I Remember How the Darkness Doubled

A band, a medium, a way of seeing.

Lou Reed in performance, 1976.

Tell a Vision

So Lou Reed walks into a bar — CBGB’s — and he’s carrying a cassette recorder. It’s the summer of 1976, and the hip but as yet unsigned band Television is the night’s headliner. Tom Verlaine, the group’s chief guitarist, songwriter, and singer, spots Reed with the recorder and assumes he’s come to tape the band so he can copy its distinctive wiry sound. He confronts the Rock ‘n’ Roll Animal. In an interview published a few months later in Screw, Al Goldstein’s infamous porn mag, Verlaine recalls the ensuing exchange:

When I saw him walk in with the tape recorder, I ask him what he’s gonna do with it. He said, “It doesn’t work.” I said, “Well, why are you carrying a tape recorder that doesn’t work?” He says, “Here, I’ll give you the cassette.” I said okay, then he said something like, “Well, I got a couple more on me.” So I said, “Well, why don’t you give me the machine?”

After a brief standoff, Reed hands over the recorder. Verlaine gives it back to him after the show.

Tom Verlaine (born Thomas Miller) formed Television with his bass-playing friend Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers) in 1973. Both young men were aspiring poets who a few years earlier had dropped out of a Delaware prep school and decamped to New York City. They lived in squalor, modeling themselves, if only platonically, on the French symbolist poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud. It was Hell who first came up with the idea of calling the band, which also included guitarist Richard Lloyd and drummer Billy Ficca, Television. The name, as a critic would later write, was “part aspirational reclaiming of the dominant media of the age and part druggy-clever play on words: tell a vision.”

It should also be said that “tell a vision,” a phrase that can be heard in one of the band’s first recorded songs, “Little Johnny Jewel,” is a perfect description of Television’s lyrics, which sketched film noir scenes in terse, imagistic verse. Here’s a characteristic bit from “Marquee Moon,” the title song of the band’s 1977 debut album:

I remember how the darkness doubled
I recall lightning struck itself
I was listening to the rain
I was hearing something else

By the time of that 1976 CBGB’s show, Richard Hell had left the group. His chaotic, proudly amateurish bass playing had become an irritant to Verlaine, who, having become a virtuoso on the guitar, was obsessed with precisely controlled musicianship. A hundred years earlier, Verlaine and Rimbaud’s relationship had come to a violent end, with Verlaine shooting Rimbaud in a Brussels hotel. Verlaine and Hell’s split was hardly amicable — they despised each other ever after —but it didn’t involve bullets.

In the fall of 1976, just a few months after his run-in with Verlaine, Lou Reed began a tour to support his new solo record, Rock and Roll Heart. The tour would be remembered mainly for its unusual stage set, designed by Reed and his photographer friend Mick Rock. Stacked up behind the singer were dozens of black-and-white televisions, synced to broadcast a series of images in unison. The display was notorious for not working very well, the sets often going dark or failing to sync up. On the night of November 5, the tour hit the shabby Palace Theater in Waterbury, Connecticut, where I, an impressionable teenager, watched from the third row.

The Blinks

During the 1950s, the television set replaced the cinema as the focal point of American entertainment. At the decade’s start, fewer than one in ten households had a TV. By its close, nine in ten did. Americans at one point were buying TVs at the rate of a hundred thousand a week. Gathering around the set became an evening ritual for most families, everyone on the couch or in an easy chair, watching situation comedies, game shows, variety shows, and dramas on the small screen. Moviegoing, a far more communal activity, declined sharply.

The members of Television, all born between 1949 and 1951, were children of television. They bathed in its radiated light. They grew up in its metaphorical shadow. Richard Lloyd, in his autobiography Everything Is Combustible, recalls the moment his family bought its first TV:

When I was about four we got one of the first televisions on the block. I think it was a Zenith. It took several minutes to warm up while there was only a little dot of light in the middle of the screen. . . . I remember my grandfather getting anxious about it needing to be turned on at least five minutes before watching a show. We would sit in a kind of panic hoping that the TV set would warm up in time.

Despite his young age, Lloyd became obsessed with the television and how it painted moving images with electric pulses. The way the screen flickered as it refreshed itself in providing an illusion of movement and life got deep into the boy’s head.

I began experimenting with my senses. I would walk around the house with a blindfold on or with my eyes closed, trying to sense the walls and furniture by touch alone. . . . People usually blink about 15 times a minute with brief visual interruptions. I wondered what it would be like if the blinks were backwards. I began walking around with my eyes closed and I blinked them open only every once in a while. I wanted to find out how little visual information I could carry on with. I used to cross the street and walk on the sidewalk in this way, with my eyes closed except for the fastest possible blinking to find out what had changed. It made the world appear like a flipbook.

The young Lloyd blinked backwards into a new mode of perception. He would live, as his friend the Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz later wrote, “on the line between inspiration and madness.” The warping of his senses and sensibilities may have been unusual in its intensity, but he was hardly alone in coming to live televisually. Everyone was developing what Iggy Pop would later call, punningly, a TV eye. Everyone was living more and more inside his own head.

Popular TV shows, from I Love Lucy and Father Knows Best in the fifties to the Andy Griffith Show and the Beverly Hillbillies in the sixties to All in the Family and Good Times in the seventies, tended to be set in a familiar, middle-class domestic milieu. Even the occasional oddball show like My Favorite Martian, The Munsters, or Lost in Space shared that same quotidian setting. But there was one commonplace domestic activity you almost never saw people do on television: watch television. Even as television became the conduit and shaper of culture, it remained invisible in the products of culture. It’s not hard to understand why. Watching someone watch TV is boring.

Hell and Verlaine, in naming their band Television, and Reed, in performing in front of banks of TVs, were trying to impose their own cultural meaning on TV, to make it visible on their own terms. It’s not a coincidence that it was in the seventies that electronics companies like Sony began selling video cameras to individuals. Andy Warhol, whose gravitational pull was felt by most avant-garde musicians in New York City, purchased his first one in 1970. The video camera promised to liberate TV production from commercial studios and put it into the hands of the masses. What had come to be seen, at least by intellectuals, as an oppressive force in culture might now be a tool of self-expression.

But it was too late. It was also in the seventies that nerdy hobbyists began to cobble together microcomputers for their personal use. The focal point of American entertainment was about to get even smaller, even narrower, even lonelier. It would shrink to a device you could hold in your hand, a screen designed for an audience of one.

The Rectangle

Like the TV before it, the smartphone has remained largely invisible in the products of culture, even as its dominion over culture has grown. Watching a person look into a phone screen is even more boring than watching someone watch TV. And because people with smartphones know everything that’s going on the instant it happens, a society of phone-wielders is resistant to the development of dramatic tension. There’s a reason so much narrative art is now set in fantasy worlds or in the past: there are no phones there.

That’s beginning to change now, at least in literary story-telling. Because much of what flows through phones takes the form of words, writers who have grown up with texting and social media are incorporating the rhythms and quirks of online writing into their work, just as writers of epistolary novels did after letter-writing became commonplace in the eighteenth century. As the rise of autofiction shows, the claustrophobic solitude that characterizes social-media use is seeping into art.

What does it feel like to know everything all the time without taking your eyes off a small, luminous rectangle? What does it feel like to be a child of the phone, with its superabundance of visual information? Where are the blinks, so seamless, so highly resolved, taking our minds now? We’re starting to find out. The phone is becoming visible. Whether it’s too late or not is hard to say.