C’est l’histoire d’un loser éternel devenu un winner, et pour toujours. Un mec totalement paumé dans son époque qui aura travaillé son style dans l’ombre durant près de dix ans. A l’origine de la création du punk-rock avant tout le monde, il aura puisé au plus profond de son être et de son âme pour transformer le banal en or en donnant naissance à l’une des mutations les plus brillantes de la révolution atomique. En provenance d’une planète inconnue, il vient de repartir dans le cosmos, l’occasion de lui rendre un hommage aussi vibrant que le furent ses tripes.
Sirotant du café froid, et bouffant des clopes pour se nourrir, ils zonent dans la zone de l’East-Village new-yorkais, récitant leurs textes d’apprentis poètes sur des bancs remplis de merdes d’oiseau. Vivant dans un monde qui n’existe plus, comme beaucoup de jeunes perdus, avant d’inventer un monde qui n’existe pas encore, ils tentent de se faire un nom sur la scène littéraire, et publient un recueil drolatique, en 1971. Celui-ci se trouve dans la dernière édition du fanzine poétique de Hell, Genesis : Grasp, qui n’a donc rien à voir avec le groupe Genesis que les deux détestent, comme la plupart des groupes de la planète Terre, mais avec la «compréhension de la genèse», comme Google Traduction nous l’a soufflé, qui fascine un peu plus ces deux zozos. Drôlatique, et totalement perché, le recueil est signé par une mystérieuse Theresa stern, qui n’est autre que la signature commune de Verlaine et Hell, qui prennent un plaisir malin à brouiller les pistes, à faire les cons, et à s’inventer une vie de femme dominatrice. Malheureusement pour cette chère Theresa, elle n’aura absolument aucun succès, mais au moins, elle les aura fait bien marrer, et nous aussi.
En possession d’un diamant brut, il renvoie chier durant des mois de gros labels dont Island Records, pour travailler cet uranium enrichi à l’âme pure, encore, et encore, et encore. Le mariage est finalement conclu en août 1976, et c’est Elektra Records qui osera dire «oui, je le veux» en premier, le label qui avait signé les Doors et, douce ironie de l’histoire, les «premiers punks » du MC5 et des Stooges. Entre temps, Richard Hell s’est barré du groupe pour mettre en boîte le son des enfers qui sera repris par toute l’Angleterre, de quoi laisser le champ totalement libre à Tommy, qui va enfin pouvoir lâcher sur les humains et accessoirement graver sur de l’acétate la bombe post-atomique qu’il prépare depuis si longtemps.
Inutile de rouer de coups votre adversaire, il suffit de lui asséner quelques fins uppercuts, efficaces et décisifs. S’inspirant de la rage sourde de leur génération, ils en ont tiré le musc, un élixir de vie d’une brillance inégalée tiraillé entre le feu et la glace, sur une ligne de crête vertigineuse où beaucoup auraient perdu la vie. Cette révolution dans la révolution, Tom Verlaine en a une grande part de responsabilité, si ce n’est énorme, au delà du fait qu’il en a vécu, à 100 à l’heure, toutes les étapes. Cette tension extrême, noire et totale des uppercuts électriques, affûtés comme des lames, c’est lui. Cette dissonance et ces motifs impressionnistes à la beauté sidérante et exotique, c’est encore lui. Cette tristesse lancinante dans le regard quand il éclate en sanglots mélodiques insondables, c’est toujours lui. Cette voix de crooner psychopathe, sorte de Lou Reed en version décérébrée, qui martèle des visions mystiques avec les yeux les plus noirs de la création, c’est lui aussi. Ces étoiles filantes, ces métaphores divines et ces punchlines d’un autre monde, c’est lui. Et que dire de ses solos ? Véritable John Coltrane de la guitare amplifiée, son héros de jeunesse qui aura sans le savoir enfanté un putain de génie, il exulte des lignes érotiques dans la transe furieuse de l’instant fatal, récitant ses alexandrins électrifiés tel un poète cyborg perdu sur la main stage d’un club miteux, avec des néons qui dégueulent leur lumière cramoisie en guise de guide mystique.
Tom Verlaine, who died on January 28,
2023, had an approach to playing guitar that was never easy to describe.
