In the few short years after Jimi Hendrix died in 1970, the sound of guitar-based rock changed radically. Among the masterminds of this overhaul was Richard Lloyd, one half of the virtuoso guitar duo in the trailblazing band Television, and a founding member of the New York movement that was eventually branded “punk”.

But Lloyd’s critical part in the revolution wasn’t all about tossing the previous generation’s work on the scrapheap. He was an obsessive student of none other than Hendrix himself, and put years of intense effort into cracking the code of the major players who came before him.

“I learned really slowly because I was crappy,” Lloyd explains to the Straight from his New York City home, in advance of a rare Vancouver appearance. “Everything I have is from sweat. You know 99 percent sweat, one percent inspiration? Well, I’m like 110 percent sweat, down to my toenails.

“I used to see all the great guitarists who would come through New York in the late ’60s, from Jimi Hendrix on down to Duane Allman and Chuck Berry and God knows,” he continues. “And I found a few pathways through the fretboard that I still use to this day—mostly pentatonic and then adding the major tones from whatever mode it’s in.”

Talk of major tones and modes may not be what you’d expect from someone widely credited as a central figure in a movement that soon produced the Sex Pistols. But then none of the Pistols made a stage debut with John Lee Hooker, as Lloyd did when he was a young player. And Television’s sound was not only stripped down and edgy, but also tightly plotted, stately, even clockwork-delicate at times, especially in glittering exchanges between Lloyd and fellow guitarist Tom Verlaine that blurred the old line between rhythm and lead roles.

“At first, they didn’t know what to call us, then they called us new wave,” he recalls of the early reactions to a band that was “like four hoboes from outer space who land with guitars and amps and drums”.

So, he says, “they put us into the punk barrel, even though we were pre-punk and pro-punk and through punk.”

The high point was their radiant 1977 debut LP, Marquee Moon, which was followed a year later by Adventure and, a full 14 years after that, by a third album, simply titled Television. Lloyd hasn’t played with the group since 2006, and he refers to its current incarnation—which came through Vancouver for the first time in June—as “just Tom Verlaine and band”.

He’d rather talk about the short western tour he’s about to make with his own four-piece, which starts out here and wends through Washington state before heading on to, of all places, Wyoming. (“When we get to the Donner Pass,” he declares, scrambling the map, “we’ll eat one of us in honour of that great, illustrious historical fact. So we’re bringing an extra drummer.”)

And what’ll be on the set list? “As a band we’re very excited to get out on the boards and do rock and no roll, just clump,” he says, as cryptically as his guitar work is a model of clarity. “Clump and boom—implosion, explosion, a nuclear search for some Higgs boson musically. One of the reasons Television’s songs were so long in the early days is we’d be hunting for something. We’d just keep digging and digging and digging until we found something precious to present. So there may be a little of that.”

The Richard Lloyd Group plays the Railway Club on Tuesday (September 8).