Friday Music, 1880 or So

Let's try something new - this Friday's musical post is devoted to one song, Television's 1880 or So.



I have fallen hopelessly in love with this song. For a long time I couldn't find it anywhere - I saw it on YouTube somewhere a couple years ago, and after that looked for it on records, but none of the records it is on showed up for sale, so I had to make do with occasionally watching the video. But - the last time I did that, it occurred to me to try iTunes - lots of stuff has been turning up there - and sure enough, there it was - a live version, Live at the Academy NYC 12.4.92. A glorious rendition of the song. (And a heck of a record too.)

But I'm hung up on 1880 or So. It's classic Television - pretty melody (deriving I suppose like much of the best American music of the last 40 years from the pretty Velvet Underground songs), with tight interlocking guitars and a throbbing motorik beat, Verlaine drawling the words, the two guitarists taking solo turns. Lloyd goes first - tight and fast, dense, a bit showy, with that gorgeous twangy stratocaster tone - Verlaine haunting the solo, keeping time, and starting to slip out of its shadows as Lloyd winds down... But first there's another verse - and it's Verlaine's turn. He plays a different kind of solo - one of the secrets to their sound, right? the way Loyd's style varies from Verlaines, complimenting each other... So Verlaine's solo is slower, spacier, built around simpler patterns, bending notes and tones, playing closer to the beats - staccato notes, and a way of slicing up the rhythms, speeding up, slowing down - the oft noted debt to 60s jazz, Coltrane and Dolphy, their way of making the rhythms of their solos as important as the notes. Verlaine, particularly, reminds me of Monk - solos that aren't hurried or forces, notes placed with precision, both as notes and as beats. Wandering the internet I found this review (at this site, devoted to the band) - I refer you here to the"two guys who can play rhythm guitar" line - that's another of their powers - the ease with which they slip from lead to rhythm. They never get lost, even when they are shredding - and they play around the beats, with it, against it, cutting it up, stretching it out, making the guitar lines percussive things, no matter how lovely the melodic and harmonic ideas may be.

Songs like this (1880 or So, Marquee Moon, etc.) put me in mind of Richard Thompson - I don't know if they were trying to play like him, but they sound like him. The clean guitar tones, and especially the way they build solos, always burrowing into the rhythms, always sliding the tone around, always surprising. Verlaine maybe more than Lloyd - Lloyd is great, but less surprising, more conventional - Verlaine, though, is mind boggling - his control over the machine, getting such a carefully controlled range of sound out of it, his mastery of time, his ability to make every sound beautiful. When they are right, there is almost nothing better. Maybe, maybe, there are bands that got it right more often, but we can leave them for another day.

Finally - like any great live band - always sounding different... take this version, from about the same time as the Later version above - the structure is the same, but the actual breaks are different - Lloyd, I think, a little more aggressive (than on the TV show, if not the record) - then Verlaine playing a much more minimal solo, manipulating the tone almost as much as playing - milking that beautiful guitar sound for itself....



Or this, from 2005 - a long intro, lovely twangy Lloyd solo that really lets fly, then a very minimal, but lovely, finale by Verlaine...