From the album Marquee Moon, Elektra Records, 1977
Vertigo.
For the disaffected and dissatisfied in 1977, no track expressed the feeling of rock music in dizzying free fall with greater menace and implied ennui as "Elevation" by Television.
A large part of growing up manifests in staking one's own claim on fresh vistas. We don't necessarily crave a complete break from the past, from the frontiers settled by older siblings or preceding generations. But we want some real estate to call our own.
From Television's debut album Marquee Moon, the track "Elevation" just fascinated me when I was 17. Fall of 1977, freshman in college, trying to finally hear all these punk or new wave or whaddayacallit bands I'd read so much about in the pages of Phonograph Record Magazine. I asked the campus radio station for help, and was rewarded with the sounds of the Ramones, Blondie, the Dictators, the Adverts, the Jam, Willie Alexander and the Boom Boom Band, the Runaways, and oh yeah!, Television. I could never get enough of this jagged, loping, serpentine noise, so mesmerizing, so different, so gratifyingly dizzying in its willful application of elevation going to my head. And staying there. Marquee Moon was among my earliest LP purchases in this broad category of NEW MUSIC circa '77 and '78. It would not be the last.
Oh, no. Not even close to the last.
Years later, I read something that compared Television to the Grateful Dead, keying on the group's essential musicality in contrast with the three-chord image of much of their CBGB's contemporaries. That comparison would have horrified me in the '70s, and I doubt many Deadheads would have agreed with it either. Minus the determined DIY stance of original Television bassist Richard Hell, though, the members of Television--guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, drummer Billy Ficca, and Hell's four-string replacement Fred Smith--could be jazzier, more inclined to improvise, while still maintaining a Bowery edge. Television might not have jammed like Bob Weir and Jerry Garcia, but their sound was in some ways closer to the Dead than it was to the Ramones or Blondie, or even to Talking Heads.
Television split after their second album, 1978's Adventure, and did an eponymous reunion album in 1992. Marquee Moon was their signature work, an acknowledged classic in rock 'n' roll's storied history of fresh vistas claimed, frontiers settled. A song on that album begged (or warned), "Elevation, don't go to my head." The plea is for naught. The head surrenders. The body falls.
You are absolutely correct.
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