Post-punk, art rock, art punk, whatever; it was one of Verlaine’s great
creative achievements that over three studio albums with Television, and a
prolific solo career, he was able to unshackle his style from labels. Hard to
define, sure, but you know it when you hear it.
The sound he pioneered in Television,
along with second guitarist Richard Lloyd, had a propulsive yet cerebral
power, grandiose yet melancholy, intense yet epic. Based in New York City,
where they regularly performed at legendary club CBGBs, Television had an
energy and attitude which suggested punk. What came out the speakers, however,
would challenge that conclusion. There was nothing quite like it.
Maybe this is what happens when you
approach the guitar from a different perspective. The instrument was not
Verlaine’s first love. When he was a kid growing up in Delaware, he started out
on piano before picking up the saxophone as a young teenager. He liked
symphonies. He liked jazz. Speaking to Guitar Player
“I played piano because when I was a kid
I’d be really transported by symphonies,” he said. “My mother would get these
supermarket records of overtures. That was music for me. The only thing I liked
on radio were flying saucer songs. In the early 60s I hated pop. An older
friend of mine had some Coltrane and Ornette Coleman records, and that’s the
music I liked. I had a brother who bought Motown, and I thought it was totally
twee. The first rock record I liked was Yardbirds stuff, because it was really
wild.”
The Kinks and The Rolling Stones can
also claim credit for changing Verlaine’s mind about guitar, and doing as they
would do many times before and since, changing music history over the course of
two frenetic rock songs. All Day (And All Of The Night) and 19th Nervous
Breakdown did the damage.
“Those are the records that made me
think the guitar could be as good as jazz,” Verlaine told Guitar World in 1981.
“Up until then the electric guitar was a stupid instrument to me. When I heard
the solos on those records, the sound, the general sound, that’s when it
occurred to me that the guitar was a cool instrument.”
Having no intrinsic affection for the
guitar, Verlaine could easily resist the impulse to covet other players’
styles. It is often thus: the best guitar heroes are the ones who never wanted
such status. Fortune favours those bold enough to experiment with an
instrument. It also favours those who work at it.
Television were famously dedicated to
rehearsals. Their marathon practice sessions would be masochistic if just in
service to a sound wrought on three powerchords and a 4/4 backbeat. Verlaine
and Lloyd had designs on Television being something more. Besides, the Ramones
would soon claim brevity for their own. Expansiveness was the smart play.
Set loose and turned wild in the febrile
thrum of 1970s New York – the milieu of Blondie, Talking Heads et al –
Verlaine’s electric imagination reconfigured guitar music and set the table for
a generation of alternative rock acts, many of whom would stake their own claim
to greatness.
Television’s debut album Marquee Moon,
with its iconic cover photo by the great Robert Mapplethorpe, remains
essential, remains exhilarating, and remains somehow special and alien even
though the independent rock cognoscenti has kept it on regular rotation since
its hit record stores in ’77. It is one of the most influential rock albums of
all time. The likes of Sonic Youth, Pavement and Johnny Marr were listening.
“It was more expansive,” said Thurston
Moore of Sonic Youth, speaking to ShortList in 2020. “The guitar interplay
between Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine was just really informative for me. It
was really dry and super-poetic whilst still being really unpretentious.”
What Television were doing was something
new. Just as it worked with Sonic Youth, who came out of a similar cultural
environment, weaned on experimental music and art, it did in England. In a 2021
Guitar World interview, Johnny Marr said Verlaine and Lloyd were the fresh
blood guitar music needed.
As alternative rock and post-punk innovators, Television is one of the most lauded rock bands ever. Their opus, Marquee Moon, retains a withdrawn cool that sets them apart from their peers like The Velvet Underground and The Stooges. Yet no matter how canonized and widely influential they have become, Television will always feel like a band for the heads. If I’m getting to know someone early on and they express admiration for the act, I’ll be damned if it doesn’t garner them some immediate cool points in my book.
Verlaine’s primary instrument was a 1958 Fender Jazzmaster, which makes its presence powerfully felt on the title track of Television’s debut album. “If you have a pedal board that looks like the console of the Millennium Falcon or insist on implementing copious after-effects to your recordings, Marquee Moon is a great example of how you can get bold sound with just a guitar and amp,” writer Mike Duffy once wrote in a blog post for the iconic guitar maker’s website. He’s right: The 10-minute track thrives because of how pure its tones are. Verlaine’s angular soloing darts in and out of his collaborators’ taut jamming. It’s a testament to how punchy the Jazzmaster can sound when cranked through the natural distortion of a tube amp. (Verlaine was also notably fond of the Fender Jaguar, which feels like a sibling instrument to the Jazzmaster.)
