Richard Lloyd, Television Guitarist, Dead at 75

Richard Lloyd, co-founding guitarist of Television and an architect of post-punk, has died at the age of 75. Lloyd revealed in August he had been diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma, a serious form of bile duct cancer. According to Rolling Stone, he passed away Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Lloyd was best known as one of the musical minds behind the 1970s punk band and an artist with such alluring musicality to stand on his own, having released nine well-received solo albums over a 50-year career. Growing up in Pittsburgh before moving to New York, Lloyd picked up the guitar as a teenager and learned alongside the apocryphal musician Velvert Turner, who claimed to be a friend and guitar student of Jimi Hendrix, though that assertion is generally regarded as unlikely. But it’s a tale that Lloyd believed, positioning himself as an understudy of Hendrix through Turner. Lloyd even said Hendrix punched him backstage after he accidentally insulted the Stratocaster wielder. Lloyd was an influential figure in the nascent New York punk scene of the mid-1970s, devising a guitar style that injected the musical movement’s raw, aggressive string work with harmonic complexity and a more thoughtful approach. He joined up with Richard Hell, Tom Verlaine and Billy Ficca in 1973 to solidify Television’s lineup, with Hell leaving in 1975, replaced by Fred Smith. Lloyd’s guitar playing was instrumental in the band carving out a place in the CBGB cohort. CBGB, the famous club that nurtured punk rock in its youngest years, may not have become the haven it grew into without Lloyd. The guitarist has claimed over the years that he was the spark behind CBGB becoming a punk club after stumbling across the newly opened venue and working with Television’s manager at the time to get them a gig there in 1974. Other punk bands, musicians and outsider artists like The Ramones, Blondie, The Talking Heads and Patti Smith followed. In a 2007 interview, Lloyd said “CBGBs is the most famous rock ‘n’ roll club to have ever existed and I fucking created it! I was the invisible force behind it.” What he did at CBGB was akin to putting on a three-year long party “I threw along with my friends and all those other bands that would otherwise have day jobs if it weren’t for me.” His guitar playing and the mark it made on punk was a more measurable claim. On the opening title track of Television’s debut album Marquee Moon, Lloyd’s lead work and rare use of power chords in a genre that subsisted on them created the template for angular melodies, harmonic dissonance and off-kilter playing for post-punk bands like Fugazi and swayed a host of other groups such as R.E.M. and The Pixies. Television, with Lloyd as one of their integral parts, left an outsized impression for a band that only lasted from 1973 to 1978 in their initial run and released two albums. The band reunited in the 1990s and put out a self-titled album before going on hiatus and coming back together in the 2000s. Lloyd left the band on good terms in 2007 while he pursued his own music. Lloyd found critical success as a solo artist with his 1986 solo album Field of Fire and its follow up the next year Real Time. Music journalists raved about his distinct guitar chops and the way this skill created a unique sound palette for his songs. The guitarist also became a go-to musician for power-pop songwriter Matthew Sweet, playing on his seminal album Girlfriend from 1991 and many others. He toured and recorded throughout the 2000s, releasing his last album The Countdown in 2018. Despite his influence on musicians and bands as well as his clear love for his instrument and crafting songs, he said in a 2000 interview that he didn’t aspire to become a musician. He just was one by default. “I’m a musician by refusing to grow up, and not wanting to undertake any of the other disciplines that might have been necessitated by having a goal,” Lloyd said. “I lived in absolute terror of growing up, and I found the one thing that you could actually do and do well and it prevented you from growing up.”