Richard Lloyd
Alchemy

Join the band as a guitarist with such Thomas Miller and Richard Meyers. And so far, you might say, everything falls within the ordinary. Or at least, it seems.

Wait a moment.

Try to rewrite the same sentence, but instead of those names write Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell. And nothing is ordinary anymore. This is called – the specific weight of Names.

Richard Hell would not have been in the game for much longer, to tell the truth. Frictions with Verlaine, they say (if I wrote in English, I'd say… friction, because we're talking about that Band), impossible coexistence. And instead, perfect alchemy with the new entrant. Two Guitars that intersect like it happens once in a million. Who is the lead Guitar is quite clear, yet… discussions about lead and rhythm guitars already seem dated in '77/'78. The rest is a Story already told.

And an adventure that ends with Adventure. Then the solo careers should begin - or so the biographies of old rock usually tell, the one with lead and rhythm guitars, the one with solos, the one that, at the end of the Seventies, finds itself short of terms to define what's happening.

“Well, he's not Verlaine, but…” - is the comment I've most often heard about Richard (and who knows how often and with how many I've had the chance to talk about him, I won't tell you…). And it says almost everything, especially that but and those ellipses.

Ellipses that you could fill at your pleasure after spinning Alchemy two or three times – in other words, the card that Richard plays almost simultaneously with Verlaine's Kingdom Come. His opportunity. He doesn't arrive there too well, dragging between various dependencies and even the first sets are half a disaster. That contract with Elektra doesn't seem like one that will last long. However, this record… well.

Question: what's the only track on Adventure not entirely composed by Tom? It's Days. And there's a reason. Listened to just before Alchemy, it gives a sense of continuity. Simple structure (apparently), latent melancholy, vocal counterpoints. Yes, the second voice. Try the impossible: imagine See No Evil or Foxhole (two titles) without backing vocals. Richard had a melodic sensibility that would have allowed him, once on his own path, to be: not just someone good with six strings, but also someone with the intuition to write potentially successful pieces. Potentially, of course.

When he plays, Richard isn't one to make you think of the scream of a thousand birds. But to always consider him alongside the old travel companion is limiting, it's a cross that – inevitably – he will carry forever. And it doesn't tell of the refined songwriting found in pieces like In The Night and Woman’s Ways, (a little masterpiece reminiscent of the Byrds, with a high sixties rate right from the harmonica). High-level power-pop manufacture, perfect harmonic lines where everything sounds familiar but irresistible, and solo interludes of pure class you can slip into at just the right moment. Misty Eyes are basic three chords and a simplicity with little to envy even Lou Reed's Coney Island Baby. No instrumentals, no cacophonies, no complex rhythmic inventions. Just the beautiful sound of someone who certainly hasn't stopped listening to the Who because punk has arrived in the meantime. On the contrary.

There's Blue and Grey that makes me think of Dangerous Type by the Cars - perhaps for the keyboards, perhaps for the drum breaks, perhaps for the rarely predictable 4/4 on which Ocasek built an empire. And the two solos in Pretend (that can be done, certain terms from "old" Zeppelinian rock must still be used…) is the closest thing to the Television that the album has in its tracklist, unsurprisingly thrown together with a certain Fred Smith – potential alternate take of Adventure…? Not at all, much more. And Dying Words is a New York thing from '79, a summary of everything in four minutes.

What the audience's response was to Alchemy, I'll let you imagine. It would only be necessary to add that we'd find Richard only seven years later: not in Manhattan but in Sweden, not with Fred Smith but with a crowd of anonymous local musicians, and – naturally – not with Elektra.

After all, it was an album of potential success.