13. Prove It
14. Friction
15. Venus De Milo
16. Double Exposure
17. Marquee Moon
13. Prove It
14. Friction
15. Venus De Milo
16. Double Exposure
17. Marquee Moon
CBGB, JANUARY 1975
18. Hard On Love (Fast Version)
19. UFO
20. Poor Circulation
21. Breakin’ In My Heart
18. Hard On Love (Fast Version)
19. UFO
20. Poor Circulation
21. Breakin’ In My Heart
CBGB, MARCH 1975
22. Blank Generation
22. Blank Generation
LOST TELEVISION RECORDINGS
You may recall the video links I posted a while back of the band Television rehearsing in 1974.
Well, the good folks at Doom & Gloom From The Tomb (yes, that’s a Richard Thompson reference) have been posting more crucial documents of the era. The first was titled Kingdom Come: The Lost Television Album. It’s a compilation of songs captured between ’74 – ’78 that never made it onto the band’s two Elektra releases.
Last week, they posted Television: A Season In Hell – a set of recordings made when the band still featured punk conceptualist Richard Hell on bass. Download both while you can: they are the best-sounding and best-annotated sources I’ve found for this stuff. Thanks D&GFTT!
Below: a flier for the very first Television gig, which in fact did not take place at CBGBs, but at the Townhouse Theater in Times Square, an old movie theater that the Modern Lovers had rented out for a show around the same time, as I mention in Love Goes To Buildings On Fire.
http://doomandgloomfromthetomb.tumblr.com/post/18962115402/television-a-season-in-hell-soooo-heres-a
Invisible Hits: When Eno Met Television
Welcome to Invisible Hits, a column in which Tyler Wilcox scours the internet for the best (and strangest) bootlegs. Tyler also blogs at Doom & Gloom From the Tomb. This time, he digs up Television's pre-Marquee Moon demos, recorded by none other than Brian Eno.
During his unfathomably productive 1970s, Brian Eno made an indelible mark on the New York City rock scene, most famously on the trio of visionary LPs he made with Talking Heads and the era-defining no-wave comp No New York. But Eno's first encounter with the NYC scene remains unavailable: A five-song demo recorded 40 years ago with the then-fledgling Television.
Not available officially, at least—the demos have been available through more subterranean channels for decades. After Television, Eno, Island Records A&R man Richard Williams and engineer John Fausty entered Good Vibrations Studio near Times Square in late 1974, the CBGB scene was abuzz with rumors about the “legendary Eno Tapes.” The recordings subsequently appeared on Italian vinyl in the late 1970s (with Eno’s name misspelled on the sleeve as “Bryan”) and then debuted digitally in the 1990s on the essential Television odds-n-sods bootleg CD, Double Exposure. For unknown reasons, the demos were bypassed when Rhino reissued Television’s catalog back in 2003. But of course, the curious can now check out these unreleased tapes on YouTube.
Taken as a whole, Television’s Eno Tapes provide a tantalizing glimpse of an alternate universe where two of the most powerful musical forces of the 1970s forged a long-lasting and fruitful working relationship. Alas, it was not to be. From the outset there was, shall we say... friction.
In a 2013 blog post, Richard Williams wrote, “Tom [Verlaine] didn’t like the way things turned out, and later he blamed Eno … Tom might equally have blamed me or Fausty, but he and Eno didn’t get on, although there was no overt falling out. That still seems a shame. I didn’t realise at the time what a perfectionist Tom was, and that he wanted perfection even on his demos.”
Verlaine elaborated in an interview with Sounds a few years after the fact: “The whole thing sounded like the Ventures. It sounded so bad. I kept on saying, why does it sound so bad? And [Eno would] say, ‘Whaddya mean? It sounds pretty good to me.'”
In a 2013 YouTube comment, Television’s guitarist Richard Lloyd went even further, disavowing Eno’s input altogether. “This was NOT produced by Brian Eno," he wrote. "Richard Williams from Island wanted to record the band and [said] that he would like to bring Eno along because Richard didn't know anything about how to record in studios. So we said OK, but didn't use a single idea that Eno brought.”
Further muddying the waters was the fact that Verlaine and bassist/vocalist Richard Hell were falling out personally and professionally. “By the winter of 1974-75, Tom was shutting me out beyond a doubt,” Hell wrote in his recent memoir I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp. “He had not only stopped allowing most of my songs onto set lists, but he’d told me not to move around onstage while he sang. He didn’t want any attention distracted from himself.” Hell claims that one of his songs, “Blank Generation,” was recorded during the Eno sessions (it’s never appeared on bootleg), but complained that Verlaine performed it “like a novelty song.” Just a few months after the sessions, Hell left the band for good.
So, the whole situation was complicated to say the least. But despite the general negativity expressed above, Television’s Eno demos are very much worth hearing.
Take a listen to this demo of “Venus de Milo”, one of the band’s signature songs. While it doesn’t have the majestic quality of the Marquee Moon version, there’s a nervous energy present here that sounds strikingly like early Talking Heads—a band that was still six months away from its first show at CBGB, and whose members almost certainly caught early Television gigs.
“Double Exposure” (the only tune recorded at these sessions that wouldn’t show up on Marquee Moon) and “Friction” highlight the group’s garage rock roots, with a nagging, Nuggets-like riff stop-starting behind Verlaine’s sneering vocals and proto-no-wave guitar scrawls. “Prove It” comes across almost fully formed, a dream-like noir set to a sashaying salsa beat. Finally, the attempt at Marquee Moon’s epic title track is not quite the masterpiece it would eventually become. But it does hint at a more successful collaboration between Eno and Television, when at the peak of the song’s famous climb-the-stairs climax, a cascade of piano and ambient sound washes over the guitars, a zen-like calm overtaking the wiry tension. You could call it positively Eno-esque—except that Richard Williams says Verlaine played the keyboards here.
Ultimately, both Eno and Television would go their separate ways to create some of the most adventurous and influential music of the decade, leaving the legendary Eno demos as the only evidence of one of the great what-ifs of rock history.
