Your mother should know…Television’s Marquee Moon

Two years ago, when The Strokes ignited that whole New York neo-art punk comeback that was supposed to revitalize rock-‘-roll (um, oops), everyone cited Television as one of the genre’s obvious influences. As punk mainstays (and mid-’70s CBGB stalwarts), however, Television never really achieved the iconic status of The Ramones, Blondie or the Sex Pistols. Luckily, Elektra/Rhino has just reissued the band’s two early albums, 1977’s Marquee Moon and 1978’s Adventure (they briefly reunited to record 1992’s Television). Marquee Moon is the masterwork of the two. Fluid and exhilarating, it’s an elegant piece of highly stylized punk rock. The band was already several years old and had gone through several incarnations (it had also lost bassist and co-founder Richard Hell) by the time it recorded Marquee Moon, and the album reflects the mastery of artists at the top of their game. Television elevated ’70s rock by combining the fleet scrappiness of punk with the sophistication of Tom Verlaine’s lyrics. Verlaine was a poet with a Patti Smith-style Rimbaud complex and a knack for haunting imagery (‘I remember how the darkness doubled / I recall lightning struck itself…’). Guitarists Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were pioneers the stop-and-start opening riffs of the title track can be heard in countless Strokes songs as well as Interpol’s ‘Obstacle 1.’ Marquee Moon has some of the same contemplative psychedelia that keeps high school kids listening to Pink Floyd, only without the heavy-handed lugubriousness. The songs can be mournful (‘Elevation’) or exuberant (‘Friction’) or even kind of sweet (‘Guiding Light’), and they all conjure the druggy specificity of ’70s downtown Manhattan as well as a larger emotional malaise. The 10-minute title track is an unpretentiously brilliant jaw-dropper. The reissued CD includes includes alternate versions of ‘See No Evil,’ ‘Friction’ and ‘Marquee Moon,’ an untitled instrumental and the previously unreleased ‘Little Johnny Jewel.’