Album: Marquee Moon
Year: 1977
. . .
We have a timer in our kitchen, and when it goes off, it makes a two-note repeating pattern: “beep-beep beep-beep beep-beep” and I swear to gods that every single time, I start singing “beedlebeedlebeedlebeedlebeed” in time to it. Just like the opening of “Marquee Moon.”
Coming out of spastic frenzy of “Friction,” the opening of “Marquee Moon” is as precision-tooled as it possibly gets: every single note is exactly where it should be, and each player gets to introduce himself.
First off, let’s welcome Tom Verlaine, who is playing a simple two-chord riff at a nice measured tempo! Then, here is Richard Lloyd, wrapping a singalong hooky lick around those two chords! And now, it’s Fred Smith, playing a two note bassline filling the holes Verlaine has left between each of his riffs! And finally, with a falling-down-the-steps drum roll, please enjoy how Billy Ficca’s hi-hat and kickdrum mirror Smith while his snare cracks with Verlaine!
It’s best to let it all wash over you: listen too hard and you might get vertigo, and for heaven’s sake, don’t try to reverse-engineer it, that’s how people go mad. All in all, it could be the background music for one of those old WB shorts that showed some kind of automated factory process where if somebody had stuck a screwdriver or crowbar and stopped any part of it, things would go flying every which way, causing injuries and maybe even deaths.
Luckily, Tom Verlaine knew this, because soon after all of this got going, he distracted us from the high-wire act his band was pulling off by singing words that were even weirder.
I remember
Ooh, how the darkness doubled
I recall
Lightning struck itself
I was listening
Listening to the rain
I was hearing
Hearing something else
After each verse, there’s a guitar led fanfare exploding out of the precision-tooled verses, Verlaine and Lloyd playing in perfect sync, Ficca running his drums in circles around them, Smith holding it all together until they stop, just for a sec, as if to announce: “Here’s the motherfucking chorus of motherfucking ‘Marquee Moon,’ motherfuckers!”
Life in the hive puckered up my night
A kiss of death, the embrace of life
Well, there I stand ‘neath the marquee moon
Just waiting
Gods! Listen to how the guitars wail and scream around Verlaine, the drums crash and roll, and how the best thing of all of it is Smith’s bass hooks, until the all crash together as Verlaine resignedly sings “just waiting.”
One of the coolest tricks of “Marquee Moon” is how something different happens after every single chorus. After this first one, they all stop for a second — “Marquee Moon” is a lot of things, but it’s not about groove or flow — and instead of the guitars picking things back up, it’s the rhythm section, Ficca and Smith just setting the stage for another verse where everything is in its place.
I spoke
To a man down at the tracks
And I ask him
How he don’t go mad
He said “Look here, Junior
Don’t you be so happy
And for Heaven’s sake
Don’t you be so sad”
The lyrics of “Marquee Moon,” of course, are an impressionistic mood with the darkness doubling and lightning striking itself and Verlaine being so caught up in his own head not even the rain — and it’s always the rain — can take him out of whatever nightmarish hellscape he’s envisioning. Or maybe, he’s just looking at mid-1970’s New York City, what with its Sons of Sams and bankruptcies and awesome graffiti artists and blackouts and baseball riots and where all the TV footage is always 47 people crammed into a five square-foot space. And it’s always nighttime. Always. There just wasn’t daytime in New York City in the mid-1970s, like Sauron’s eternal darkness creeping out from Central Park.
Life in the hive puckered up my night
A kiss of death, the embrace of life
Well, there I stand ‘neath the marquee moonHesitating
After that second chorus, it’s Lloyd’s time to solo, and he just explodes out of Verlaine’s “hesitating” with no hesitation at all, like he’s running down Bowery street full blast after a mugger who’s stolen his mojo — or more likely, his smack — until he hits a brick wall, setting up the final verse.
Well, the Cadillac
It pulled out of the graveyard
Pulled up to me
All they said, “Get in”
“Get in”
Then the Cadillac
It puttered back into the graveyard
Me
I got out again
Apparently, Verlaine originally wrote 20 verses of “Marquee Moon” — like Bob Dylan and “Like A Rolling Stone” — and who knows why he picked the three he did for the final song, but one the great unexplained things about this verse is what he was doing standing outside of the graveyard in the first place. Did he know that the Cadillac was just going to turn around and go back into the graveyard? Not to mention, didn’t he learn to never get into cars with strangers? Especially Cadillacs? Especially Cadillacs that were just leaving graveyards? Only to turn around and go back in? Did they forget something in the graveyard and had to go back and get it? Like maybe Richard Lloyd’s smack?
