Tell A Vision

Tom Verlaine

I’ve got a quote for you, a good quote to describe Television...In madness there is order.

If people listen to, you know, Fleetwood Mac – they’re going to think our first record was grating. There’s all guitars, no sweet harmonies, I mean sure. They’re just going to hear it as like exhausting or something,. I mean I like that about our records. I think a record should exhaust you by the time it’s done, otherwise it’s not even worth the seven dollars.

I can't presume to speak for the others, but I never felt anything negative from anyone when I was onstage with Television. When I played rhythm behind Lloyd, the only thing that concerned me was to push him as hard as I could so that he'd go beyond what he was capable of and come up with something new, and vice versa. That's the only thing that mattered.

Everybody's out trying to be commercial. I'm not trying to be anything, really.

You know, there is something I'm looking for when I'm writing. But I couldn't tell you what that is.

People ask me this a lot, what a song's about.... I do think analyzing a song can be interesting, although it doesn't necessarily get to the point. It's a whole other side activity. I do like making a thing into pictures. If I get an abstract idea and all the words in it don't represent tangible things, I might try to take the idea and make it into a picture, create a little scene there, an image.

There were a lot of things I listened to, but so-called pop music never killed me, you know, the type of stuff that always seems to make it on the radio. The whole radio thing seems so… it's like they've accepted the whole "new wave" thing only because this kind of pop element came into it. In Europe they really love emotion, but here it's like, "let's stay away from it because we might cry or something".

I have a real soft spot for flying saucer songs and Frankenstein songs. When I was a kid the first record I ever really liked was called "The Mummy", and the flip-side was called "The Beat Generation" which Richard Hell later re-wrote as "The Blank Generation". I thought it was the greatest thing I had ever heard. I didn't like Elvis much then, but I was very young. When I was a kid I used to play that monster all the time!

As peculiar as it sounds, I've always thought that we were a pop band. You know, I always thought Marquee Moon was a bunch of cool singles. And then I'd realize, Christ, this song is ten minutes long with two guitar solos.

They do tend to rhyme, though. As corny as they are, I really like it when songs rhyme.

We're also opposed to the trends in uncommercial rock. I don't see our style as different from any number of so-called successful rock groups... You name 'em - you name the successful rock groups...that's what I'm talking about. I don't think we're so different from any of them.

I think amongst the guitars, it's a liking for the same kind of tones, so you don't have one guy playing twang and the other guy playing with a fuzz tone. So, right away, the two guitars have a kind of "band" sound. It's not that far off from '60s bands, really, like Yardbirds or early Rolling Stones, where sometimes the two guitars sound like one big guitar weaving back and forth. With Fred it's a simplicity thing - he doesn't play very complicated parts, which help the guitars poke out more. And with Billy, it's like he has an incredibly broad background in drums. He and I used to play sort of quasi free-jazz stuff in the '60s. So he has this really wide background of different styles.

Well that's what Eno's tape sounded like to tell ya the truth, when Eno did us we sounded like The Ventures! And it wasn't bad on one of the songs, but on all 8- Euchh! No balls, no balls...

I don't think anybody thinks about their past much, unless they're in a mental institution.

Places like Belgium and the south of France, Sweden and Copenhagen are really alive. They really love rock 'n' roll, they really respond.

The Beat thing happened when I was younger. I used to run away from home, inspired by the Beats, like in '64 and '65.

I've only heard one person call me pretentious and he was a guy who auditioned for the band and later became a rock critic for High Fidelity Magazine.

My non-career. My excuse for a career? Honestly, I never think about the word ‘career.’ I’ve had managers, the minute they say it to me, they look at me and just roll their eyes.

I heard a side of it - or maybe the whole thing - once. I didn't think much of it. There were a lot of old Tom Verlaine chord changes on it, but I don't care 'cause we're not doing them anymore anyway.
I don't say that out of conceit. I just heard it right away - I don't even think he's aware of it. Actually, I don't care.

I'm kind of proud of that little record! I mean I've heard about a million other records that have come out since then by all these groups around here and there and I really like 'Little Johnny Jewel'.

Johnny Jewel is how people were maybe two hundred years ago. Back then, when people got up in the morning, they knew what they had to do to get through the day - there were 100% less decisions. Nowadays, we have to decide what we want to buy in grocery stores, what job to take, what work to do. But not Johnny. For him, it's all right there - it's a freer state, and that's what my music is looking for...
... To understand Johnny, you should think of William Blake. He was the same kinda guy.

I don't want any production credit. I think producers are overrated. They're for people who, first of all, don't know anything about music or arranging and have no ear for their own doings. They can't tell a good solo from a bad solo, stuff like that.

(On playing Glastonbury Festival)
Frankly, it will be a hilarious way of coming back. There's no soundchecks and it will be us just winging it to an enourmous number of people. How can anybody take a band seriously that hasn't played for 14 years and is going to do a festival without a soundcheck?

