Marquee Moon: Beyond Punk Rock

 

Few bands that carried the punk label could boast of something like this. Two guitars that dialogued and intertwined as if they came from a single mind. Songs that made sense without ever falling into the tedium of the worst progressive music. Andy Johns’s production avoided the grandiosity of Led Zeppelin and came closer to the clean sound of The Velvet Underground’s third album. The mass American public ignored them. The English critics loved them. The band had no interest in looking like a fashionable group. They preferred to go almost unnoticed. They occupied a strange space between street-level, agitated punk and the rawest, most aggressive progressive rock. Marquee Moon was a cerebral and passionate album at the same time, a combination that seemed impossible. Even Brian Eno found it difficult to hit the exact point needed to capture the band’s sound in a series of failed demos. Lou Reed offered to produce them. David Bowie did too. Both were rejected by the band.

Imagine a pair of guitar virtuosos on the stage of the legendary CBGB and you already have the idea of what these Rolling Stones from Mars, who played jazz that sounded like rock, were doing in the mid seventies New York scene, alternating with the New York Dolls and Patti Smith. Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca and Fred Smith played as if Ornette Coleman had joined The Velvet Underground. Verlaine and Lloyd sounded like saxophonists playing guitars. Ficca achieved the sound of a free improvisation drummer thanks to Johns, the same man who had given John Bonham his sound, who knew exactly how to capture that freedom without domesticating it.

Verlaine and Lloyd spoke of their devotion to Love, Quicksilver Messenger Service and The Byrds. They were more post punk than proto punk rockers. The band had played their repertoire live for years. When they arrived at the studio, one or two takes were enough to record the perfect version they wanted. Johns handled the technical aspects more than anything and supported the band spiritually. He let them record what they wanted. Marquee Moon is the sound of punk turned into attitude and vision, far removed from every cliché and from the minimalist three chords.