(TV) For all you CD lovers who won't be getting the Adventure reissue

[Keith Allison <keith@marquee.demon.co.uk>]

The 4 Men With Beards label has just reissued Adventure on Audiophile 
180 gram vinyl (following their excellent MM reissue a couple of years 
ago). It's terrific. If you don't have to get up and turn the record 
over in the middle, then how can you feel the anticipation between the 
end of Careful and the start of The Fire? It's like being 22 again! 
(Well, for us older folks).
Anyway, For all you CD lovers who won't be getting it, here's the liner 
notes:

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TELEVISION'S GLORIOUS 'ADVENTURE': BATTLING THE SECOND ALBUM SYNDROME 
FROM A FIERY FOXHOLE


From the moment back in the Sixties that people started taking the Long 
Playing format seriously, second albums have proved
a dauntingly dicey hurdle for many a rock musician to leap. It's
the old cliche: you get twenty-five years to make your first
album, six months for the second. Some bands, still buzzing with
the thrill of getting their music on tape and in the shops for the
first time, take a 'why fix what isn't broken' approach, more or
less replicating what worked on the debut with a few subtle
tweaks here and there. Others go bat-shit kitchen sink crazy,
cramming every half-baked musical idea and indulgence at hand
they can onto the ensuing disc: damn the expenses, we deserve
an 80-piece orchestra! Then still others take the second album
as an opportunity to judiciously expand their sonic palette, a
deeper restatement of their artistic approach.

To be realistic, though, most second albums fall into the first two
camps.  If only this were a perfect world and a band could, by
force of will, skip over their sophomore (and possibly
sophomoric) effort and get right to the Career-Making Classic LP
that will be forever included on those lazy rock-crit. lists of Best
Rock Albums Of All Time, Or At Least This Year.  If Love could
have only jumped from "Little Red Book" right ahead to Forever
Changes, say, or the Clash had forgone Sandy Pearlman, sent
out straightaway for Guy Stevens and made London Calling. But?
a cooler head prevails, when one thinks of all the great follow-
up albums that would have been denied the music buying
publicoid: Radio City, Reckoning, Happy Trails, Anthem of The
Sun, Ramones Leave Home, This Year's Model, White Light
White Heat, Funhouse. Well, we all have our favorites. Still, if
you're in a band looking to be in it for the long haul, there's no
getting around The Difficult Second Album.

To be sure, in the autumn of 1977 and winter of 1978, Tom
Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Fred Smith and Billy Ficca - the four
creative minds of Television - knew they well and truly had their
work cut out for them. Their spring '77 debut LP, Marquee
Moon, had been greeted with near universal acclaim from those
Whose opinions mattered in the worldwide music press.  It also
enabled the band to finally break out of their nurturing New
York environs and out into the real world, such as it was. They
toured America as opening act for the newly solo Peter Gabriel,
their sets for the most part thoroughly confounding much of the
Genesis-jonesing fanboy contingent. Television also toured the
U.K., supported by fellow NY combo Blondie, the latter's
commercial star just beginning a megawatt ascendance that
would eclipse all their CB's/Max's brethren, much to those
bands' collective surprise and doubtless envy.

In 1978 the great levelling boulder that was Punk had created
ripples that were just beginning to make themselves heard,
taking varying, wide ranging forms. Those factions that chose
to push this new Punk archetype to ludicrous and borderline
dangerous extremes, for example. Then you had those who
beat a retreat into more traditional, conservative rock idioms
(Power Pop, anyone?). Others took to that which was informed
by the exotic and ethnic (reggae/ska/dub), then beyond that,
out on the fringe, there was that which was just downright
obscure and outside - some for its own sake, some not, most
gagging for face time with Brian Eno.

Where did Television fit into this brave new post-punk world?
Would the expectations of those enamoured by Marquee Moon
be met, even surpassed? With the underground music scene
mutating and changing, was there still space for the mix of
raw yet sophisticated guitar work and dreamy lyric
surrealism that was Television's stock in trade? Did any of
this prey on Tom Verlaine's mind as he sat in a New York
studio, working on the Difficult Second Album? Maybe yes,
maybe no. But then again, maybe he just got on with it.
Stubbing out his umpteenth European cigarette, wiping down
with a clean rag the neck of his Fender Jaguar, or clear
Plexiglas Dan Armstrong guitar (previously wielded by Keith
Richards on the Stones' Gimme Shelter tour), signaling to the
guy in the booth - John Jansen, recommended by Alien Lanier
of Blue Oyster Cult, later seen manning the board for prog-
rock paragons like Supertramp - that he was ready for
another pass at the solo for "Glory".

