Earworms: Marquee Moon by Television

Honoring the genius of Tom Verlaine

I was listening

Listening to the rain

I was hearing

Hearing something else.

I know what you mean there, Tom Verlaine. As a guitarist, Tom Verlaine was unique in rock. He took his initial inspiration from 60s garage bands, from the early Rolling Stones to the Count Five. That was a raw, expressive style of playing, with significant input from the blues. But unlike virtually every other guitarist who listened to that sort of thing, Verlaine used it as a launching pad far from the genre restrictions of his heroes. He found a way to make his guitar soar the way his favorite poets did with words. The rhythms, intonations, flights of fancy, and melodic inversions all call to mind the work of Symbolist poets such as Paul Verlaine (who gave him the idea to change his last name from Miller) and Arthur Rimbaud. As Van Morrison would sing in a completely unrelated context, he “tore down a la Rimbaud.”

The history has been told many times. Verlaine and his friend who became Richard Hell moved to New York looking to make their artistic impact. They learned to play guitar and bass, added Billy Fica on drums and Richard Lloyd on second guitar, and deemed themselves Television (still one of the most perfect band names ever!). Hell left the band behind, former Blondie bassist Fred Smith came in, and this four-man lineup, after a few years of woodshedding songs on the stage at CBGB’s (which Verlaine hadhelped convert to a rock club) recorded a debut album, Marquee Moon, which 45 years later remains an exquisite aural document of musical possibility and beauty.

The band made one more album, Adventure, then broke up. Verlaine made a series of wonderful solo albums in the 80s, while Lloyd made a couple of spottier but solid ones, then in 1992 they all got back together for one more creative record as a team, and a tour which enabled me, at long last, to experience their brilliance live. This century, they were able to make very lucrative concert appearances though Lloyd was replaced by Jimmy Rip in 2007. After 1992, Verlaine only released one instrumental solo album. I read an interview with Lloyd a few years back that said his erstwhile partner had stopped writing words, which meant he couldn’t come up with any more songs.

It may seem obvious to choose a song from the first album to focus on in the wake of Verlaine’s unexpected death at the age of 73. It would probably be worthwhile to give close listens to all his work in the fifteen years he made such glorious records. But a song like “Marquee Moon” is iconic for a reason. It is a masterpiece of concision, despite being roughly 10 minutes long (some 45 seconds returned to the CD mix of the recording).

The intro to the song is wonderful. First one guitar establishes a rhythmic pulse, two beats of the same chord, then rest, two beats, rest, after the fourth time change chords, repeat the pattern. This will continue throughout most of the song. When it returns to the first chord, a filigree of notes forms a riff in the other channel, darker yet somehow with a lightness to its feel, starting in the open space between the chords, and floating over them. After the pattern repeats again, the bass inserts its deeper echo of the chords in yet another rhythmic space, accompanied by some light hits on the high hat before the drums bounce across the tom toms and then lock into a groove with accents on yet another open spot in the sequence. Each member of the band is in lock step with the others, but nobody is playing on the same downbeats.

Verlaine starts singing. By this time on the album, listeners have had time to adjust to the timbre of his voice. It’s slightly woody, with occasional slips just off the notes, bearing a bit of a debt to Roky Erickson from the 13^thFloor Elevators, whose “Fire Engine” was a staple of their live shows in those days. But Verlaine sings behind the beat where Erickson tends to push forward in his songs, and that difference helps this band move in a different direction, one more open to abstraction while never abandoning a commitment to rhythmic pulses.

“I remember how the darkness doubled / I recall lightning struck itself.” Images that don’t make sense except they seem perfect enough to allow us to understand destructive urges yet see no evil ( to paraphrase a different song from the album). Can darkness be any darker? Can lightning double back and hit itself? Can two guitars, bass, and drums sound any clearer, feel any more sublime?

After two verses (the second being quoted as the intro to this piece), the band goes into a different, more lock-step passage with Lloyd playing a richly composed melodic figure as the music pumps itself up, preens with the confidence of four young men who know exactly what they’re doing and how they want to sound. The chords rise, Verlaine intones: “Life in the hive puckered up my night / A kiss of death, the embrace of life / Ooh, there I stand ‘neath the Marquee Moon” Everybody drops out save one guitar chord, at the end of which, Verlaine says casually, “Just waiting.” Again, literal sense is not being made, emotional resonance is completely achieved. This feels like the act of creation, like the moment of conception, like the certain knowledge that something fantastic is going to be achieved.

There are two more verses, each punctuated by a return to that chorus, before the cosmic trip of Verlaine’s guitar solo. Like the light show at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Verlaine’s playing is not about anything other than beauty and truth, grace and breath. Oh, sure, if you’re conversant with the concept of mixolydian scales, it might be understandable on a more technical level. For me, it’s enough to know it’s not an ordinary rock guitar solo. It starts somewhat like the beginning of the song, only now Lloyd is holding down the chords, and his melodic counterpoint is no longer there. Once the pattern is established, Verlaine’s guitar starts rumbling, clearing its throat, spitting out phlegm before starting riffs higher up the neck, then answering them lower, picking up speed, adding more notes.

The drums up the intensity, the bass leans in, and Verlaine bounces off the band, never leaving his carefully constructed phrases, going from low lines to middle notes, to higher ones, playing faster, bending occasionally, mostly staccato, generating frenzy without being frenetic, in juxtaposition with the rhythms, getting higher and higher, harder and harder, going from quarter notes to eighth notes, eventually landing back down in the lower register, climbing the scales on the same riff over and over, higher and higher, faster and faster, then that chordal riff which does the same trick, the drums and bass harder. Everybody eventually lands in a space where they climb the scales together on a hard-edged four beat section with Fica’s drums going wild.

Then, the cascading high-pitched filigrees from both quitars at once, while Fica almost marches, and overdubbed guitars slam chords here and there. Until it all starts over again, and we’re back to that first verse, understanding that the darkness was replaced by light, that the lightning made it brighter, that the rain dried it all up. One more quick riff, then slow everything down to a crawl and end with a chord that serves as a final bow before Fica’s cymbals provide the last cries of love.

The world is a far, far better place for having had Tom Verlaine in it.