Lucking Out (16 page)

When my review hit the pages of the
Voice
, Patti was happy, the band was happy, her manager, Jane Friedman, was happy, CBGB’s was happy, I was happy, everybody was happy, and it was nice not feeling like the bad guy in print for a change. Normally, I would have pocketed that happy outcome and moved on to the next target spot, but I kept returning to CBGB’s to catch Patti’s sets, sometimes two a night, chatting with Patti and Lenny, the neon beer signs lined above the bar, the click of pool balls, and the smell of wood, beer, urine, sweat, mop water, and time ill spent reminding me oddly, fondly, of the American Legion hall where my parents did so much of their drinking while I fed the pinball machine. A former Hells Angels hangout, CBGB’s still hosted the occasional Angel or three. Word was that the owner, Hilly Kristal, and the Angels had an arrangement in which they could drink for free and in return wouldn’t kill any of us, which seems fair and reasonable. Their arrivals and departures were still intimidating, in particular the entrance of one glowering, fur-bearing boulder who wore his leather vest over a wide-load body that spurned bathwater and soaping those hard-to-reach places as intrusions of civilization. You could smell him coming and you could smell him going, his pungency notable even in this tramp steamer: he had reached the stage when only a fire hose on full blast would help. “Do you think he knows how bad he smells?” one regular asked, to which another dryly replied, “I dunno, you could always go ask him.” Which of course would have resulted in a horizontal ride to the emergency room. The Angels were not to be trifled with, theirs was not a sporting manner. One of the scariest early moments I had in New York was when I was sharing a crosstown taxi with a former teacher of mine from Edgewood High who had temporarily moved to Manhattan to do graduate work at New York University’s theater department. The cab stopped mid-block in the East Village at a red light. “Jesus, look at that fat slob,” my teacher said. It was a hot summer evening, the cab windows were rolled down, voices carried, and the fat slob in question resting on his gut was a Hells Angel squatting on the steps of the Angels’ clubhouse on East Third Street, the same clubhouse where a woman had been thrown to her death from the rooftop by one of the members. It was unclear whether the Angel on the steps had caught the exact phrasing of the exclamation from my teacher, but his head turned in our direction and his eyes twitched, the shift of his buttocks indicating he was about to rise to his feet. The light was still red, two or three cars were in front of us, and then it turned blessedly green, the cabdriver easing forward so that it wouldn’t seem he was hurrying guiltily away. “Sorry,” my former teacher said, his voice overlapping with the driver’s saying, “Man, don’t ever do anything like that again.”

If nothing else, the seventies in New York taught me situational awareness, a vital attribute for every slow-moving mammal prone to daydreaming. Like so many who came to see Patti, I would sometimes glide backward to the street when the opening band began tormenting their guitars after tuning up on each other’s nerves for five or ten minutes. It wasn’t like cooling your heels out on the piazza. Bottles would be dropped from the Palace Hotel men’s shelter above CBGB’s, their green and clear glass smashing on the sidewalk, some of them exploding with pee, the contents recycled from the beer or Thunderbird that the bottles formerly contained. It wasn’t a nightly occurrence, but it happened often enough to keep you limber. Scraggly panhandlers who didn’t bother to work up an inventive line of patter to go with their outstretched palms would pester anyone stationary, even though CBGB’s customers themselves were the very portrait of slim pickings and linty pockets. Abuse was shouted from passing cars, on general principle, not for anything in particular, and the occasional curiosity-seeker or casual-date couple would serenade by, open the front door for a peek, and get a faceful of inchoate racket blasting from the stage—all the deterrence they needed to keep moving to find a different lovebird destination, assuming they weren’t eaten by cannibals before they got to Canal Street.

One night after Patti finished her first set, she stopped to say hi at the bar and leaned in with a pointed suggestion: “James”—she always called me “James”—“you should stick around for these guys. They’re really amazing, you’ve got to see them up close.”