So then, here was Adventure, the sound of a band secure
enough in its collective mind to get on with it, if perhaps not
-getting it on' in the accepted 1978 rock and roll or even Punk
Rock sense.

One cause for criticism was Jansen's production, decidedly far
smoother and subtler than the nakedly direct sound of
Marquee Moon. Then there was the matter of Verlaine's
lyrical concerns, always owing much to the surreal and
romantic, now venturing way into the mystic - a terrain that
your average punk rock kid of the day, in love with concrete,
speed and subversion of the suburban paradigm, was perhaps
loathe to follow Verlaine into.

More's the pity, for it's this combination of imaginative
production, Verlaine's typically spare and evocative lyrics - and
the band's unapproachable musical gift for the edgy yet
complex - that serves to form quite a heady listening
experience, one step up and three steps sideways from the
estimable joys of Marquee Moon.

One measure of Verlaine's persistent vision here, an admittedly
after-the-fact hindsight your reporter finds intriguing, is how
many of the songs reference inner space - dreams and the
dream state, which within Verlaine's mind might very well be
a sovereignty unto itself. That is to say, one would be hard
pressed to find much of anything literal to latch onto in these
lyrics - I mean, can anyone claim to be totally conclusive
otherwise as to what songs like "The Fire" or "The Dreams'
Dream" are 'about'? (For Verlaine's part, he did offer to an
Elektra Records publicist, at the time of Adventure's initial
release. the insight of "The Fire" being about 'two people,
whose interior experience' - inner space again - 'suddenly
matches up with the world around them'. Only to add, with
classic understatement, that 'it's difficult to explain.')

At the end of the day, though, one can just let the words be,
conveyed in Verlaine's characteristic tremulous and trebly
caw, as but one element of the total musical experience. And
the music found herein is more than up, to the task: there is
the modal, nigh Eastern mystery that accompanies and
extrapolates on the mere eight lines of lyric to "The Dreams'
Dream". The 50's sci-fi movie tension winding through "The
Fire", made spookily sonic flesh via switchblade-prepared
guitar strings, as well as an Ondioline, the obscure French
keyboard instrument most famously used by producer Joe
Meek on his 1962 global smash, the Tornadoes' "Telstar".
"Carried Away"'s rapturous, keyboard-dominated musical bed
for still another Verlaine dream, by its conclusion fairly
floating off the grooves to join it.

Not to say that there's nothing for the lumpen rock plebe, or
those in love with Marquee Moon's more corporeal moments,
to get off on. "Days" is coolly possessed of a chiming, Verlaine-
admitted 'Byrds played backwards' conceit. "Careful" - one of
only two TV songs from their back catalogue aired herein -
contains jaunty, goodtime guitar licks courtesy Richard Lloyd,
and whimsical (even a tad risque) lyric sentiments; it even
got an unexpected thumbs-up from the Hi-De-Ho Man himself
Cab Calloway, who happened to be recording in an adjacent
studio at the time. There's "Foxhole"'s mordant battlefield
humor, matched by a one-take, tightrope Verlaine guitar
prowl, and Richard Lloyd finally getting his due as The Other
Guitar Player In Television with a scorching solo flight on
"Ain't That Nothing" (done more than justice live during the
1980's by West Coast psych-pop artisans The Rain Parade).

And then we have "Glory", a classic album opener and enough
of attention-getter in its position to earn covers by several other
bands that came up in the college-rock decade that followed,
including Deep South neo-pop mavens The Windbreakers and
literate Scottish tunesmith Lloyd Cole (although there is the
perhaps apocryphal coda to the latter's effort, involving Cole
meeting Verlaine on the street and being told in no uncertain
terms to cease further performance of said song).

All told, a perfectly enjoyable piece of work that spoke and
boded well for - if not the eventual dissolution of the band that
lay down the road - an endurance of talent and musical
invention that, with the occasional new recording and live
reconvening of the tribe, holds as true now as it did over a
generation (!) ago. So consider this, then, to be not Marquee
Moon Redux, but its equally engaging, red-sleeved stepchild. Immerse 
yourself. Hear the glory, with no worries. Savor deeply this great 
Adventure.

Michael Layne Heath

San Francisco
January, Year Five
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"The Wonder - Tom Verlaine, Television & Stuff"
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