See No Evil

Got my music geek on tonight with one of my very favorite albums of all-time, "Marquee Moon" by Television. I was updating my little "song of the day" thing over on MySpace when it struck me to see if there was any Television music I could add to the page. Sure enough, there was, including "See No Evil" the lead cut from the album. Listening to that took me back to when I was about 14 and first stumbled upon the record in my little neighborhood public library of all places. It looked really cool and kind of dangerous, so I took it home and it made a big impression on me. I'd never heard anything like it, with two precise lead guitars duking it out from song-to-song and Tom Verlaine's emotive yelps, and just a strange poetry to the songs -- nobody else had really heard anything like it either, and they remained largely a New York phenomenon, sort of the poor cousins to Talking Heads. They put out a second album called "Adventure" that was somehow missing the magic, except for the amazing song "Glory" -- as someone once said, you get 20 years or so to write your first album, but only a year or two to write the second one (which leads to the frequent "sophomore slump" problem so many bands experience with their second albums, not to mention second novels, etc). After "Adventure" they basically split up into various other projects until they got together in '92 for an album and a tour, so I did get the chance to see them live, and it was really magnificent. Someplace I have pix and signatures from that show. Guess they still get together for shows now and then, which is somehow reassuring. Coincidentally, it looks like Rhino is reissuing Marquee Moon next month... 30 years after its initial release. That's impossible, right? That would make me how old?

Anyway, tonight I played "See No Evil" about six times from the MySpace page, then just loaded up the full album on my iTunes and it really gave me a second wind while editing some shots tonight, although it is tough to run Photoshop while playing air guitar. ;) I did a slight edit on this photo of Eilispidh to make it MySpace safe to sort of tie in with the song... see if you can guess what I cropped out.