“What the f*ck is ham powder?”, Richard Lloyd—one of the founding members of proto-punk band Television—asks me over breakfast. We’re at a place called Big Bad Breakfast, a southern breakfast chain located in the Northshore neighborhood of downtown Chattanooga. His choice.
He was 20 minutes late to our interview, and when he walked in, Elvis’ “Jailhouse Rock” was playing over the restaurant’s speakers. Lloyd apologizes. He’s flying out the next day for a month-long Northeast run with the Richard Lloyd Group, his touring band, and has a lot to do before he leaves.
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He’s wearing a black leather jacket, a button-down orange Hawaiian-patterned shirt, and his signature black fedora. He looks out of place here in Chattanooga, a mid-sized southern river city town in the southeast corner of Tennessee, far away from his longtime home of New York City. Maybe it’s because I know his place in New York’s legendary punk scene, and to see him here, living in my hometown, is still shocking to me. Or maybe it’s just his New York accent.
We make small talk until the waitress comes and takes our order. Lloyd inquires about the ham powder—which we find out is dehydrated cooked ham in powder form used for seasoning—and commits to the “Jack Benny”: two poached eggs on top of a fried hash cake, sliced ham, wilted spinach, hollandaise, and, yes, ham powder. I get something called “Yard Work,” a scrambled egg concoction with veggies, avocado, and Swiss cheese, and an Earl Grey tea with honey to drink.
Lloyd moved to Chattanooga seven years ago, if he remembers correctly. I’ve met him a few times while working for Songbirds, a Chattanooga-based guitar museum, concert venue, and music education foundation, where he performed a few times and had on display his custom 1961 Fender Stratocaster—the same gold-swirled, blue-green matte-colored guitar he played 50 years ago with Television at the then-newly opened New York City music club, CBGB.
Before gentrification claimed it, CBGB—as if I need to tell you—was the birthplace of the New York City punk and New Wave movement, defining the careers of bands like the Patti Smith Group, the Dictators, the Heartbreakers, Blondie, Talking Heads, and most famously, the Ramones.
The origin story of CBGB and how Hilly Kristal originally intended for his live music club to play country, bluegrass, and blues is by now, well-tread territory. His initial vision, of course, didn’t last long. But what may not be so well known, at least to those who only know CBGB as a clothing brand, is Television’s role in it all.
Lloyd was born in Pittsburgh but moved to Greenwich Village with his parents at age six. With aspirations to become a musician, he left New York and arrived in Los Angeles in 1971. Lloyd heard about how the New York Dolls had taken up residency at the Mercer Arts Center, and that some sort of emerging underground music scene was happening.
“I was in L.A. for two years and I heard that there was a scene [flourishing],” Lloyd tells me. “So I made arrangements with a friend to drive from L.A. to New York. And when we were in New Orleans…I heard that the Mercer Arts Center had fallen…collapsed. When I got to New York, there was no place, there was no scene…”
The Mercer Arts Center—located on the first two floors of the dilapidated, 101-year-old building that formerly housed one of the largest and most lavish hotels in the world, the Grand Central Hotel—opened on December 20, 1971. The vision was a facility that offered performance spaces for a variety of acts. It housed six theaters, an art-house cinema, two acting workshops, a rock club, a jazz lounge and bar, a restaurant, two boutiques, and an experimental film and performance venue called the Kitchen.
While you could see plays like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Tubstrip, and The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds (my favorite title), you could also see bands like the aforementioned New York Dolls, Modern Lovers, Wayne County, and Suicide. The arts complex became the place where glam rock, performance and video art, and underground theater collided into this wonderful world of experimental creativity.
But then on Friday, August 3, 1973, the building collapsed due, in part, to faulty renovations. By the time Lloyd arrived back in New York, he was right. There was no place to play.
To understand how Television and CBGB became the gateway to New York City’s punk movement, let’s use the collapse of the Mercer Arts Center as the bridge that ties the 1960s folk music and avant-garde arts scene to the 1970s punk and New Wave movement we all know it as today.
