Richard Lloyd, guitarist of New York rock band Television, dies at 75
Richard Lloyd, co-founding guitarist of New York rock band Television, has died at 75 years old.
According to a statement from his family given to Rolling Stone, Lloyd passed away on Saturday, 7 November, at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, after a battle with cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile duct.
After his diagnosis in March this year, by August, a GoFundMe was launched to help cover his medical costs after the illness forced him to stop touring. Bassist Sean Seymour, who played in Lloyd’s solo band, said touring remained his main source of income.
At that time, Seymour also revealed the severity of Lloyd’s condition. “He has tumours in his liver, including one located dangerously close to a major blood vessel,” Seymour said. “Because of its location, doctors cannot safely operate to remove it at this time.”
Born in Pittsburgh on 25 October 1951, Lloyd first started out on the drums before switching to guitar. As a teenager he became a devoted gig-goer, catching greats including Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, The Who, The Jeff Beck Group and The Grateful Dead. He left school early and moved to Boston, where he ended up playing with John Lee Hooker, before spells in Los Angeles and then New York.
In New York in 1973, Richard Lloyd met Tom Verlaine, then still Tom Miller. They formed that year, with Verlaine, bassist Richard Hell and drummer Billy Ficca. They became fixtures at the legendary New York club and punk-rock/new wave epicentre CBGB, alongside the likes of Patti Smith, The Ramones and Blondie. Bassist Fred Smith took over from Richard Hell in 1975, after which their debut single, Little Johnny Jewel, arrived, followed by their debut album, 1977’s Marquee Moon.
Television made one more album, Adventure, in 1978, before splitting amid tensions between Lloyd and Verlaine. Lloyd’s first solo album, Alchemy, followed in 1979.
He went on to release nine solo records in total, the most recent being 2018’s The Countdown and played on records by artists including Matthew Sweet, Stephan Eicher and John Doe of LA punk band X. He also published a memoir in 2018, Everything Is Combustible: Television, CBGB’s and Five Decades of Rock and Roll, a loose run of short pieces that covered his early years, his heroin addiction and his time alongside Hendrix, Keith Richards and the CBGB crowd.
Television reunited in the early ’90s, releasing a self-titled album in 1992 and touring on and off for the next few years. Lloyd left the band in 2007. Verlaine died in 2023, which Lloyd later said made him the last functioning member of the band. He said that gave him a responsibility to the fans and so he returned to playing Television songs live after years of avoiding them.
Lloyd was also candid about what the band meant to him. “I wanted to make a dent in rock history,” he told Guitar World in December last year. “That was my goal, and that came true.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