Unlike
many of those who have written movingly about Tom Verlaine since his death at
73 on January 28, I never met him—not even one of those starstruck sightings at
the Strand. But if you were coming up in the ’90s and into guitar and
songwriting, you were bound to bump into that first Television record: in a cut
out bin at the local record store, on a jukebox in a bar, in someone’s dorm
room. The four guys looking out from the Robert Mapplethorpe photo on the cover
(run through a Xerox machine to burn off some of the color) appeared
malnourished, faintly collegiate, with great taste in shirts and jackets. The
band name above them in stark white letters brought out the pulp sci-fi aura
that hovered around the box in your parents’ living room: Tele-Vision. And then
you cued up the LP and something magical happened: it was punk rock for
musicians! DIY in attitude and conception, sure, but as angular as Monk, as
expansive as Yes, funky in that square way that makes things funkier, and all
held together with a biting guitar sound close to Mike Bloomfield’s on Highway
61 Revisited. The Ramones were great, but Television made their CBs confreres
sound like Johnny one notes. Television had chops, tunes, and weren’t afraid to
stretch out and solo—they even had arrangements for god’s sake. The punk-est
part was Verlaine’s unsteady colt of a voice, a hint of Buddy Holly, maybe some
Bryan Ferry, but with an adenoidal candor all his own that really was a fuck
you to FM radio.
Born Tom Miller, Verlaine grew up in New Jersey and Delaware. In 1968, he moved to New York, where he teamed up with his friend Richard Hell to form the Neon Boys, which in turn mutated into Television, one of the founding bands of the Bowery scene that birthed American punk. (Hell left soon after to form the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, who’d just left the New York Dolls.). In 1975, they released a two-sided single, “Little Johnny Jewel”—a noir-tinged vignette with a bone-dry guitar sound achieved by plugging directly into the mixing board. Soon after, material for an LP was demoed with Brian Eno. Judging from what can be heard on YouTube, this promising-on-paper collaboration came out entirely flat. They eventually hooked up with Andy Johns (brother of Glyns) who showed up with ideas for a Zeppelin-y drum sound that horrified Verlaine (“No. No. No. No. No,” he is alleged to have said). The approach they ended up with was the audio equivalent of putting that Mapplethorpe image through a photocopier: tight and composed but with all studio sheen bleached out. Marquee Moon (1977) sounds both dinky and grand, an epic executed in a cube of concrete.
Small miracles of performance and conception can be found all over that first Television record. It helps that everyone plays their asses off. The rhythm section of Billy Ficca and Fred Smith gives the guitars a fluid grid over which to launch a bunch of great ideas: the pinwheeling kaleidoscope that forms the nucleus of “Venus”; those 16th rest gear shifts that slice the chorus of “Elevation” in half; the solo of “See No Evil” which dissolves Framptonish puffery into a minimalist reboot of Chuck Berry; “Guiding Light”’s trad gospel F# triad over a pedal C# (hark—a piano!), over which Lloyd plays a throwback solo that wouldn’t be out of place on a Bob Welsh record. My favorite moment comes eight and a half minutes into the title track, after the two guitars have been squirming and spiraling their way out of the D major counterpoint with which the tune starts, finally defaulting to bare ascending octaves. And then the lost D major returns, only it has changed into a rainbow shimmer of arpeggios, at the center of which there seems to be a bird chirping! How Verlaine manages to get that bird to appear from out of his Fender Jazzmaster remains a source of wonder to me. It’s one of the most gorgeous and mysterious things ever to happen on an electric guitar.
The second Television record, Adventure, has always struck me as a little fatigued, but it has some beauties on it too. The McGuinn-ish “Days,” with its chiming, sun-dappled intro and a divine legato guitar line after the first chorus, is one of the best things in the TV catalogue. The closer “The Dream’s Dream” is full on psych, and the LP’s one nod to expanded structure a la “Marquee Moon.”
