Wednesday, March 15, 2023
To Richard Lloyd at Mohawk Place last night. I don't think there is another album more important to me than Marquee Moon, so when this show was announced in immediately after Tom Verlaine died I bought tickets that day.
I needn't have been in such a hurry. To get to the important part first, Lloyd was terrific. His set list include plenty of Television songs, opening with "Foxhole" (which I've never cared for, but works well as a live rave-up), along with some Velvet Underground stuff, and things from his solo career that I knew, and that A also knew, impressing Captain X. The man can really play, and I shouldn't even have to say that. Richard Lloyd was one of the guitarists on one of the greatest guitar albums of all time.
This brings me to my second point: Richard Lloyd was playing on a Tuesday night in a bar in Buffalo that could be described as a dive, or a dump, or maybe even a toilet. The tickets were $15 bucks. In one of the obits of Tom Verlaine someone quoted Verlaine as saying that he spent his post-Television days, "Trying to avoid having a professional career." He seems to have succeeded, but Lloyd is still out there, still radiating punk energy and attitude, still playing.
In his most recent Christgau Sez the Dean opines about rock and roll longevity, and I think this is applicable to Lloyd:
Artists run out of gas, that’s all. They have an idea or an angle or just a bunch of stuff to say—musically, verbally, or both. They’re making a good living at it, enjoying the road although that seldom lasts, bonding with their bandmates. Conflicts arise, but at the very least they find themselves with a job they like. Only those artistic and interpersonal materials generally get stale even if replacement bandmates are easier to come by than replacement spouses. An impressive exception is Neil Young, who despite his affable demeanor there’s little evidence is actually all that nice a guy, his certifiable genius enhanced by endurance alone. In pop/rock/whatever that’s truly unusual. In jazz, where hard-earned technical skill counts for more and lasts better, lifers are far more common.... But in pop, even when commercial success endures, the aesthetic excitement often seems staler and staler even for listeners who engage with the innovations or if you like fads pop records have somehow been generating for over a century.
An artist like Richard Lloyd deserves to be heard, and deserves to be respected in the same way that we listen to and respect our jazz elders, and he's out there demanding it. It was a great show last night, even if only about a hundred of us saw it.
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