40 Years Ago Today: Television Debuted at CBGB on the Bowery (Bryan Waterman)

[swag]

http://www.boweryboogie.com/2014/03/40-years-ago-today-television-debuted-cbgb-bowery/



Excerpt:

Those of us who’ve been marking punk’s 40th anniversary this month – a contentious dating scheme, I know – pin our claims on a show that happened 40 years ago today, when the band Television played its first set at CBGB + OMFUG, the club that occupied 315 Bowery from the end of 1973 to 2006. Prior to renaming his bar as CBGB in December 1973, the club’s owner, a 43-year-old ex-marine named Hilly Kristal, had operated under the name Hilly’s on the Bowery, to distinguish the space from other venues he had owned elsewhere in the Village.

. . .

CBGB’s re-opening night, Wednesday the 20th, featured ridiculously cheap drink specials, followed by three nights of the Con-Fullam Band, a bluegrass act from Maine, but the next week he advertised three nights of Elly Greenberg’s country blues over a smaller, innocuous listing for Sunday: “ROCK Concert TELEVISION March 31.” Another ad for the first show, paid for by Television’s manager, foregrounds a photo of the band and also lists the “fancy guitar pickin’s” of Erik Frandsen.

An inauspicious start for punk to be sure. No one called it that yet, of course. All the band members knew was that they wanted to play stripped-down rock and roll, essentials, not the bloated corporate rock or virtuoso prog garbage you got on the radio. They sounded more akin to earlier New York underground bands, the Velvet Underground or New York Dolls, but they were decidedly not glitter, either. Richard Hell, who came up with the band’s earliest image, wanted them to look like street kids, like Bowery Boys. They wore oversized thrift suits with torn shirts, sometimes held together with safety pins. They cut their hair short, rejecting glitter and hippies alike. They wanted to blend in with the bums on the street. A few years later, Malcolm McLaren, who had briefly hoped to take the band to London, gave up and created his own band there instead. The Sex Pistols’ look was directly lifted from Hell’s template for Television.

Television’s first Sunday shows at CBGB may or may not have attracted enough patrons to allow Hilly to make money from the bar, but they did lead to a confluence of interests and talents that would shape the local scene. Friends from the downtown film and lit circles, Warhol scenesters from Max’s Kansas City near Union Square, drag queens from the Bouwerie Lane made up the early crowd. The group’s biggest payoff came on the third Sunday of their residency, when Hell succeeded in getting his friends Patti Smith and Lenny Kaye to drop by and see his new band. Smith and Kaye were currently trying to get a band of their own off the ground, and Patti already enjoyed some celebrity as a rock poetess and critic. She wrote some of the band’s most influential early press, helping to cement its mythology.

Television fit right into a narrative Smith had already been crafting in her rock criticism. Like John the Baptist wandering through the wilderness, she had both prophesied and searched the stars for signs of revolution. In the March 1973 issue of Creem, Smith called for a “dirtier,” more “old school” form of rock than she saw around her; she thought it might be “coming down and we got to be alert to feel it happening. something new and totally ecstatic.” Television seemed to fit the bill.

. . . more

[friendly_iconoclast]

1. You gotta include the link to this video from 1974

[Tom Ripley]

3. Fantastic! There used to be a great clip of Verlaine attempting to teach an overly-medicated Hell...

how to play "Venus", but it seems to no longer be available on YouTube.

[Tom Ripley]

2. I saw them play last fall and they are still transcendent