100 Greatest Songs of the 70’s #32 Television – Marquee Moon

Released: 1977

Call it fate, call it lack of imagination, call it whatever you want, but many of the records dubbed the most influential of all time were met with a wave of apathy when they were first released. Into this category you can put the Velvet Underground’s White Light/White Heat and you can most certainly include anything by Nick Drake; Also to add to that list would be Television’s Marquee Moon.

You can’t eat, smoke or use critical acclaim to buy a car of course, which is why the highway to musical success remains littered with human wreckage on either side. Formed in New York City and incubated by the nascent scene that sprung up around CBGB, early versions of what would become Television had witnessed auditions from amongst others Chris Stein and Dee Dee Ramone; the line up which eventually coalesced around Tom Verlaine then went into the studio to record their debut Marquee Moon with the intention of limiting it to just eight songs.

It was then and is now an album that critics have endless trouble slotting into the conventional array of labels; is/was it art rock? post punk? psychedelic garage? Seeded by punk, in the UK the album’s title track – so long at over ten minutes it had to be split over both sides of a 45 – even became a sort of hit. On it you can hear the genesis of thousands of imaginary guitars being played in thousands of bedroom mirrors, a chorus of people who were all inspired to form bands and make rock n’ roll and some of whom – a tiny handful – that sold lots of records and got rich and famous doing it. That’s just the way it is.