Richard Lloyd, the Television co-founder and guitarist who helped bring a deft virtuosity to punk’s stripped-down fury, has died at the age of 75.
Lloyd’s family said in a statement that the guitarist died Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end,” his family said in a statement to Rolling Stone, adding that Lloyd died from cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct cancer.
Lloyd was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in March. According to a GoFundMe set up to help Lloyd cover medical expenses and other costs, the guitarist developed tumors in his liver, including one that was so close to a major blood vessel, his doctors were unable to operate and remove it.
Television were one of the most innovative bands of punk’s first wave, thanks largely to the twin guitar attack of Lloyd and frontman Tom Verlaine. While many of their peers perfected a loud, fast pummel of power chords, Lloyd and Verlaine (who died in 2023) developed an intricate interplay of riffs and licks, and never shied from spiraling into headier realms inspired by jazz, art-rock, and even jam bands.
Lloyd and Verlaine’s stellar guitar work anchored Television’s seminal debut, Marquee Moon, which was released in 1977. That album cemented Television’s place in the punk pantheon, even though their output otherwise consisted of just two more albums, 1978’s Adventure and 1992’s Television.
Lloyd was born Oct. 25, 1951 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised largely in New York City. His first instrument was the drums, but he was fascinated by the guitar and decided to switch after a “hallucinatory experience.” “My drums lost all their color — like in the Wizard of Oz in Kansas — and everything became grayscale,” Lloyd wrote in his 2017 memoir, Everything Is Combustible. “The drums didn’t sound good anymore, and I heard a voice — an auditory hallucination that told me, ‘You need to play a melody instrument.’”
One of Lloyd’s first guitar partners was Velvert Turner, a musician from Brooklyn, who himself was developing his guitar skills under the tutelage of Jimi Hendrix. After dropping out of high school, Lloyd moved to Boston, where he played with blues legend John Lee Hooker. He also spent some time traveling and living in Los Angeles, but eventually moved back to New York City and embedded himself in the proto-punk scene there.
Television formed not long after Lloyd returned to NYC in 1973. His friend, the manager Terry Ork, took him to see Verlaine play at a club, and Lloyd knew instantly they would make a great musical pair. As he put it to The Stranger in 2015, “I saw Tom play and I thought, ‘He’s got it.’ And I knew I had it. But I was missing something and so was he. What he was missing, I could supply. And vice versa.”
Explaining what he had that Verlaine didn’t, Lloyd continued, “The fleshing out of all the songs. All the filigrees and arabesques on Marquee Moon are all mine. Even though the solos are maybe different, during the verses, when Tom’s singing, I’m playing all the melody. I brought a rock & roll heart.”
Joining Lloyd and Verlaine in the first iteration of Television was Richard Hell on bass and Billy Fica on drums. Hell eventually left and was replaced by Fred Smith, who’d been playing with Blondie. The band soon became a fixture at legendary punk clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. They released a debut single, “Little Johnny Jewel,” in 1975, before signing with Elektra Records, which released Marquee Moon two years later.
One of Lloyd’s most impressive contributions to Marquee Moon was his idea to double track some of his most intricate guitar parts. As he wrote in Everything Is Combustible, he thought it was “sad and pathetic” to go into a recording studio and come out with a record that just sounded like a band playing live in a room. Wanting to give the record something extra, he insisted to Verlaine and co-producer Andy Johns that he could replicate the part he’d laid down for “Venus” note-for-note to give the song more depth.
“When I came back into the room they were saying they couldn’t believe it, but it sounded perfect,” Lloyd wrote. “Tom wanted me to do it on everything, but I knew that it was a kind of ear candy that should come in and out of the various songs to make it a real record. So, I refused to do it in some instances, and in others I did double or more.”
For example, on “Guiding Light,” he laid down eight different guitar tracks “which is why it sounds powerful and thick. I did my very best to make it a record — not a live document.”
Despite having the backing of a major label like Elektra, Marquee Moon failed to make a commercial dent, and the band’s opening tour slot for Peter Gabriel scarcely created more fans. Not long after the release of Adventure in April 1978, the band broke up. The following year, Lloyd released a solo album, Alchemy, which earned some positive reviews, but also went nowhere commercially.
During this time, Lloyd’s drug use was spiraling out of control. In his memoir, the guitarist admitted to overdosing on numerous occasions, and compared his experiences in the early Eighties to the Great Depression. “I could hardly draw people to gigs and I was thoroughly addicted to heroin,” he wrote. It wasn’t until 1984 that Lloyd got sober, and two years later he released a second solo album, Field of Fire.
Lloyd would release seven more albums over the course of his career, including a live record, 1987’s Real Time; a collection of unreleased material, 2010’s Lodestones; and what would be his final solo album, 2018’s The Countdown. He also toured regularly, worked as a session musician — including gigs with Matthew Sweet and X’s John Doe — and gave guitar lessons.
While Lloyd was part of Television’s reunion in 1992 and rejoined the band again for a stint in the early 2000s, he left ahead of a 2007 tour commemorating the 30th anniversary of Marquee Moon. In that interview with The Stranger, Lloyd expressed frustration that the band wasn’t focused on doing new things; he said that, after the release of their 1992 self-titled album, the band wrote and demoed eight songs, but nothing would likely come of them because Verlaine had “run out of lyrics.”
Lloyd evinced a complicated relationship with Verlaine during his latter years. On the one hand, he would insist he loved Verlaine and wouldn’t have spent 35 years in a band with him if he didn’t, but also characterized him as difficult to work. Lloyd also remained upset that Verlaine took all of Television’s publishing, even though Lloyd said he contributed significantly to the band’s songwriting.
Though unafraid to voice these opinions, Lloyd insisted he wasn’t bitter. As he told The Stranger, “I didn’t get into this for the money. Some people did. I got into it to become a renowned guitarist who’s made an irrevocable impact on rock & roll history.”