[Diesel]

He was Amercan aye?! Just let that sink in for a moment

[The Soup Nazi]

I'm sure several of you are familiar with the "Bakers Dozen" section of The Quietus, in which an artist picks 13 albums they love. Television appears on a bunch of those lists, so I thought, why not include a little compilation on this thread:


Television - Marquee Moon

This was the great danger of me picking these records - that they'd all come from 1974, but that was when I was most enthusiastic about buying records. And Marquee Moon… I just played it over and over and over again. I just love it. US punk was very different [to UK punk]; over here, the concept of it was absolutely fantastic, and that was the whole thing that got me into it, but it was a bit one dimensional. The Ramones were great, but they were kind of a caricature - a cartoon band. And a lot of punk over here seemed to go for that, as a backlash against over sophistication.

I just felt that Marquee Moon and the stuff from New York was odd, and it was different, and it was weird - and I always liked weird thing. It still had a lot of energy; I liked Marquee Moon in preference to, say, Patti Smith's Horses… it was just contrived enough. Any further and it would be too pretentious. It's still great today; as soon as I put it on and hear those first few bars of 'See No Evil', it reminds me of when it first came out and I played it non-stop. Although imagine my disappointment when I bought Adventure on the red vinyl and tried desperately to like 'Foxhole', and it didn't happen.

—Stephen Morris

[The Soup Nazi]

Television - Marquee Moon

This was a record that I discovered a little bit later, when I first moved down to New York when I was about 21. I moved in with these crazy, fun people – one was Irish and one was English – and it was a very rock and roll time, I have to admit! Everyone was going a little bit crazy in their own way. We would come back to the apartment late at night after being in the bars and play that record as a reminder, a representative of that spirit we were trying to create of defiance, anger, but also of a totally 'fuck you' attitude I guess. It really marked me.

—Martha Wainwright

[The Soup Nazi]

Television - Marquee Moon

Marquee Moon is hands down my favourite album. It's hard to land on exactly why. I've been listening to it for close to 40 years - let's say 35 - and that it still sounds fresh, that points to something.

As a teenager I expected to hear something punk-er/weirder because I got it around the same time as Cramps' Gravest Hits and Wire - Pink Flag and Pere Ubu and Dead Boys. Instead I heard something beautiful that expressed the same anger and confusion, but also curiousness and wonder. It's emotionally complex.

I guess all of those records are emotionally complex. X - Los Angeles, too. Beautiful. As evidenced by their immeasurable influence, Television had something happening purely on a musical level, too. I was too young to understand this, but [there were] enough guitar ideas to sustain the next three generations of guitar players.

—Doug McCombs

[The Soup Nazi]

Television - Marquee Moon

It's just the best guitar record. The way the guitars weave together… I got it when I was a teenager and took to it right away. The first time I heard their music was seeing R.E.M. with Bob Mould on guitar covering 'See No Evil'; it was punk, but not simple. It might be a record that's hard to talk about. Lyrically, it doesn't really grab me, and it's weird, as a lyricist, to love a record like I love this one without really having much of a handle on it. There isn't a lot you can even make out, he's not much of an enunciator. The guitars are so good, it pulls the rest of it along.

When I was married, my wife came home one day and she was like: "I met this guy, this older guy, he was in a band called Television – you ever hear of them?" "Yeah, I know them. They're pretty big." It was the drummer. I forget his name.

—Craig Finn

[The Soup Nazi]

Television – Adventure

I think that as great as Marquee Moon is, I love Adventure just as much. There's that truism, that cliché, that you have your whole life to create your first record and a year to create your second one and Marquee Moon has obviously got that sort of perfect quality to it like they'd been planning it for ages. You hear it in their demos, working towards how great 'Venus' is going to be and how great 'Marquee Moon' is going to be; they had so many amazing songs in that period. You look at the cover of Marquee Moon and you're like, 'where's 'O Mi Amore', where's 'Adventure'?' and it comes to their second album and they still don't have these songs. All these great songs that they had in their repertoire aren't even on their second record. Marquee Moon is perfect but I don't think perfection is necessarily the be all and end all. There's something so beautiful and so human about Adventure. I do think the fact that it's not considered as good definitely made me gravitate towards it but I just love every song on that record as much as anything on Marquee Moon.

—Ira Kaplan

[The Soup Nazi]

Television - Marquee Moon

The reason I love this record, apart from it being an absolutely incredible record, is that up until hearing Marquee Moon I wrote songs on my own and when it came to putting things together with a band, I would always have in my mind that I would play chords and then break for a solo and then have some more chords.

A friend of mine who is a great guitarist himself asked me whether I had heard a song called 'Marquee Moon' and suggested we try learning the guitar parts together. We sat down like teenagers and tried to learn them. I suddenly realised that you can have loops of really intricate riffs – it doesn't have to be just chords and solos. So, 'Marquee Moon' changed my attitude to arranging - in terms of the guitars - a song.

