Is my Television on the blink?: reading about the origins of punk from the middle outwards

It's heresy to say so in most muso circles, but I find Television's Marquee Moon slightly boring. Yeah man, you'll have to drum me out of the music blogger's union immediately for that remark. But no, all the praise for this already-praised-to-death album in the wake of Tom Verlaine's demise last month just reaffirmed this feeling. Solid, serious (very serious) music people were falling over themselves to assure us that Verlaine's guitar playing was "sublime", a sign of his "greatness". That it was "cosmic" and he was the true heir to Hendrix. And so on (and on). Er, yeah, we'll just have to differ. Call me a philistine, but I think the guitar playing on Marquee Moon starts to feel horribly repetitive, over-ornamented and show-offy after a track or two (the ten-minute title song, for example is, by the second half, utterly tedious). To me this is basically early-70s prog-rock "virtuosity" which has accidently washed up on the shores of the '77 punk-new wave scene. It's like punk never happened ... Anyway, all the Verlaine guitar god adulation stuff had one positive side-effect the other week. It meant I dived back into Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain's Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk, a book I started reading about ten years ago but eventually got bogged down in by all the juice-ridden stories of Jim Morrison/MC5/Stooges drugs-and-sex excess. 

Four legs bad, eight legs good: the Ramones are just standing there  

This time I did the only sensible thing you can do with this sprawling but eventually very readable book: start in the middle. So I read the cluster of chapters called The Piss Factory: 1974-1975, followed by the subsequent chapter on the debut Ramones LP and their first visit to the UK (the July '76 Roundhouse gig). So here's how it went down with me: 

*No-one "invented" punk but Richard Hell (style, attitude) was certainly important, and so was Television's manager Terry Ork for blagging Television three Sunday night slots at CBGBs in April 1974 when it was still hosting country, bluegrass and blues bands.   

*If Television were impressive and even mesmerising live ("the arms of Richard Hell and the neck of Tom Verlaine was so entrancing", says a typically arch Danny Fields), then the Ramones were a revelation. Leee Childers says of his first visit to CBGBs (tagging along with Wayne County): "The whole place stunk of urine. The whole place smelled like a bathroom. And there were literally six people in the audience and then the Ramones went onstage and I went, 'Oh ... my ... God!'"  

*Punk magazine was callled "Punk" apparently fairly randomly. Legs McNeil, then 18, was hanging out with two old schoolfriends (John Holmstrom and Ged Dunn) in Connecticut during the summer of 1975, driving around listening to the Dictators' just-released proto-punk Go Girl Crazy! album on a cassette in their car. The brattish feeling of this record and a sense of wanting to have a magazine for "other fuck-ups like us" was evidently what made the new label pop into his head. "The word 'punk' seemed to sum up the thread that connected everything we liked", says McNeil, "drunk, obnoxious, smart but not pretentious, absurd, funny, ironic, and things that appealed to the darker side". 

*Dee Dee Ramone is a pretty pivotal figure: he tells Joey he should come out from the Ramones' drumkit and start doing the vocals because he thought Joey "wasn't like anybody else" (meaning he wasn't copying Iggy Pop or Mick Jagger). Dee Dee seems have been the one from the Ramones who forged relationships with other figures in the New York scene. He also - as Richard Hell is quick to acknowledge - wrote the majority of Chinese Rocks, NYC punk's "answer" song to the Velvet Underground's heroin. (Which is is better? The VU's song by a mile, if you ask me). 

*Malcolm McLaren's well-known sojourn in New York during the city's early punk period apparently involved some entertaining-sounding culture clashes. The New York Dolls, nominally being "managed" by him in their final drug-addled phase, seem to have tolerated him because he was at least enthusiastic and more or less together. I say tolerated, but that's relative. Jerry Nolan thought he was "goofy" (his pet world for MM apparently), Johnny Thunders "didn't like" him (Nolan's take) and Nolan says: "He was always making jokes with that sort of English humour, humour that no one can understand - let alone two guys on heroin". Poor Malcolm! Elsewhere, someone in the book says (not unkindly) that McLaren was "sort of faggy" and "camp", which sounds about right. 

*Though the 74-75 CBGBs scene has long been thought of as ground zero in the folk lore of punk's foundation, apparently to the people at the time it didn't really feel like that. According to Legs McNeil, as late as July 1976 "punk" was still just the magazine, the Ramones, Richard Hell, Johnny Thunders, Patti Smith, and the Dictators". He says: "There was only about a hundred people hanging out at CBGBs. Amd half of those people were not punks, they were from the art world, inspired to come to the Bowery by the yuppie whine of David Byrne".

Hmm, who doesn't like a bit of yuppie whine in the Bowery? In the past 20 years or so I've frequently traversed the Bowery during my New York visits, navigating my way via overpriced healthfood shops and overpriced bistro-cum-bars - landmarks of the post-CBGBs Downtown non-scene. It's not bad. I like the streets, the buildings - it's not that gentrified - and Chinatown is nearby and there are often decent bands playing in Brooklyn. Given the utter shittiness of CBGBs as an actual bar and venue that emerges in the Please Kill Me reminiscences and the fact the venue's junky scene could sometimes see doped-up punters ripping purses out of young women's hands and running off to a waiting taxi, it doesn't sound like it was always that much fun. Who knows? Maybe if you went on the right night ... One of the good things about McNeil and McCain's intermeshing of multiple testimonies is that it means you get a lot of viewpoints, including some eminently believable stuff about people behaving badly. A post-Stooges scene so full of drugs, egomania and competiveness emerging in a city known for its smart-ass sarcasm and biting bluntness was never going to be a hippy paradise. Patti Smith comes out of several reminiscences less than brilliantly, while the ubiquitous Nancy Spungen also makes an appearance as a pre-Pistols hanger-on and "whiner". There's also an anecdote from the artist Duncan Hannah about a time when he'd offered to do an early fan club promo thing for Television, a piece of writing to kick things off. Hannah says that Richard Hell thought it was "cool" but Tom Verlaine's reaction was slightly different: 

"Then Verlaine shows up at Max's and says, 'Yeah I read your thing'. He looks at me and he says, 'What are you? You get up in the morning and you look in the mirror and go, 'I'm Duncan Hannah, and I'm cute'. Is that that what you do?' I said, 'What?'. Verlaine was just hateful, he just started saying all this hateful stuff. It was real personal, he kept just going on and on about me ... he went on like this, and then I realised what he was doing. He was praticising his Bob Dylan cruelty, like in the documentary on Dylan, Don't Look Back. You know how Dylan is in that, he's just a killer, right? And Dylan was grooming himself to be the new Dylan."

Torn curtain indeed. OK, no, maybe Verlaine was just having a bad day - a bad week or a bad year (and for a much rosier take on Verlaine, see this piece from Galaxie 500's Dean Wareham). But I dunno, the Verlainian approach to music - very serious, ultra-controlled, super-precise - is so anti-punk that I end up recoiling from it (admirable though it can be in short bursts). I'll happily leave it to guitar practitioneers like Chris Forsyth to delve into the complexities of Verlaine's revered technique. Instead, like McLaren who brought the phrase back to London with him, I'll (sort of) go on belonging to the blank generation, the punkish hell to Verlaine's guitar-toned heaven. I may not be authentically drunk, obnoxious, smart, absurd, funny or ironic, but I can always ... try.