Before the Collapse of the Mercer Arts Center
Part 1: The Danny Fields Connection
“I started listening to the radio when I was 12, and Lou Reed wasn’t the first person who said, ‘My life was saved by rock and roll,’” writer, poet, and performance artist Penny Arcade tells me over the phone. “We all said that because we were all under the covers listening to FM radio, and our news dispatches came in the form of rock ‘n’ roll. The messages that music was carrying were not only messages of social change but were messages of philosophy and even decadence. It was the new romanticism that harkened back to the 1860s.”
Arcade arrived in the East Village in 1967. At 17, she joined John Vaccaro’s Play-House of the Ridiculous—an influential queer political performance theater company—as a performance artist. This kind of experimental theater offered social commentary by drag queens parodying pop culture. By the time she was 19, she was one of Andy Warhol’s Factory Superstars and was featured in his film, Women in Revolt.
“It was a very heady and tumultuous revolutionary time…” she says. “Those two years were a sea change in American alternative culture, And obviously it was fueled by rock ‘n’ roll.”
Arcade notes that she could see the change that was happening in New York City. While the folk scene happening in Greenwich Village at places like the Gaslight and the Bitter End in the ‘60s provided a more mellow kind of protest to the atrocities happening in the world, New York City was being invaded by artists with a louder, much more dramatic way of protesting. “I think that the big change that happened occurred after Danny Fields signed the MC5 and then came back with Iggy Pop and the Stooges.”
Fields played many roles in New York’s emerging punk scene: journalist, publicist, manager, among others. Frequenting the original iteration of Max’s Kansas City in the ‘60s, he became a temporary fixture in Warhol’s social circle during his brief time managing the Velvet Underground, eventually writing about it and penning the liner notes to the Velvet’s Live at Max’s Kansas City, recorded in 1970 and released in ‘72, following the band’s breakup. As a publicist for Elektra Records, Fields visited Detroit and Ann Arbor, Michigan in September 1968, recommending that the label sign the MC5 and the Stooges. Both bands played in New York City multiple times in the late ‘60s, sowing the seeds for a new kind of music scene.
“I think that it was that influence because…when you saw him [Iggy] perform, it wasn’t like a normal rock ‘n’ roll band. There was something else happening there that was more like the kind of performance art we were doing,” says Arcade. “And I think that kind of opened the door, along with Alice Cooper, who was performing at Max’s.”
During a phone conversation, Ernie Brooks of the Modern Lovers tells me about Fields, “He was one of those guys who just had an amazing sense of what was new and good.”
According to Brooks, he was attending Harvard in 1971 and living in an apartment with fellow aspiring musician Jerry Harrison (who would go on to join the Talking Heads in 1977) when Fields introduced them both to Johnathan Richman.
Richman had formed Modern Lovers in 1970 with childhood friend John Felice (guitar), David Robinson (drums), and Rolfe Anderson (bass), but Felice and Anderson soon left the band. Brooks joined on bass and Harrison on keyboards, with Felice leaving and rejoining several times later. With Richman as lyricist and singer, the Modern Lovers blended early garage rock with their love of the Velvet Underground—simple yet vulnerable.
“There was an element of the sound of the Velvet Underground,” says Brooks. “But of course, some people described them as being dark and us being light…We all loved the Velvets and their sound but in some ways, certainly lyrically, we’re on opposite ends of some sort of spectrum.”
The Modern Lovers’ popularity in Boston rose after Fields encouraged Lillian Roxon of the Daily News to hear them. Her glowing review led to the band’s studio demo at Warner Brothers. Word spread about the recording and the Modern Lovers soon invaded New York City, becoming part of the musical sea changes happening there.
“I think the Modern Lovers were important in the sense that we showed, as did the New York Dolls with whom we coexisted, that you didn’t have to be virtuosos by any means on your instruments to get something across,” Brooks says. “We still were a rock band…but the lyrics were clear and powerful in a message that was absolutely not one that was normally being delivered by rock bands then…or maybe ever. I think it was running counter to something. And that was important to the fact that we got noticed.”
