Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) (12 page)

Less than a month later, the New York Dolls called it quits. Rockwell fretted in the
Times
about the effects of overexposure on young New York bands. Though he doesn’t name groups other than the Dolls and the Velvets, coming as his comments do during the last week of Smith and Television’s reign at CBGB’s they seem to ask what impact Smith’s contract will have on the new scene.
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And yet Rockwell was complicit as part of the press machine that had been tracking Patti for years — and which she’d explicitly courted. From the moment he broke news of her contract with Arista, the crowds at CB’s started to grow until the club was past capacity. “CB’s was the first time we had played so many times in a row,” Smith’s manager, Jane Friedman, recalled a decade later. “We didn’t just pack CB’s, we had people literally standing around the block who couldn’t get in.”
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Fields corroborates: On 17 April he wrote that “Hundreds were turned away from Patti Smith’s gig at CBGB last weekend. Way to go, Patti!” At the conclusion of this run, Ork cornered Hilly and told him he couldn’t beat these receipts “with your country and bluegrass, dude!” He recalled in
Please Kill Me
: “I considered that the official beginning of the scene.”
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In early April, as the CB’s shows were gaining momentum in the wake of Smith’s contract,
SoHo Weekly News
ran a “Know Your New York Bands” piece by Betrock profiling Television. The piece pinpoints tensions that would soon lead Hell out of the band and would eventually separate Television from the scene it had helped to establish. Treating Verlaine as the band’s clear leader, Betrock gives nods to Hell for “Blank Generation” and Lloyd for “What I Heard,” though it’s clear these are token turns in the spotlight. Meanwhile, Betrock quotes Verlaine praising Patti Smith but dismissing the general CB’s scene as “campy and non-sincere — and that’s not the way rock should be.”
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Though Betrock didn’t seem to anticipate that Hell would actually leave the band, Fields caught wind, and in his 10 April column warned “a certain musician in a certain hot new band! Don’t leave the group! Wait a year and a half — then you’ll be able to do anything you want!”
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The advice obviously didn’t take: the following week Fields reported that in “a shockeroo move, bassist Richard Hell has left Television, to start a new group (details must wait until next week). Replacing Richard temporarily will probably be the bass player of Blondie, and no doubt Television will continue to thrive, but Richard will be missed.”
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The following week he reported on the Dolls’ breakup and the formation of the Heartbreakers with Hell and ex-Dolls Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan.

Verlaine told the crowd at Television’s first post-Hell show, on 17 April, that Fred Smith had learned 15 songs in two days. Smith later said that he already knew the band’s songs fairly well, given a year of performing in opening slots for them with the Stillettoes, Angel and the Snake, and Blondie. On some accounts, Verlaine had been discussing the personnel change with Smith even in advance of Hell’s departure; Verlaine even admitted having jammed with Smith on off hours just to feel out the fit.
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Still others suggest Verlaine had also sounded out Ernie Brooks, bassist for the Modern Lovers.
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Hell halted production on poetry chapbooks by Verlaine and Smith his Dot Books imprint had planned to publish. Verlaine’s
28TH Century
, already typeset, remains unpublished.
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Fred Smith had been with Debbie Harry and Chris Stein in one band or another for over two years. In
Please Kill Me
, Harry responds to Smith’s departure from the other side of Blondie’s breakthrough: “Fred Smith fucking quit Blondie. I was pissed. I was pissed at all of them — all of Television, all of the Patti Smith Group, and Patti and Fred. I was pissed at Patti because she talked Fred into joining Television. Boy, did he make a mistake. Ha ha ha.”
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Photographer Roberta Bayley, who worked the CB’s door and was living with Hell at the time he quit Television, also noted the irony that Blondie eventually outstripped Television commercially: “But at that point Television was the one tipped for big, big success. Blondie was the worst band in the city — they were just a joke. Everybody liked them personally but they didn’t really have it together on a musical level.”
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Patti had already poached Kral from Blondie and Dougherty from Mumps. For Harry and Stein, these personnel shifts marked the end of CBGB’s communal era. With Patti’s contract a done deal and rumors afloat of others, knives came out.
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For years Harry would complain that Patti Smith had had it out for her from the start: “Basically she told me that there wasn’t room for two women in the CBGB’s scene and that I should leave the business ’cause I didn’t stand a chance against her! She was going to be the star, and I wasn’t.”
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For many fans, Hell’s departure marked the end of an era as much as had the arrival of gawkers, wannabes, and record labels. The acrimonious split intensified over the next two years, especially during the UK media frenzy that followed
Marquee Moon
’s release. Hell and Verlaine’s mutual rage seemed evidence of abiding feelings: “[T]he two new wave culture heroes regularly vilify one another with Romeo/Juliet intensity,” Vivien Goldman wrote in 1977.
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Certainly the scenario echoed other high profile falling-outs: Lennon and McCartney, Zappa and Beefheart, Reed and Cale, Ferry and Eno. “It’s very hard to know just how honest I should be about the reasons for my demise from Roxy,” Eno had told Nick Kent in the summer of ’73. “The problem is that when it gets printed, it all seems to look much more meaningful and serious when unqualified by that chuckle at the back of the throat. … People who do great hatchet-jobs on the members of their old band usually come out looking like losers when it all appears in print.”
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Kent should have relayed that warning when he started tracking Television in 1976. Instead he helped widen the gulf between the former friends. Kent returned to the states in the spring of ’76 to cover the British glam band Sweet at an Ohio gig. Stopping over and returning via New York, on Malcolm McLaren’s advice he looked up Richard Hell, hoping to score heroin, and wound up crashing a few weeks on Hell’s couch in a perpetual nod. After publishing Hell’s side of the break-up that year, Kent offered an ecstatic review of
Marquee Moon
in early 1977, followed only a few weeks later by an article repeating some of Hell’s most damning (and most frequently reprinted) characterizations of Verlaine: “I knew though from the very beginning — with Tom — that it’d probably end that way,” Kent quotes Hell as saying. “Years and years ago, when we were dropping acid together — God, it’d get very, very scary. He’d really open up then and he more or less revealed that he had this fundamental belief in his absolute inherent superiority to everyone else on this earth.”
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Kent gave space to this swipe in what was supposed to be a post-album feature on Verlaine, even as he acknowledges Verlaine’s dissatisfaction with Kent’s earlier piece on the friends’ breakup:

