Melody Maker, April 15, 1978: Difference between revisions
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He was laughing quietly to himself at the time. | He was laughing quietly to himself at the time. | ||
"I think there's a lot of fucked up people writing about music. Like, these people are supposed to be music critics, and they're just stupid. It's ridiculous what some of them have written. | "I think there's a lot of fucked up people writing about music. Like, these people are supposed to be music critics, and they're just stupid. It's ridiculous what some of them have written. | ||
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not that simple, you know." | not that simple, you know." | ||
It is almost a year since Television first breezed into England on the back of ecstatic reviews of their debut album, | It is almost a year since Television first breezed into England on the back of ecstatic reviews of their debut album, ''Marquee Moon''. Their first British concerts confirmed all the enthusiastic notices that had been regularly flying out of New York for months, if not years (they seemed to be forever organising a British excursion). | ||
This month, Television's arrival for a second crack at Albion has been received with considerably less critical elation. ''Adventure'', their second album released last week, has not been unanimously praised. The frantic applause which greeted | This month, Television's arrival for a second crack at Albion has been received with considerably less critical elation. ''Adventure'', their second album released last week, has not been unanimously praised. The frantic applause which greeted ''Marquee Moon'' has cooled. | ||
This paper was alone, in fact, in its acclaim (I was that soldier). Elsewhere, the comics took it to the cleaners. and some jokers took it into the backroom for a solid mauling. Verlaine's been antagonised by the insensitivity of some of the reviews — as you'll have guessed from the introductory outburst — though he attempts a facade of equanimity. I'm on his side, so we'll let him have the floor for a few paragraphs. | This paper was alone, in fact, in its acclaim (I was that soldier). Elsewhere, the comics took it to the cleaners. and some jokers took it into the backroom for a solid mauling. Verlaine's been antagonised by the insensitivity of some of the reviews — as you'll have guessed from the introductory outburst — though he attempts a facade of equanimity. I'm on his side, so we'll let him have the floor for a few paragraphs. | ||
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"I find it offensive that critics should ignore the music and attack the personality of the musician, especially when they don't even know the people involved. Like. I don't think I've even met these people. They know what they're talking about. They don't know a thing about me. One of them says I'm still, nice, with Patti Smith or something. It's ridiculous, what are they talking about?" | "I find it offensive that critics should ignore the music and attack the personality of the musician, especially when they don't even know the people involved. Like. I don't think I've even met these people. They know what they're talking about. They don't know a thing about me. One of them says I'm still, nice, with Patti Smith or something. It's ridiculous, what are they talking about?" | ||
I mention that several of the reviews of ''Adventure'' correspond to the criticisms of Television's concerts last year: namely, that their music lacked emotion, that it was cold and detached. I quote from one review that described them — entirely without justification, in my own opinion — as " the prodigal sons of doom, gloom, destruction and general slash your wrist downness" (sic). | I mention that several of the reviews of ''Adventure'' correspond to the criticisms of Television's concerts last year: namely, that their music lacked emotion, that it was cold and detached. I quote from one review that described them — entirely without justification, in my own opinion — as "the prodigal sons of doom, gloom, destruction and general slash your wrist downness" (sic). | ||
Verlaine bursts out in derisive laughter. | Verlaine bursts out in derisive laughter. | ||
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"If they got some younger guys in, some 20 year old deejays, I think the whole music scene in the States would be revolutionised | "If they got some younger guys in, some 20 year old deejays, I think the whole music scene in the States would be revolutionised | ||
in two years. At the moment it's terrible. | |||
[[image:1978-04-15 Melody Maker pages 40-41.jpg|340px|center]] | |||
"There's one trend in the States at the moment that's so sickening it's got to die within the next year. You know, you get this young wealthy guy who'll find a band and spend, like, 20,000 dollars on getting them costumes and lights and all sorts of crap, and he'll put them out on the road for a year, and with some sort of pull he'll get them signed to a record company. | |||
"This is a band like Angel, Styx, or someone, that I'm talking about... They sorta set themselves up against Kiss or Yes. Christ, who listens to that crap? I find it really sickening. | |||
"No, there's no radical music in the States that I'm aware of, except maybe in the jazz communities. There're a few what you might call new wave bands but all of them are Ramones imitators and I would guess that maybe half of them have disappeared already. | |||
"Pere Ubu are an interesting band. A friend of mine used to play in Pere Ubu. I forget his name. He died last year. I haven't heard their album yet, but I used to talk to that guy — what is it? Crocus <!-- Behomoth --> Behemoth, the singer. He calls himself David Thomas now, which seems more sensible. He's interesting. | |||
"They used to come to New York once in a while and I used to talk to him. He's, like, one of a kind, which is something I got a weakness for. | |||
"I only heard Devo on the radio last night. They sound interesting, but a little too tied up with their own philosophy to be what they really want to be. That idea of DeEvolution, that's an English idea, if I'm not mistaken. I think Colin Wilson talked about it in one of his books." | |||
I'd read that he'd been impressed by David Bowie's recent work, ''Low'' and ''Heroes'' especially. | |||