The Modern Lovers stood apart from other bands emerging at the time, more art rock, a precursor to New Wave and Talking Heads. Instead of the drug-and-alcohol-riddled antics of the long-haired, face-painted New York Dolls, with their silk scarves and brightly-colored androgyny, the Lovers were much more conservative in their fashion and their lifestyle—dressed in jeans or khakis, T-shirts or oxfords, sometimes with neckties, singing about love and the past. The Modern Lovers were the Leave it to Beaver version of punk rock, but much more emotionally vulnerable, compared to the other young bands competing to see just how far they could take their theatrics. They eschewed typical rock attitudes—the posing, the frequent misogyny, the drug use, Brooks tells me. “Somehow that band was seminal for groups as wildly different as the Talking Heads and Sex Pistols.”
Brooks explains that, just as in Boston, poetry readings—like the ones performed at St. Mark’s Church as part of the Poetry Project in New York’s Lower East Side—helped influence what would eventually become punk music. “Painting, sculpture, experimental theater, and music—from classical to metal—they all mixed downtown as the ’60s moved into the ’70s and CBGB became a focal point.”
Patti Smith was another performer inspired by the arts, especially by poets Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Paul Bowles.
Guitarist/music journalist Lenny Kaye first performed with Smith at St. Mark’s Church on February 10, 1971. Smith was doing spoken word and Kaye joined her. “I came on for a little bit of guitar rhythm,” Kaye tells me over the phone. “But it wasn’t supposed to be a band—it was more like…kind of art happening because Patti wanted to shake up her poetry reading and give it a little extra zip.”
They didn’t play together again until November 1973, eventually forming a full band, the Patti Smith Group.
“One of the things about the Patti Smith Group is…we didn’t want to be a punk band or a pop band or anything,” Kaye says. “We wanted to have it all. We wanted a sense of freedom beyond definition.”
Part 2: Glammin’ It Up
Before the New York Dolls became the darlings of the Mercer Arts Center, singer David Johansen, guitarists Johnny Thunders and Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur “Killer” Kane, and drummer Billy Murcia played their first show on Christmas Eve, 1971 at a homeless shelter at the Endicott Hotel.
“The Dolls ruled the roost in New York City,” Andy Shernoff, co-founder of the Dictators, another influential New York proto-punk band, tells me during a phone interview. “Every band was trying to imitate the Dolls. But no band looked as good as the Dolls, or was as hip as the Dolls, or had as good songs as the Dolls, or even played as well as the Dolls. They were exciting and charismatic. There were a lot of glam bands in England making great records—the Sweet, Roxy Music, Slade, Suzy Quatro. The New York Dolls brought that excitement to the local New York scene and inspired so many people to start bands, myself included. I know they inspired the Ramones.”
“There was a glam scene in New York,” Shernoff tells me. “It was the only rock and roll scene in New York at the time. We had a little more of an MC5/Stooges approach. There was a club in Queens called Carpentry, and it was sort of home to the glam rock dictators. Then there was the Mercer Arts Center—that was sort of the New York Dolls’ home base.”
Arcade uses the old photography adage that an art form doesn’t become an art form until everybody can do it. “When people attempt something, as we did with […] underground theater, we didn’t have a template for theater, but we did theater anyway, and we invented our own form of theater. And I think that’s what happened with rock ‘n’ roll. People invented their own template for rock ‘n roll, whether it would be Patti Smith or the New York Dolls. There were so many bands that came out of that period, most notably, Wayne County & the Electric Chairs, Queen Elizabeth, Ruby and the Rednecks, the Stilettos. Everybody just got the idea, ‘Oh, we could do this too.’”
