Richard Lloyd, Television’s Guitarist, Dead at 75

Richard Lloyd, co-founder and guitarist of the band Television, died at age 75, the New York Times reports. He was diagnosed with cholangiocarcinoma in March. Lloyd was an integral part of New York’s CBGB scene — a music club in the East Village where many punk musicians got their start. Television was no different. The band at the time (Tom Verlaine, Richard Hell, Billy Ficca, and Lloyd) began performing in New York, mostly at CBGB, and paved the way for more rock bands to perform at the club. “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. “This is what we were up against. If you were lucky, you could get an opening slot once every six months at the Bottom Line or something. Being a local act playing original music was just unheard of.” Eventually, Hell left the group before the release of their first album, Marquee Moon, an album still regarded as one of the best rock albums of all time and the blueprint for alt rock music.

Television broke up shortly after their second album, Adventure, in 1978. Lloyd released three solo albums before the band reunited in 1991 to release their last album — Lloyd released nine solo albums in his lifetime. He left the band in 2006 to focus on his solo work and taught guitar privately to students in New York.