Richard Lloyd, Television's Virtuoso Guitarist, Dies at 75
Seven Lights
Richard Lloyd, the guitarist who co-founded Television and brought a virtuoso’s interplay to punk’s first wave, died Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He was 75. His family said the cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct cancer.
His wife, Sheila, and the family dog were with him at the end, his family said. “We are so very sad that Richard Lloyd has today passed away at the age of 75,” Television wrote in a statement on the band’s social media accounts, offering “deepest condolences” to his wife, family and friends. Johnny Marr and Lloyd Cole were among the musicians who paid tribute, remembering him as “a seeker and finder and a true inspiration.”
Lloyd was diagnosed with the cancer in March. A GoFundMe campaign established to cover his medical costs reported tumors in his liver, one so close to a major blood vessel that surgeons could not remove it. The band appealed to fans for financial support in August.
Richard Lloyd was born Oct. 25, 1951, in Pittsburgh and raised largely in New York. He took up drums first, then switched to the guitar after what he described in his 2017 memoir, “Everything Is Combustible,” as a hallucinatory experience. His drums, he wrote, “lost all their color, like in the Wizard of Oz in Kansas, and everything became grayscale.” After dropping out of high school he played briefly with the bluesman John Lee Hooker in Boston before returning to New York.
There in 1973 he joined Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca to form Television, among the first bands to play regularly at CBGB. “There were very few places to play, and there were no places to play if you played original music,” Lloyd told Consequence Sound in 2023.
Hell left before the band’s debut, “Marquee Moon,” released in 1977 with Fred Smith on bass. The twin guitar attack of Lloyd and Verlaine, drawing on jazz and art rock as much as punk, became the defining element of the record; its title track, more than ten minutes long, endured as a landmark of post-punk. “Adventure” followed in 1978, and the band broke up that year.
Television reunited in the early 1990s and released a self-titled third album in 1992. Lloyd left the group in the mid-2000s, released nine solo albums beginning with “Alchemy” in 1979, worked with Matthew Sweet and taught guitar privately in New York.
Verlaine died in January 2023 at 73; Smith died in February at 77. Lloyd is survived by his wife and a son, Dylan. No memorial arrangements were announced.