Life in the hive puckered up my night
A kiss of death, the embrace of life
Over there I stand ‘neath the Marquee Moon
I ain’t waitin’, uh uh
And now it’s time for Tom Verlaine’s guitar solo — my favorite guitar solo on any record — and there is nothing better than when I’m driving somewhere, and “Marquee Moon” comes on and there’s still over 12 minutes left in my drive, because that means I can listen to that solo in all of its glory and splendor yet again. Still, I don’t even know how I can describe it, when all of the things I’ve been reading to prep for this exact moment use words like “mixolydian” to describe it. And every time I see that word I wonder “wait, was he making great cocktails out of seemingly unrelated elements?”
Which, yeah, he kinda was.
Of course, they don’t just jump into it instead both Verlaine and Lloyd are playing the two-note kitchen timer riff for a bit, with Fred Smith paying the counterpoint on his bass and Billy Ficca skittering behind them, and only once it’s all established does Verlaine come in sideways laughing with his first low electric salvo of notes, which if you listen carefully enough you can actually see, and then at first he repeats himself, then slightly different groups of notes — leaving entire universes of space in between each blast of notes like Miles Davis on “Shh/Peaceful,” — until he doesn’t
Then, Tom Verlaine starts bringing his notes closer to each other, so it isn’t groupings of notes but individual ones each rolling from the other but still having enough time to say “hey there!” to the note that preceded it and wave “bye!” to the note that comes after, but still it’s all measured and stately. Until it isn’t. Because suddenly, and somehow imperceptably, it all starts getting higher and higher and more and more intense — like in Breaking Bad or The Sopranos where they ratchet up the tension in a episode to the point where it’s unbearable and in the next one they ratchet it up a little bit more — and you might even miss that Billy Ficca is joining in the fun, throwing in random rolls and fills and fills and rolls while Verlaine continues winding his guitar higher and higher, if not faster and faster and at some point he start arcing his guitar skyward outside of the atmosphere out of site out of the world out of everything, and then and then and then, out of nowhere the whole band is in lockstep playing the same thing, and it’s like thunder striking itself.
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
And suddenly Ficca breaks ranks and slightly relieves the tension, skittering out of the song like a surprised nest of rats on a dark NYC street, like all of the syncopation was just too much, but everybody is still all together, getting just a bit higher.
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam! Bam-bam-bam!
Near the end, Fred Smith’s bass makes its escape, but Verlaine and Lloyd remain in perfect unison until they explode into a million shards of light, Verlaine’s guitar twittering around Lloyd’s glassine arpeggios. It’s beyond lovely, beyond time and space.
And it was recorded in a single take. Because of course it was. When producer Andy Johns wanted to do it again, Tom Verlaine refused, even though Billy Ficca thought what they had just done was a rehearsal. Think about that. You know what? No, don’t. It’s too mind-bending. Even though I’m (not at all) paid to think about these things too hard; it’s still fucking with me to realize that even though they’d been playing “Marquee Moon” since the Richard Hell days, and even though the full band thunder at the end is pre-ordained, “Marquee Moon” was different every single time they ever played it. And this was the take they captured. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.
On my original album of Marquee Moon, it essentially ended there: everything kind of fades away, Billy Ficca picks up the beat, and “Marquee Moon” fades out just as Verlaine reprises the opening verse.
So imagine my surprise in 1989 when I bought the CD of Marquee Moon — Along with the recently-released Don’t Tell a Soul, it was the first CD I ever bought — and discovered that not only was there a full verse that got faded out, there was even an actual ending!! Which, of course, wouldn’t surprise anybody who encountered “Marquee Moon” for the first time in the 21 century.
Interestingly enough, “Marquee Moon” was released as a single in the UK, with the first 3:15 on the A-side — basically everything through Lloyd’s guitar solo — and the rest on the b-side. And it charted! I mean, it stalled out at #30, but still.
Anyways, it also brought side one of Marquee Moon to such an amazing end that it would be impossible to top. And, in fact, for awhile I played Marquee Moon side two first, just so I wouldn’t have to listen to another Marquee Moon song after “Marquee Moon,” but that really didn’t work, either.
“Marquee Moon”
“Marquee Moon” performed by Tom Verlaine, 1984
“Marquee Moon” live in Rio, 2005
Did you miss a Certain Song? Follow me on Twitter: @barefootjim
The Certain Songs Database
A filterable, searchable & sortable somewhat up to date database with links to every “Certain Song” post I’ve ever written.
Certain Songs Spotify playlist
(It’s recommended that you listen to this on Spotify as their embed only has 200 songs.)
Support “Certain Songs” with a donation on Patreon
Go to my Patreon page