Legendary rock guitarist Richard Lloyd, founding member of the band Television, shares the story of his life in music with Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz. Lloyd’s new memoir is “Everything is Combustible.” Starting in Pittsburgh and moving through New York City and beyond, with a cast full of music legends, Lloyd uses his distinct voice to chronicle Television’s humble beginnings, their rise to fame, his drug addiction and recovery, and his touring adventures with artists such as Matthew Sweet, John Doe, and Robert Quine. Lloyd also details his solo years, including the backstory of his iconic and critically-acclaimed records such as “Alchemy” and “Field of Fire.”Lloyd recalls the heyday of the New York rock music scene, filling the void in the written records of music history, and giving the first complete account of Television from one of the founding members. Richard Lloyd was born in in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1951. He is a world renowned electric guitarist, songwriter, recording artist and a founding member of Television. As an author, Lloyd was a regular columnist with Guitar World Magazine: the “Alchemical Guitarist.” As an autodidact, he has developed extensive expertise in many scientific and religious areas, and believes in the alchemical rule: “One book opens another.” Chris Frantz is a founding member of TalkingHeads and Tom Tom Club. He is a drummer, songwriter, radio show host and is soon to be an author. He recently started a new electronic music duo with Tina Weymouth called Chris Und Tina. He resides in Fairfield, Connecticut. Recorded January 25th, 2018.
Nothing beats meeting your heroes especially when they’re happy to share their secrets. In the late 1960s, then-teenaged Richard Lloyd, Television co-guitarist and new wave pioneer, managed to get backstage and into the dressing rooms and inner circles of people like Jimi Hendrix and John Lee Hooker. He asked questions, took mental notes, and absorbed lifelong lessons about the guitar. He put those lessons to good use, too, and developed an alternative, holistic approach to the instrument. That approach was enhanced by his left-brain orientation, plus his never-ending spiritual quest.
Lloyd also studied the teachings of mid-20th-century mystical teacher George Gurdjieff, and those studies—in addition to the impact they’ve had on his spiritual life—transformed his understanding of music. The result, which you can check out in a series of instructional videos and columns that appeared in Guitar World about a decade ago (now on DVD as The Alchemical Guitarist), is a complex, pattern-focused, vertical approach to the instrument based on an idiosyncratic understanding of the major scale.
Lloyd came to prominence in the mid 1970s withNew York band Television, a group he founded with Tom Verlaine, Billy Ficca, and Richard Hell in 1973. (Fred Smith replaced Hell on bass in 1975.) Television, along with the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, and others, were integral to New York City’s burgeoning punk scene. That scene—which, except for a few bands like the Ramones, wasn’t really punk—was based out of CBGB, a club on the Bowery. The black-walled rectangular-box-shaped venue supported a smorgasbord of styles, like new wave, post punk, and art rock, that dominated the Top 40 in the ’80s, albeit in a more plastic, synth-drenched incarnation.
But those sounds in their pure, distilled form were Television’s home. Television was a guitar band—no wailing synths or bad hair for them—and their debut, 1977’s “Marquee Moon”, is an iconic testament to the early, pre-sellout days of new wave. Lloyd and Verlaine shared guitar duties and crafted tight, interwoven parts, and the band was a huge influence on later acts like the Pixies, Sonic Youth, R.E.M, and many others. Lloyd’s tone with Television, while often overdriven and warm, sounds sharp and somewhat stark when appreciated in context—and given his roots and early association with Hendrix, it was a clean break with the past.
Lloyd left Television for the first time in 1978, after the band released its second album, Adventure. They reunited in 1992, and Lloyd stayed in Television until 2007. Along the way, he’s worked with other artists, including Matthew Sweet and X’s John Doe, released solo albums, and established himself as a sought-after teacher and alternative-rock elder statesman. His new solo album, The Countdown, is a collection of fuzzy, mid-tempo rockers that, along with the paperback edition of his 2017 memoir, Everything Is Combustible, was released in November.
“Before, everything was sacred about music. Personally, I think it still is something sacred, because you’re dealing with vibrations, and the universe is made of vibrations.”