"Yeah, I liked them. Bowie's one of the few intelligent people left around. I'm sure he has his problems, same as Eno (who, you will remember, was due to produce Television's first album until he had a falling out with Verlaine). | |||
"But I think he's pretty smart, very intelligent. But then, I'd even say Joe Walsh of the Eagles was very smart and very intelligent because he was clever enough not to quit his own band until he'd made something like a million dollars." | |||
Verlaine, you will have gathered, does not esteem most of his contemporaries; nor, after his experiences during the last year since Television returned to America from their European jaunt, does he have even the most tenuous respect for the industry that ostensibly supports the individual musician. | |||
The last 12 months have been, it transpires, pretty traumatic for Verlaine and Television. They split from their management company (Wartoke, whose principal clients included Patti Smith, John Cale and Television) because of a dispute about payment for their extensive European tour. | |||
"We haven't played in nearly a year," he complains. "We did three dates in Illinois when we got back from Europe, and then went to New York and rehearsed, and then did the record. We haven't worked, primarily, because I sensed that our managers weren't quite right for us. | |||
"I didn't want to get into some long fight with them, so I just suggested that we part. company. But it still took, like, seven months to get out of the contract and then it took something like five and a half months to record the album. It was all time wasted in frustration and negotiation. | |||
"It was a situation of spending energy you could spend better in other ways. I was put in the position of having to do it. | |||
"You have to be ruthless. I don't think I have that kind of ruthless streak, no. You probably have to have a manager who is ruthless to a certain extent. To spend even an hour of a day talking business is something I can't stand to do. Particularly since most people in the music industry think that musicians are nuts. | |||
"Their attitude is, you just play the music, that's enough.' But it's not. You want to make sure you get paid for what you do. You want to make sure the conditions are right for you to play a concert. Some guy might send you to a club that has a p.a. built for a jukebox. These people, they treat musicians like they're adolescents. | |||
"Yeah, there is an adolescent mentality in rock 'n' roll, but to be treated like that continually, it doesn't make you feel bitter, but it does make you lose your respect for people you might at one time have had a lot of respect for." | |||
I'm an unsympathetic toad at the best of times, and suggest to Verlaine that most rock musicians bring such dismal circumstances down upon their own heads largely through their own stupidity and blindness to everything but the gratification of their own inflated egos and habits. | |||
"You're right. Too much of that crap goes on in rock 'n' roll. A lot of people in rock 'n' roll are not... they aren't sober all the time. That's probably okay if you've got a manager who can take care of you all the time. | |||
"A good manager will do that. He'll recognise that a guy loves to drink and performs great when he drinks, and as long as the guy's not an alcoholic and ruining himself, that'll be fine and he'll be looked after. But it's still true that musicians get catered to more than is good for them. You can be taken advantage of and not even notice it; you lose sight of everything. | |||
"It sometimes looks like everybody's out to take advantage if they can. I mean, we're very lucky to be with Elektra. We took five months on ''Adventure'', but they never pressured us. They knew we had to be left alone if they were going to get anything out of us. | |||
"Some groups need pressure from the company to get something out, otherwise they'll just go into the studio and drink beer all night. I couldn't work under that kinda direct pressure. | |||
"There're so many other kinds of pressure to contend with. Like, we were really looking for a producer. I had a whole list of names, you know. Because I like to have someone there with me, someone who knows a lot about the technology of the studio, because I don't want to be worried all the time about instruments distorting and sound levels — it's so frustrating. | |||
"But we couldn't find a producer who was right for us (John Jansen, who finally produced the album in collaboration with Verlaine, was an engineer recommended by Allen Lanier of the Blue Oyster Cult). | |||
"Most producers are really inflated people. I mean, once they've worked with. a band that gets a gold record, they suddenly start demanding, like, 30,000 dollars and a third of the royalties. Jesus, who's worth it?" | |||
Hey — still with us? Well, this is where we knuckle down to assessing what we can of ''Adventure'', Tom having barked back at his critics and side-swiped some aspects of the industry of human happiness along the way. | |||
Now it was recently proposed (by Chris Brazier, actually, in his persuasive piece on Patti Smith) that rock 'n' roll can be successfully defined as a direct descendant of Romanticism. The association is genuinely valid, even if it has largely been debased. | |||
{{cx}} | {{cx}} | ||
''remaining text on page 41 still to come | |||
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"But drugs, you know, they begin to dominate the personality, to say the least. Their after-effects, the memory of the experience, can be inspiring in a certain sense. But they do lock you onto a certain level that you do have to get away from after a while. | "But drugs, you know, they begin to dominate the personality, to say the least. Their after-effects, the memory of the experience, can be inspiring in a certain sense. But they do lock you onto a certain level that you do have to get away from after a while. | ||
"I also think that for sure they can debilitate a person's ability to communicate. That's pretty obvious. I also think they make people more egotistical and at the same time make those people less aware of their own existence. It removes them from reality. " People who mess with drugs, I can't take their personalities. I can't stand to be around them for too long. There are still a lot of people doing it to themselves. They also have so many illusions about things that they're totally boring to listen to." | "I also think that for sure they can debilitate a person's ability to communicate. That's pretty obvious. I also think they make people more egotistical and at the same time make those people less aware of their own existence. It removes them from reality. "People who mess with drugs, I can't take their personalities. I can't stand to be around them for too long. There are still a lot of people doing it to themselves. They also have so many illusions about things that they're totally boring to listen to." | ||
