Richard Lloyd Dies: Guitarist With Influential Punk Pioneers Television Was 75

Richard Lloyd, whose intricate guitar work for the pioneering punk band Television was a fiery counterpart to the sinewy stylings of the band’s co-guitarist and singer Tom Verlaine, died today of the bile duct cancer called cholangiocarcinoma at his home in Chattanooga, Tenn. He was 75.

His death was reported by his family to The New York Times. Lloyd had been diagnosed with the cancer in March.

With his Television bandmates Verlaine, bassist Richard Hell (later replaced by Fred Smith) and drummer Billy Ficca, Lloyd was among the innovative, even revolutionary, New York bands in the mid-1970s to establish the East Village dive bar CBGB as the epicenter of a new downtown music scene. Along with Patti Smith and the Ramones, Television led the way in creating and developing a new sound – defined later (and loosely) as punk – that was often as literate and playful as it was sonically powerful.

Formed in 1973, Television grew out of the teenage friendship of two Delaware boys, Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers, who by the early ’70s had changed their names to, respectively, Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell and set about developing the spiky guitar sound and keening vocal style (courtesy Verlaine) that would reach its apotheosis in the band’s 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon.

By the time of their 1974 debut at CBGB, Verlaine and Hell had recruited Lloyd to be the group’s second guitarist, a move that gave Television its signature and distinctive dueling Strat-versus-Jazzmaster sound. Unlike the more power-chord-heavy guitar bombast of other bands on the scene, Television specialized in complicated, even byzantine interplay between the six-stringed instruments. And like Patti Smith, Verlaine sang lyrics that signified a devotion to poetry as surely as did his chosen name.

Born Richard John Alt on Oct. 25, 1951, in Pittsburgh, Lloyd grew up in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and began playing guitar before he hit his teens. He became a regular in the audience of the famed Fillmore East rock palace, mesmerized by the music of The Grateful Dead and other bands of the era. He would be forthcoming about working as a male hustler to support himself during the lean years.

With an early residency at CBGB, Television quickly won over audiences as well as fellow musicians like Patti Smith, Lou Reed and David Bowie, who had caught the band during a trip to New York and set about spreading the word to anyone who would listen. Bowie would later record the group’s song “Kingdom Come” for his 1980 Scary Monsters album

The band’s initial line-up didn’t last long, though, as the old friends Verlaine and Hell began to bicker over everything from their music to the way it was performed on stage. Hell quit in 1975 and formed a sort of punk supergroup called The Heartbreakers with ex-New York Dolls members Johnny Thunders and Jerry Nolan. He eventually left that group to form Richard Hell and the Voidoids.

Hell was replaced in Television by ex-Blondie bassist Fred Smith (not to be confused with Patti Smith’s husband Fred “Sonic” Smith).

Despite its quick success, Television called it quits in 1978, in part because of Lloyd’s increasingly dire heroin addiction and mental health issues. Lloyd would release nine solo albums after Television, and he and Verlaine, despite a prickly relationship, occasionally reunited the band. Neither guitarist would ever match the success or influence of Television in its genre-building heyday.

Verlaine died in 2023.

Lloyd is survived by wife Sheila O’Keefe Lloyd; son Dylan; and brother Eric Lloyd.