CHICAGO — At a time when the legacy of the CBGB era is, due to the passing of Joey Ramone, very much on the minds of music fans, Television's performance at the Metro on Thursday — their first U.S. show since 1993 — was to be savored.
Alongside fellow '70s NYC scene vets Suicide, the tentatively reunited quartet — singer/guitarist Tom Verlaine, guitarist Richard Lloyd, bassist Fred Smith and drummer Billy Ficca — are one of the keynote acts of this year's Noise Pop Chicago festival.
An exacting sense of brittle tension and transcendent release has been the hallmark of Television, but Thursday's performance was too ragged to truly exploit the aforementioned quality the way a longtime fan might want. Still, that Verlaine and Lloyd, who have sustained a mutual animosity over the years, could put aside their quibbles rendered this comeback nonetheless a precious thing (Lloyd seemed almost isolated from the rest of the band, sequestered at stage left while his bandmates were weighted stage right).
Preston School of Industry, a new band featuring former Pavement guitarist Scott Kannberg, opened the show. In Pavement, Kannberg functioned in relation to Stephen Malkmus much as Lloyd did to Verlaine: essentially as second banana. But whereas Lloyd's first post-Television efforts, like the solo LP Alchemy, revealed a fully flowered muse, Kannberg's music amounted to ordinary indie rock.
But Kannberg's band's presence opening this bill, as well as the previous night's performance by Yo La Tengo, highlighted the fact that Television formulated the tenets of what would blossom as indie rock in the mid-'80s a good 10 years prior with their epochal performances at CBGB and with their tremendously influential Marquee Moon (1977).
That the band imploded in 1978 after two studio records and reunited briefly in 1992 for another only intensified the potency of its abstract, thoughtful guitar music. Perhaps only the Velvet Underground and R.E.M. exerted a similarly profound influence on underground guitar music of the last 20 years. And those two bands never made a case for the co-existence of virtuoso guitar solos with art-song panache. Television did.
The band took the stage around 8:10 p.m. and proceeded to dawdle in the face of exultant fans. Verlaine and Lloyd bent down, methodically tuned their guitars and adjusted their effects before joining Smith and Ficca in a modal jam that bled into "1880 or So," the meditative opening tune of 1992's Television. Verlaine, a gaunt, diffident character, retained his air of offhand hauteur by addressing the audience infrequently — an introduction of the band, a claim that "we all went out and bought new clothes for this show" and a snarky "yeah, right" reply to requests for the early TV chestnut "Fire Engine" were the sole comments from the ever-obtuse guitarist.
Listening to Television's sprightly shuffle "This Tune" or Marquee Moon's hallucinatory march "Venus," it became clear to anyone who had never seen Television before what the division of labor was, guitar-wise. Lloyd plays the signature riffs and trickier patterns, like the arpeggios on "Venus," while Verlaine sticks to rhythm and sporadic fractured solos.
Television's "Beauty Trip" and "Little Johnny Jewel," an early TV epic included only on the 1982 live record The Blow-Up, were next, both demonstrating a bluesy tendency uncommon to the band's oeuvre. And it was here that it became evident that Lloyd's more conventional style held the band together, since Verlaine's fluttering and trilling stylings cannot inspire group cohesion alone (Ficca, as ever, is more a busy drummer than a straight time keeper).
A slightly less-explosive-than-necessary "See No Evil," which opened Marquee Moon, was followed by Television's sinister "Call Mr. Lee" and Marquee Moon's playful, stop-time "Prove It." The show's highlight was a medley of Television's two sprawling centerpieces, the exploratory "The Rocket" and "Rhyme," a sumptuous come-on that suggests Barry White with an infusion of William Blake's aesthetics.
Finally, "Marquee Moon," Television's piece de resistance, commenced. A swelling edifice of a tune, it was executed faultlessly by the band until, during the crucial rave-up toward the song's conclusion, Lloyd broke a string. As he searched for and tuned his spare guitar, Verlaine, Smith and Ficca were left to carry on in a diminished capacity. After five minutes of Verlaine wringing cacophonic notes with occasional interjections from the rhythm section, Lloyd returned for a final crescendo. With the set proper over, Lloyd exited, looking quite sheepish.
Television returned for an encore of the stark "Glory," the evening's sole selection from 1978's Adventure, and a raucous rendition of the Count Five's garage-punk standard "Psychotic Reaction." As Television left the stage, a self-described indie-rock fan was heard to comment that his roommate, a jam-band partisan, had found Marquee Moon the only record the two could both endorse.
