Television - Marquee Moon

Marco Pandin tells us about his discovery of Television

I was in love with Fernanda Pivano when I was sixteen and with Patti Smith when I was eighteen: the former opened the door to the world for me, the latter was the rebellious older sister who ran away from home and sneaked back at night to tell me secrets. I had met some anarchists older than me on the radio and in bookshops, with whom I liked to talk and to whom I liked to stay and listen. In my early twenties I had already made some radical decisions about pacifism and anti-militarism that would later make my life quite complicated.

When punk came out and people started talking about it I was confused. I had bought and listened to Patti Smith’s first two albums as soon as they came out, often and gladly, getting great joy from them and plenty of fuel for my dreams. As far as I could tell, Patti Smith was considered a poetess and a punk artist, but in my opinion, she was punk in a stellarly different way from the punk that my older radio comrades described as animated, useless and violent, a freak show, junk that should have stayed off the air. Theirs was pretty much the same reading that was offered by the anarchist press – if you go fiddle with the online archive you can find out that in the A/Rivista Anarchica the first time something was written about punk was in October 1977 in these terms:

“…A markedly exhibitionist and consumerist phenomenon. (…) To meet them on the street dressed in their fashion and decorated with pins, to see them engaged in furious brawls with teddy-boys or the police, to notice their presence, in short, is very easy even on the streets of central London. That is why journalists feel obliged to talk about them: what is really aberrant is the fact that punks are given a revolutionary characterisation or meaning. In La Repubblica of 14 October, an article presents the Milan punks (who dress as Fiorucci’s) as a pale copy of the London punks, they are defined as simpicistic as if their London colleagues were not. Punk is a spectacular phenomenon, but essentially insignificant…’.

This article in the Anarchist A/Review came out at the same time I picked up ‘Marquee moon’ – I had just turned twenty. By Television had appeared on the radio, who knows how long ago, a seven-inch with no cover and half a song on each side. A cubist and singular piece that the vast majority of my fellow broadcasters considered useless and/or banal and never included in their programmes, preferring certain rock with balls, singer-songwriters from the squares or the last crumbs of prog. Since I liked that record, but everyone seemed to despise it, one day I swiped it from them, who’s going to notice and who cares if there’s a radio stamp on the label. Some time earlier there had been an unforgettable scene on the radio – the editorial staff had been really angry with a kid who had dared to play a couple of tracks by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. Punk was fascist rubbish fit for sewers and dumps, they thundered, not for the red waves of a free radio station like ours. Like theirs, I said to myself.

Oh, Little Johnny Jewel
He’s so cool
But if you see him looking lost
You ain’t gotta come on so boss
And you know that he’s paid
You know that he’s paid the price
All you gotta do for that guy
Is wink your eye

The lyrics were what they were, in the sense that it completely escaped me where Television were going with this – a bit like Lou Reed’s ‘Walk on the wild side’, a song that was heard regularly and everywhere but whose cryptic lyrics could only be understood by the initiated. Instead, I really liked the work of this mysterious guitarist, who wove the second half of the song like a spider’s web, thin yes, but viscous to the point that I was trapped in it every time. I know, it was a shit record, but I liked it. I listened to it often and fantasised over the music. It would end, I’d turn the record over and put it back on. “Little Johnny Jewel’ not only lacked a cover, but it also lacked a leaflet with two lines of presentation or other useful information: the only information on the label besides the band name was a ‘Part one’ and a ‘Part two’ and a (Verlaine) written like this in brackets. Of Television I had read in NME or Sounds that they were a punk band and played frequently at CBGB’s in New York. To me, however, what came out of the record seemed anything but punk, in the sense that instead of urgent one/two-minute sound spurts (Verlaine) and the others had chosen for their debut single a song that lasted so long that they had to break it in two. I told you I was confused.