But then, weirdly, after that the track 'Marquee Moon' began to haunt me out. I had some gigs in Australia and Brazil and I figured out that if the record company gave me a round-the-world ticket it would be cheaper for them and also mean I could go to places like Thailand and Chile in between the tour. And every single place I went I would hear the track 'Marquee Moon' being played on local radio stations. It started to become really, really creepy.

So, when I came back from the tour I thought I better buy the bloody record as it was haunting me. I found it for a quid in a charity shop as if everything was lining up for me to listen to this record in its entirety. And I did, thankfully, and it has just really changed my attitude to playing guitar and how I could structure things differently in terms of guitar playing.

—Cate Le Bon

[Diesel]

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

I found it for a quid in a charity shop...

That'll be right

[The Soup Nazi]

From Trouser Press:

Souvenir From a Dream: Memories of Tom Verlaine

In late 1975, two Trouser Press writers brought Tom Verlaine of the then-unsigned band Television up to their apartment for an interview. This hour-long conversation has never previously been published. Here, it is accompanied by an introductory essay by the novelist Bruce Bauman as well as audio clips from their conversation.

[The Soup Nazi]

And now, a priceless bit from:

 

I added the text within brackets for context. (By the way, I typed this whole shit, so you better read it, fuckers.)

As 1976 began, Television seemed ready to fulfill that promise [this refers to Danny Fields' January 1st, 1976 review of Television and Patti Smith's December 1975 shows in the SoHo Weekly News, where he wrote that "Simply, it was a wonderful weekend, and it bodes well for everyone involved"]. The sound that would make Marquee Moon was more or less in place. Once they began performing new compositions "See No Evil" and "Guiding Light" in late '75, all the songs were written that would eventually be on the album. Their live shows attracted larger crowds than ever: at CBGB's they broke house records two nights in a row in December before headlining the final show of CB's Christmas Rock Festival on New Year's Eve. Smith joined them on stage at CBGB's around 5 am to help them finish their second set. Fields, who named Television and the Ramones the "Cosmic Newcomers" in his year-in-review column, reported that Lou Reed had been won over as a fan, that the underground director John Waters had been to see them, and that Paul Simon had come to a show in November with Arista's Clive Davies. But still no contract, a situation that would wear thin with Television's relations to other CB's bands over the coming months, as Verlaine came to feel more and more distant from the scene he had helped start. Some of their peers —starting with the Ramones— had negotiated contracts of their own. He would feel even more separated from the musicians overseas who would form the UK punk scene, many of them fueled by legends of New York's Bowery enclave.

When the NME sent [Charles Shaar] Murray back to New York near year's end to find "The Sound of '75," he somehow missed Television's live shows. He did hear the single ["Little Johnny Jewel"], though, which couldn't live up to his memory of seeing the band live the previous spring, and so he only offered the band a mixed review in his feature, which was the most extensive the scene had received overseas. Noting the band's "willful inconsistency," he concedes: "And since they still haven't recorded anything impressive (viz the debacle of the Eno Tape, a tale of almost legendary status in CBGB annals), it seems unlikely that any of the major labels who've decided that they can get along without Television are likely to change their minds unless a particularly hip A&R man manages to catch Tom Verlaine and his henchmen on a flamingly good night."

That a reporter from the NME was talking about having heard the "legendary" Eno tapes seriously unsettled Verlaine. It's not quite clear when Verlaine first heard Roxy Music's new album Siren, but by the end of '76 he was telling reporters he believed Richard Williams or Brian Eno had distributed their demo tape so promiscuously that Ferry had ripped off at least a dozen lines. Roxy's song "Whirlwind," for instance, included the line "This case is closed," Verlaine's sign-off in "Prove It." But Verlaine's list of resemblances seems superficial. The lack of a contract seemed to be pushing him toward paranoia. As early as December '75, Danny Fields had noted Lou Reed's habit of taping CBGB's shows on a portable Sony cassette recorder, still a novelty. But when Reed packed his recorder into a Television show in the summer of '76, Verlaine bristled. Lisa Robinson took notes on the confrontation, which came on the cusp of Television's finally signing with Elektra:

"What's he doing with that tape recorder?" mumbled Tom Verlaine. "Do you think I should ask him to keep it in the back?" Ask him for the cassette, I suggested, or the batteries. "Hey, buddy," Verlaine said to Reed. "Watcha doin' with that machine?" Lou looked up, surprised. "The batteries are run-down," he said. "Oh yeah?" responded Verlaine. "Then you wouldn't mind if I take it and hold it in the back, will ya?" Lou handed a cassette over, then said, "You'd make a lousy detective, man. You didn't even notice the two extra cassettes in my pocket, heh-heh." Verlaine was not amused. "O.K. then, pal, let me have the machine. I'll keep it in the back for you." Reed handed over the machine, then said, "Can you believe him?" His eyes widened in surprise.

Verlaine's paranoia may have been warranted: when Reed played the Palladium at the end of '76 in support of his Rock and Roll Heart LP, he played in front of a bank of television sets, as if to stage a pissing contest with the new underground.