The Formative Years - Television
Television was one of the reasons why people started wearing CBGB’s shirts.
If you dig stripped down, guitar based proto-punk, Television and their fantastic debut album Marquee Moon is basically the template for what most bands out of the 1970s New York rock scene riffed on and one that launched a thousand bands.
Within the context of its time, Marquee Moon was nothing but revolutionary with its technical proficiency displayed via intricate virtuosic instrumental passages, inspirations sourced from avantgarde jazz and the essence of 1960s garage rock.
Velvet Underground and the 13th Floor Elevators are omnipresent as influences but Television elevated their legacy to new heights by incorporating surf music experimentations with reverb, British invasion, psychedelic rock influences and well calibrated dual-guitar interplays characteristically interlocking pushing and pulling melodic versus rhythmic guitar lines with a subtle twang.
Television artfully combined poetic sensibilities with the raw, mesmerizing and simple energy of what was to become punk.
The knotty Marquee Moon with its ravenous appetite for strung out, despairing angular melodies that showed new ways of creatively channelling electric guitars paired and the angst ridden lyrics is a timeless bedrock masterpiece the fingerprints of which can be detected on the underlying components of alternative music fifty years on.
