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For some reason, he believed that weird kid who claimed to know Jimi Hendrix.

Richard Lloyd was still a few years away from starting the groundbreaking guitar-rock band Television, which would make history in the 1970s with the landmark album "Marquee Moon." As a teen growing up in Greenwich Village, he knew that everyone else laughed at Velvert Turner -- everyone, that is, except for Lloyd.

"I looked at him and thought, 'Yeah -- Jimi Hendrix doesn't live on Mars; he has to know somebody, so why not?'" Lloyd told The Daily Times during a recent phone interview. "We became best friends over me being the only one who stood in his corner. As it turns out, it was true, and being best friends with Velvert gave me access to a lot of running around in that kind of crowd."

Turner, Lloyd would come to learn, first saw Hendrix on television and was immediately possessed by an indescribable urge to get to know the guitar god. He tracked Hendrix down and befriended him, and the man who would turn "Purple Haze" into something of an anthem for the late 1960s took Turner under his wing, teaching him guitar and mentoring him.

Around the same time, Lloyd was mesmerized by the rock 'n' roll lifestyle. He looked at the scene like an anthropologist, he said, more than as a musician, and it all started when he first saw The Beatles play "The Ed Sullivan Show."

"From that point, I wondered how four men could sing love songs where everything is in personal pronoun and could engender this worldwide revolution in thinking that doesn't go away in six months?" Lloyd said. "Then, in 1966 or '67, the electric guitar broke out of its standard eight-bar solo, and I began to realize the possibilities of this instrument and how the guitar and the drums were an incredible force.

"I played drums and studied them for a couple of years, but then I switched to guitar, which I always wanted to play. My parents were even against it, telling me, 'You're a good drummer; you can always get work as a drummer. As a guitarist, you're a dime a dozen.' So they wouldn't buy me a guitar. I had to finagle one myself."

One thing he didn't have to spring for was lessons. His friend Turner was taking guitar lessons from Hendrix when the rock star was in New York, and Lloyd lived a couple of blocks away. After his lessons, Turner would be excited to show off what he had learned, so he would drop by Lloyd's apartment and the two teens would play together. Eventually, Turner introduced Lloyd to Hendrix. That was in 1968, a couple of years before Hendrix died.

"All I ever did was try to remain quiet so I could last longer behind the scenes," Lloyd said. "I wouldn't hazard to begin to talk to Jimi and try to build a friendship with him. But he knew who I was and that I was Velvert's best friend."

For the past 30 years, Hendrix has been the benchmark for Lloyd's own guitar playing. He recently released an album of Hendrix covers titled "The Jamie Neverts Story," titled after the code name Lloyd and Turner came up with for Hendrix so kids from their neighborhood wouldn't tag along when they went to meet the icon. In the album's liner notes, Lloyd's relationship with Hendrix is talked about in detail, and it's a fascinating tale -- so much so that Lloyd couldn't even get his old Television bandmate to believe it.

"I think I told Tom (Verlaine) the story once, but he didn't believe me -- he thought I was joking," Lloyd said. "I always had that influence held tightly to the chest. It was nobody's business, in a way. But my friend Velvert died in 2000, and so I began reconnecting with that part of my past.

"At the time, I already had a record out and another record in me of originals, but around that time it started to germinate in me that I should do a record of Jimi's songs and dedicate it to my friendship with Velvert and the over-arching friendship with Jimi."

His relationship with Hendrix, however, may always be a footnote to his involvement in Television. Formed in 1973, the band was one of the founders of the New York punk rock scene, helping turn the club CBGB's into the headquarters of the movement.

In 1977, the band released the album "Marquee Moon," now considered a classic for its complexity and two-guitar interplay, which to that point was more or less a novelty. In the years since, the record routinely makes numerous "best albums of all time" list from major publications such as Rolling Stone, NME and Pitchfork.

"When I saw Tom Verlaine play for the first time, I realized he had 'it,' and all my life I've looked to try and teach people 'it' and usually come away with great despair," Lloyd said. "You can teach harmony, but you can't teach melody. You can show someone the craftsmanship of songwriting, but they're the ones who have to put out the antenna and wait for the universe to send them a song.

"The actual creative process is not one over which human being have control. I always thought that; otherwise I wouldn't have picked Tom. I'm the one who made the decision and suggested to our first manager, Terry Ork, that he put Tom and I together as a guitar-playing team."

By 1978, however, the relationship between Verlaine and Lloyd had soured, and after the release of the album "Adventure," the two went their separate ways. Lloyd released a series of solo records and loaned out his talent as a session guitarist. When Television reformed in 1992, Lloyd was a part of the band's sporadic touring until 2007, when he bowed out for the last time.

"Playing together was terrific, but I quit Television, and I'm not going back," he said. "It's too painful, too stupid and Tom's too greedy. He's too controlling, too this, too that. In the beginning, you had to pick your battles, and it was worth it.

"I felt like Television had something so unique and special -- like a champagne glass with the bubbles coming up through it. That's how I felt; like the bubbles were coming up within me. I felt that kind of excitement."

However, unlike a lot of artists who have endured bad blood with former bandmates, Lloyd isn't bitter. He doesn't avoid mentioning Television, and he doesn't refuse to play material he wrote for the group during his time within. If anything, he's proud of his involvement.

"When you do something other people find valuable or extraordinary, it's often perceived as an albatross around your neck and that you'll never make another statement so great, but that's simply not true," he said. "The resonance that's in 'Marquee Moon' -- that's what I prayed for when I was a kid. I wanted to be in the pantheon of rock 'n' roll history, I wanted to make a contribution to it, and I actually went out and did it.

"So why should I complain? If I died yesterday, my place in rock 'n' roll history is secure. We not only produced 'Marquee Moon,' but without Television, there would be no CBGB's. What it stood for originally? 'Country, bluegrass and blues,' and we basically went in and took over. Other bands that played there -- Talking Heads, Blondie, the Ramones -- they basically followed us there when they heard it had become a place in New York to play original music."

With that statement, some might find it ironic that Lloyd's latest project is most decidedly not original. But an album of Hendrix tunes, performed in Lloyd's unique style, is still better than most of what passes for guitar rock these days. Lloyd himself, a columnist for Guitar World magazine for the past few years, doesn't scoff at what he sees littering the rock landscape these days -- he mourns over it.

"About four years in, I realized that young and upcoming guitar players don't play the guitar like it's a musical instrument -- they play it like it's a video game," he said. "All the shredding, the 'I bet you can't play faster than me ...' Whereas in the 1960s, the electric guitar was an instrument that had enormous lyricism, and the epitome of that was Jimi Hendrix.

"He was like the wooden rabbit at a dog race -- no matter what you did, he was always ahead of you. And you had to have seen him live -- no film imparts the kind of charisma and/or nuclear, otherworldly effect that he had on the audiences. The first time that I saw him with Velvert, it was like looking into a nuclear reactor. He became the benchmark that no one will ever reach."