Album of the Week: Television- Marquee Moon

Punk rock and I don't get along too well. Our incompatibility stems from the opinion I hold about it, which is that it was a musical movement that was important and influential but produced nothing, music-wise, I find brilliant. Allow me to clarify before I am garroted: I think the Sex Pistols are a disgustingly overrated band who are interesting for every reason except their music, which sucks. Similarly, the only straight up, traditional punk album you need is the first Ramones album. Then, you more or less know exactly what every other punk band will sound like.

See, punk rock is great because of what it spawned and the bands it influenced, not for punk itself. It wasn't important for the people who saw the Ramones or Sex Pistols in '75-'77 and thought "wow, they aren't very good at their instruments, and they can't sing, but I find this very riveting. The people are taking back rock and making it dangerous again. Maybe I'll start a band who sound like this"; rather, it was important for the bands who were inspired to try out their own crazy ideas on stage because they felt liberated by punk rock. It was the post-punks, the art-punks, the New Wavers, and the myriad of later rock strains (indie rock, alternative rock, noise-pop, riot grrl, anti-folk, alt-country, etc.) that, retroactively, made punk bands important.

Bands like Television, Wire, and the Talking Heads, who simultaneously existed with punk and went beyond it, are the ones that I feel are the true innovators. After all, you can trace the Sex Pistols and the Ramones back to 60s/early-to-mid 70s garage rock without much effort. But the unique sounds of those three bands showed how far this new punk "anybody can be a rocker no matter how strange they are" ideal could go. Where the Talking Heads brought funk, pop, and world music to punk, and Wire brought psychedelia, prog-rock (arguably), and art-rock to punk, Television brought jazz to punk via their complex, interlocking guitars and clean, lean guitar solos. The result is one of the best albums ever made, and a touchstone that many musicians are still inspired by. In fact, invoking Television when describing a new band's sound has become music critic shorthand in the years since Marquee Moon's release, denoting a rock band with long guitar solos and/or deft, complex interplay. See: Sleater-Kinney, Wilco's last few releases, etc.

Though Tom Verlaine's lead vocals, full of untrained yelping, compelling in their nervous way, are in line with punk's "the less you know about music, the less trained you are, the better you're off" dogma, the rest of the band's sound flies in the face of this while remaining inside the punk sphere. Yet Marquee Moon sounds nothing like most punk rock, and it remains hard to classify--all the more reason why it is so often invoked to describe other bands, as I said above. Since punk orthodoxy is all about short, simple songs with no flashy guitar solos, Marquee Moon sticks out as quite possibly the most paradoxical of '77 punk albums. The title track, a ten minute epic that has long since passed into the land of absolutely classic band defining tracks, reminds one of other startlingly original songs that are standing between genres and don't truly belong to anything.

Marquee Moon's genius was in overturning the prevailing trends of punk rock just as the movement was taking shape. The band's guitarists used relatively clean/distortion-free guitars, and stuck to linear, melodic lead/rhythm guitar interplay instead of the dirty tones and chord bashing/riffing of most punk. Songs like 'Venus' and 'Prove It' could have easily been simple punk songs, but Television injected them with a playfulness missing in the angry, overly serious punk scene. At the same time, they actually tried to be good at their instruments, and borrowed heavily from jazz in inventing a rock guitar style that went beyond power chords and Jimi Hendrix's face melting solos. Though derided as 'the Jerry Garcia of punk' in the past, Tom Verlaine, and foil Richard Lloyd, crafted a guitar based, improvisational style that pops with inventive ideas, melodies, and complex interplay. Listening to hard-to-find 'official' bootlegs, it quickly becomes obvious that Marquee Moon was more restrained than their live shows, which allowed the full band's collective might full flight. Within the focus of a studio album, however, this greater length and immediacy was traded for tight playing and near-perfect music--witness the surprising poetic delicacy the band allows on 'Guiding Light', a yin to the title track's atomic bomb yang of flawless, free flowing solos that never get tiring.

Marquee Moon stands alongside the great masterpieces of 20th century pop music. It sounds completely timeless, and, even to this day, when so many have taken inspiration from it, it sounds startlingly fresh and original. I first heard it while in high school and had no idea it was from 1977 until I saw the back cover. Truly, this is the sort of album that is so exciting and original that it makes you fall in love with listening to music all over again.