I spent last weekend hanging out with old friends. Pete was in town, and we gathered to celebrate his return, and to remember the whelp years of college and beyond, back before we had houses and kids and retirement accounts. He asked me to make him a mix, which will be getting underway as soon as my external hard drive starts playing well with iTunes. (I haven’t downloaded the very latest, and I suspect Apple purpose-builds little spit-the-dummy episodes into the software when they want you upgrade). His only request was that I include the track “Marquee Moon” by Television.

And, in the wheels-within-wheels way of the web, what should come across my eyeballs this morning, but a Marquee Moon video? So here you go, Pete—it’s the first installment of your mix:

I have a long history with this song, that band.

Once, long ago, when I was just jetsam, going wherever the waves took me, open to whatever flotsam floated by, I had a significant record-collecting friend (we’ve all had them, some of us are them) who toured me through his collection and basically turned the girl who named her five white mice after the Rolling Stones into a whip-dancing, Factory-meets-the Knitting Club New York Doll.

His apartment was the warmest place I knew in my chilly wintry city, and he’d spend hours pulling records from the ceiling-high cinder-block shelves, saying, “you’ve gotta hear this!,” a cigarette always burning in one hand as he scanned the spines. He had a fluttery quality, not gay so much as enthusiastic. Like most music mavens I have known, his collection was sorted by style of music, then obsessively alphabetized. It’s the same cataloguing mania that allows young men to remember all the RBIs and ERAs since baseball began. I do not have this gene, for I have breasts and a TV-DVD habit, plus, I like to read and go outdoors.

All the albums he’d been listening to would be stacked along the TV wall, and Wire would mix with The Shaggs, which nestled next to Laurie Anderson. (Remember when we all listened to her? It was spoken word, AKA rap without the rhythms.) One night, when I had done things to myself that made certain men long to take care of me, I fixated on a particular album. There was a simple band picture on front, but one of the men had a beseeching sweetness (this is the sort of shit we girls read in to the faces of rockstars, and it never serves us well) that made me want to pet him like a pony. The band was Television, the man was Tom Verlaine, the singer/songwriter and guitarist. Those are his jittering guitar runs, that’s his quaver-on-the-line gospel drawl.

I spent the night listening to my friend’s carefully curated soundtrack, but I kept looking at the album cover. “Tom Verlaine understands,” I’d say. “Tom Verlaine understands.” And just as my friend’s music guided my listening tastes for years to come, that picture shaped my appetites in love. I’ve always had a thing for those ropey-armed glitter-junkies (no mom, not real junkies. Just guys in bands who look like they might be) with eyes that tell me they know me, that I’m needed. And why not?

After all, Tom Verlaine understands.

Video, Marquee Moon, Adventure

Tags: adventure, marquee moon, television, tom verlaine

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 30th, 2008 at 11:10 am and is filed under Friends, Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.