Dec 14

Television

TELEVISION
 
 
Television  is an American rock band, formed in New York City in 1973 and considered influential in the development of punk and alternative music.  Television was a fixture of the 1970’s New York rock scene along with acts like the Patti Smith Group, the Ramones, Blondie, and Talking Heads.  Although they recorded in a stripped-down, guitar-based manner similar to their punk contemporaries, Television’s music was by comparison clean, improvisational, and technically proficient, drawing influence from avant-garde jazz and 1960s rock.  The group’s debut album, Marquee Moon, is often considered one of the defining releases of the punk era.  (More from Wikipedia)
  

Punk and new wave were almost interchangeable terms before long, and some of these bands definitely had a foot in both camps:  The hotbed of punk rock in the early days was the CBGB club in New York City, but the house band there almost from opening night, Television (one of the great guitar bands) is now viewed as one of the earliest new wave bands, even though their original vocalist and bass player Richard Hell would leave the band to form one of the punkiest bands of the time, the Voidoids. 
 
(April 2010)
 
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Phil Gammage is from Houston and went to college at the University of Colorado.  He was walking through one of the classroom buildings early in the school year in 1977 and heard some raucous music being played.  It seems that a fine arts professor at the college, Jerry Kunkel had been to the CBGB club, the punk-rock mecca in New York City; there he had heard Ramones, Television and some other early punk bands.  He came back to the university inspired to start a rock band himself.  

 

The practice session that Phil Gammage heard was Jerry Kunkel on lead vocals, his new wife Marsha Vann Kunkel on bass guitar, and Jerry Budwig on guitar.  Phil picked up a guitar and plugged in; by the end of the night, he was asked to join the band.  Drummer Peter Roos was originally from New England and had also seen Television; he joined the band shortly afterward. 

 

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More generous praise can be found in the Wikipedia article.  Reviewing a 1984 Certain General show at New York’s Pyramid club, the UK-based New Musical Express called the band “New York’s answer to [Echo and] the Bunnymen with a few [Jim] Morrison tendencies thrown in” [but with] “plenty of individuality and a lead singer full of passionate presence — agonized lyrics torn from twitching limbs”.  The review concluded by observing that Certain General was “almost psychedelic in their unfettered spirit”.  Bomp! Records – whose affiliated label Alive Records reissued November’s Heat in America in 1999 – has called them “NYC’s 80’s cult favorite”, while Rock & Folk identified Certain General as “the bridge between Television and Radiohead”. 

 

(March 2015)

 

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Robert Mulrooney and Dave Hanna of the Ramrods were first in a band called Streets that later evolved into the Deviates; Mulrooney says of that period: “We were a bar band playing covers, four nights a week, but we’d throw in stuff like Television’s ‘Venus De Milo’, and as long as [the audience] didn’t know it was ‘punk’, they’d dig it.”
 
(March 2016)
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In seemingly no time, the music scene was crowded with top bands and artists whose work has held up well over the decades since, among them Patti Smith Group (whose debut album, Horses came out before Ramones, in December 1975), Television, Richard Hell, the Heartbreakers (the punk band not Tom Petty’s group, though he was a part of the scene as well), Talking Heads, the Dead Boys, Blondie, the Clash, the Cars, Elvis Costello, Pat Benatar, Joy Division, the Specials, the Go-Go’s, the Police, etc., etc., etc. There were so many that rock critics and others began distinguishing bands in the safety-pin set as “punk” and others that were less confrontational as “new wave”.  
(December 2016)
Last edited: March 22, 2021