Hey. Ho. Let's Go . . . Online
Why I'll always be a punk rocker.
I AM AN ONLINE PUNK ROCKER. I TURN 51 NEXT MONTH. I SEE NO CONFLICT HERE. * One of the more overused tenets of male Baby Boomerdom is the one handed down by St. Pete Townshend in 1965. It runs (all rise and repeat after me): "Hope I die before I get old." * The embarrassment, of course, is that most of us went ahead and got old anyway. Denying it won't change a thing. You can wear the ponytail with the business suit, but it's not going to turn your desk into a Harley. * This, however, is why the Internet was invented. Before the Net, middle-aged men had to gather in physical groups to sustain the illusion that they were still culturally relevant. The fishing weekends, the garage bands, gathering the boys to drink beer under the pretense of one sporting endeavor or another - all require intense schedule clearance and spousal negotiation. That means they're hobbies. * Eternal youth isn't a hobby, though. It should be able to be tapped into at all hours, running concurrently to that which our wives and children foolishly insist is "real life." If it's secret, all the better. * Enter the online user interest group.
Back in the mid-1990s, as the Internet was morphing from a secret computer-department handshake into a cultural and commercial juggernaut, I discovered a few sites devoted to my favorite rock group. Every aging boomer boy has "his band," the one that keeps him puttering along forever young as the culture zips past in the left-hand lane. For me it's Television. Haven't heard of them? Good. It means they're still cool and, through a complex and deeply necessary psychological process, so am I.
To some men, the most important cultural scene is the one they just missed. Example: I arrived in New York City in late 1979, as the fumes of the initial punk moment were evaporating. CBGB and other protean dives 'n' discos were still around, but the bands that had made their names there no longer played them. Patti Smith and the Ramones, Blondie and Talking Heads had all clambered out of the Lower East Side to change the world and, to an extent, popular music.
Television didn't play much either, but mostly because they were busy breaking up. Arguably the first rock group to play the famed CBGB - the band members fraudulently convinced owner Hilly Kristal they knew their way around the country, bluegrass, and blues for which the club was named - Television was at one point the most hyped outfit in the whole scene. After two prized but dismally selling albums, they were roadkill. Nor should this have been a surprise, since Television's sound wasn't pop and it wasn't really what came to be known as punk either. Instead, the group - anchored by twin lead guitarists Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd - purveyed an unholy combination of free jazz, downtown attitude, and molten post-Deadhead ax wankery. The title song of their debut album, "Marquee Moon," clocked in at a very un-Ramones-like 10 minutes and 47 seconds. It was, and is, glorious.
Oh, and Verlaine's singing voice? The best way to describe it is a stressed-out rooster being put through a laundry mangler. An acquired taste, yes, but once acquired you don't know how you lived without it.
The group was on the outs when I first heard of them; I came to Television, in fact, by way of Verlaine's 1979 self-titled solo album, which in turn I came to by way of David Bowie covering "Kingdom Come" on one of his albums. So the sense that the party had broken up just as I showed up at the door with a case of Genny Cream Ale was acute.
But what could a poor boy do except play air guitar along with the records, catch Verlaine whenever he toured, and maintain the flame with a dwindling band of acolytes? For a while there it seemed like my friend Gerard and I were the only ones who remembered the group at all.
THEN I FOUND THE WONDER, named for Verlaine's 1990 solo album. Reached at thewonder.co.uk, it's a Television-centric website launched in 1999 by a British Television fan named Keith Allison, now 53. When I stumbled upon it, the site was the newest and most graphically ambitious of a clutch of online TV outposts, several of which have since been folded under its all-inclusive umbrella. There was an annotated discography of legal and extra-legal recordings (bootlegs, if you must), links to press reviews, photos, a rock genealogy, and so forth.
Lurking behind all of this, I discovered, was a community, and the novelty is that it was global. Instead of Gerard and me, suddenly there were Englishmen and Brazilians and guys from Florida and women from Texas, all sharing our obsession with the perfect live version of "Marquee Moon."