Offended by this piece, Verlaine responded by attacking Kent to another magazine’s interviewer: “Nick Kent is the guy who prints hearsay, total hearsay,” he told the British underground paper
ZigZag
in June of ’77. He’d given a platform to Hell, “a guy who’s said a million times that he’s out to get me, and who’ll say anything that’s going to make me look bad.” No stopping there:

About Hell, Verlaine stepped it up, denouncing him not just as a bad bass player but also as a junkie:

There’s more here than just “he said/he said” between former friends. The Hell/Verlaine split has been taken to indicate tensions running through the entire scene. The critic Bernard Gendron, for instance, reads this conflict as competing discourses — art versus pop — with Verlaine representing high-minded art aspirations and Hell representing punk’s DIY ethos and pop image-orientation. On the larger scene, Gendron argues, art rockers like Talking Heads lined up with Television and Patti Smith, while the Ramones sided with the “fuck art, let’s rock” agenda of Hell and his later bands, the Heartbreakers and Voidoids.
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But this view, though compelling, overlooks ways in which the Ramones and Blondie (and the Dolls before them) grew out of Pop contexts (not just pop, lower-case p); Hell’s very image for Television betrays Warholian influence. Plus, part of Hell and Verlaine’s beef seems to have resulted from Verlaine’s desire for broad commercially viability. Contra Gendron, what emerged during CBGB’s first phase was nearly the inverse of his art/pop dynamic, one that aligns art
and
pop bands like Patti Smith Group, Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Ramones with aspirations for commercial success and left other bands — the Voidoids, the Dead Boys — more closely identified with transatlantic punk, which kept an emphasis on the original impulse to stick it to the record industry. Though some believed that punk had commercial potential in the late ’70s, its mass appeal would remain much more limited than would the art-pop new wave stylings of Blondie or Talking Heads.

Fred Smith’s arrival was to Television what Lloyd’s had been to the erstwhile Neon Boys. Things fell into place. The band’s sound tightened, taking on a more streamlined tone. Like Verlaine and Ficca, Smith had played in bands throughout high school. A Forest Hills, Queens, native, he’d joined a short-lived band called Captain Video in 1971 and had responded to Elda Gentile’s ad for a bass player a few years later, which led him to the Stillettoes. Photos of Fred with the Stillettoes show him in full flash mode: knee boots, velvet shirts, long hair parted down the middle and feathered, eye shadow and lipstick.
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Fred’s bass playing was certainly more fluid and jazz-derived than Hell’s, a better fit with Verlaine’s impulse to improvise on long, rollicking numbers like “Breakin In My Heart,” which shared ground with Patti Smith’s improvisatory style. “At the first rehearsal me and Lloyd [were] looking at each other and thinking, ‘God, this is a real relief.’ It was like having a lightning rod you could spark around. Something was there that wasn’t there before. Fred could follow stuff. I remember starting up in the longer songs and being able to do stuff that wouldn’t throw everybody.”
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Though such comments emerged from the drawn-out feud with Hell, and so should be taken with a grain of salt, Smith’s arrival — and the elimination of Hell’s material and stage presence — pushed Television toward
Marquee Moon
’s emphasis on precision over rough proximity, even as many fans mourned the loss of Hell’s energy on stage.