One day, in the record shop in Campo San Barnaba, they displayed in the window Television’s first album, which had just been released: a black cover, and above it a photograph of four ugly guys staring at me, and one of them seems to want to offer me something – I don’t know if it’s a plectrum, a coin, a razor blade, a joint. The guy in the shop as usual knows what he’s talking about: he explains that ‘it’s punk music like Patti Smith’ (I had already bought ‘Radio Ethiopia’ and ‘Horses’ from him), and in exchange for ‘Marquee moon’ I give him all the money I have in my pocket. While I’m paying, he also tells me that the ones inside the record are new recordings made on purpose, not the sessions Brian Eno had worked on at the time of “Little Johnny Jewel” – the wholesaler in Munich from whom he had just bought supplies had assured him of this. I arrive at piazzale Roma with this smoky talk churning inside my head and hop on the first bus home. During the journey I turn around and turn over the record cover in my hands and go on fantasising in front of that dark photo with the black border around it. I tear off the cellophane: in the inner envelope there is a picture of them playing, the two guitarists sitting, looking at each other and exchanging telepathic messages. On the back they have the lyrics, I am struck, and I like that image of (Verlaine) tenderly embracing the Venus de Milo, the very woman whose arms were never found. I wonder what the music will be like inside the vinyl. As soon as I get home, I rush to put it on the turntable and within forty minutes eight songs I better understand those things those faces those speeches and the other sounds that were also around “Little Johnny Jewel”. (Verlaine) for me definitely becomes Tom Verlaine. It wasn’t a pick, nor a coin, nor a razor blade, nor a reed shot: on the cover is him offering me a key. His guitar sounds as if ramifications sprouted from its neck, as if each single note came out of his fingers and through the amplifier sought its own way to heaven.

I remember
Ooh, how the darkness doubled
I recall
Lightning struck itself

I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else

Life in the hive puckered up my night
A kiss of death, the embrace of life
Ooh, there I stand neath the Marquee Moon
Just waiting

I spoke to a man
Down at the tracks
And I ask him
How he don’t go mad
He said, “look here, junior, don’t you be so happy
And for heaven’s sake, don’t you be so sad”

Life in the hive puckered up my night
The kiss of death, the embrace of life
Ooh, there I stand ‘neath the Marquee Moon
Hesitating

Well, the Cadillac
It pulled out of the graveyard
Pulled up to me
All they said, “get in, get in”
Then the Cadillac
It puttered back into the graveyard
Me, I got out again

Life in the hive puckered up my night
A kiss of death, the embrace of life
Ooh, there I stand neath the Marquee Moon
But I ain’t waiting, uh-uh

I read somewhere that ‘Marquee moon’ is a cardboard moon like the ones in the circus. I’ve also read that it’s the moon moving slowly across the sky during the New York blackout – but you know, there’s been time to think about that over the last forty-odd years, and on the net everyone can write whatever they want. On the other hand, I have a strong feeling that Television’s Moon can embrace broader meanings: I think the song tells of the bewilderment of those times when everything around was sadness but, if you put your faith in advertising, it really seemed as if the future could be touched with your fingers. They did not seem to seek visibility, Tom Verlaine and co. were one of the most recalcitrant groups to enter the scene: rather than songs designed to be played on the radio, they composed pieces about ten minutes long, each a kind of rock symphony with a very slender, delicate, transparent structure. They were the equivalent of filigree, of tissue paper, of certain fine embroideries. They were steam, they were frost, other than that punk coming from England, so dirty, rushed and stinky. Back then, the American sales charts were inhabited by danceable crap and adult rock: Fleetwood Mac, Eagles, Foghat, Boston, Peter Frampton, America, Elton John. Jefferson Starship, the wreckage of a historic rock band, had attracted over fifty thousand people to their New York concert – maybe it’s them inside that luxury car that goes in and out of the cemetery, the Cadillac that Tom Verlaine doesn’t want to get into. It makes me think of that feeling of being cramped (life in the beehives he says, in the huge buildings of New York) inside the dark then, and the inert wait for the night to end – hard not to empathise. How many times have I listened to ‘Marquee moon’. Each time it seemed like that voice and that music rested like tiny drops of moisture on the ceiling and walls of my room. In my dreams I was at CBGB’s, Tom Verlaine and Television on stage, a handful of kids swirling around Patti Smith, standing in the throng is Allen Ginsberg motionless as if praying with his eyes closed, and me just behind, so close I could brush his wings.

Article by Marco Pandin, stella_nera@tin.it
Translation by Max

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