Television's One Of A Kind Musical Alchemy: Live At The Waldorf On Vinyl

 

[review by Rev. Keith A. Gordon]

TELEVISION

Live At the Waldorf In San Francisco

(Radio LoopLoop, UK)

VENUE: The Old Waldorf, 444 Battery Street, San Francisco CA; June 29th, 1978.

SOUND QUALITY: Not too bad, really, with some cavernous quality to the sound and a little hollowness to the overall mix. Still, although Tom Verlaine’s vocals are a bit muddy, his and Richard Lloyd’s guitars are quite distinctive, as is Fred Smith’s underrated bass playing. Billy Ficca’s drums are minimal, with really only the high tones crashing above the instrumental drone. Eh, I’ve heard worse…

COVER: Up-close-and-personal B&W photo of the band in all of its Lower East Side junkie chic below a black banner with the band’s name and the album title in what has to be the worst use of the Helvetica font in existence. Back cover sports a more relaxed color pic of Television (actually credited to photog Lynn Goldsmith!), band credits, and track listing with more should-be-a-crime use of Helvetica. 

TRACKLIST: Side A: 1. The Dream’s Dream • 2. Friction • 3. Marquee Moon • 4. Careful Side B: 5. Venus de Milo • 6. Foxhole • 7. Ain’t That Nothin’ • 8. Little Johnny Jewel

COMMENTS: Television is notable not only for its revolutionary, guitar-driven sound, but also for their status as one of the punk pioneers that took up stations at New York City’s infamous C.B.G.B.’s club. Originally formed in 1972 as the Neon Boys by Verlaine and his longtime friend Richard Hell along with drummer Ficca, they would add Richard Lloyd as a second guitarist in 1973 and change their name to Television. Their unique blend of psychedelic-rock, punky garage-rock, and avant-garde musical experimentation quickly earned the band a cult following at C.B.G.B.’s and Max’s Kansas City. 

There was only room for one alpha dog in the ranks, however, and Hell quit to first form the Heartbreakers with former New York Dolls member Johnny Thunder and, later, the Voidoids, which rode their song “Blank Generation” to punk-rock infamy. Hell was replaced by the more talented, if less charismatic Fred Smith (no relation to the MC5/Sonic’s Rendezvous Band axe-mangler Fred “Sonic” Smith) and the band was signed to the major label deal that resulted in the classic, groundbreaking Marquee Moon and Adventure albums. Although both albums received widespread critical acclaim, their meager stateside sales, along with inner-band tensions, seemed to have doomed the Television experiment before it could really take wings (although, interestingly, both of the band’s albums charted in the U.K.).  

After a warm-up show at the familiar My Father’s Place in Roslyn NY, Television launched its 1978 tour in support of Adventure in April with a string of dates in the U.K. Returning home in late May, they tooled around NYC and the East Coast before heading out to the West Coast for a mere four dates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle. San Francisco’s Old Waldorf was a legendary Bay Area venue that, although it was only open a short while (roughly seven years), nevertheless hosted a number of impressive shows by folks like Spirit, Metallica, the Dead Kennedys, Rory Gallagher, Poco, and R.E.M. The June 1978 performance documented by Live At the Waldorf came at the tail end of the tour and would be the band’s last North American road run until reforming in 1992. Adventure was released just months prior to this concert and the album’s eight-song set list is split roughly 60/40 between tracks from Adventure and the band’s 1977 debut, Marquee Moon. 

I’ll leave it up to Television fanatics to debate the merits of this particular set list but, to this fan, the swirling, oddly-syncopated, angular psychedelia of “The Dream’s Dream” provides a great showcase for the band members’ myriad instrumental talents – the guitars chime like a thousand bells, the bass riffs are hearty and jump lustily out of the grooves, and while the aforementioned shoddy mix underplays Ficca’s talents, he makes his presence felt nonetheless. Verlaine’s vocals take getting used to – a sort of deep, nasal, NYC patois – but they’re effective and haunting riding above his and Lloyd’s mesmerizing guitar lines. The sound quality nosedives a bit for “Friction,” from Marquee Moon, but the song’s cascading guitar licks, Verlaine’s strident vocals, and percussive rhythms rise above the fuzzy, distorted mix to create a staggering slab of raucous city slang. 

