Alchemy Generation: Richard Lloyd 70

OK, maybe no one will see this, but this page is 8 years old today so it seemed wrong to let that day pass without saying something.

I know I have been gone from here 6 months and in the comments of that last post, I tried to explain why. The full-time job of doing this at the high level I try to do it at just got to be too much time investment.

I also got tired of being stuck at 666 posts, devilishly good as that might have been.

I've still been working on stuff -- in particular a huge project collecting, in one place, the almost 100 non-album tracks of a certain seminal band, who shall remain nameless until the end of November -- but for the last half a year I've put this page down out of sheer exhaustion with it and everything it requires to at least not suck at it.

In short, this bootleg bag is the most pissed-in pool every created by humans, and to try and be the goalkeeper poolboy that struggles in vain to clean it can get really stressful and mighty time consuming.

Anyway it's my birthday so I can do whatever the fuck I want to do, and I want to celebrate someone exactly 15 years my senior who's been on my internal playlist in one iteration or another since teen times, back in 1811 or something.

People know him from the band Television, but I always felt he was too easily overshadowed in that group by the other guitarist.

We'll hear him here way back 40-something years ago when he had just split Television and made his first (yes it's tremendous even now, decades on) album on his own.

This is a very abrasive and in-your-face performance of the majority of that record, broadcast as part of "New York City Music Week" live over the old WPIX-FM.

There's even a quick interview at the end with Blondie's Debbie Harry & Chris Stein outside the venue, discussing the NYC scene of the time.

So yeah, in case you haven't figured it out yet, Richard Lloyd -- guitar crusher of our lifetimes -- is the big 70 today, can you believe that? I feel older every second.

Richard Lloyd

Hurrah 

NYC, NY

9.23.1979

01 Misty Eyes

02 In the Night

03 Alchemy

04 Number Nine

05 Woman's Way

06 Blue and Grey

07 Pretend/Should've Known Better

08 John Ogle interviews Debbie Harry & Chris Stein  

Total time: 40:04

Richard Lloyd - guitar, harmonica, piano & vocals

James Mastro - guitar

Matthew McKenzie - guitar

Fred Smith - bass

Vinny DeNunzio - drums

master off-air FM cassette of the original WPIX-FM broadcast of "NYC Music Week 1979"

channel-balanced and retracked by EN, October 2021

267 MB FLAC/October 2021 archive link

This is around on a bootleg all over the place, but I seriously doubt they took the effort to fix the channel balance and retrack the thing like I did. I think they skipped right to the "profit passively off music you didn't create" part.

I'm gonna try to finish the things I've been doing so I can share the fruits of my (wholly uncompensated) labors here with whoever still visits this place, coming in the near future.

OK? Thanks for reading this and happy milestone birthday to Richard Lloyd, who was smart enough to turn off the Television when it was longer fun to watch, and created his own equally-as-must-see programming in the process.--J.