Well, so what? In this there was nothing to differentiate The Wonder and the related Television online newsgroup (tv.obbard.com), begun in 1998 by a Yale graduate named Phil Obbard, from a million other sites devoted to everyone else's favorite pop artists. This, in fact, was the masterstroke and the curse of the Internet: that fans of the biggest artists (the Beatles, Dylan) and the most willfully obscure (the Shaggs) could corral the faithful into self-sustaining communities that acknowledged nothing but genius (the artists') and loyalty (ours).
I dabbled in other rock fan sites, I confess it. The Kinks and John Cale both host vigorous online parasite communities, and the venerable EnoWeb (enoweb.co.uk), established in 1993, proved a valuable rabbit hole in my pursuit of the mysterious musician/producer/giant throbbing brain known as Brian Eno. (It was through one of his e-mails posted at EnoWeb, by the way, that I learned how most pop artists react to their fan sites: with vaguely grateful terror.)
But I kept coming back to The Wonder and the Television newsgroup because, to be frank, I liked the company. With any online community there are the gabbers and the lurkers - the people who do most of the talking and those who post once a year, if at all. I found myself leaning toward the latter, partially because as a member of the working press I felt suspect, mostly because everyone else seemed to know more than me.
Through the TV community I found myself learning of other bands and sounds. I witnessed online spats and the newsgroup equivalent of makeup sex. There was an anonymous woman who claimed to be one of Verlaine's ex-girlfriends; she left in a huff after a few years. Tribute albums were put together by those members with working bands, and a CD trading network arose. I started getting Jiffy envelopes in the mail, their return addresses offering glimpses of lives lived away from the hive-mind of adulation.
There was one guy who cooked up a maddening nine-part Television quiz designed to make the rest of us look like Eagles fans. (It's at thewonder.co.uk/quiz.htm; good luck.) The most charmingly impassioned of us all, he'd post pleas for technical help and musings that would veer off topic before looping deftly back to the subject at hand. This guy, it turned out, lived in the Boston area, and when I moved here in 2002, I got to know him a bit. Verlaine and the rest of the band had mended fences to the point of gigging a few times a year - there had been a reunion album in 1992, followed by limited-release live recordings and much on-again/off-again intra-band tension - and I found myself meeting Leo face to face at a Boston performance.
What was I expecting? A fifth Ramone, maybe: stovepipe legs, spindly arms, a blast of dark, anarchic energy. Instead, here was this gentle soul with a weathered, inquisitive face under a beret. The greatest shock was that he was shy.
No, the greater shock was that Leo was old - or exactly as old as I had convinced myself I no longer was when surfing the Television ether. It hit me that our online avatars are more a matter of mind than of pixels, and that the most powerful ones aren't found in Second Life or other graphic virtual worlds but in our heads. They're the magic mirrors we construct to keep us feeling like the fairest punks of all, until we pass a real mirror, and the jig is up in a puff of smoke.
This is an understandable quandary, if laughable to anyone looking in from the outside. We were the generation defined by our youth and by the youthful energy with which we changed music, culture, the world. It all kept changing, though, and we stopped, brought to ground by kids and compromise. It happened to our parents and it will happen to our children, but it wasn't supposed to happen to us. That was the promise, and that was the lie.
The bitter truth is that popular music stops speaking to each of us at a certain point, and then the standard options are acceptance, dismissal, or blind panic. (I experience all three when my 11-year-old kicks the car radio over to KISS 108 and Flo Rida gives that big booty another smack.) Online fan groups provide two additional possibilities: willful ignorance and community filtering.
In the end, the wonder of The Wonder isn't that it stops time and lets me relive a cultural moment I was never part of (although that's nice). Rather, it helps me spin the CBGB era forward while reminding me I'm not alone in my love for this narrow piece of the past and its ritual minutia. We share the places where the DNA of "our group" resurfaces in the current pop marketplace - a guitar squall here, a Verlaine mention there - and swell with we-were-here-first pride as Marquee Moon inches higher and higher on lists of the Best Albums of All Time.
Better is knowing the Wonder boys and girls themselves, as well and as little as I do. It took me a while, but I realized I was keeping young not by listening to the band I love but by listening to the people who listen to it.
Staff writer Ty Burr is a film critic for the Globe. E-mail comments to tburr@globe.com.