John Lee Hooker once gave him advice about guitar playing—specifically about learning how to play one string at a time. Lloyd walked into the dressing room and sat down. Eventually, he took notice of me and he said—he pointed his finger at me, and he said, “And you, young man, what do you do?” I said, “I play guitar.” He said, “Are you good?” I said, “I don’t know.” He said, “No, no, no. You’re great. I can tell. Come over here and I’ll tell you the secret of playing the electric guitar.”
Then he cupped his hands and he whispered in my ear, “Take off all the strings but one and learn the one string up and down and down and up and bend it and shake it until the women go ‘oooo.’ Then put two strings on and learn two strings up and down and down and up.” I went home, but I didn’t take the strings off. I couldn’t afford to take them off—I didn’t have a replacement set. But I did practice what I call vertical knowledge, which is up and down pitch on a single string, a great deal. Jimi Hendrix had also suggested that to us—that we learn the neck that way.
To learn the single string. In fact, some of Jimi’s solos … like on “May This Be Love,” are all on the B string. The entire solo. There’s another one that’s all on the G string: “I Don’t Live Today.” Except for the last note, it’s all on the G string. It’s a very cool way to play. My solo on “Elevation” [from Marquee Moon] does the same thing on the G string. It goes up in A minor from the second fret to the 17th fret.
A lot of the guitarists in the New York City bands that you came up with were so different: Television, Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones.The scene was that everybody played original music and no covers. That was the basis of it, and there were an amazing number of bands who did not sound the same: the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Television, Mink DeVille, the Shirts, the Dead Boys … there were tons and they all sounded different, which was fantastic. Pretty much everyone got signed, that’s right. It took three years for Television to get signed. A lot of the bands had been signed, but we kept turning record companies down. We didn’t want to have a producer come in and we didn’t want to have to make a record on a $2 budget. We waited and went with Elektra because they had Love, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and the Doors.
The Boston rock veterans of Guster are back after a four-year break with a new album titled Look Alive. The band appears to have been restless in the interim, as this new album incorporates everything from grand, arena-style pop hooks to the whimsical balladry of ‘60s groups like the Kinks.
In case you quit the internet last week, our new album Look Alive comes out on January 18th and you can head on over to www.guster.com this very second to hear a whole third of our new record, check out the full track listing, and pre-order or pre-save how you see fit. The bands 8th studio album is out today. Look Alive is an inspired and fulfilling place to have arrived after 27 years of creativity.
Now, also feast your eyes on the album cover! It was embroidered by a fabulous artist named Nikki Virbitsky.
“Overexcited” is from Guster’s new album, Look Alive, out now on Nettwerk Music Group & Ocho Mule Records.
ATO Records is thrilled to announce Nilüfer Yanya’s debut album “Miss Universe”, due out March 22nd. Nilufer uniquely blends elements of soul and jazz into intimate pop songs with electronic flourishes and a newly expressed grungy guitar sound. Miss Universe was largely recorded in the same remote Penzance studio she used to jam in with her uncle Joe – a former musician himself – and features co-productions with both her former school guitar teacher The Invisible’s Dave Okumu and her live bandmates Jazzi Bobbi and Luke Bower, as well as producers John Congleton and others.
2019 is starting in whirlwind fashion with Nilufer touring throughout February with Sharon Van Etten across North America.
This is a lovely taster from Rozi Plain’s upcoming new album ‘What a Boost’. Distinctive guitar tones hover and bounce off a rhythmic drum beat in a languid fashion whilst Rozi’s voice is calm and restrained. There is an alluring pattern with the guitar playing and this enables the song to build a subtle but strong foundation to the proceedings. This lets the music breathe and allows the listener to nestle into a happy corner and appreciate the seamless layers this song offers up.
‘Symmetrical’ seems to unearth little and satisfying discoveries with each listen and with this in mind, I cannot see anyone wanting to refrain from the former. To see her put this together on stage at an intimate venue will surely be more than the usual treat!
Catch Rozi Plain at her upcoming UK tour, Her upcoming album could well be amongst the critic’s choices of 2019
Taken from Rozi Plain’s upcoming album “What a Boost”.
