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Re: (TV) Re: Lee Renaldo on Television



This is great, thanks for posting!

--Phil


________________________________
From: postitnote <postitnote@sbcglobal.net>
To: tv@obbard.com 
Sent: Monday,
February 4, 2013 2:33 AM
Subject: (TV) Re: Lee Renaldo on Television
 
This
was Lee Renaldo (Sonic Youth) listing his musical influences.  This is what he
had to say about Television:

Television: Marquee Moon

Here, you've got the
dawn of the punk movement-- stripping music back to the essentials. At the
time, that was very important to my re-involvement with music, which had
gotten so bombastic, serving larger audiences and scenes and big stadium
concerts. When I was in the first years of university, I fell in more with the
visual arts crowd because it was more interesting than where music was. But
then these NYC punk bands brought things back to small clubs and basic
musicianship. It revitalized and redefined what music could be, taking it out
of the "big time/factory/money machine" and to the people in dank places like
CBGB or Max's.

Television also played really great songs that were sometimes
quite challenging. Television, the Dead, the Beatles: These were groups where
you could feel that if any one stem dropped out, the records would not be what
they were. It was about collective participation. I did music for this Todd
Haynes film about Bob Dylan a few years ago called I'm Not There; we put
together a small band, and it included [Television's] Tom Verlaine. Playing
with him was a real blast of an experience.

The first time I heard Marquee
Moon, I was in college in Binghamton, New York, and we'd been listening to
some of the other records from that period, probably Talking Heads and Patti
Smith. I'd seen both of those groups play around, but I heard Television were
really the band from that period. It wasn't the Voidoids or the Ramones-- it
was Television that could flex this incredible musical muscle while having
great songs and punk poise.

I spent a lot of time in the cinema lecture hall
at school, and it had a great sound system. A couple of other guys-- all of
whom I would go on to play music with to one degree or another-- and myself
got ahold of Marquee Moon and put it on the big Altec-Lansing speakers and sat
in this empty theater. We were staring at a white screen, listening to the
record, almost in the dark. It was an incredible way to experience that
record: quite loud, quite clear. It knocked us all out.
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