whims—but his Cannes-starlet bare-shoulder T-shirts and sunglasses and color palette clashed with Television’s first-thing-picked-off-the-floor antifashion indifference, its muted choice of cuts and fabrics, which sent a different message statement: it’s the music that counts. Not visual flash and certainly not pose-flexing showmanship, which Hell also had on tap. Unlike the archetypal rock bassist forged in the medieval ironworks, Hell didn’t hold his sentry position as the unmovable pillar in a cross-fire hurricane, bolted to the bass and rooted to the floor in the classic stoic stance of the Stones’ Bill Wyman and The Who’s John Entwistle. He got buggy onstage with a popcorn-popping battery of head-wagging, moue-making, and hair-raking, with a few Pete Townshend jumps thrown in that had rather less liftoff than Townshend’s, but then Pete was the more practiced catapulter. Perhaps Hell made a minor spectacle of himself in self-defense to distract from his bass playing, which fell a bit below minimum requirements even by garage-band standards. “Close enough for rock” went the jokey catchphrase, but Hell wasn’t close enough to get close enough for rock, often seeming to lose his place on the bass. What he brought to the stage was louche charisma and the authorship of the future punk anthems “Blank Generation” (“I belong to the blank generation and/I can take it or leave it each time”) and “Love Comes in Spurts.” But even these assertive numbers were rudimentary pumpers compared with the topographies Television was intent on exploring; friendship or no friendship, it never would have worked out. There was room for only one vision in Television, Verlaine’s. Hell would soon vacate the crew, his corner filled by Fred Smith, who defected from Blondie and conformed to the Wyman-Entwistle model of unassuming sentinel safeguarding the beat. Hot-chick interest peeled considerably after Hell left the band, but he wouldn’t be gone from the CBGB’s stage for long, returning with a sound that went every which way, like bullets careening off steel drums with a slow-death heartbeat in the background of something big about to keel over.
Patti was the first draw at CBGB’s and the first to break out of the pack. I interviewed her in her studio apartment a block up from St. Marks Place, which looked as if it had been tossed by narcs given a bad tip on a drug stash and not bothering to tidy up afterward. It was hot, as I recall: no air-conditioning, Patti tugging on a bra strap that seemed to be chafing. In the sink a Lone Ranger mask floated in a glass of water. Before we went up to the studio, I met Patti at a coffee place in the East Village where, prominently on the table, was a brick-heavy copy of a dictionary of symbolism. I got the impression that she used it to interpret the symbols in her own lyrics, explore the Jungian range of their profundity, and when I mentioned this reference book being displayed for my benefit to someone later, he found it posey and pretentious. I found it the opposite. A truly pretentious artist would have disavowed any scholarly knowledge or curiosity about the symbols in his or her work, regarding them as mysterious effusions from the etheric realm that it was up to each listener to unriddle—oh, don’t ask me to explain, it’s up to you to explore the ambiguities while leaving my precious artistic integrity intact. “We murder to dissect,” and all that. Patti didn’t treat her creative apparatus as a tamperproof black box with a secret password. Patti was an unabashed autodidact. That was one of the most admirable things about her. In a decade with so much fatalistic derision stocking the pantry, her hero worship was unfashionably uncool, her faith in the pantheon unshaken. Our idols are our instructors, and revelations without knowledge are just pieces of dreams with no assembly kit. William Blake, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Rimbaud, Edie Sedgwick, Isabelle Eberhardt (who dressed as a boy and adventured in Arab lands, her memoir one of Patti’s touchstones), her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, Robert Bresson,