Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do)

My thoughts on pop music and pop culture, plus the weekly playlists from THIS IS ROCK 'N' ROLL RADIO with Dana and Carl (Sunday nights 9 to Midnight Eastern, SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM in Syracuse, sparksyracuse.org). You can support this blog on Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/user?u=2449453 Twitter @CafarelliCarl All editorial content on this blog Copyright Carl Cafarelli (except where noted). All images copyright the respective owners TIP JAR at https://www.paypal.me/CarlCafarelli

Friday, September 2, 2022

THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE: Elevation

This chapter is in some potential drafts of my long-threatened book The Greatest Record Ever Made! (Volume 1), but is more likely to be pushed back to an even-more-theoretical This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio, Volume 2.

An infinite number of tracks can each be THE greatest record ever made, as long as they take turns. Today, this is THE GREATEST RECORD EVER MADE!

TELEVISION: "Elevation"

Written by Tom Verlaine

Produced by Andy Johns and Tom Verlaine

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.

If you like what you see here on Boppin' (Like The Hip Folks Do), please consider supporting this blog by becoming a patron on Patreon, or by visiting CC's Tip Jar. Additional products and projects are listed here.

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio with Dana & Carl airs Sunday nights from 9 to Midnight Eastern, on the air in Syracuse at SPARK! WSPJ 103.3 and 93.7 FM, and on the web at http://sparksyracuse.org/ You can read about our history here.