It wasn’t too much to ask, given that it was said to be two of the members of Television, Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine, who had convinced Hilly Kristal to book them there on otherwise empty Sunday nights, a band that hardly conformed to Hilly’s original concept as musical host, the full initialed name of the club being CBGB & OMFUG: “Country Bluegrass Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers,” a mirthful mouthful. Inside and out, CBGB’s looked like a hick joint, a misplaced honky-tonk, an impression fortified by Hilly’s flannel shirts. So, in retrospect, Television’s guitar duo were the Romulus and Remus of American punk. It didn’t occur to me until then that my skipping the band’s set after the first song or two might have been noted as a shade insulting, given that I had rapturized Patti and looked as if I were giving her regular openers the brush-off. It wasn’t that I was a significant presence in the room but that the funky birth canal of CBGB’s was so tubular it didn’t take binocular vision to spot a regular beating an exit. Patti’s request was also an allusion to the fact that I usually stationed myself at the back. This was a pattern that began in grade school, when we were seated alphabetically and I nearly always ended up against the back wall, helping forge an identity of being the classic wise guy in the last row, the classroom’s color commentator. And it continued with my comradeship with Pauline, who, as mentioned before, favored the last row of the screening room, the film projector’s beam raying directly above our heads. But this hanging-back business was more than precedence and habit. It betrayed my reluctance, my fear of getting too close to anybody or anything; my preference for maintaining detachment, distance, for avoiding involvement and allowing myself a quick escape route from wherever I found myself. I wanted to take everything in, from safe afar, through a panoramic lens. But that night I did as Patti beckoned and positioned myself closer to the stage for Television’s second set.

It took them forever to tune up, but then it always took them forever to tune up, bent over their guitars like car mechanics over a tricky transmission. Then Verlaine, relatively satisfied, would nod, their name would be announced to scattered applause, the lights would come up, and Tom would open with a little joke. It was always the same little joke, the same lame little icebreaker. It was about asking a flower seller on the street about buying some flowers for his sweetie and the seller giving him one rude brush-off after another before squawking: “Listen, pal, stop bothering me—can’cha see I’m trying to sell these flowers?” It was not a joke that got funnier in the retelling, and the fondness Verlaine held for it would always be inexplicable, like so much else about him. He was and would remain an unbreakable code. After the punch line died a small, swift death came the siren-whine of guitar as Television began “Fire Engine,” a cover of a 13th Floor Elevators song whose cover-appeal was also elusive, so Tinkertoy was its construction, no matter how gussied up the guitar attack. Up close was better than the back, but I still wasn’t getting the gnostic gospel message. But at some point in the set, perhaps it was “Venus de Milo,” perhaps it was the gorgeous “Judy” (which the band never recorded, a sin, a crime, though it has surfaced on bootlegs, like a plaintive cry retrieved from the ruins of Atlantis), Verlaine lifted his face to the light, eyelids closed, and I could see that he was beautiful, the light striking his Antonin Artaud cheekbones like a close-up in
The Passion of Joan of Arc.
(One of Patti’s favorites, and I could see now how Verlaine was Artaud to her Falconetti, not a comparison that rose naturally from seeing them hold hands like sweethearts between sets at the rear of CBGB’s.) The imploring death rattle that was his normal singing voice didn’t matter, because it was meant to sound constricted, his eyelids fluttering like exaggerated REM sleep or pained rapture. As the songs became longer and the virtuoso soloing of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd wove intricately, passionately upward in a double helix without spiraling off course and descending into doodling, as drummer Billy Ficca kept jazzy order in the backseat (instead of pounding rhythm like a heavy-metal humpster), I felt a religious conversion coming on without quite being sold, despite the bravura finish (the first of many bravura finishes) of “Marquee Moon,” which planted the summit flag on the set. Because although there was dynamic dissonance to Television’s performing and the discordant jabs that testified to the influence of free-form improvisationalists such as Albert Ayler and John Coltrane, two of Verlaine’s favorites, there was also an underlayer of discombobulation.

Or, rather, a side pocket.

