If they'd stuck together, Richard Hell and Tom Verlaine might've headed THE band of the late '70s. As singer, Hell was the loosest and most natural sounding of a new breed of screech-and-gulp-ers. As frontman, Hell invented punk fashion. (Malcolm McLaren, having failed to cut a lasting deal with him or with the New York Dolls, took the Dolls' sound and Hell's look [and lack of interest in bass] back to England for his pick-up band.) And Verlaine could take care of the remaining little chores like writing and playing music.

But they were jerks who hated each other. Hell left, ultimately deciding that a musical career took seriously uncool amounts of exertion. Verlaine thereafter leaned on a whiter-shade-of-pale imitation of Hell's phlegmatic vocalese, coming off like Barney Fife next to the Lawrence Olivier instruments.

I read where Verlaine and Hell were childhood pals who escaped from the orphanage together. Yeah, right; and those are their real names, and Bob Dylan was a freight-hopping Okie. But I believe the story about them finding Richard Lloyd through the Village Voice ad: "Fender guitarist wanted for all-Fender band." There's one guitar lineage for the pliant and slippery Gibson, starting around Chuck Berry and leading to both heavy metal and L.A. AOR, and another for the clanky cranky jangle of the Fender, starting around Buddy Holly and leading nowhere by the mid-'70s. Smooth excess vs. rhythmic constraint. (Which is why a first time Television listener can feel let down after all the hype: "I thought this was a guitar band?" It's a different language of guitar.) Lloyd, a classic pop musician, plays classical Fender -- clean lines with a clear structure -- and makes a perfect friendly adversary to Verlaine's soul-trapped-in-wood-by-an-evil-spell....

Ooh la, Verlaine's guitar. As weak as his solo studio work can be, I'd never pass up a chance to hear Verlaine in concert, wringing an incredible double-back-on-a-dime range seemingly out of his bare hands. Keith Allison is right to use the word danger so often. It seems like a physical transformation is going on: a centaur with Verlaine's spindly upper body shoved on a Siegfried-sized bucking horse, or a guitar Little Mermaid (book not movie) who wished for a human voice and now feels knives in its throat every time it breathes.

Add the jagged drumming of Billy Ficca, and although the band runs like clockwork, it's with glass gears and a lot of sharp edges. Luckily, Television was rounded out by the bass of "Nonsonic" Fred Smith, the only non-virtuoso in the band and the only nice guy -- nice enough to help keep the band together for the course of two albums and a couple of tours, and nice enought to show up on both Verlaine's and Lloyd's post-breakup albums.

"But I love disaster. And I love what comes after...."