walking upstream…
Television
photo: masao nakagami · cc by-sa 2.0 ↗Television
sourcesWikipedia2 · Damien Love
Television emerged from New York's mid-1970s downtown scene, founded by guitarist-singer Tom Verlaine and bassist Richard Hell, and helped inaugurate the CBGB milieu that birthed American punk. Yet their music pointed elsewhere: on the 1977 debut 'Marquee Moon,' Verlaine and second guitarist Richard Lloyd traded long, interlocking single-note lines that owed as much to modal jazz and 1960s garage-psych as to punk's power chords. Hell departed before that album, replaced by Fred Smith. The record sold modestly in America but was rapturously received in Britain, where its clean-toned guitar counterpoint and taut arrangements shaped a generation of post-punk players. After a second album the band split in 1978, reuniting intermittently until Verlaine's death in 2023.
the sound in question
1977
Marquee MoonTelevision
walk the tributaries ↓
The Velvet Underground1960s · Art rock / Proto-punk / Experimental rock
Verlaine and Hell came up idolizing the Velvet Underground, and Television inherited their downtown template: plain-spoken, street-level lyrics; guitars that favored drone, clang, and repetition over blues licks; and a willingness to let a two-chord vamp run long. It is the Velvets' idea that rock could be both arty and raw, elegant and abrasive at once.
listen: upstream & here
1969
What Goes OnThe Velvet Underground
1977
See No EvilTelevision
listen forPlay the Velvet Underground's 'What Goes On' next to 'See No Evil': both drive a churning, repetitive rave-up where the tension comes from insistence and interlocking guitars rather than from a chord progression going anywhere.
John Coltrane1960s · Jazz / Modal jazz / Spiritual jazz
Verlaine took up saxophone as a teenager under the spell of Coltrane and the jazz avant-garde, and it reshaped how he played guitar. Television's long instrumental passages borrow modal jazz's logic: solos built as patient, exploratory lines over a vamping, largely static harmony, more concerned with extended melodic development than with riffs.
listen: upstream & here
1961
My Favorite ThingsJohn Coltrane
1975
Little Johnny JewelTelevision
listen forSet Coltrane's modal reading of 'My Favorite Things' beside 'Little Johnny Jewel': both stretch out over a hypnotic, unchanging base while a lead voice spins long, searching improvised lines that build and recede.
The Byrds1960s · Folk rock / Psychedelic rock
Television's bright, treble-forward guitar tone and their raga-like, modal solo lines connect to the Byrds' mid-1960s experiments, when the group folded Coltrane-inspired drones and Eastern scales into ringing electric folk-rock. Critics routinely place Television in that lineage of resonant, jangling American guitar.
listen: upstream & here
1966
Eight Miles HighThe Byrds
1977
VenusTelevision
listen forCompare the Byrds' 'Eight Miles High' with 'Venus': both send bright, ringing guitar lines spiraling upward in long modal runs, the playing hypnotic and raga-like rather than bluesy.