In terms of the solos, I don't come at it from an instrumentalist's point of view. I can't imagine why anybody would want to learn how to play somebody else's solo, but I guess that's how a lot of guitar players come to it. Whereas I had - maybe it was the misfortune - of taking piano and saxophone for years.''

I'd never assume an audience was anything but totally receptive and perfect. Seriously, it seems to me that's the only circumstance you can work under. Otherwise, speaking for myself, you may as well be in the advertising business.

Yeah, I'd say there's probably about a couple of hundred people I admire - but that has nothing to do with what a person does themselves. That's why I never mention these things. You can read a detective novel you really like, but it had no bearing on what you do yourself, you just think, "God, how this guy wove this together!" Or you get into the energy of it. Or you see a poem which makes a great statement about sentiment, but it's not sentimental.

Practice? I never practice. I just write songs and take solos.

I always like junkyards. All this metal piled up - they're filled with pathos, those places. Much more pathos than most of the music I've heard. You look at it, and there's more feeling, even though it's depressing, than there is in a lot of music I hear these days. A junkyard is what it is, whereas listening to a record by, say, Styx, is something else.

I've seen a lot of people getting into Jazzmasters because of me, and, well, people don't know what they're in for. I mean if you're looking for endless sustain, you're going to have to get it out of your hands (laughs). Because a saxophonist gets it out of his breath. You've got to work for it on the guitar - it means you have to pull it out of yourself, otherwise, what are you doing? You end up playing a lot of noise or scale exercises.

I recently realized that Television has influenced a lot of English bands. Echo and the Bunnymen, U2, Teardrop Explodes - it's obvious what they've listened to and what they're going for. When I was sixteen I listened to Yardbirds records and thought, "God, this is great." It's gratifying to think that people listened to Television albums and felt the same.

I'm not even sure who my audience is.

I just don’t like people coming up to me and saying something. It immediately makes you become insincere. There is no way that you can react to it sincerely. I really don’t have that much interest in stardom.

I was just listening to some of the stuff over headphones and I really like the way Richard does his guitar stuff - it sounds real random! I'd always loved his chord work, he is one of the chord guys. Townshend is also one of the chord guys I admire. I actually like rhythm guitar more than lead in a certain way. I love playing rhythm guitar!

Pablo Casals said that "the desire for innovation leads to greater aberrations in art than would acceptance of what's already there" and I think he's definitely got a point.
......
Style to me is incidental. The British are very adept at creating it for its own sake, but the best style is incidental. John Coltrane had a style but it was totally incidental to what he was.

In Old English they don't say I had a dream, but there's another usage of the word - "life is but a dream," to be corny about it. It's implied with eyes wide open, rather than asleep. But I'm not a philosopher to explain myself. I wish I could. Maybe that's why I'm a musician.

You can't get so interested in just making sounds. The point of it all is some kind of expression.

I'm not a clown but I'm not an academic either.

I like thinking of myself as invisible. I find it a very advantageous way to live.

With my records, it's just a matter of trying to create something fresh for myself in a very finite context, which is the pop song. I don't know anything about the people who buy my records, and what, if anything, they get out of them.

(on getting arrested for speeding without a license)
They couldn't believe someone could be so stupid. The judge asked what I did for a living. I said, "Well, I write songs." He said, "Well, I guess you got a new song here, don't you?"

When I think of 'influence', I think of 'influenza', like somebody's picked up a germ.

I always thought I was commercial. I always thought I was writing hit singles. These days, whatever's on the radio is considered commercial. People like what's on the radio, whatever it is.

(on Warm and Cool)
But it's not really a rock record. It's kind of bluesy. There's also something Fifties about it, and something -not in terms of sound but concept - sort of Oriental, in the sense of keeping it incredibly simple and leaving lots of space.

The whole reputation of being a rock guitar player, I could really care less about it. Still, when I hear new groups today I do occasionally hear something where I think... ahh, I've heard that lick before.

We're not really together, as you can see, just want to break the world record for longest time in between albums.

We haven't changed, the time between the songs is longer than the songs.

I can't remember ever being really bored. I find life very interesting, actually. I think some other musicians are always looking for something to give them an idea, but I find I have to reject 90 percent of my ideas because they don't live up to some self-imposed standard. That's also why I don't make a record once a year. I throw so many things out, and I have to have something to say.

I write a lot of more instrumental music than I do vocal music. It's because I come out of a background of playing piano and then playing sax for a number of years. I kind of got into rock backwards. A lot of guys go into rock and then get sick of it and then go into something else. I came the other way, so I've always just had a lot more stuff lying around.

Boogie! I hate boogie, God, I mean, not the Chicago boogie like Willie Dixon or Howlin' Wolf, but all those awful white bands…

Well, I worked in a sheet metal factory once and scarred my wrist from the cuts. I found a sympathetic psychiatrist who told the draft board I was insane. We used the scars as proof of a suicide attempt.