Flanked on Verlaine’s right was Television’s bassist, Richard Hell. Hell was not only the band’s bass thumper but also a singer and songwriter and a longtime friend of Verlaine’s, the Paul McCartney to his John Lennon, ideally. (Verlaine once told me that one of the best things about the Beatles was the way they could shout out harmonies and make them seem intimate.) They had met at boarding school in Delaware, a couple of matching misfits named Tom Miller and Richard Meyers who hopped the fence to hitchhike to Florida together, only to be stopped in Alabama, not the most welcoming place for strangers, and sent packing home. But the two of them had gotten a gulp of the fugitive kick of busting out of the regiment and didn’t intend to take their boring slot in the employment line. New York was where they had to be, the cockroaches welcoming them with waving antennae. They eventually adopted alter egos together, shedding their everyday humdrum names for legendary French
poète maudit
personas—Verlaine deriving from Paul Verlaine and Hell from Arthur Rimbaud’s
Season in Hell
—dissolving their former identities by dropping acid together to invite visions and synesthesia, knocking down the partition walls of selfhood. They also gender-bender-blended, adopting a mutual drag persona in print, that of the floozy poet Theresa Stern, a Puerto Rican prostitute working the streets of Hoboken and the author of
Wanna Go Out?
(“Wanna go out?” was what hookers asked in the seventies of any man who caught their eye, the predecessor to the later invitation “Wanna party?”) The author’s photo for Theresa Stern was a composite shot of Verlaine and Hell wearing wigs—a blurred sister persona. (Though it would be Hell who kept up the Stern impersonation solo in print, giving interviews under her name.) It was seeing the drag-happy New York Dolls at the Mercer Arts Center that clicked Hell into realizing there was much more sexy fun to be had playing rock than pecking at the typewriter keys like a trained chicken.

Photographs of the test-run incarnation of Television called the Neon Boys reveal the pouty preening of so many rockers dabbling then in David Bowie’s and the New York Dolls’ makeup kits, going for that androgynous, washed-ashore, fuck-me-I’m-pretty look. But by the time Television was double billing with Patti, Verlaine had adopted the nondescript tee or the thrift-shop bargain shirt that actually buttoned for those special non-festive occasions, dissolving the barrier between street clothes and stage wear and spurning the theatricality of glitter and glam droogies like the Dolls and their imitators. It was a taste choice, Verlaine being a master of high-visibility low profitability, but it also reflected a recoil from the train-wreck legacy of the Dolls, whose members buckled from too many drugs and reeled off the road, regrouping and forging ahead but never again with the runaway splendor of their legendary performances at Mercer Arts Center, where the lead singer, David Johansen, and the guitarist Johnny Thunders augured to be the Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the East Village cockroach kingdom. (As was remarked at the time, David had the lips and Thunders the licks.) The commercial flop of the Dolls and their inability to break out beyond their cult following (though their influence in England was incalculable, the Smiths’ Morrissey being their number one pining fan), coupled with their casualty toll and reliable undependability, made it that much harder for newer New York bands to get signed. I mentioned this once to Bob Christgau, saying that some of the younger rockers felt the Dolls had blown it for those coming up after them, to which Bob shot back, “Well, if that’s how they feel, fuck ’em.” He wasn’t going to coddle a bunch of ingrates.

Hell’s look was his own—like Edie Beale, he inventively made do with whatever was near at hand and served his whims—but his Cannes-starlet bare-shoulder T-shirts and sunglasses and color palette clashed with Television’s first-thing-picked-off-the-floor antifashion indifference, its muted choice of cuts and fabrics, which sent a different message statement: it’s the music that counts. Not visual flash and certainly not pose-flexing showmanship, which Hell also had on tap. Unlike the archetypal rock bassist forged in the medieval ironworks, Hell didn’t hold his sentry position as the unmovable pillar in a cross-fire hurricane, bolted to the bass and rooted to the floor in the classic stoic stance of the Stones’ Bill Wyman and The Who’s John Entwistle. He got buggy onstage with a popcorn-popping battery of head-wagging, moue-making, and hair-raking, with a few Pete Townshend jumps thrown in that had rather less liftoff than Townshend’s, but then Pete was the more practiced catapulter. Perhaps Hell made a minor spectacle of himself in self-defense to distract from his bass playing, which fell a bit below minimum requirements even by garage-band standards. “Close enough for rock” went the jokey catchphrase, but Hell wasn’t close enough to get close enough for rock, often seeming to lose his place on the bass. What he brought to the stage was louche charisma and the authorship of the future punk anthems “Blank Generation” (“I belong to the blank generation and/I can take it or leave it each time”) and “Love Comes in Spurts.” But even these assertive numbers were rudimentary pumpers compared with the topographies Television was intent on exploring; friendship or no friendship, it never would have worked out. There was room for only one vision in Television, Verlaine’s. Hell would soon vacate the crew, his corner filled by Fred Smith, who defected from Blondie and conformed to the Wyman-Entwistle model of unassuming sentinel safeguarding the beat. Hot-chick interest peeled considerably after Hell left the band, but he wouldn’t be gone from the CBGB’s stage for long, returning with a sound that went every which way, like bullets careening off steel drums with a slow-death heartbeat in the background of something big about to keel over.