Richard Lloyd, the Television co-founder and guitarist who helped bring deft virtuosity to the stripped-down fury of punk, has died aged 75.
Lloyd’s family said in a statement that the guitarist died Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee. “His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end,” his family said in a statement to rolling stoneadding that Lloyd died of cholangiocarcinoma, a cancer of the bile ducts.
Lloyd was diagnosed with bile duct cancer in March 2026. According to a GoFundMe set up to help Lloyd cover medical and other costs, the guitarist developed tumors in his liver, including one so close to a major blood vessel that his doctors were unable to operate and remove it.
Television were one of the most innovative bands of punk’s first wave, thanks in large part to the dual guitar attack of Lloyd and frontman Tom Verlaine. While many of their peers were perfecting loud, fast-paced power chord playing, Lloyd and Verlaine (who died in 2023) developed a complex interplay of riffs and licks, and never shied away from venturing into more heady realms inspired by jazz, art-rock, and even jam bands.
Lloyd and Verlaine’s stellar guitar work fueled Television’s landmark debut, Marquee Moonreleased in 1977. This album cemented Television’s place in the punk pantheon, even though their output otherwise consisted of only two additional albums, 1978’s. Adventure and the years 1992 Television.
Lloyd was born October 25, 1951, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and grew up largely in New York City. His first instrument was the drums, but he was fascinated by the guitar and decided to change after a “hallucinatory experience”. “My drums have lost all their color, as in the Wizard of Oz in Kansas – and everything became grayscale,” Lloyd wrote in his 2017 memoir, Everything is combustible. “The drums weren’t sounding good anymore and I heard a voice, an auditory hallucination that said, ‘You must be playing a melody instrument.'”
One of Lloyd’s early guitar partners was Velvert Turner, a Brooklyn musician, who himself developed his guitar skills under the tutelage of Jimi Hendrix. After dropping out of high school, Lloyd moved to Boston, where he played with blues legend John Lee Hooker. He also spent time traveling and living in Los Angeles, but eventually returned to New York and embedded himself in the proto-punk scene.
TV formed shortly after Lloyd returned to New York in 1973. His friend, manager Terry Ork, took him to see Verlaine play at a club, and Lloyd immediately knew they would make a great musical duo. As he said The stranger in 2015, “I saw Tom play and I was like, ‘He has he.’ And I knew I had he. But I was missing something and so was he. What he lacked, I could provide. And vice versa.
Explaining what he had that Verlaine didn’t, Lloyd continued: “The flesh of all the songs. All the watermarks and arabesques on Marquee Moon are all mine. Even though the solos might be different, during the verses, when Tom sings, I play the whole melody. I brought a rock & roll heart.
Richard Hell on bass and Billy Fica on drums joined Lloyd and Verlaine in the first iteration of Television. Hell eventually left and was replaced by Fred Smith, who played with Blondie. The band quickly became a staple at legendary punk clubs like CBGB and Max’s Kansas City. They released their first single, “Little Johnny Jewel”, in 1975, before signing with Elektra Records, which released Marquee Moon two years later.
One of Lloyd’s most impressive contributions to Marquee Moon was his idea to double some of his more complex guitar parts. As he wrote in Everything is combustiblehe thought it was “sad and pathetic” to walk into a recording studio and come out with a record that sounded like a band playing live in a room. Wanting to give something extra to the record, he insisted to Verlaine and co-producer Andy Johns that he could reproduce the part he had planned for “Venus” note for note to give the song more depth.
“When I came back into the room, they were saying they couldn’t believe it, but it sounded perfect,” Lloyd wrote. “Tom wanted me to do it on everything, but I knew it was some kind of ear candy that had to go in and out of different songs to make it a real record. So I refused to do it in some cases, and in others I doubled or more.”
For example, on “Guiding Light” he composed eight different guitar tracks “that’s why it sounds powerful and thick. I tried my best to make it a record – not a live document”.
Despite the support of a major label like Elektra, Marquee Moon failed to make a commercial dent, and the band’s first tour for Peter Gabriel did little to create more fans. Shortly after the release of Adventure in April 1978, the group broke up. The following year, Lloyd released a solo album, Alchemywhich received positive reviews, but also went nowhere commercially.
Meanwhile, Lloyd’s drug use was spiraling out of control. In his memoir, the guitarist admits to having overdosed on several occasions and compares his experiences from the early 1980s to the Great Depression. “I was having trouble getting people to gigs and was completely addicted to heroin,” he wrote. It wasn’t until 1984 that Lloyd got sober, and two years later he released a second solo album, Field of Fire.
Lloyd would release seven other albums over the course of his career, including a live album in 1987. Real time; a collection of unpublished material, 2010s Magnetites; and what would be his last solo album, that of 2018 The countdown. He also toured regularly, worked as a session musician – notably with Matthew Sweet and John Doe of X – and gave guitar lessons.
While Lloyd was part of the 1992 Television reunion and rejoined the band for a stint in the early 2000s, he left before a 2007 tour commemorating the 30th anniversary of Marquee Moon. In this interview with The strangerLloyd expressed frustration that the band was not focusing on new things; he said that after the release of their self-titled album in 1992, the group wrote and made an eight-song demo, but that nothing would likely come of it because Verlaine was “out of words.”
Lloyd demonstrated a complicated relationship with Verlaine during his later years. On the one hand, he insisted that he loved Verlaine and wouldn’t have spent 35 years in a band with him if he hadn’t, but he also called him difficult to work with. Lloyd also remained upset that Verlaine had taken all of Television’s publications, even though Lloyd said he had contributed significantly to the band’s songwriting.
While he’s not afraid to express these opinions, Lloyd insisted he’s not bitter. As he said The stranger“I didn’t get into this business for the money. Some people did. I got into this business to become a renowned guitarist who had an irrevocable impact on the history of rock & roll.”
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