Hello! Thank you for signing up to, or stumbling on, this no-news-newsletter written by me, Ashley Clark. If you do choose to subscribe—and it’s free—you’ll receive bulletins about whatever’s on my mind: usually some combination of art/film/music/literature/football. If that sounds good, hit the button!
This week’s quick rec is an absolutely storming track that I first heard on the “Black Rio 2 - Original Samba Soul 1968-1981” compilation CD I once owned: “Super Market” (1974) by one Pete Dunaway. I won’t say much about it—all you need to do is listen, and if you’re not a fully paid-up fan by the forty second mark, when Dunaway’s vocals kick in following an outrageously supple, sinewy string-laden funk intro, then frankly you don’t deserve to experience the euphoric finale. (Sorry, that sounds a bit hostile, but its’s true!)
I must have listened to this song a thousand times, and I’m still not 100% clear on what it’s all about. There’s definitely a reference to a violent tragedy in there (“And I’m talking ‘bout a man / Standing by my side / Whoa-ah-ho-whoo / Who died!”), but I’m not sure where a supermarket comes into it, or why Dunaway starts chanting the word ominously toward the end of the song. Anyway, it sounds cool, and whatever the impassioned singer is trying to convey, it’s coming from his heart.
You may also be asking yourself, “Hang on a minute, ‘Pete Dunaway’ doesn’t sound very Brazilian, does it?”, and you’d be right. Dunaway was a sometime stage name assumed by the São Paulo-born singer, songwriter, producer and arranger Otávio Augusto Fernandes Cardoso, who also happened to be a prolific composer for Brazilian telenovela themes, and later forged a successful career in advertising. Maybe Cardoso was a big Faye Dunaway fan, and pilfered his moniker from the star of Bonnie and Clyde and Chinatown? I will literally never know. Cardoso/Dunaway, seemingly by choice, didn’t have much of a singing career—but I’m extremely glad he got this total banger out of his system.
I’m wary of this letter transforming into an illustrated register of great, recently deceased musicians. But as long as great musicians continue to die, that’s going to be a risk. And so it continues with the sad passing, at 73, of Tom Verlaine, the co-founder, singer, guitarist and chief lyricist of the band Television, whose music meant a great deal to me.
I first got into Television in the early 2000s, when large swathes of Britain came down with a (still justified, I think) high fever for The Strokes, myself included. Television were the most frequently cited antecedent for The Strokes in the music press, not just on an aesthetics level—though squint at that photo above and you could be looking at Julian and the boys—but sonically, too: those fabled “angular” guitars, the tightly interlocking rhythm section, the deadpan Downtown NYC cool of the lyrics and vocal delivery.
It was clear from the first listen of Television’s debut LP “Marquee Moon” (1977), however, that they were a different proposition from The Strokes beyond the more surface level comparisons—and that’s not to criticize The Strokes, because I still think “Is This It” is a thrilling, essentially flawless debut LP. Where “Is This It” had a scuttling, ferrety energy and a heart gleefully languishing in the gutter, “Marquee Moon” had its head in the stars, a sonic affinity with the unpredictability of jazz, and a poet’s soul. (Verlaine, born Thomas Miller, took his name from the Decadent French poet Paul Verlaine.)
There’s an old quote-cum-cliché of disputed origin which contends that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”, and it does have the ring of truth when trying to capture what makes “Marquee Moon” so special. It feels hackneyed to label music as “cinematic”, but I don’t know how else to describe the moment, eight minutes and forty-two seconds into the monolithic title track, when the escalating tension of the song’s long instrumental mid-section reaches breaking point, and suddenly… the sky turns from black to light blue, and Verlaine and Richard Lloyd’s chiming guitars sound, somehow, like a flock of birds circling joyfully over the East River. You can see it. It’s a truly incredible passage of music, as heart-stoppingly dramatic as anything you could ever watch on a screen.
Filled with humor, warmth, intelligence and invention, “Marquee Moon” features countless indelible musical and lyrical highlights. This off-hand stunner from the gorgeous, chiming “Venus”, featuring a cameo from our narrator’s hitherto un-introduced pal “Richie”, possibly a reference to Verlaine’s friend and former Television bandmate Richard Hell:
Suddenly my eyes went so soft and shaky
I knew there was pain but pain is not aching
Then Richie, Richie said
“Hey man, let's dress up like cops, think of what we could do!”
