Richard Lloyd, the founding Television guitarist whose fluid, jagged playing helped define the sound of New York’s nascent punk scene, has died at his Chattanooga, Tn., home after being diagnosed in March with cholangiocarcinoma, a serious form of bile duct cancer. He was 75.
According to a GoFundMe fundraiser organized by Sean Seymour, Lloyd’s bandmate in the Richard Lloyd Group, Lloyd developed tumors in his liver, including one dangerously close to a major blood vessel. He spent time in the ICU seven times, including two bouts with sepsis and complications involving his liver and kidneys. Among one of the first donors: Lloyd’s CBGB-era colleague Patti Smith, who contributed $5,000 to the cause.
Lloyd was born in Pittsburgh but moved to Greenwich Village with his parents at age six. With aspirations to become a musician, he left New York and arrived in Los Angeles in 1971. Lloyd heard about how the New York Dolls had taken up residency at the Mercer Arts Center, and that some sort of emerging underground music scene was happening.
As an eventual founding member of Television alongside the late Tom Verlaine, Lloyd was at the center of the downtown New York music community that coalesced around CBGB in the 1970s. Television’s Marquee Moon would go on to become one of rock’s most influential albums, its interlocking guitars helping establish a vocabulary that extended well beyond punk.
Indeed, geography found Television swept up in that first wave, but Verlaine and Lloyd hardly approached their guitars like angry young men. The pair’s fleet-fingered, call-and-response style emphasized long jams, oddball solos, and the spaces between notes — in other words, as punks go, these guys were closer to the Grateful Dead.