Marquee Moon

Television’s Marquee Moon is #38 on that Rolling Stone list from 1987. I didn’t hear this record until my sophomore year of college, after I started working at WCBN, hosting the stereotypical 3-6 a.m. slot one night every two weeks and spending those three hours running back and forth between the broadcast studio and an old production studio so that I could not only get music out over the air, but also dub four albums every shift. One of the first tasks I gave myself was to track down as many of those 1987 top 100 albums as I could. Marquee Moon was one of those.

And I loved it. The vinyl that I taped it from was a little beat up, and the whole thing just barely fit on one side of a tape, but I loved that thing. It was one of my go-to tapes that winter and I have clear memories of walking to my logic class listening to it and taking an extra lap around a hallway so that I could hear those last few desperate notes of “Prove It” before I sat down to an hour of Venn Diagrams.

And God, it’s still good. The tape has been replaced by two different CD issues, but the thing is still magic. It still crackles with this intensity, this tension, this electricity that’s unmatched, for me, by anything else from that mid-1970s New York punk scene. It’s not just the twin guitars of Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, either (though they are justly lionized). It’s the skittering drums, always solid, but rarely predictable. It’s Fred Smith’s bass weaving its own melodies around the guitars. It’s the songs themselves, with their interlocking riffs and the bizarre couplets that emerge from Verlaine’s pen, like

My eyes are like telescopes
I see it all backwards, but who needs hope?

Yet it’s the guitars you remember. Lloyd’s more traditional solos and Verlaine’s unexpected jumps and leaps, the flashes of Neil Young rumblestorms and the moments of Richard Thompson fury, the psychedelic raveups and the third-eye explorations. It’s the neurotic, tense quality of Verlaine’s solo on “Friction.” It’s the way the notes of “Prove It” seem choked off, emerging from whatever the guitar equivalent of clenched teeth is. It’s the way the riffs of “Venus de Milo” run around the lyrics with what seems like complete abandon. It’s hearing Lloyd’s solo in “See No Evil” and comparing it to Verlaine’s in “Friction” and wondering just how much of the band’s greatness was driven by fundamental tension between their differing approaches to the guitar.

The only song I’m impatient with now is “Guiding Light,” which, in the context of so much that seems otherworldly, that taps this anxious, desperate nerve so effectively, comes across as predictable, as pat, as out of place. It feels like a song that anyone could have done, whereas the rest of the album is almost dauntingly singular. I remember really liking it in college, appreciating its relative calm, its chiming arpeggios, even Lloyd’s melodic solo, but now I just feel like it drags, and I find myself impatient to get to the glorious barbed wire solo of “Prove It.”

And last thing: this is Television’s debut. The debut. The first record. How many other groups can claim such a debut? How many other first albums are this strong? Big Pink, maybe? Freak Out? Appetite for Destruction? Please Please Me? Slanted and Enchanted?

I don’t know that I’d move it any higher than #38, but I have absolutely no problem with this making the list.

Sgt. Pepper

In 1989, as I discovered an obsession with music that ran as strongly as any other obsession I had in high school, college, or after, I had two guides that kept me hunting for albums that I hadn’t heard, or might not otherwise have heard. Both were mainstream, unconcerned with too much out of the ordinary or in what Neil Young might have called “the ditch.” Any time I found myself in a bookstore, I searched for books of “the best albums of all time” or comprehensive collections of reviews, but it was these two lists – probably because I owned them – that I came back to more than others, that I read over and over, that, in the end, I almost memorized. Both were from Rolling Stone: in 1987, in celebration of the magazine’s twentieth anniversary, the staff published a list of “The Greatest Albums of the Last Twenty Years,” and in 1989, it published its list of “The Greatest Albums of the 1980s.” It’s that first list that I’m concerned with now.

Obviously, it’s limited by the two decade boundary, as well as by the magazine’s boomer bias and its insistence on focusing almost entirely on rock. But I’m not interested in complaining about that, really. Instead, now that I’ve heard, over the course of my own two decades of listening, all of those “Greatest Albums,” I want to go back and listen to them again and think about not only what they’ve meant to me (if anything), but what they mean now and to what extent they hold up.

I’ll choose albums more or less randomly.

But I’ll start with the magazine’s number one: The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

Everyone’s heard it. Everyone knows it. It’s as enshrined as The Beatles themselves in rock ‘n’ roll history.

But it’s really not that great.

Now, I love The Beatles. I’ll stump all day for Please Please Me and Revolver as phenomenal collections. I’ll make a case for Rubber Soul and Hard Day’s Night as a tiny bit flawed but still great. I’ll argue for “Twist and Shout” as fundamental to what it means to be human. I’ll listen to “I Want to Hold Your Hand” or “Help” absolutely anytime. I’ll take Lennon’s vocals on “You Really Got a Hold on Me” over Smokey Robinson’s, even.

But I can’t get behind Sgt. Pepper’s. Not at this point. In high school, I loved it, but mostly because I felt like I was supposed to. I thought “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was clever. Trippy, even – whatever that means. I figured “Fixing a Hole” had to be a wild metaphor for self-investigation and that therefore it was awesome.. I justified my love of it by pointing to the album’s supposed “concept,” and to the sound effects, and to the way that instruments moved around the stereo spectrum. In college, I stopped listening to anything on it beyond “A Day in the Life.” Now, I find myself most drawn to a couple of tracks that I tended not to like twenty years ago: “Lovely Rita” (mostly for the introduction; after that, it’s maybe a little too cutesy) and “Good Morning” (for the rhythm shifts and for the way it runs perfectly into the title track’s reprise). I still love “A Day in the Life” and probably always will. “Getting Better” is a solid song, but it’s the first one on the album and it’s the fourth track in.

“When I’m 64,” though? Awful. “Will you still need me / will you still feed me.” That’s what McCartney actually sings. “Will you still feed me?” As if the relationship is already one of medical dependence. Meanwhile, “Within You, Without You” is insufferable. “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” is a throwaway, a solid vocal melody obscured by sound effects and silliness. And “She’s Leaving Home” is maudlin and about four minutes too long.

I know that the album has fallen from its lofty mid-80s position as the great rock record, and I know that it was a big part of that Kill Your Idols book, but, even given that, it’s still overpraised. Should it make a list of the 100 best albums of 1967-1987? Maybe. Especially if “importance” is at all a factor in the judging. But should it be number one? Absolutely not.