Barefoot Jukebox

doomandgloomfromthetomb:

Other Music For Uplifting Gormandizers

It’s double-bill Thursday! Here’s a repost-by-request of this summer night in NYC. 

Let’s take a trip back in time, shall we? Not too long a trip, just 35 summers ago, to NYC’s Bowery, where great rock ‘n’ roll was being created on a frighteningly regular basis. This particular night, July 30, 1976, featured two sets apiece from Talking Heads and Television. What I’ve got for you here is both of the Television sets and just one Talking Heads set — sorry, not sure if a recording of the early set exists. But who cares, it’s an embarrassment of riches anyway. The Heads were still in their lean/mean trio phase, still a bit of a work in progress, but pretty incredible nonetheless. Judging from the audience response here and the shouted requests, they already had plenty of die-hard fans. Could any of those fans have predicted that just a few years later, this little Bowery band would record Remain In Light? Probably not.

Television’s two sets here are god-like (duh), as we hear the band just a few short months away from recording their Marquee Moon masterpiece. I’ve got a lot of Television bootlegs, but this one is special — Verlaine, Lloyd, Smith and Ficca are extremely energized, playing most of the debut LP (including a rare rendition of ”Torn Curtain”), along with a few other choice cuts. Both Lloyd and Verlaine really lean into all of their solos, Ficca and Smith bend all rhythm section rules, and, to make a long story short, Television basically sounds like the best band ever. Taken as a whole, the two bands here bear very little resemblance to what we’d come to call “punk rock.” I don’t know what to call it, other than awesome. Thanks to the taper(s) who preserved this wonderful time capsule for us to listen to all these years later. If you want to listen to it in the order it happened, here’s the tracklisting:

TELEVISION: 1st Set
1. Fire Engine
2. Poor Circulation
3. Elevation
4. Venus
5. Foxhole
6. Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door
7. Marquee Moon

TALKING HEADS
1. Girls Want To Be With The Girls
2. Book I Read
3. My Happy Days
4. Stay Hungry
5. New Feeling
6. Tentative Decision
7. Theme (instr.)
8. Warning Sign
9. (tuning)
10. So Much In Love

TELEVISION: 2nd Set
1. See No Evil
2. Prove It
3. Torn Curtain
4. Little Johnny Jewel
5. I Don’t Care
6. Friction 

TH SET

TV SETS