Love Comes In Spurts

There is curious pattern of listening. There are usually three alternate reactions upon first listening a song: you love it, you think it’s OK, or you hate. If you hate it, you usually don’t listen to it again. Chances are if you think it’s OK, after listening to it for another 10 times you’ll grow to like it to some degree. I don’t know why this is – perhaps we become more aware and perceptive of what we didn’t notice before. Perhaps our senses become number. Whatever it is, it almost always happens. The opposite happens for a song you absolutely love – sometimes it takes 10, 20, 30 listens, but eventually you’ll ease into a pattern of anticipation. And that is, after all, half of what makes a song beautiful – not the fact that you’re surprised at what happens, anyone can do that, but the fact that you don’t necessarily know the beauty you hear was coming, or know what form it takes. Once you know it’s coming, slowly the impact decreases, slowly but surely.

I’ve listened to Television’s song “Venus” for maybe, I don’t know, probably about 200, 250 times. For probably the last 49 plays before this most recent one (yes, it took that long) I’ve sunk into a pattern of surprisingly little reaction from the song. I still love it, I still find it beautiful, it still astounds me, despite the fact that I know every single guitar pluck by heart. Yet, it doesn’t astound me, doesn’t quite overwhelm me with beautiful sound like it did the first time. Well, the second time would be more accurate. I can actually recall how I discovered Television. It was summer, nearing the end of my freshman year in High School, sweltering of course, and amidst that heat somehow my teacher had enough energy to teach us about Hellenistic Greek art - and Venus De Milo. Somehow I remembered my father saying something way back when about a song about Venus De Milo. I can’t remember how I remembered it, because it must have been a random passing remark from two, three years before that. Yet somehow it stuck with me, and I remembered it that day. I arrived home and downloaded it from iTunes. Then I downloaded another song from the album, probably “See No Evil,” then another, and then finally the entire album a few days later. I listened to “Venus” the first time, and I liked it, perhaps even really liked it, but I hadn’t truly listened to it, I hadn’t truly understood what I was hearing. The second time it clicked. What I was listening to was near impossible to describe in words. It took my breath away. That day I listened to it about 20 times, and amazingly it never wore off. After every listen I would have been surprised my head wasn’t aching with some sort of traumatic bliss. It was that powerful.

And yet, how many listens later, and what’s happened? My ears had been slowly going numb into a pattern of complacency, but with little loss of breath. (Though I must admit, the other songs I hadn’t been wild about on the album – “Prove It,” “Guiding Light” – have slowly opened up my ears to sounds I hadn’t noticed before. “Guiding Light” used to be a fairly straightforward, pleasant ballad-like song, but now I notice its layering, its patterns and progressions and – brace yourselves – even its lyrics, something, despite my literary nature, I tend to place far behind a song’s sound in importance. The same thing for “Prove It.”) But today I listened to it again. Perhaps it was because I was much too tired, perhaps because it smelled like frying onions, perhaps just because I hadn’t listened to it in close to a week, which is an eternity for Marquee Moon. Whatever the reason, it opened up again. Suddenly I understood again why I had loved it so much in the first place. Maybe “understood” is the wrong word - this is not to say I hadn’t loved it all the time, but now I experienced it, felt why I loved it so much. Suddenly that traumatic bliss was back. But it’s probably not here to stay. As Richard Hell – who first began in Television alongside Tom Verlaine - once said, “Love comes in spurts.”

Picture Above: Television's 1977 "Prove It" b/w "Venus" single.