Television played the Paradise – 5/12
I really never expected to see Television. They’re a legendary band with no ostensible reason to embark on proper tours, content to play one-off festival dates and the occasional NYC gig that I would inevitably not be able to get to (case in point: last year’s Rough Trade shows). I greeted the announcement of this out-of-the-blue Paradise show with the sort of enthusiasm I reserve for a select few “holy shit how can this really be happening” performances that come along once in a great while.
Post-euphoria, of course, came the questions: What if they’re just not that good anymore? Richard Lloyd’s permanently left the band? Are they bored guys playing for a paycheck with a hired gun second guitarist? Though Television have existed sporadically for the past 40 years, they have but three records to their name. The sparsity of their output, however, has done little to temper their towering reputation. 1977’s Marquee Moon is rightly regarded as one of the finest guitar rock albums of all time. It’s a portrait of a band who have put in their time, honed a legitimately unique sound and put their best foot forward with a flawless debut. Marquee Moon is a strong enough record that the band could still be riding its coattails this many years later without having recorded another note. A less revelatory but still quite enjoyable follow-up in 1978’s Adventure, along with a solid self-titled 1992 reunion record, are regarded as icing on the cake for large swaths of the band’s modern day fanbase. The question on all of our minds, then, was whether the modern day incarnation of the band itself would live up to the standard set by their masterpiece all those years ago.
The answer, thankfully, was a resounding yes. Guitarist/vocalist Tom Verlaine, drummer Billy Ficca, bassist Fred Smith and relative newcomer Jimmy Rip, taking Lloyd’s place, took the stage with little fanfare and spent enough time fiddling with cables that the applause had died down by the time they actually started to play. Opening on an unexpected note with Television‘s “1880 Or So,” the band quickly went about easing anyone’s fears that they’d lost their touch, and schooling us all on their history in the process. Though the track was among the least familiar they’d play, the feeling was right. The fractured, intertwining guitars and Smith and Ficca’s perfectly organic rhythm section sounded precisely like Television should sound, and it only got better from there.
The setlist drew most heavily from Marquee Moon, of course, but the pre- and post-’77 tracks served the important purpose of demonstrating the band’s strengths beyond their most well-known hits. The splintered Can-isms of standalone 7″ track “Little Johnny Jewel” and the lengthy excursion of new song “Persia” gave the group room to stretch and groove. Verlaine has a truly unique voice as a guitarist, and hearing him work his magic in person, particularly on these longer and more abstract songs, was pure bliss. Much has been made of a replacement guitarist taking over for longtime Verlaine foil Richard Lloyd in recent years, but Rip’s enthusiastic fretwork was more than up to the task. A set-closing “Marquee Moon,” with Verlaine and Rip’s interlocking leads, adventurous solos and glistening interludes, was nothing short of transcendent.
An encore of “Friction” saw Verlaine playfully subverting his bandmates’ queues to end the song, jaggedly extending its final moments for a laugh. This proved one of the most telling moments for the show’s overall success: Television are still having fun with all this. The ultimate fear in heading out the door to see a reunited legacy act is that bored, listless band members with no spark left await you, and it brings me great joy to write about how Television is not one such band.
I’d be remiss in not mentioning the night’s opening set from Aly Spaltro, better known as Lady Lamb the Beekeeper. Spaltro’s subdued indie-folk was an odd fit for the bill to say the least – she was a lyrically-driven songwriter playing the kind of show where the lyrics were never really the point. Still, she did an admirable job in a difficult position. The set took a minimalist approach, featuring only Spaltro and her Jazzmaster and opening with a striking tune sung entirely a capella. The din of excitedly chatting Television fans occasionally threatened to overtake her, but Spaltro never lost her nerve, and put on an engaging show for those willing to listen.
One final note on this show: it was the first in which I relied entirely on my pocketable, recently acquired Fuji x100 for photos (excepting a recent Mountain Goats gig, which doesn’t really count since all of my shots were from the balcony and more or less identical). Television issued no photo credentials for the show, so it was ‘non-professional’ equipment only. The camera’s fixed 35mm focal length necessitated some creative cropping, but on the whole I think it performed rather admirably. Stay tuned for a few analog shots from this show as well once that roll of film is back from the lab.
