Anyone who has spent a significant amount of time listening to Television’s absolute classic Marquee Moon knows that it’s a life-changer. I first heard of it when reading the liner notes to a promo cassette (yes) for Matthew Sweet’s also-classic Girlfriend, where it made the top spot of Matthew’s “desert island discs”, and when I finally tracked down the album (it hadn’t been reissued on CD yet, or at least I couldn’t find it) I found myself not being able to not listen to it. The tape I dubbed for my car stayed lodged in the stereo for months, until it finally broke and I had to track down the CD. Skittery and taut in all the right places, lithe and dreamy everywhere else, the record takes late 70’s proto-punk and stretches it out on the rack, and in the holes where the taffy’s pulled apart they smother it with hot guitar and the dripping bark of Tom Verlaine. If nothing else the record makes you believe in the guitar solo again, and Marquee Moon rescued me from long and ill advised affair with house music and like an adulterer who had realized the shame of his infidelity, I fell back in love with my beautiful electric guitar. This was a long time ago.

Saturday night at Firehouse 13, a group from Boston called The Cult Of Point Break Society will be performing the album in its entirety, as a charity benefit for Coalition of the Willing, a group raising money to build wells and schools in southern Sudan. The group has covered classic albums in the past, such as Neil Young’s Tonight’s The Night and Big Star’s #1 Record. They have a couple of convincing recordings on their Myspace, so check them and get to the show! Firehouse 13 Presents: Cult Of Point Break Society covering Television’s Marquee Moon. 8pm, $5

Tags: fhxiii, lightning stuck itself, marquee moon, Television

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