The title track from their debut LP is afforded extended instrumentation beyond even the original version’s generous ten-minute sonic devastation, the live track running half-again as long and featuring lengthy passages of electroshock guitar, crashing drums, and funky circular bass lines sounding like a klaxon horn beneath Verlaine’s tortured vox. Adventure’s “Careful” sounds pedestrian by contrast, the song’s relatively-brief three-minute-plus running time and jaunty, up-tempo sound and vocal harmonies a shock after the mind-bending “Marquee Moon.” Side two kicks off with “Venus” (incorrectly titled “Venus De Milo” here), a Marquee Moon track that rumbles and roams across a more traditional rock ‘n’ roll soundscape, but still features the band’s jagged trademark fretwork, here paired with the vaguest vestige of a melody that made it a natural to release as a single (if only in Japan, it seems!). 

Adventure’s “Foxhole” was released as a single in the U.K. (where the band had found a more receptive audience) and is a similar up-tempo rocker but with no melodic hook, just jugular-crushing rhythms, razor-blade guitars, and muscular drumbeats that hit your ears like mortar-fire. Another Adventure track, “Ain’t That Nothin’,” was an odd choice for a U.S. single, the song’s cross-cutting instrumentation, odd time changes, wall-of-sonic-overkill arrangement, and overall intriguing, albeit challenging sound not particularly suited for battle in the rock arenas of the day, much less friendly enough for the era’s timid, strictly-formatted FM radio playlists. 

Live At the Waldorf closes out with an eleven-minute extended workout on what was the band’s actual first single, the transcendent “Little Johnny Jewel.” Originally split into two parts and released as a (highly collectible*) 7” single by their manager Terry Ork’s legendary indie Ork Records label, the song wasn’t included on Television’s debut album (although it was later added to the 2003 CD reissue of Marquee Moon). An enchanting, almost magical performance that runs through several sonic textures, light and dark, and quiet passages blown-up by shards of expansive instrumentation, the song suggests the sophisticated song structure and experimentation the band would make the cornerstone of Marquee Moon.

Less than a month after this performance, Television would break up, ostensibly due to Lloyd’s drug abuse but mostly because Verlaine’s uncompromising artistic vision prevented the other guys from getting a musical word in edgewise. Verlaine and Lloyd both launched solo careers with varying degrees of success; Billy Ficca took his skills to new wavers the Waitresses (“I Know What Boys Like”) and Smith played with folks like the Roches and Willie Nile through the 1980s. Television reformed in 1992 and released one last, self-titled album and continues to perform sporadically with three of the four original members (Lloyd leaving the band in 2007 due to health concerns). 

This show was originally released by the esteemed Trademark of Quality bootleg label as Ain’t That Nothing and duplicated through the years by titles like Live Adventures (Chapter One Records), Live In San Francisco (Four Aces Records), and Live At the Old Waldorf (Russian label DOL). It acquired a semblance of legitimacy when Rhino Records released the full performance on CD in 2003 as Live At the Old Waldorf as part of its “Rhino Handmade” limited edition series. The set was reissued again on vinyl in 2017 by Warner affiliate Elektra Records, so the major label has definitely laid claim to this particular performance for their own exploitation. What Radio LoopLoop has done is take a timeworn performance, dropped a song from the track list (in this case, a cover of the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction”), and shoehorned the remaining set onto a single disc (Elektra’s version was stretched thin across four sides). 

My half-assed Internet research unearthed a comment by legendary rock critic Lester Bangs that he heard a lot of the influence of Quicksilver Messenger Service and its guitarist John Cipollina on Verlaine’s playing in particular. The mercurial bandleader downplayed this comparison, citing the Venture as a more appropriate influence but, in truth, I can hear both bands here as well as the ever-looming Velvet Underground, all influencing the unique (and seldom-duplicated) Television sound. Verlaine and Lloyd eschewed the traditional lead/rhythm guitar dynamic, blurring the lines and redefining musical roles in favor of interlocking guitars that were allowed to improvise, almost jazzlike, on their own wavelength (something that Smith also does with his bass guitar, albeit to a lesser extent). 

You can hear a lot of this exciting instrumental interplay in the band’s live set, and Live At the Waldorf is a great example of Television’s one-of-a-kind musical alchemy. Grade: A

* A near mint condition copy of “Little Johnny Jewel” on Ork Records will set you back a hefty $40-$50 according to Discogs as of this writing…

Bonus view: