Geese paid tribute to co-founding Television guitarist Richard Lloyd on Saturday night. While performing at Philadelphia’s The Fillmore, the group worked in a bit of “Ain't That Nothin,” a track from Television’s 1978 sophomore record Adventure, during their own “2122.” Geese frontman Cameron Winter said, “Rest in Peace” to Lloyd before they moved into a bit of the song, but did not elaborate more on the musician’s passing. Geese regularly riff on covers during “2122,” sometimes to mark events like the passing of Dolly Parton.
Lloyd had passed away earlier in the day Saturday in Chattanooga, TN, where he lived during his final years. Born in Pittsburgh, before relocating to New York where he attended Stuyvesant High School, Lloyd learned guitar with the help of Velvert Turner, a student of Jimi Hendrix who worked with the guitarist at his Greenwich Village apartment at 59 W. 12th Street, and performed publicly for the first time while sitting in with John Lee Hooker in Boston, where he lived for a time.
He helped form Television in 1973, a pioneering, experimental punk act known for its long guitar solos and improvised passages inspired by Lloyd’s time seeing acts like Hendrix, the Grateful Dead, The Allman Brothers Band, Led Zeppelin, Jeff Beck and The Who.
“I saw them about eight times around then, [including] at the Fillmore East when it was still The Village Theatre,” Lloyd told Relix in 2019 while describing his love of the Dead. “They played for so long that I made a bet with myself that I’d beat them and stay awake, but it never happened. Finally, I would leave at 3:30 a.m. and be like, ‘They’re never gonna stop’ It was rawer than the hippies back then; the hippies followed that and came up with flower-power. The Dead were the elder spokesmen for that movement, but not part of it. I went to a soundcheck and I didn’t have a ticket, and I asked Jerry—because they didn’t have security back then—if he could put me on the guest list. I yelled out at him: ‘I got an allowance, but I can’t buy a ticket.’ And he said, ‘Well, mine’s full of business people.’ Then he turned to Phil [Lesh] and said, ‘What about you?’ And Phil said, ‘I don’t know anybody in New York. What’s his name? I’ll put him down.’ So I had some backstage adventures then.”
Lloyd and Television singer/guitarist Tom Verlaine approached Hilly Kristal in person about playing his new Manhattan club on the Bowery, CBGB, becoming one of the first acts playing original music to appear at the famed venue in March 1974. He served as both a guitarist and songwriter on the band’s seminal 1977 release Marquee Moon and Adventure, before the band parted ways in 1978 He also participated in Television regroupings from 1991–1993, which resulted in a self-titled LP, and the band’s sporadic reunion runs beginning in 2001. He finally left the group in 2007 to focus on a solo career, before being diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma this past March. His cross-genre work inspired generations of indie-rock, punk, New Wave and post-jam musicians.
“There’s a big difference: Regret is a sad feeling, wanting to go back and have things be different, but remorse gives you an opportunity to change,” he told Relix in that interview. “Remorse is: ‘I’m gonna use that as a sounding board so I don’t do that again.’”
