By Buzz Drainpipe, reporting from the electric ether
Let’s get this out of the way up front: Television didn’t wear safety pins, didn’t spit at the crowd, and didn’t sing about glue. They played long, spiraling guitar solos. They wrote lyrics like beat poets holed up in a Bowery loft with a stack of Rimbaud and a dying radio. They jammed—with intention.
But make no mistake: Television is the most punk band to ever come out of CBGBs.
Punk as Reactionary vs. Punk as Revolutionary
Most of the CBGB canon—your Dead Boys, your Ramones, your Heartbreakers—operated like demolition crews. Beautiful, necessary demolition crews. They blew it up to make room for the next thing.
Television, though? They built the blueprint for what could rise from the ashes.
Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd weren’t smashing guitars—they were disassembling them note by note, pulling out the wires, soldering strange frequencies, and feeding it back through poetic circuitry. "Marquee Moon" wasn’t just a song—it was a map. A strange, starlit one. Nine minutes long and not a wasted bar.
The Aesthetic of Restraint
At a club where sweat and nihilism hung in the air like a gas leak, Television was unafraid to be delicate. Their look was severe, simple, no frills. But their music was cerebral, stretched tight like wire. Punk, in the hands of Verlaine, was not volume—it was tension. Silence had as much weight as distortion. Every note meant something. You could trace the outline of the band's architecture like bones under skin.
They weren’t afraid of being boring. That’s the most radical thing in a scene obsessed with adrenaline.
Anti-Anti-Establishment
Here’s the secret: Television didn’t want to destroy the establishment. They wanted to transcend it. Sid Vicious couldn’t play his instrument—Verlaine was his instrument. They weren’t flipping the bird at the industry, they were ignoring it entirely, building their own shadow world in the margins of a crumbling New York.
They played for themselves first—and that might be the most punk ethos of all.
The Ultimate Middle Finger: Not Giving You What You Want
Television could’ve ridden the CBGB wave to fame. But they didn’t want to be The Clash, or Patti Smith, or Blondie. They didn’t want to be anything except Television. So they dissolved, fell apart, became mythic, disappeared before they could be pigeonholed.
They didn’t burn out or fade away. They vanished. Left behind one of the most perfect albums ever pressed in vinyl and a whisper in the walls of the Bowery.
That’s punk as hell.
Buzz Drainpipe
Filing this one from the shadows of the speaker stack, where the feedback still lingers and the starlight never goes out.