Uni, the NYC-based psych band that includes David Strange and Ghost of a Saber Tooth Tiger’s Charlotte Kemp Muhl and new singer Jack James, have a new single: the heavy, big-riffed “Destroyer,” which comes with a phantasmagoric video full of freaky claymation and apocalyptic visions. The Band describes it like this:
“I write this letter from a fallout shelter below the wreckage of the earth in the year 2042. Some said it was the exploitation of the poor. The rich blamed the marxist revolt. Some say the feminists had turned their backs on the men, while others blamed toxic masculinity. Helter Skelter played its part. There were clashes of political ideology, religion, race and gender as well as environmental catastrophes. Hurricanes, draughts, earthquakes and wildfires ravaged the earth. Needless to say, the firmament didn’t hold and the nuclear war left nothing but ash. Now that humanity has been razed and only the mutants are left to wander, I reflect on what could have been different from within the walls of my concrete fortress, waiting for the rations to run out.
It was neither one of these factors nor all of them responsible for what happened. It was something older than the universe itself, embedded in every molecule exploded from the Big Bang and crawling as a single cell from the primordial sludge to the White House lawn. It lives inside all of us like reptilian DNA. It is dormant when ignored but spreads like fire when fed. It is a glutton and we willingly shoveled the fuel intoit’s filthy gullet, like a cordycep fungus controlling the brains of ants. It takes many forms but each are a manifestation of the single deadly entity. It is Destroyer.
“Destroyer” premiers here, you can watch it below.
You can catch Uni this spring on the road this spring with The Claypool Lennon Delirium the band which features her GOASTT bandmate, Sean Lennon, as well as Primus’ Les Claypool.
Ryan Adams has announced ambitious plans to release three albums this year. He disseminated the info about two of the albums, called “Big Colors” and “Wednesday”, via some political journalists’ Twitter feeds.
The first of those albums to be released is “Big Colors” — it’s due out in April via Pax-Am/Blue Note/Capitol Records — and he debuted the first song from it on the Philadelphia radio station WXPN. Its choice of premiere locale seems intentional: The song is called “Doylestown Girl,” named after a nearby Pennsylvania town in Bucks County.
Adams announced that he plans on releasing three new albums at some point in 2019, which he’d previously done back in 2005. One of those albums is expected to be titled, Big Colors, and will presumably include a pair of new singles titled “Anybody Evil”, and “Fuck The Rain”. According to some of the posts shared to Adams’ Twitter account earlier this week and again on Thursday, both Mayer and Weir will be making a musical appearance on at least one of those projects.
In a press release, Ryan Adams announced his new track “Fuck The Rain” with the words “Check out this song it’s cool.” Or don’t- we all might the trump is president. I love you, sincerely Ryan Adams.
In a series of tweets posted by Adams, the rock musician informed fans that Mayer provided the solo on “Fuck The Rain”, which is scheduled to arrive on all platforms this coming Wednesday, January 23rd. The confirmation on Thursday comes a day after Adams shared a trio of photographs of himself, Mayer, and Blue Note Records President/Wolf Bros bassist Don Was working together in the studio. Was also accompanied Adams on stage during his brief performance at the Chris Cornell Tribute Concert in Los Angeles on Wednesday. Adams made sure to tag Blue Note Records, along with Capitol Records, in the social posts, leading fans to assume the upcoming projects will arrive through the historic record label.
Earlier Ryan had shared a photo alongside Weir, stating the two were working on a “secret thing” at Adams’ Pax-AmStudios.
After the colourful detour of Deep Heat (2012), Oh Mercy’s ARIA-winning singer Alexander Gow relocated to the USA, where things didn’t go necessarily as planned. Recorded across three cities, “When We Talk About Love” is rife with homesickness, lovesickness and nods to Gow’s heroes – from Raymond Carver, to Burt Bacharach, the Triffids to the Go-Betweens. Opener “Without You” is expansive and evocative, with sweeping string arrangements and the kind of honest vocal delivery that pours out like an open wound. “I’m always thinking of you with some other guy,” he deadpans. Songs like “I Don’t Really Want To Know” and “Sandy” pull off that great songwriter’s trick of pairing a melancholic lyric with an optimistic melody, but it all comes to a head on Lady Eucalyptus, a lush finger-picked take on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. “My cards are all dealt and done,” he sings like a man who’s burned everything to the ground just to start again.