"I | "I think that any writing is political," says Verlaine. "Everybody knows that. I think our music is a celebration of a certain kind of individual freedom." | ||
We have been talking about the responsibility of the artist and to what degree his work should embrace political and social concerns, the danger with the Romantic being that his pursuit of experience might become a narcissistic obsession (the French Romantics, after the failure of the revolution of 1848 and the fall of the Paris Commune, turned away from the society whose standard they had attempted to influence). | We have been talking about the responsibility of the artist and to what degree his work should embrace political and social concerns, the danger with the Romantic being that his pursuit of experience might become a narcissistic obsession (the French Romantics, after the failure of the revolution of 1848 and the fall of the Paris Commune, turned away from the society whose standard they had attempted to influence). | ||
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"There was something that happened at a specific time that really got to me. I read an article about atomic energy plants in the States, about the amount of accidents that happen in them because of inevitable human errors, and that is totally frightening. Like, 20 minutes up the river from New York, there's an atomic energy plant, and all it would take is one human error and that would be it. | "There was something that happened at a specific time that really got to me. I read an article about atomic energy plants in the States, about the amount of accidents that happen in them because of inevitable human errors, and that is totally frightening. Like, 20 minutes up the river from New York, there's an atomic energy plant, and all it would take is one human error and that would be it. | ||
"It's inevitable that | "It's inevitable that a city in America close to one of those plants is going to be affected soon and a million people are going to be killed by an accident. And there's no need for it. There's no need for atomic energy. | ||
"Anyway, I wrote a song about one of those plants. I can't remember why we didn't do it. We were probably working on something else. It's an idea I should maybe return to." | "Anyway, I wrote a song about one of those plants. I can't remember why we didn't do it. We were probably working on something else. It's an idea I should maybe return to." | ||
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"And the stories I've heard are kinda disturbing, you know. Like I heard one thing about Ayler, about how one time he was going to get on a boat in Sweden to come back to the States, and one of the girls that worked on this boat told him, don't get on this boat, I'm telling you, just don't get on this boat.' So he didn't. And, anyway, this boat sank. No one knew why. | "And the stories I've heard are kinda disturbing, you know. Like I heard one thing about Ayler, about how one time he was going to get on a boat in Sweden to come back to the States, and one of the girls that worked on this boat told him, don't get on this boat, I'm telling you, just don't get on this boat.' So he didn't. And, anyway, this boat sank. No one knew why. | ||
"Like, I think," he continues gravely, " that people in politics tend to get paranoid about anything that's togs freely expressed, anything that's genuinely kinda emotional ind being communicated and enjoyed. I don't know, Morrison died under very strange circumstances. No autopsy report exists now. He's just thrown in a grave in a foreign country. I mean, there's all this stuff. | "Like, I think," he continues gravely, "that people in politics tend to get paranoid about anything that's togs freely expressed, anything that's genuinely kinda emotional ind being communicated and enjoyed. I don't know, Morrison died under very strange circumstances. No autopsy report exists now. He's just thrown in a grave in a foreign country. I mean, there's all this stuff. | ||
" There are also rumours going around about how Dylan was told to shut up after his motorcycle accident. They're just rumours, you know... I mean, no one's come up to me and actually said anything. But I wouldn't be shocked if someday somebody did... Politicians, you know, are all in their forties, and they're all frightened of youth. It wouldn't surprise me if there was something going down... Some kind of silencing faction knocking people down. | "There are also rumours going around about how Dylan was told to shut up after his motorcycle accident. They're just rumours, you know... I mean, no one's come up to me and actually said anything. But I wouldn't be shocked if someday somebody did... Politicians, you know, are all in their forties, and they're all frightened of youth. It wouldn't surprise me if there was something going down... Some kind of silencing faction knocking people down. | ||
" I'm not | "I'm not, like, a paranoid or anything, I don't keep looking behind me... It's just that there could be some other reason why all these people are dead. | ||
" It just seems that anybody who came on real strong in the Sixties is dead. They're either out of action or it's all over for them. Hendrix was another one... These people probably abused things... drugs, you know... and maybe that's the more likely reason they're dead. If you'd prefer to believe it." | "It just seems that anybody who came on real strong in the Sixties is dead. They're either out of action or it's all over for them. Hendrix was another one... These people probably abused things... drugs, you know... and maybe that's the more likely reason they're dead. If you'd prefer to believe it." | ||
I think we'll just leave it there for the present, while we're still ahead. | I think we'll just leave it there for the present, while we're still ahead. |
Revision as of 22:48, 3 July 2021
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