To note the changing music scene, Kaye—together with Elektra Records co-founder Jac Holzman—produced Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the First Psychedelic Era, a compilation album of American psychedelic and garage rock singles from the mid-to-late 1960s. “When I did the Nuggets album in 1972, there was a sense that a time had passed and that certain aspects of what that music was was necessary for the music to move forward. Things had gotten so progressive and top-heavy that there was no entry level for musicians to take things to the next generational evolution.”
Like the Modern Lovers, the flamboyancy of glam rock didn’t fit the fashion aesthetic the Dictators had in mind, and so, Shernoff tells me, the venues they could play were limited. “We didn’t wear satin or platform shoes. It didn’t look right on us, so we wore what we wore off stage: sneakers, jeans, leather jackets. We released our first album in 1975, and while we were recording it in August of 1974, the Ramones were doing their first show at CBGB. We’ve been called the missing link. We helped pave the way, but the Ramones took the gold medal.”
Less than a year before it collapsed, the New York Dolls headlined a New Year’s Eve show in 1972, supported by Wayne County, Suicide, Ruby and the Rednecks, and the Modern Lovers.
Brooks remembers that show well. The night started off stressful because the band’s van broke down in Hartford, Connecticut, forcing Brooks to hitchhike to his parents’ house in New Canaan 50 miles away to borrow their station wagon, and then drive back to stuff as much of their equipment in it as he could. They ended up borrowing amplifiers from the Dolls, he says, which were bigger and louder than theirs.
“We went on really late, and it was a totally wild scene because of all the spandex, platform heels, and all the trappings of the glam and pre-punk meld of Dolls’ fans.”
In attendance that night, Brooks tells me, was Richard Hell, who had just formed the Neon Boys, a precursor to Television—and would soon pioneer the ripped T-shirt and safety pin look.
“They were waiting for the Dolls and they knew what the Dolls were, but they didn’t know who we were. And they saw us come on stage and the way Jonathan opened the show, using the guitar as punctuation, he struck a chord, declaiming, ‘We’re the Modern Lovers from Boston, Massachusetts, and we don’t want a girl just to ball—we want someone we care about, or we want nothing at all.’ They were really scratching their heads. And then they were sort of saying, ‘Is this really cool? What is this?’ It was sort of the perfect bemused, puzzled reaction.”
The Collapse of the Mercer Arts Center
Part 1: There’s No Place To Play
The Mercer Arts Center was one of the only places to play for New York City’s first wave of punk and New Wave bands to play original music. Then it collapsed, leaving a huge void in the music scene.
“When we started playing, there was no place to play in New York because nobody wanted to hear original music,” says Shernoff. “Now, if you were a cover band, you had lots of gigs like Twisted Sister; they made tons of money playing Long Island, New Jersey, and upstate New York.
It’s hard to imagine that, in a place as big as New York City, the birthplace of punk music, there were no clubs for rock bands to play original songs. But everyone I interviewed told me the same thing, starting with Lloyd during our breakfast: that after the collapse of the Mercer Arts Center, there was no more music scene in the city.
The original Max’s Kansas City—opened by Mickey Ruskin in 1965 and a hotspot for visual artists, writers, and celebrities such as Robert Rauschenberg, William S. Burroughs, and Andy Warhol—had lost its luster and would close by the end of 1974. Club 82, a basem*nt bar known for its lavish drag shows among the LGBTQ community, was also in decline.
“The New York Dolls had started something in 1972 at the Mercer Arts Center, but by ‘73, all the places that you could possibly play as a rock band were closed,” Kaye tells me. “I remember we played the Blue Hawaii room in the Hotel Roosevelt. There was no sense of gathering […], but by the beginning of 1974 there seemed to be a little coterie of excitement down on the Bowery.”
Part 2: Other Music for Uplifting Gourmandizers
I’m going to steal this quote from James Nevius, who borrowed it from Teddy Roosevelt for this article because it’s just too damned good not to include when describing the Bowery in New York’s Lower East Side, where Hilly Kristal opened CBGB.
The Bowery is one of the great highways of humanity, a highway of seething life, of varied interest, of fun, of work, of sordid and terrible tragedy; and it is haunted by demons as evil as any that stalk through the pages of the “Inferno.”
