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| Noo Yawk, 1975. Yikes? |
A recent flurry of page hits for the first in this series [here - Ed.] inspired me - too strong a word - to pen this sequel, late at night though it be. The wind howled through the shadowed stones, banging the moldering shutters, as if in warning. I lit a guttering tallow candle and made my way to my study, high in the ruined tower of this age-old house above the Miskatonic. Shiveringly, I cut a new quill, uncorked the inkwell, and arranged a blotter on the escritoire. As I bent to my task the rats chattered hideously in the rotten wainscotting, as if mocking my literary pretension. The cursed rats! Ever louder! Ever closer! Must ... finish ... must ... *bonk*.
Television's first album was a stunning achievement on release, and remains, along with epic presingle Johnny Jewel, some kind of apogee [is this the right word? - Ed.] of guitar rock. Yayy! It's a Perfect Ten, with no evident failings anywhere. There are those who defend Adventure, the second album (as I once did), but it's really a stance that requires clinical denial and results in a cognitively dissonant stress head. It's okay, I guess, and that's truthfully the best we can say about it. The third album? I bought it, along with a few other hopeless punters, and tried to convince myself it was worth listening to again. Just different, right? But also duller and weaker, even less interesting than Adventure. Meh. They should have stopped after the first, and the world would be a better place.
The Ramones got universally ecstatic reviews for the first album, because it's a genius-level zeitgeist statement, a work of art, a fantastically perfect idea manifested in a perfect way. Whatever you think of the music (it always sounded a bit thin to me) it established Th' Brudders as a global brand. How could they follow that? Who cares? They needn't have bothered, but the formula was good for more sales across a series of rinse-and-repeat albums. And t-shirts. You're going to tell me yebbut Rocket To Russia is pretty good, thinking that I'm interested in your opinion, a mistake. They should have quit after the first, or become a jam band.
Patti Smith, darling of NY Loft Society, shook things up in an entirely good way with Horses, but insisted on hanging around for a ballsaching series of "challenging" albums that are used to illustrate the concept of diminishing returns at music biz conferences. Yes, Easter had the hit Because I Stole This From Bruce Springsteen, but she could have locked the stable door after Horses bolted. To give her her due, she's nearly as good a poet as Rod McKuen, although not as accomplished as Jim Carroll, another alumnus of the New York School Of Scag, or Elliott Murphy. But Horses has kept its impact untouched by the passing decades - true bottled lightning.
This post funded in part by IANYTYWU "It's A New York Thing, You Wouldn't Understand", a non-profit organisation.