Richard Lloyd Trio, Lager House, January 12, 2026
Richard Lloyd was in town tonight, and it felt like a message from the home country, back before we had email and flying cars in our pockets, when you needed to talk to someone from another place to find out about that place. The last time I saw Lloyd he was opening for Dream Syndicate at Bowery Ballroom in 2018. Like, that is a SHOW. That is alignment, that is sympatico, that is lineage. Tonight it was a small gathering of like minds on a Monday night in January, but these days, that's not nothing. It's actually a lot.
When I lived in Seattle in the mid-90s and a New York musician would come to town, I would be there but it would absolutely feel weird and off kilter. I mean, the Dictators or Jim Carroll at the Croc, Patti Smith at the Moore, Lou Reed at Benaroya—it was a message from home but it didn’t feel like home. Seeing someone so New York in Detroit felt more connected, and this music didn’t feel out of place. My theory about that is that Detroit is a darker city with a vast and ancient music history across multiple genres. (I mean, the bar has a MC5 mural in its back garden.)
For tonight's show, I got there early so I could make sure I was close enough to the front so it would be loud enough to drown out chompers. So I had a cozy little spot against the wall towards the front of the room, not at the stage, I didn’t need that—until someone needed to shove in front of me during “See No Evil” when I was having a moment, eyes half closed, just vibing along with it, not entirely sure what part of it was what sounds were actually entering my ears and what part of it was memory and all those hours of listening and listening and listening.
They then decided to start having a conversation with another person who also arrived at that moment to stand right in front of me. So I moved around them and wedged myself right up against the stage which I didn’t really need, the sound wasn’t as good, but the tradeoff was that I was leaning against the wall so my literal skeleton was vibrating from the sounds coming out of Richard Lloyd’s guitar. That is deep medicine.
I wondered what my body knows and what it thinks when it hears this music. I know how it feels, it feels like joy and alignment. I know these songs, they know me, it is this symbiotic, cyclical energy. I’ve thought a lot about Television over the past couple of months because Patti Smith’s band performed a Television medley every night on their most recent tour (which you can read about in this little book!). There are some records and music and art that are just definitively New York, and the first Television album is one of those whole, complete and total entities. That record breathes and shimmers and vibrates and it couldn’t have been made anywhere else and sounded the same.
(My favorite Richard Lloyd story was when he sat in with Patti and the band on the last night of CBGB’s in 2006 and he was complaining about needing to tune or something that, you know, Richard Lloyd would complain about, and Patti reprimanded him by saying that she had just played guitar and no one was going to notice if he hit a bum note or two.)
Feeling the vibrations off the wall made me think of nights at CBGB’s — not seeing Television, I was not old enough—but I would usually be stage left leaning against the edge of the speaker column and I would tell my friends, You know, Television built this stage, and who knows how much of that construction was still there by the time we got there, but also? The vibrations in that fucking place, the resonance, the walls, the floor, the ceiling, by the time we got there every inch of that place held some kind of insanely important vibration from someone in the class of 1975.
Lloyd went through songs from Alchemy and Marquee Moon and a particularly excellent “Ain’t That Nothing” from the second Television album, and then he played “Psychotic Reaction” in his very specific arrangement that I last witnessed when he appeared at the Nuggets 50th anniversary a couple of years ago. But the last song was something people weren’t expecting. It began with a slowly rumbling bass line that sounded somewhat familiar and once I couldn’t quite suss it out, I got impatient so I leaned over the monitor to try to see what it was on the setlist, not wanting to wait until I got a melody line I could latch onto. Ahh. But I wasn’t the only one with this thought process. Slowly, one at a time, I watched as other folks quietly walked over to the stage, peered down at the setlist, nodded or raised their eyebrows and walked back. It turned out to be an insane interpretation of “8 Miles High.”
Lloyd is out with an incredibly solid journeyman rhythm section, not flashy but eminently capable, tight, solid, there to hold up and support the pyrotechnics. This is what passes for punk rock’s oldies circuit, a bar in Corktown on a Monday night. There should have been more people there but the people who were there were there because they wanted to be, and you could feel the respect and attention and just plain old affection from the audience. It felt incongruous to be at a show when my friends in Minneapolis are being terrorized (after my friends in Portland, LA and Chicago) but I’m not going to let them take this away from us.