I told somebody in Europe I was 43. I never tell my true age. It's ridiculous that people ask. The press doesn't deserve anything but lies.

I don’t think Marquee Moon was so good, y’know? Just another record. First records everybody likes a lot.

Richard Lloyd

Can I just say that if you asked me, I'd say Television was a lousy fuckin' name for a rock group.

Television was the only band of its ilk that treated the guitar with delicacy, not as simple rhythm support for teenage aggression.

Some bands don't ever get along and they do fine. Some relationships are built where there's an incredible tension. [Television is a] musical experience of great strength, but that doesn't mean you all have to play poker on Friday night.

Television was one of those magnificent kind of events where everything fell into place.

We're an analog band, we're not digital... When things come out on CD they have to be digitalised. There's a good engineer I know who says that analog is like film and digital is like video. If you put something you've filmed on video then it will retain all of its beauty and sheen of film. If you record something on video it will be grainy, and if you put that on film it will retain its graininess. We're analog... valve. We're valve people, not solid-state people.

Some of the albums I like best in the whole world are considered psychedelic albums. A psychedelic album is an album that when you put it on, if you listen to both sides, when it's over, your perceptions have been changed and I think that our record can do that.

I think it's mood-evoking in a way that the voice starts to come in and then just fades away. It gives you the conception that the song never really ends.

They were recorded without processed cheese. Listen to old '50s records. The style may be dated, but the recording isn't.

Rock is stronger than any misguided theories of cultural events. It's bigger than that.

Thanks to MTV, half the population of the western world thinks they're going to be rock musicians. In Hollywood at 8.30 AM you literally see all these long-haired rock and rollers with guitars, like businessmen with briefcases, going to this guitar college where they all learn speed and thrash and tapping. And it's like, 'oeyyyyy'! All the 64th notes make you king. You wonder where all those guys are headed, since 99.9999 percent of those guitars are eventually going into the closet!
......
I purposely didn't learn any of those hip licks. There's a million guys technically better than us but there's something else that makes you a musician rather than just a guy who plays an instrument. The real criteria for success is inexpressible!

Some-one called my style 'sense of urgency' guitar playing and I've always admitted I often don't know where I'm going when I solo. But that desperation is what makes it exciting.

I am not a punk rocker. You've got it mixed up. Nobody is a punk rocker. Punk rock is just a label. It wasn't part of our ethics. The whole idea was that we were trying awfully hard to become good at our instruments. What you're talking about is the "anybody can be in a band, you don't have to know how to play your instrument" mentality, which is really an English idea. It's a social, political rebellion. It had nothing to do with Americans.

I'm a classic middle '60s fan of the moment where electric guitars went centre-stage with Hendrix, Beck, Page, Bloomfield. I followed the English invasion bands back to the Americans and ended up in the blues. Buddy Guy is an all-time hero. Tom wouldn't say that.

A song sort of defines itself. Tom's like an editor: I might have a part, and he'll ask me to play inside-out or backward, or move two bars behind. Same with the drum beat: Billy will be just playing, and then Tom will come up with an idea, and a song falls into place. That's how it works. You'll have a part, find a sound, then the part isn't right anymore and the other part has to change.

The guitar is like a cuisine and you can't expect people to eat the same thing all the time.

To me, the coolest riffs are composed of two guitar parts that interlock like gears. You need both parts to make whole. I work things out on an electric that's not plugged in to make sure a good tone isn't forgiving a part that couldn't stand up naked. Only after the parts are written will I struggle to find a tone that supports the creativity.

When we play together, nobody knows who's going to do what. It's like seeing a Maserati on city streets. Everybody turns and looks, you can't take your eyes off the car. You know it's capable of doing 220 [m.p.h.], and it's not. But you're looking at it because it could.

It was like running away from home. It was very exciting, like joining the circus.

Fred Smith

It's amazing, I go out with other people on tour and it never fails that someone tells me, "I heard you when I was 13 and you changed my life."

One thing that happened when we got together at the end of ’90 and jammed, more than Tom or Richard’s guitar being there, was Billy’s hi-hat. The way he plays his hi-hat is unlike anything else. One day they’ll discover the Television sound is Bill’s hi-hat playing. The rest is superfluous.

For six years people were asking why we broke up, then they asked when we'd get back together. For the next six they'll ask why did we reform?

In some bands a bassist can relax back in the pocket with the drums but Tom likes the bass to be melodic, so I have to fit notes into some unusual places.

Blondie was like a boat that was sinking and Television was my favourite band.

I think most of the songs [on Marquee Moon] sounded pretty much like they sounded live – except in tune.

Billy Ficca

Alternative music doesn't have to be "alternative" [mock wincing facial gesture]. I mean, we COULD be weird and avant-garde if we wanted, but really, at our core is a pop band.

You can't yell and encourage an electronic drum track.

I guess you might say Tom does a lot of composing in the studio.