Television's Richard Lloyd gives guitar lessons

by Andrew Sacher

photo: Richard Lloyd (right) in 2009 (more by Benjamin Lozovsky)

Do you want to learn to play guitar? Do you want to be taught by a guy who played on one of the most inventive guitar rock albums of all time? If you answered yes to these questions, you’re in luck! Former Television guitarist Richard Lloyd is giving lessons, as Vulture points out. The lessons are $100 an hour, and you can get in touch with Richard for one by grabbing the email address on his website. The Vulture article’s author, David Marchese, actually took a lesson with Richard, and here’s what he says:

Tall and wiry, Lloyd invited me into his living room — where a Television concert poster hung on the wall — handed me one of his gorgeous Fender Stratocasters, and flipped on a couple of small amps. “Can you play me a major scale?” Lloyd asked, a little gruffly. Yep. “Pentatonic scales?” I played one. Lloyd next ran me through some tough chording exercises, up and down the neck. My left hand hurt. “Do those for 20 minutes a day,” he said. He put his guitar down and took out paper and a pen. He drew a circle. We seemed a long way from Marquee Moon.

“When I was a kid,” Lloyd said, dividing the circle into 12 sections like a clock face, “I had a little hamster. I used to watch him run on his little wheel. He was so happy.” Lloyd, his hands stained from the paintings he’d been working on before I arrived, marked intervals on the wheel. “This is a wheel to make you happy, too.” He wrote the names of different modes on the wheel: Locrian, Myxolydian, and so on. “The basis of all music theory,” he said. He asked me to play him a lick, and I squeaked out a blues cliché. “I’ve never been sadder about a death then when that hamster died,” he said, before demonstrating a much more exciting version of the lick I’d just played.

Sounds pretty awesome already. Read the rest of the article here.