“When you think of New York now, if you think of the Bowery where it meets Bleecker Street, there’s a lot of action there,” Kaye says. “But at that time, it had a real remoteness to it. It seemed like it was almost in another city. You had the mass of New York City above you uptown, but there was not a lot of action.”
Originally called Hilly’s on the Bowery, CBGB was located at 315 Bowery and opened its doors in December 1973. “It was at the right location down in the Bowery, where it was all alcoholics and homeless and drug addicts and prostitutes,” Shernoff describes. “So no record company guy wanted to go down to the Bowery, which is now packed full of restaurants and things. At the time, there was nothing, literally, nothing on the Bowery that anybody wanted to go to.”
By this time, Lloyd was living in New York and had befriended Terry Ork, the manager of a bookstore called Cinemabilia. Ork introduced him to Tom Verlaine, Billy Ficca, and Richard Hell, and the band Television was born, with Ork as manager.
Lloyd knew they needed a place to play. During one of the band’s rehearsals, Verlaine mentioned seeing a new place in the Bowery, the “Skid Row” of New York City.
“One day Tom came to rehearsal and said, ‘I walked down to the Bowery and I saw this place. The guy was putting the sign up. You want to go up with me and talk to him about live music?’” Lloyd tells me as our food arrives. “So he and I went up, and Hilly was outside fixing the awning. He came down from the stepladder and showed us inside the place and said he was going to have music.” Lloyd mentioned to Kristal that they played “a little rock.” Kristal was adamant about not having any rock bands play at his club. “We’re not loud,” Lloyd remembers telling him. “We’re different, unusual, like nothing you’ve ever heard before.” Kristal was skeptical. The next day, Lloyd and Ork talked him into letting them play on a Sunday, with Ork claiming that he would provide more bar tabs than his best day because he was going to invite all alcoholics to the shows. “That’s what he said. I think that’s what he did too.”
Television’s first show at CBGB was on March 31, 1974.
“We put it together because he was going to have it at the front of the club, facing back, like a drive-in movie. And we said, “You know, you’ll get noise complaints.’ He says, ‘I’m not going to have anything loud…” Kristal compromised and put the stage in the middle of the bar.
Soon, Television began playing at CBGB every Sunday, then two nights a week, and eventually four nights a week. Like the Beatles’ Hamburg days, with every set, Television developed its sound into something unlike anything else around: a dual-guitar-driven soundscape of free-spirited, jazz-influenced harmonics fueled by the metaphorical onstage rivalry between Verlaine and Lloyd.
Television played CBGB so often they unofficially became the house band, which brought a certain authority to its role. Because Kristal had no clue about rock music, it was Television that insisted Ork be in charge of booking, with Lloyd and the other members signing off on which up-and-coming groups would play there.
Television, along with CBGB itself, began to gain a loyal following, opening the door for other groups to perform there that didn’t fit with Kristal’s original vision, like the Dictators, the Heartbreakers (led by Johnny Thunders and Richard Hell, who had just quit their respective bands, the New York Dolls and Television), and Talking Heads.
“It was surprising to see how many bands appeared out of nowhere,” Lloyd tells me between bites. “And all of a sudden they sprouted like mushrooms. So it was very exciting.”
The Patti Smith Group was one of the first groups to play sets with Television in those early days. “I remember on Easter 1974, Patti and I went down and saw Television at CBGB,” Kaye says. That was the first time we walked in there. And, that’s where we met Tom [Verlaine] and realized that here was a place that all these bands without a home could find their home.”
The Patti Smith Group debuted at CBGB in early1974.
Lloyd explains to me the differences he noted while playing at CBGB during the band’s heyday: “It used to be that the audience was separated from the performer in a very strong and permanent way. But that’s not how it was anymore.”
I ask him to clarify.
“We used to have dead stops in the middle of a show, you know, stop for just a second. And the people in the audience weren’t breathing; there was that kind of attention. You could hear a pin drop.”
