I’ve played Television‘s Marquee Moon and Adventure to the point of exhaustion—I can barely stand listening to them anymore, regardless of how much I love the music on both albums—but for some reason I only recently got around to the live album Live at the Old Waldorf, San Francisco, 6/29/78. Rhino released it in 2003 (though CD copies seem to be going for lots of money on Amazon), and the show comes from the 1978 tour that was the band’s last until its members briefly reunited in the early 90s. The Blow-Up, a bootleg cassette of a show from the same tour, has been around for a while, and I’ve had a digital rip since college. I’m not sure if the Waldorf show is as good as what’s on Blow-Up, but the improvement in sound quality is substantial, and the band is loose, loud, and in the pocket throughout. It’s worth listening to the whole show, and you’ll probably want to after listening to the first song. The set opener is “The Dream’s Dream,” the snaky, hypnotizing closing track off of Adventure, but the version the band does live rocks out way harder than the studio version. Though lead singer and guitarist Tom Verlaine went on to have a decent solo career, listening to this show makes me lament that the band dissolved for an extended period of time right when they were at their peak as a live act. But at least we have this document of just how great a live band they were. The 12 O’Clock Track for the live version of “The Dream’s Dream” plus a Spotify embed of the whole album are available below.