After the swaggering glam of the Portland-recorded ‘Deep Heat’, Alex Gow holed up in the NSW coast with producer Scott Horscroft to craft a breakup record for the ages. Largely eschewing the characters he filtered his emotional point of view through on the last record, Alex (playing almost every instrument here) marries a lyrical vocabulary tied to the mature pop of the sixties and early 70s (Bacharach/David, Carole King) with a timeless sonic approach that gives his tender melodies room to breath. The vividness of ‘Lady Ecalyptus’ and ‘I Don’t Really Wanna Know’ is devastating, but the album is never a depressing or unpleasant listen, just a collection of great pop tunes.
“It’s not about what happened in the past, or what you think might happen in the future. It’s about the ride, for Christ’s sake. Irving Feffer said that. We like to think he was right.”
Born from friendship, Heavy Lungs formed in the Spring of 2017 and set sights for loud, agile performance. If you book them, they will come. The EP your mother told you to worry about. Forget your fears and open your ears. ‘Straight to CD’ was recorded throughout 2018 at the mystical Nave studio in Leeds, UK and the mighty Malthouse in Bristol, Earth.
A mix of aggressive caring for each other, this new ep is a collection of golden oldies and true blue tracks from HL, to you.
Exploded View, the international music project of Annika Henderson, Hugo Quezada, and Martin Thulin has returned and taken flight with their second full length, “Obey”. The album was recorded at Hugo’s and Martin’s studios in Mexico City with Annika visiting from Berlin. Leaving behind their raw, live recording process, and embracing overdubs and multi-instrumentalism, the band has crafted their most ambitious work to date. The four-piece that recorded the band’s self-titled debut album and Summer Came Early EP became three to create a more concise collection of songs. Their motivation for creating together remains purely passionate and the improvisational spark the band is known for has morphed into the emotional flames of being close friends with a deep desire to make music with each other.
This passion serves as the main conceptual thread throughout the album and the result is an almost hypnotic dream sequence that lulls the listener into a lucid state. Once in this state you become free to experience all of the classic dream motifs that the band has in store: intrigue, danger, ecstasy, visions that are hard to place but feel primordial, and a constant sense of movement. From the aptly titled opener “Lullaby” the record weaves you through 10 apocalyptic yet soothing songs. By the time you reach the song “Obey,” you are firmly in the band’s palm. And the titular track delivers, bringing you on a hypnotic voyage with a shuffle 3/4 rhythm, where singer Annika Henderson’s voice is caught in a rotating, inescapable rabbit hole tale, accompanied by the high-pitched modular bleeping sounds of the Moog and eerie landscape of the Solina.
When asked about the title of the record, singer Annika said “this is in reference to so many things. We live in a society where we must obey or risk punishment. This can be social punishment, legal punishment, emotional punishment – if you dare to step outside, you will reap the reward. We live in a time when we are self-certifying a lot. Whether it’s how we present ourselves on social media or our diet or our job – we obey the social norms. Our fears are used against us by advertisers. Our fears of growing old or being excluded – we must conform or pay the high price – buy this and you will be accepted. We must obey.” She adds musingly at the end “It’s also funny because in the band we often feel like we are all compromising, so we must all obey each other’s wishes to some extent too.” The meta nature of this sentiment, wanting to break free and also recognizing necessary emotional compromises, is just one of many juxtapositions in this record. The band recognizes that some of the freedoms they advocate for are only attainable in sleep and have thus created this dream state record to help release us all.
Striking the balance between precise and wild, between unshackled and grounded, grooving and unhinged, has always been Exploded View’s specialty. The have a special knack for making the esoteric feel accessible and crafting pop music out of seemingly raw consciousness. This unique ability to make beautiful music that feels written beyond the veil is at the heart of what makes the band so captivating and powerful, and it’s on full display all over Obey.