That connection to the audience Lloyd describes came from the mutual respect of the other musicians in the crowd, along with photographers and journalists who were documenting and reporting this new emerging music scene.
“Bands would get up there without much fanfare and play, mostly to the members of other bands,” Kaye tells me. “But it was a place to play. It gave you a stage where you could experiment; you could see who you might want to become. You could make your mistakes there. It was a very forgiving audience because everybody else was in another band. And it was as unpretentious as can be. It was so local that you could never dream that what would happen there would travel the world.”
Part 3: The Rise of “Punk”
One of the journalists who became a regular at CBGB was Legs McNeil, the co-founder—along with cartoonist John Holmstrom and publisher Ged Dunn—of Punk magazine. Inspired by their love of comic books and the music of the Stooges, the Dictators, and the New York Dolls, the magazine was (according to Legs) the first publication to document the popularity of the CBGB scene.
McNeil moved to New York City in 1974, immediately after finding out he wasn’t graduating from high school. “It was great. It was nothing. Everything was broken down and it was just magnificent,” he tells me during our phone conversation. “It was like Berlin after World War II. I think there were burned-out houses on every block because I guess the landlords had them torched to collect insurance money. The Bronx was burning every night. And the Lower East Side was burning. So the heroin dealers would move into the burned-out houses and use them to distribute their dope.”
Shernoff says this all contributed to the emerging New York City punk scene. “New York was broke. It was falling apart. That’s why the rents were cheap,” he says. “That’s why the musicians came here. That’s why people were able to form bands and dedicate their lives to their creative artistic endeavors. New York was a wasteland.”
Mary Harron, who would go on to direct I Shot Andy Warhol and American Psycho, was hired as a writer for the first issue of Punk, which was published on January 1, 1976, featuring a caricature of Lou Reed on the cover, drawn by Holmstrom. While the zine helped popularize the word “punk” to describe New York’s music scene during the ‘70s, it was also progressive in hiring female writers and photographers during a time when journalism was very much a male-dominated industry.
“It was like, why wouldn’t we, you know?” McNeil tells me. “And plus, there were a lot of women on the scene. We were hanging out with them. It wasn’t like…forethought. Debbie [Harry] used to give us rides home in her car. I mean, they were our pals.”
By the mid-’70s, New York became a punk music destination city for musicians and fans because they read about it in magazines like Cream and Crawdaddy and 16 Magazine, Arcade says. “There was a promotion of people who were doing music in New York that was quite nascent, whether it was Wayne County or the New York Dolls or Patti or whoever they were promoting. People were promoting their friends, and they were reporting on something that was starting to happen, but it was actually created, you know, through almost a mythology of this rock writing.”
Shernoff says that in those days, musicians and journalists interacting was common, mainly because they all hung out at CBGB: “A positive record review could affect sales.”
McNeil remembers that the first night he went to CBGB, he saw the Ramones. “It was close to Thanksgiving, 1975. They were just fantastic. They were everything a band should have been:short songs, no drum solos, no guitar solos. […] We made a tape of them on a cassette recorder, and we used to play it every morning because we couldn’t afford coffee. It was a great way to wake up.”
McNeil went back the next night and saw Talking Heads. He also remembers seeing Blondie. “Blondie sucked in the beginning, but because they opened for the Ramones for two years, you saw them get better and better, and then when they [CBGB] got a new sound system, you could actually hear Debbie’s voice.”
For anyone who played or hung out at CBGB during the ‘70s, they knew three things: watch where you step, don’t eat the food, and use the bathrooms at your own risk. “Hilly had a dog, a Saluki, who used to sh*t on the stage,” Lloyd tells me.
“Stiv Bators of the Dead Boys used to jerk off in the chili,” says McNeil.
Over the next year, Max’s Kansas City reopened as Max’s II; Club 82 briefly bounced back as a place for glam and punk bands to play; and Hurrah was the first large dance club to feature punk and New Wave bands, as well as industrial music. Television and CBGB helped pave the way for all of them.
