(TV) Jay's question a few days ago on Verlaine & Ficca

["Casey, Leo J" <CaseyL@VOLPE.DOT.GOV>]

"Tom Verlaine Without TV: The New Season"
NEW YORK ROCKER, #22, September 1979
by Roy Trakin
NYR: Did you enjoy working in the studio more this time than with Television? 
Did you have more control? 
TV: Yeah, but it has nothing to do with control. It had to do with picking 
the right person for the song. I don't like making someone do something 
he doesn't want to do. You can't make Billy Ficca play a certain way if he 
doesn't want to play that way. I would think, oh, this song would be perfect 
for Jay Dee Daugherty. And he'd come in and play and I wouldn't have to 
explain anything.
NYR: Was it a difficult decision to break up television? 
TV: It's painful in the sense, you work with people a long time. 
I've known Billy (Ficca) for fifteen years. I just wanted to do 
something different. I'm just glad no one in the band took it real 
personally. I know Richard always wanted to write songs and have 
his own group. He was writing songs he knew weren't quite right for
Television. In terms of the sound they put out. I don't know how 
badly he wanted to do them because he never tried to force them 
on the rest of us. I think he knew what would fit in our overall style 
and what wouldn't.
 NYR: Can you think of someone whose opinion about music you 
would respect more than your own? 
TV: I wouldn't mind having a guy behind the board who was real 
sympathetic to my whole style and sound, which is something 
Television never found. Someone who could get the right 
combination of distortion and twang in the guitar sound 
which every engineer we ever had dealings with did not understand. 
They were used to guys with a Marshall and a Les Paul blasting 
away into these small microphones with the standard series of things 
they do or approach. Billy had a strange way of tuning his drums,
 for instance. The [his] whole thing was different. I think the records 
capture some of it; I don't think they capture what we could have if 
the right engineer had come along and was able to get the sound we
wanted on vinyl.
http://www.marquee.demon.co.uk/artics.htm

http://www.obbard.com/tvlist-archive/0102/msg00041.html

http://www.obbard.com/tvlist-archive/0102/msg00045.html
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