Re: (TV) Re: Lee Renaldo on Television

[Bob Beatty <bobjb2002@yahoo.ca>]

That was an enjoyable read. Thanks Deb.
I'd like to see Tom do  more collabs with some of the SY-ers, besides the
"Million Dolllar Bashers" band that played on that soundtrack of Dylan covers
Lee mentions. Quite a listenable album. There was a short interview I read
online a few years back with Tom & Thurston interviewed together. In it Tom
mentioned he had a habit of driving out to Thurston's place in Connecticut now
& then, & they'd play music together. Wouldn't it be nice if they'd record
some collaborations & release them? And if they'd  tour together too, so much
the better! Or now that Sonic Youth seems likely defunct with Kim's &
Thurston's split as spouses, how about Tom & most of the SY-ers joining
together into a "super group" that might be dubbed "Sonic TV"? Just a pleasant
reverie to imagine!

--- On Mon, 2/4/13, postitnote <postitnote@sbcglobal.net> wrote:

From: postitnote <postitnote@sbcglobal.net>
Subject: (TV) Re: Lee Renaldo on Television
To: tv@obbard.com
Received: Monday, February 4, 2013, 2:33 AM

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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