Richard Lloyd Dies at 75: The Television Guitarist Who Helped Rewrite Rock

Richard Lloyd, the Television co-founder and guitarist who brought real virtuosity to punk's first wave, has died at 75. His family told Rolling Stone he died Saturday morning, November 7, at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. "His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end," the family said. The cause was cholangiocarcinoma, a bile duct cancer he was diagnosed with in March.

If you've ever played a clean, bright, interlocking guitar part over a downtown-sounding groove, you owe the man something. Probably a lot.

The other half of Marquee Moon

In 1970s New York, plenty of bands were perfecting loud, fast and three chords. Television went the other way. Lloyd and frontman Tom Verlaine, who died in 2023, built songs out of conversation: riffs answering licks, lines weaving around each other, solos that drifted toward jazz and art rock without ever losing the snarl. Marquee Moon, released in 1977, is the proof, and it still sounds like nobody else.

Lloyd was blunt about his share of it. "The fleshing out of all the songs. All the filigrees and arabesques on Marquee Moon are all mine," he told The Stranger in 2015. "Even though the solos are maybe different, during the verses, when Tom's singing, I'm playing all the melody. I brought a rock & roll heart."

Studio brain, rock and roll heart

One of his biggest moves on that record was a studio one. In his 2017 memoir, Everything Is Combustible, Lloyd wrote that he found it "sad and pathetic" to make a record that just sounded like a band in a room. So he told Verlaine and co-producer Andy Johns he could double his intricate "Venus" part note for note. They didn't believe it until they heard it.

He also knew when to stop. "I knew that it was a kind of ear candy that should come in and out of the various songs to make it a real record," he wrote. On "Guiding Light," he stacked eight guitar tracks, "which is why it sounds powerful and thick. I did my very best to make it a record — not a live document."

That's a lesson worth stealing: doubling is seasoning, not the meal.

From drums to Hendrix's orbit

Lloyd was born October 25, 1951, in Pittsburgh and raised largely in New York City. He started on drums until, as he described it in his memoir, a "hallucinatory experience" drained the color out of the kit and a voice told him, "You need to play a melody instrument." One of his early guitar partners was Brooklyn's Velvert Turner, who was learning from Jimi Hendrix. Lloyd later played in Boston with John Lee Hooker before heading back to New York in 1973.

That's where manager Terry Ork took him to see Verlaine. "I saw Tom play and I thought, 'He's got it.' And I knew I had it. But I was missing something and so was he," Lloyd said. With Richard Hell on bass and Billy Ficca on drums, later with Fred Smith replacing Hell, Television became a fixture at CBGB and Max's Kansas City, cut "Little Johnny Jewel" in 1975 and signed to Elektra.

After Television

Marquee Moon didn't sell, and the band broke up not long after 1978's Adventure. Lloyd's 1979 solo debut, Alchemy, drew good reviews and little else. He has been open that the early '80s were rough, writing that he was "thoroughly addicted to heroin." He got sober in 1984 and kept working: Field of Fire in 1986, the live Real Time in 1987, Lodestones in 2010 and his final solo album, The Countdown, in 2018. He did sessions with Matthew Sweet and X's John Doe, toured regularly and taught guitar.

He rejoined Television for the 1992 reunion album and again in the early 2000s, then left before the 2007 Marquee Moon anniversary tour.

The legacy

Lloyd never pretended the business treated him fairly, but he said he wasn't bitter. "I didn't get into this for the money," he told The Stranger. "I got into it to become a renowned guitarist who's made an irrevocable impact on rock & roll history."

Mission accomplished. Put on "Venus" tonight, listen to the guitar under the vocal and you'll hear it.

Sources

• Rolling Stone: "Richard Lloyd, Television's Virtuoso Guitarist, Dead at 75" (rollingstone.com), November 7, 2026.
• Richard Lloyd, Everything Is Combustible (2017), as quoted by Rolling Stone.
• The Stranger interview with Richard Lloyd, 2015, as quoted by Rolling Stone.