Something, something… said “you better not”
Verlaine’s unforgettable elocution on the snarling, spiraling rocker “Friction”:
I start to spin the tale
You complain of my dic! ….tionYou give me friction!
The entirety of Verlaine’s epigrammatic epic “Guiding Light”, a radiant, courtly and fragile slow jam that could be about many things, but which I’ve decided is about an opulent King finding love at the exact time he discovers that he is facing death. (It’s probably not about this at all, but such is the joy and wonder of Verlaine’s ambiguous, evocative lyrical poetry...)
(A nerdy aside: my very first encounter with Television came in the pages of now-defunct British rock and pop magazine Q, probably some time in the late 1990s. Q had a now quaint-seeming feature, way back in the pre-Google days, when frustrated readers would send in lyrics and ask the editors to help them identify the track. One reader recalled the couplet “It’s too ‘too too’ / To put a finger on”. The answer, of course, was “Marquee Moon’s” seventh track, the jaunty neo-noir gumshoe mystery “Prove It”. It would be years before I’d hear the song.)
In hindsight, I’ve come to realize that “Marquee Moon”, more than any other album, represented for me an imaginary New York. Its version of the city, this off-kilter, open-hearted, curious and mythical place, where Broadway “looked so medieval” and “seemed to flap like little pages”, took root in my mind long before I visited for the first time in 2006. Sometimes, when I’m strolling around the Lower East Side, down the Bowery, or around Soho, with my headphones in, it still feels that way now, in ways I can’t adequately explain with verbs and adjectives. Billy Joel it ain’t—nor Nas—but it’s a New York state of mind.
I’ll keep it brief on Television’s 1978 follow-up LP “Adventure”, which is also a terrific record. It has a special place in my heart for a personal reason: I was gifted this original, candy apple red vinyl copy by a schoolfriend’s Dad, who knew that I was getting big into music, and who was clearing out his overflowing record collection. Here it is today!
Another memory: one night I fell asleep with the “Adventure” CD playing, and it got stuck on a skipping loop of a few seconds from the eerie final moments of the last track “The Dream’s Dream”. I kept waking up, but never for long enough to get up and stop the CD, so those haunting bars weaved their way into an attenuated, circular dream about nothing more than shadows, stairways and corridors. A dreamer dreaming to the dream’s dream. A bit on the nose, but unforgettable nonetheless. (Unforgettable, too, is this incredible live version of the song recorded in San Francisco in 1978—listen to the way Fred Smith’s bass punches through!)
I managed to see Television live once, with my Mum in 2005, when the “Marquee Moon”-era line-up played a gig at the South Bank Centre’s Queen Elizabeth Hall as part of the Meltdown festival curated by Verlaine’s close friend Patti Smith. It was a special evening, and culminated with Smith joining Television onstage to read some of her poetry over an increasingly stormy instrumental backing. (Here, by the way, is a beautiful tribute from Smith to Verlaine in the New Yorker; and I also recommend the Instagram account of the NYC photographer David Godlis—he’s been posting some incredible pictures of Verlaine and the band in the past week.)
“Marquee Moon” and “Adventure”, so rich and so full of life, have provided me with such sustenance over the past couple of decades that I’ve never really advanced beyond them into a full appreciation of Television’s third and final studio LP—a self-titled effort from 1992—or Verlaine’s solo discography. I am sad that it’s the gutting news of Verlaine’s death that has nudged me to embark on this new stage of the journey, but I’m looking forward to discovering more. Cheers Tom.
One last little thing before I go: I just finished reading Stay True, the superb new memoir by Hua Hsu, one of my favorite culture writers. I can’t recommend it highly enough. An account of Hsu’s college years—and of one particularly special and significant friendship he experienced—Stay True is a precise and poignant read. It’s a self-reflection that’s equal parts critical and generous, and it unfolds lucidly, without a wasted word. It’s also got a really, really great cover:
Until next week!
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