Free eBook Television's Marquee Moon (33 1/3) download

This book is a welcome addition to a too small Television bibliography. For such a significant band there is precious little serious writing on their work. Waterman's account is very good. He does focus on on the story of CBGB and while he foregrounds Television's role, this is a story that has been told before. His discussion of the album is interesting, but limited. he focuses on the lyrics and the evocation of New York, which is all well and good, but he struggles with the band's musicality and there is little he says about the recording process. He attempts to grapple with the album's significance and has some interesting things to say along the way, but I found the book curiously bloodless. Nevertheless, it is great to have a book on this wonderful band and its astonishing album.

Very good read, exactly what I hoped for. Compliments "Sonic Transmission" (another book on Television ) and "Please Kill Me" (about the New York Music scene from Warhol/Velvet Underground thru the punk scene of the '70s). I missed that scene (raising family) but discovered the music later, becoming a fan of the Ramones, Dead Boys, New York Dolls, Johnny Thunders & the Heartbreakers, the Tuff Darts, and especially Television. Television's music defies categorization; the songs, though familiar, would change just slightly as Television went the years and periods of activity, the fluidity adding to their appeal. The music is refreshing and enjoyable; this book highlights their most classic of studio albums, in just the way any Television junkie would want.

Since Marquee Moon only has eight tracks, the author spends a significant amount of time discussing the history of the band. In particular, the author discusses the personalities and personal histories of Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell, the original nucleus of the group. I found the entire story fascinating, but you may not feel the same way.

The biggest issue I had with the book was the artsy over-analysis of each song. Again, the low song count was probably the driving factor in the author's decision to pen such lengthy interpretations. I personally found a lot of the analysis unnecessary and unentertaining.

I have started this review two or three times, trying to decide what I really want to say about it. On the one hand, there is so little available about Television, that I welcome and embrace pretty much anything that helps bring attention to a band that I profoundly love and respect. By the same token, I have some serious issues with the book that I am hesitant to go too far in praising it simply because it exists.

I picked up Marquee Moon a couple of days after it was released, as soon as it made it the a local Indianapolis record shop. I had never heard the band, but had followed them at distance through NYC-centric publications like Rock Scene magazine. The record had a significant influence on 16-year-old me, just beginning to play in bands and write songs. Listening to our Swirls Away album again after so many years made me realize how significantly Television influenced and informed the stuff I was playing and writing. But way beyond that, the album and the band became touchstones for me, life in general department. I mourned when the band broken up and followed the careers of the justly-celebrated Verlaine and the criminally-overlooked Richard Lloyd down to this day. I would be hard pressed to name my favorite album of all time, but Marquee Moon in certainly in the top 2 or 3. Enough background.

Okay then, the book. Waterman writes well and the book is very readable, coherent and enjoyable as a read. However, he spends 2/3 of the book rehashing in great detail information and history that most fans of the band are going to be familiar with. He balances his sources (virtually all secondary ) to the extent of presenting different sides of the story to the point of muddying rather than clarifying contested versions of that history. Readers of Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk or From the Velvets to the Voidoids: The Birth of American Punk Rock, or any number of other books dealing with 0's NYC music scene will have gone through all of this before. Nothing really much new is presented other than Waterman's desire to link the scene, including television to Pop Art, Warhol and various strains of French poetry. Not that these are specious arguments, but at the end, they really don't illuminate all that much.

I also confess to an annoyance at the overt fixation on the Tom Verlaine - Richard Hell relationship and the overall infatuation with Verlaine at the expense of the other members of the band. Lloyd, who receives at least a little text here, is presented mostly as a sort of junky/gigolo/sex symbol, his considerable gifts as a guitarist and counterpoint to Verlaine's own great talents given extremely short-shrift. Fred Smith appears as little more than a story of how he was poached from Blondie. Billy Ficca gets less than that. The overriding view of the band as a backdrop for Verlaine's brilliance sells this band very, very short.

Once he finally gets around to talking about the album, ostensibly the reason for the book, very little attention is given to the mechanics of how the album was written, rehearsed and recorded. We find out that the band spent several weeks rehearsing and shaping the songs prior to going into the studio, but no information or insight into how those rehearsals shaped the way they emerge on the record as opposed to how they had previously been performed on stage. Once in the studio, well, apparently the record got recorded, but that's about it.

And once the record is talked about, you would almost think that it is a spoken word album. The lyrics are analyzed, pulled apart, scrutinized at length - first this way, then that. What ultimately comes out is: well, maybe he meant this, maybe he meant that, maybe he meant something else. It gets a little annoying. Of course, Guiding Light, in which the lyrics were credited to Verlaine and Lloyd, rather than Tom alone, gets glossed over quickly. Apparently Richard's input dilutes the poet's vision or some such. Now, I like and enjoy Verlaine's lyrics - elliptical, full of puns and word-play, fleeting images and plaintive longing. They are good, evocative lyrics. But to analyze Marquee Moon by focusing more or less exclusively by the song lyrics is, to me, to kinda seriously misguided. Lit Crit 401 - Senior Seminar is not the approach I, personally, would take to this record.

Of course, life is full of books that aren't written the way I might write them, and the world is probably all the better for it. However, this goes beyond it "not being what I hoped it would be." I simply don't feel that the book really tells me much about the album, or presents much, be it fact or insight, that opens it up for me in ways that help me see it anew.

I am glad this book exists. I am glad I read it. But, to quote, as Waterman does: What I want / I want now. And this isn't quite it.

marquee moon is one of the greatest guitar records ever produced and a unique document of a tumultuous and highly creative time and place: new york city in the mid 1970s. this book gives a fascinating glimpse into the emerging music scene that began to seep out of the bowery, primarily from hilly kristal's new club, which was named for the eclectic music he envisioned presenting: "country, bluegrass, blues, & other music for uplifting gormandizers," shortened on the awning to CBGB & OMFUG and finally simply known as CBGBs. as its de facto house band, television honed its unique sound there, eventually drawing enough critical attention to land a record deal. along the way, a lifelong friendship would end in tatters and a new kind of music would be created - one that owed as much to the grateful dead as it did to the velvet underground or the ramones.

this book is a quick and satisfying read. if you're at all interested in this seminal album, you owe it to yourself to pick this up.

This book not only covers the band and the process that lead to the creation of one of the greatest albums ever made, but also goes in depth on the birth of the Punk scene in NYC and CBGB.

Great

Great!