(No members of Television were harmed during the making of this CD)

Being a brief history of Television, for those not in the know. The following are extracts from Monica Kendrick's excellent Introduction section on Marquee Moon - An Unofficial Television Page. "... Richard Meyers and Tom Miller ran away to New York as kids because that was the place to be if you were young and full of yourself, with music and poetry spilling out your pores. That was the place to take a new name and become someone else and perhaps reinvent an art form in the process. Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine eventually found themselves to be coming from very different places - but they had to try it out to find that out: like all inventions and reinventions, a process of trial and error. That element of chance and possibility was what corporate control had leeched out of the music in 1973: no danger, no transcendance. (No friction, no elevation.)... " "...Meyers and Miller were a pair of too-smart-for-their-own-good boarding-school kids who'd once run away from school together. Meyers was a hellfire-and-brimstone poet, and Miller a longhaired singer/songwriter who had spent more time than was healthy alone with instruments and records... " "... Meyers [Richard Hell] had been convinced by the New York Dolls that great rock 'n' roll didn't have to be hard to play, and he allowed Miller [Tom Verlaine] to teach him the rudiments of bass. Billy Ficca, an old friend of Verlaine's from Delaware, played drums and Richard Lloyd - a friend of early supporter Terry Ork - joined in on guitar: enter first the Neon Boys and then Television... " "...According to witnesses... Hell, who affected a torn-shirted, short-messy-haired look that he said he lifted from Rimbaud and actors in French New Wave films, thrashed around at his bass as if he could express more in flailing than he ever could in music, occasionally falling to the floor and staying there twitching, while Verlaine stammered and moaned and strained at his guitar as if he were hoping to squeeze juice out of it--and impossibly, he did... " "... Their gigs were attended by small knots of friends and rock cognoscenti displaced by the literal collapse of the New York Dolls' home base the Mercer Arts Center. Word of mouth was the favored means of advertising, and gradually allies started appearing in the press... " "... Years later, Verlaine reflected on a film of one early performance where Richard Hell was twitching on the floor and "it looks like I'm kicking him to death." The berserker tension of their stage style had roots in a real conflict that threatened to destroy the band before their career even happened: Hell and Verlaine were at each other's throats. Verlaine was coming to place more and more emphasis on musicianship, craft, and songwriting, whereas Hell's vision was much closer to anarchistic performance art. To this end, Hell was very interested in imagemaking, confrontation, and all-round assaults on audience expectations - but by his own admission he was not very interested in practicingthe bass. Gradually, Verlaine was edging Hell's songs - which included "Love Comes in Spurts" andthe now-historic "Blank Generation" - out of the set, and when Verlaine proposed cutting the latter,Hell decided to cut himself instead. Verlaine replaced him with Fred Smith, who had previously been with Chris Stein and Deborah Harry in the band that would eventually become Blondie..." "Television were signed to Elektra Records in late 1976, and released their masterpiece Marquee Moon... Marquee Moon is a punk record in the true sense: it ispassionate, occasionally grating, sublime in its intuitive flights into and out of pop-song constrictions,and made with a hearty bird flipped at industry expectations and the demands of faddishness. It is not a punk record in the sense of punk as fashionable genre: no short sharp ripping buzz-chords, no two-minute songs, no profanity (not even the word "society"), not a gob of pleghm or safety pin anywhere to be found. Its centerpiece title track is a dazzling nine-minute excursion across the narrative line of a hallucination, and it was fairly typical of their stage shows at the time -Television had evolved into a searing guitar band, and Verlaine and Lloyd wove long, spiralling, radiating showers of notes and wails between and around each other, with the stakes getting higher minute byminute. Sometimes it would still fall apart - Lloyd would resort to pulling the strings to the breaking point and beyond like an archer with a bow; Verlaine would find himself stranded in outer space without a safety line of musical logic. That was what gave them their edge..." "...Marquee Moon is a cornerstone... both it and its followup, Adventure reached the British Top 10 in 1977 and 1978, and in America were buzzwords among devout music fans for years - like the Velvet Underground before them, Television found their most excited audience among young musicians and their greatest influence years in the future..." "Television itself broke up in 1978... frustrated by the fickleness of the press and of audiences... Richard Lloyd released two solo albums, Alchemy and Field of Fire, and flickered in and out of the music business for years while wrestling with substance abuse problems. He has since rallied, and now plays with the Matthew Sweet Band. Tom Verlaine has released seven solo albums. He has never topped the majestic purity of Marquee Moon, but then he doesn't have to--certainly no one else has. His solo records continue exploring the parallel languages of words and music and the relations between them, and the moments that fall between the cracks of description, when life is most intensely felt. As a songwriter, he's a skewed-pop genius who can spin a sudden intuitive phrase into a concrete "souvenir from a dream,"; as a guitarist he's a first-rate sonic illuminist who weaves playful virtuosity through sharply spiritual passion in a manner more common to jazz musicians... " "... Television also have the distinction of being one of the only long-gone bands to reunite a decade and a half after their original breakup without embarrassing themselves much at all: 1992's Television was a wonderful - if underrated, but I suppose that's to be expected - record that sounded like a logical followup to Adventure, and the following tour showed them in fine musical form... "

There has been so much great music made by various combinations of these people and others that it would be a crime to miss out on it. The following websites will tell you about it - what it's like, why it's wonderful and where you might get it:

Marquee Moon - An Unofficial Television Page

Santadog's Television Pages

Just The Facts

The Last Word Is The Lost Word

The Wonder - Tom Verlaine, Television & Stuff

Richard Lloyd - Matters