Television and Richard Hell — CBGB, New York City

Television — Tom Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, Billy Ficca, and Richard Hell — were among the first bands to play CBGB at 315 Bowery when the venue opened in December 1973, and their residency there through 1974 and 1975 helped establish the venue as the centre of New York's emerging punk and new wave scene. Richard Hell — born Richard Meyers — was Television's original bassist and the co-author of the look that British punk would appropriate wholesale: torn clothes held together with safety pins, spiky hair, an attitude of radical self-invention. Malcolm McLaren visited CBGB in 1975 and went home to London with Hell's aesthetic if not Hell himself.

Hell left Television to form the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders and then his own group the Voidoids, recording "Blank Generation" (1977) — a song and album that articulated punk's existential core with more intellectual precision than most of its contemporaries. Tom Verlaine's Television, meanwhile, developed an entirely different direction: their debut album "Marquee Moon" (1977) was built on long, interweaving guitar lines and Verlaine's literary, elliptical lyrics — a record that occupied its own unique space in the punk landscape and has only grown in critical estimation since.

The CBGB building at 315 Bowery is now a retail boutique, but the address remains a major landmark of New York music history. Television's "Marquee Moon" is regularly cited as one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Richard Hell continued writing — both music and fiction — after his musical career wound down. Tom Verlaine died on January 28, 2023, in New York City. The era they inhabited, and helped create, defined the aesthetic parameters of alternative music for the next forty years.