Adventure (1978)

There was a time when I was willing to argue that this second outing from Television was even better than the first, although I don't think so any more. But, if you have to stop and think about it even for a second, you know that makes this good. The edges and burrs are rubbed down to dreamy, floating textures that I'm convinced are closer to where Tom Verlaine intended his music to go – certainly it's closer to most of his solo work. Where Marquee Moon is a product of a band honing the songs and the jams in live venues, this is more fruit of the studio and songwriter Verlaine. The visceral immediacy of that classic first may be severely diminished, but what remains is gentle and lapping and eternal, like waves pounding rock into sand on a shore: a product of the times of gods, ethereal, immortal, chameleon, with the sweetest inflections. No time is ever the wrong time to hear this.

Marquee Moon (1977)

"See No Evil" Anyone familiar with England's Dreaming by Jon Savage understands the case for the punk-rock bands of mid-'70s New York City actually being the horse that pulls the cart of London's Sex Pistols/Clash punk-rock. Don't get the cart in front of the horse. The Ramones came out in 1976, the obvious black leather monolith for much of what followed in the hallowed year of 1977, and that was known as punk-rock from the first gleam. Not to mention the Dolls or Patti Smith. But the question no one has yet answered well remains: What's freakin' in common about the rest of them? You tell me: Blondie, the aforementioned Dolls and Patti Smith, Richard Hell, Talking Heads. Perhaps most mysterious of all, Television -- hippies who took on the guise of a '60s garage-rock band, even as they made a point of punting away any and all sign of the 1-2-3-4 attack, with or without three-minute pop sensibilities, favored by their many peers. This stuff is way, way closer to the Dead's "Dark Star" or Pharoah Sanders's Karma than "Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue." (Another question that has occurred to me: Does the band's name derive from Tom Verlaine's initials?)

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