“We played Club 82, which was in a basem*nt around the corner—it was fabulous,” Lloyd says. “That’s where David Bowie, John Lennon, and a whole slew of people came to see us. The Bridge and Tunnel crowd heard about it—that means anybody not from Manhattan.”
According to Lloyd, bands began getting signed to record deals in late ‘75. Television did several demos for different record companies, eventually signing with Elektra. “Everybody else got signed first for very low money. Those first Ramones, Talking Heads, and Blondie records were made with $6,000. We weren’t willing to do that…but Elektra stood by us pretty well.”
Television focused on building a large fanbase to draw the attention of record companies and, potentially, higher financial offers. “In my theory, record companies don’t sign talent,” he says. “They invest in your business, which you better already have. They can then go in underneath and take your business and build it from there. And in certain cases, it works out well.”
Marquee Moon, the band’s debut masterpiece, was released on February 8, 1977, to critical acclaim.
Lloyd recalls asking Elektra to give the band money to make T-shirts because they felt like it would be good advertising. The company refused. “We were ahead of the game that they wouldn’t let us play.” The record sold fewer than 80,000 copies.
Despite this, Television’s forward-thinking when it came to booking bands, combined with Kristal’s open-mindedness to create a space for artists on the fringe to congregate, had started a movement.
“I think there was a realization that things were changing,” says Kaye. “The word ‘punk’ was in the air, even though at that point, it was not a specific style, but a kind of sensibility of being on the outside of the music industry.”
Part 4: Punk Never Dies
“No one ever thought this was going to go anywhere,” says McNeil. “When you call something ‘punk,’ the mainstream media finds it very easy to put down, you know?”
Throughout the end of the 1970s, CBGB became a well-established breeding ground for soon-to-be legendary artists such as the Police, the B-52’s, Elvis Costello, and Joan Jett & the Blackhearts. Throughout the ‘80s, CBGB gained a reputation as a place exclusively for hardcore punk, with bands such as Dead Kennedys, Misfits, Bad Brains, and an early iteration of the Beastie Boys as a quartet. By the 2000s, CBGB had gained icon status as the birthplace of punk. Yet that status wasn’t enough to save it from rising rent costs. Despite efforts to save the club, CBGB closed its doors forever on Halloween night, 2006. Less than a year later, Kristal died due to complications from lung cancer.
Shernoff looks back on that era with a huge smile on his face. “Every weekend a future legendary band played CBGB, and each one had a singular individual sound. It was a fantastic period of musical creativity.”
“One of the things I think is really important was Hilly Kristal’s sense of laissez-faire and originality,” says Kaye. “The one thing he didn’t want was a bunch of cover bands. His only insistence was that they play original music. And certainly, that set the mark for what CBGB would offer to the world. And Hilly, Lord love him, didn’t try to mastermind it. But in the end, you know, he allowed it to happen. And that, to me, is the mark of a great club owner.”
As Lloyd and I finish our breakfast, he laments about the lack of a true music scene here in Chattanooga, like the one he helped create in New York. “There’s no scene down here, sadly. There’s absolutely no scene. Completely bereft of that kind of possibility.”
I wonder if he misses the ways things used to be, back when he was playing on that tiny wooden stage he helped build, in a club that’s been gone almost 10 years now, in a neighborhood that’s no longer recognizable.
Lloyd, however, is not a man to dwell in the past. “I prefer to live in the present,” he says.
After Verlaine’s death in January 2023, Lloyd is now—as his wife, Sheila, told me last year—the unofficial spokesperson for the band, which means he puts up with writers like me to help tell his story.
But, it turns out, Television doesn’t need my help—they continue to find new audiences, thanks in part to Lloyd’s touring and consistent album sales. “There’s a new reissue on vinyl that came out just recently,” Lloyd says. “Five thousand high-fidelity copies. And they sold out.”
The band’s legacy—and that of the entire NYC punk movement—is still shining.
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