Marquee Moon

Television

album cover

An Unpunk Punk-Era Manifesto

For a moment there in the mid-'70s, it looked like guitar rock had pretty much run its course. The major works of the British blues-influenced bands (Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple) were in the past, and the American iterations, like Aerosmith, were blatant copycats. The most influential band in the U.S. was nearly unknown, those dystopian explorers the Velvet Underground. The most promising rising stars, like the Ramones, were savage primitivists with limited skills. Then came Marquee Moon.

Television's debut amounts to a radical rethinking of rock guitar. The singer and primary songwriter Tom Verlaine and his technically adept lead player, Richard Lloyd, did not bludgeon listeners. They needled them instead, with fantastic barbed-wire melodies and sprocketed counterlines. The New York band's sound was built on the precise alignment of several contrasting motifs: verlaine would establish a rhythmic phrase, against which Lloyd would splatter defiant, often deliriously dissonant, melodies. "There weren't many bands where the two guitars play rhythm and melody back and forth, like a jigsaw puzzle," Lloyd said in an interview marking Marquee Moon's 2003 reissue. "It was what we were obsessed with when we recorded." This twin-guitar attack inspired bands across the rock spectrum—scruffy alt-rockers (the Pixies), noise specialists (Sonic Youth), and big arena acts like U2. (The Edge, U2's guitarist, simulates the intricate Television sound all by himself, with effects pedals.)

With their extended instrumental sections, impenetrable moods (see "Torn Curtain"), and often-lofty lyrics ("I fell right into the arms of Venus de Milo," goes one), the songs of Marquee Moon advanced ideas far more ambitious than those of the New York punk brigade. Television knew its rock history (traces of Chuck Berry and the early Rolling Stones creep into songs like "Friction") and, more important, knew what it needed to avoid—the cursory punk snarl. That knotted-up and spectacular sound drew massive love from critics, and has since been cited as a cornerstone of modern rock—Marquee Moon is number 128 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. Yet Television hasn't connected with a large audience, suffering commercially for an innocent crime: This band was way too hip for the room.

Genre: Rock
Released: 1977, Elektra
Key Tracks: "Friction," "Venus," "Torn Curtain".
Catalog Choice: Live at the Old Waldorf, 6/29/78.
Next Stop: Sonic Youth: Daydream Nation
After That: The Soft Boys: Underwater Moonlight.
Book Pages: 769–770

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About 1,000 Recordings

Celebrate the joy, the revelation, the mystery, the fun, the sheer shivers-up-the-spine pleasure of great music.

Essential operas. Milestone rock albums. An education in the blues. The world of world. Classical from Bach to Bartók to Beethoven to Brahms. And dozens of unexpected gems, surprising discoveries, and long-lost masterpieces.

This is an online version of the list (published alphabetically in the book). The entries in the book break down genre bias and broaden every listener’s horizons—think Miles Davis to Claude Debussy to the melodic story-songs of The Decemberists. And the writing is passionate, informed, opinionated.

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