Underrated Drum Tracks I Have Loved 2016, Part 3 – Marquee Moon by Television

In 2004, I was playing guitar in a band called Great Days of Sail, led by Yo Zushi (with whom I still play today). Our first show was supporting Lach at the Barfly in Camden. Lach was, even then, a veteran figure, and a biggish name for a new band to be supporting. He’s a New York songwriter and the originator of antifolk*, and is responsible for nurturing a host of like-minded artists at The Fort, the night he ran at the Sidewalk Cafe. On stage with him that night was Billy Ficca, the drummer from Television.

I was way more stoked about playing on the same stage as Billy Ficca than Lach, if I’m honest. Antifolk is not really my thing, but from the time back in high school I bought an issue of Total Guitar with a full transcription of Marquee Moon in it, Television have very much been my thing.

The glory of Television is the lucidity of their arrangements. There is no padding, just drums, bass, two guitars, a vocal and that’s it. Everything is mixed and recorded dry, tight and close. You can hear every single note that is played, and, more importantly for our purposes today, every nuance of the drum performances.

Billy Ficca is one of the best. His playing is powerful and authoritative, yet also full of subtle details. He gives you a solid backbeat and so many cool hi-hat licks that it takes dozens of listens to absorb them all (especially when you’ve got Tom Verlaine’s and Richard Lloyd’s superb soloing to take in, too). My favourite Ficca performances from Marquee Moon are Elevation and the title track, which features career-high performances from all involved, Ficca not least.

Billy’s playing on these songs is seriously inventive. Elevation features super-cool triplet fills on the hats, and an absolutely savage push in the choruses. Marquee Moon, meanwhile, features, well, everything. In its 10 and a half minutes, Ficca plays pretty much every conceivable idea on the drums. The verses are driven along by his funk-infused hi-hat work. The pre-chorus guitar-melody sections are lifted by his creative emphases on the cymbals. The choruses see Ficaa throwing in rapid-fire snare fills before bringing the band back round for another verse with whole-kit fills. During the long instrumental section that follows Verlaine’s solo, Ficca knows just when to swap from the hats to the ride, from the ride to the toms, from the toms to snare and from the snare to the brass. It’s compelling as all hell, and when it all breaks down after the “seagull” section and Ficca launches back into the verse groove, joined at first by Fred Smith’s bass and then Lloyd’s and Verlaine’s guitars, it’s a glorious moment.

A lot of attention is paid to Television’s guitarists, and rightly so: Verlaine and Lloyd were magnificent players, both technically accomplished and allergic to blues-rock cliche. But every great rock band from the Beatles and the Stones onwards have been built on a great rhythm section, and Television’s was one of the best. After the band ended, Ficca played with the Waitresses (yep, that’s him playing on Christmas Wrapping) – another great rhythm section.

Television: l-r Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, Fred Smith

*Antifolk was briefly a big noise in above-ground publications. To the uninitiated, it may sound like lo-fi folk, or like folk played by punk musicians, and that’s not far wrong in many cases. But it’s easier to define as an attitude than an identifiable style of music. Lach began his antifolk nights after being unable to get shows at established folk clubs in New York in the mid-1980s and deciding that if no one else would give him a gig, he’d have to do it himself, so the key element of the genre name isn’t “folk”, but “anti”. That is, it’s about not fitting in and being proud of it, rather than striving to sound a certain way.

Yo’s music at the time had more to do with country and Leonard Cohen, but the antifolk association was certainly useful. My involvement with GDoS lasted about eight months, and the band crashed and burned within 18, but those were rarefied circles we moved in for a while, huh?

Into the Mystic – Van Morrison

If you’re reading this blog, you’re probably aware of the veteran US rock critic Robert Christgau. He’s practically the last of his generation still doing what he does at anything like the pace he worked at in his youth. He wrote for most of career for the Village Voice, but he’s also contributed to Spin, Creem, Esquire, Playboy and Rolling Stone, and more recently online for MSN’s music site, where his writing was the only thing on the site that wasn’t half-arsed. Willfully eccentric though his views may sometimes be and gnomic as his two-sentence capsule reviews often are, he’s the originator of much of what we talk about when we talk about rock criticism. His reviews carry weight because he’s heard more or less every notable release since the late 1960s (certainly up to the start of the internet age).

I very seldom share his opinions. I love loads of records he’s panned (for example, David Crosby’s If I Could Only Remember My Name), and find his enthusiasm for, say, the New York Dolls or modern Bob Dylan somewhat baffling (‘Love & Theft’ and Modern Times both A+ records? Hell, no!). But there’s a few records to which he’s given A+ reviews down the years that I agree with him wholeheartedly about: After the Goldrush by Neil Young, Paul Simon’s self-titled debut solo album, Television’s Marquee Moon, and our subject today, Van Morrison’s Moondance.

Christgau’s definition of an A+ record is: ‘an organically conceived masterpiece that repays prolonged listening with new excitement and insight. It is unlikely to be marred by more than one merely ordinary cut’.

I prefer a simpler definition. A record that couldn’t be improved upon by subtracting or adding anything to it. Perhaps it has a song or two that are a notch below the best on the record, but still, the whole is stronger for the presence of them than it would be without.

Most of the records I think of as perfect were not conceived as major commercial statements: Judee Sill, Joni’s Blue, Paul Simon, John Martyn’s Inside Out, Fred Neil – these are small, intimate, personal records, not ones that aimed for the mass market or tried to make big, generalised statements. When you try to appeal to everyone, it’s very hard to make an album that’s a coherent, satisfying listen all the way through. Even the Beatles only got near it once, with Revolver, which is damn close to perfect, but is perhaps let down very slightly by a couple of weakish Harrisongs (Love You To and I Want To Tell You) and the inherent difficulty of making songs as disparate as Taxman, Eleanor Rigby, I’m Only Sleeping and Love You To live together on one album, and that’s just the first four songs!

Moondance is an exception to this. John Lennon once described Imagine as the sugarcoated version of his solo debut, John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. Well, Moondance is the sugarcoated version of Astral Weeks. It has all questing, Celtic romanticism of Astral Weeks, but with condensed running times, repeated choruses, horn charts you can sing along to, tight performances and the sort of flawless engineering (by a young Shelly Yakus, his first (!) lead engineer credit) and production you just don’t come across any more. It’s the sort of music that puts a smile on your face, the sort of music that should play in pubs during long, damp afternoons, the sort of album of such sustained quality that picking one song as a highlight is close to impossible.

But if I had to – and for the purposes of this post, I did – I’d choose Into the Mystic, which I’ve loved since I first heard it for John Klingberg’s bass line, Van’s passionate, joyful vocal, John Platania’s guitar arpeggios in the bridges, and those glorious saxophones (I love their low-pitched, rising response when Van sings ‘And when that foghorn blows’ – so simple, so inspired). Astral Weeks has become the canonical Van Morrison record, the favourite of critics, poets and budding songwriters with a literary bent. Moondance is the Radio 2 staple, the people’s choice. This time, just once, I reckon the people are right.