Television co-founder Richard Lloyd, CBGB guitarist, dies at 75

By Grace Kim

Richard Lloyd, the founding member and guitarist of Television, died at 75 on Saturday morning at his home in Chattanooga, Tennessee, his family confirmed. In a statement to Rolling Stone, his family said: “His loving wife Sheila and his dog Willie Mays were with him at the end.”

Lloyd brought a sophisticated musical style to Television, an influential band in punk’s early New York scene. His family attributed his death to cholangiocarcinoma (a form of bile duct cancer) and said he received the diagnosis in March 2026. An earlier crowdfunding campaign (online fundraising) had disclosed that tumors had developed in his liver and that one of them could not be removed surgically.

Television formed in 1973 and played a significant role in the punk movement that grew around CBGB, the former music venue on the Bowery in New York City. The group ranked among the earliest punk acts to perform at the downtown club. Before that, CBGB had focused mainly on country and bluegrass music.

In a 2007 interview, Lloyd described his contribution in emphatic personal terms: “CBGB’s is the most famous rock ‘n’ roll club to have ever existed and I fucking created it! I was the invisible force behind it.” Read alongside the band’s documented role there, the remark shows that Lloyd placed his own contribution at the center of the venue’s punk history.

Television recorded just two studio albums during its peak in the late 1970s. Its first, Marquee Moon, came out in 1977 and has since earned widespread recognition as a landmark recording.

Rolling Stone placed it at No 107 on its 2023 list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. That dated ranking offers a concrete measure of the later reputation the album has built as one of rock’s most influential guitar-led records.

The Guardian’s 2005 review put Lloyd’s guitar at the center of its account. It wrote: “Lloyd’s guitar was the louder in a lopsided sound mix, so it was impossible to overlook the amount of ground he was covering. Crisp, crunchy chords, dextrous fills and torrential Van Halen-style solos tumbled from his fingers.”

The description makes the musical mechanism clear: Lloyd’s guitar occupied the foreground, while his chords, fills and solos supplied density and motion. “Ground he was covering” refers here to range: the capacity to move from chordal rhythm through short fills into extended solos.

What does Lloyd’s death change for Television’s legacy?

It changes the biographical frame around a history already fixed by recordings and testimony. Television’s formation in 1973, the group’s early CBGB performances and the 1977 release of Marquee Moon remain factual anchors. For anyone assessing the band, those documents still supply the practical answer: they show how one guitarist’s work shaped the group’s identity and CBGB’s punk history.

Those records also separate three kinds of evidence: what the band played, how a critic heard it and how the guitarist described his place in the scene. For future accounts of Television, the 1977 album, the 2005 review and the 2007 interview will remain the firmer basis for placing the group in New York punk.