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Re: (TV) Sour Grapes / Alternate Ver of Television's Founding?



On Sun, Jul 24, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Dennis D <dend@nyc.rr.com> wrote:

> I guess everyone has their own version of "history". Fred has enough going
> on in his life that he doesn't have to brown nose up to Tom to make a
> living, I think he likes playing in Television and no matter how we all feel
> about it Television is a band and band lose and replace members all the
> time.


I was thinking about this as well.  There's a version of what *could* have
happened that would have been only a little different from "real" history in
some ways, but might have changed the way we all think of stuff, and it goes
like this:

Let's say that Tom had kept the Television name and put out his first solo
album, or something very similar to it with maybe more contributions from
Billy and/or Fred under the name "Television".

That would've been pretty normal for that time; very few of Television's
peers as a band put out more than one or two albums without a major lineup
change.  So if by 1979 Television had become a band that changes lineups
like everyone else, and went on to put out something akin to Dream Time, or
if indeed all of Tom's solo LPs went out as "Television" records, you'd very
quickly come to think of the Verlaine/Lloyd/Ficca/Smith lineup as only the
second lineup of several.  Yes, it'd be the quintessential one and we'd all
want that lineup back whenever possible (except for the purists who would
always want the Hell version back!), and maybe it would take some of the
specialness of the band away, but then again, we wouldn't have the fuel for
the kind of controversy we have today.

I know there's the big controversy about the "contract" stating that it has
to be 3/4 of the original band to be called "Television", but I'm pretty
sure those kind of agreements are routinely discarded in the rock band biz.

What I mean is that one of the things that's made Television an anomaly is
that lack of lineup shuffles, to the point where the MM/Adventure lineup has
come to be considered sort of sacred in a way that doesn't happen to
individual lineups of most bands.  But that's really sort of an accident of
history that might better have been given up early on.  We still could have
gotten reunions of the classic lineup... but the other stuff might have been
a lot less messy, and in fact the music might have been better served in
that format than having Tom as a solo artist.

Just figured I'd throw that out there since I'm all about heresy today...
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