The CBGBs coterie was more or less initiated by Television. It was Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, and their quasi-manager Terry Ork who (so the story goes) suggested to Hilly Kristal that his honky-tonk dive could be a suitable hangout for people making new music on the Lower East Side. That the founders of New York’s punk headquarters were unapologetic musos is something of an irony. It undoes the cliché that the performances at CBs were a three-chord missile aimed at the lumbering dirigible of ’70s Rock, or a mere theatre of studied ineptitude. Television’s relative musical sophistication in part stemmed from Verlaine’s starting points in jazz (his first choice to produce Marquee Moon was Rudy Van Gelder). Though a fan of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, he was not usually a note-y, splatter-gun shredder. His solos are closer to Miles: spacey, feline, searching, severe, and happy to hit a clam if it’s the right clam.
As if this weren’t enough, he was also literary! That the author of “Marquee Moon” called himself Verlaine (after the 19th-century symboliste) was one reason you might find half-read (probably not even) New Directions paperbacks of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and Rimbaud’s Illuminations lying beside copies of The Replacements’ Let It Be and Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug in your bandmate’s filthy apartment. The lit-rock thing was in part a response to the decisive shock of versification that popular music received at approximately the moment Dylan sang “she wears an Egyptian ring it sparkles before she speaks” in 1965. But for us ’90s kids, that kind of songwriting was just as likely to have been associated with Verlaine, whose lyrics could sound tossed off, even as they had been clearly filed to the bone: I remember how the darkness doubled; Broadway looked so medieval, it seemed to flap like little pages; My eyes are like telescopes; Well the Cadillac, it pulled out of the graveyard.
These were the sort of future-noir tableaux the bumpkin magus Rimbaud had prophesied in his wild visions of cities and which run through The Big Sleep, Alphaville, Nova Express and, well, Television. It was enough to make you move from rural Wisconsin to New York City, which I did in 1997, with a Telecaster and a bunch of songs and the hope of finding a red jacket like the one Richard Lloyd is wearing on the cover of Adventure. I did eventually find such a jacket, acquired from a girlfriend in a trade for my hardcover copy of Martin Amis’s The Information. I later learned that the coat had been shoplifted from the J.Crew off the Bowery.
There’s a lot more Verlaine than Television. Starting with his 1979 self-titled debut, he made six solo records marked throughout by shades of rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll, affectionate hat tips to the Velvets in their lucid third LP mode, and later, period art-pop with requisite doses of synth. Bowie recorded Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come” for his excellent 1980 record Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, in which he tests out one of his most outlandish Ethel-Merman-on-PCP vocal vibratos (which I always took to be his weird tribute to Tom’s singing style). To be targeted by the Ziggy/Aladdin/Duke was of course a badge of distinction, as well as a testament to Verlaine’s auteur-like vision.
Many of the tracks on Verlaine’s solo records fit no recognizable template or genre. My favorite of them, Dreamtime (1981), a set of asymmetric songs bathed in a kind of glowing frost, features bit parts by fictional characters like “Mr. Blur.” The sui generis “Days on the Mountain” from the next record Words from the Front (1982) wholly defies comparison: I will refrain other than to say that Verlaine, or at least the character singing, sounds delighted to be “walking around the inside of a bell.” On “Lindi-Lu” from Cover (1984), he’s singing in a faux-SUN hiccup over pulses of synth and guitar that for some reason make one think of moves in a game of Connect Four. These records show that the electric guitar had become for Verlaine an expanded palette for making mixing desk mini-compositions. A single riff might be three separate takes of three different guitars going through three different amps, panned across the image to create a single impossible part. You can feel the work getting further into the ’80s as the gate reverbs on the drums become more extreme and conspicuous—really, everything sounded like Peter Gabriel’s SO in 1987—but the guitar playing never strays far from Verlaine’s fingerprint.
In 1992, the original members of Television reunited, making an album that picked up where “Little Johnny Jewel” left off. Recorded with the kind of care that had come to mark Verlaine’s solo work—hyper-fastidious guitar and amplifier choices, microphone placement, et cetera—it’s a wonderfully lithe and spooky set of tunes. And they are not just delicacies from the Guitar Lab. Ficca forces everyone to push against the clock, the quartet more than once finding that slight vertigo when backbeat becomes unmoored from the metronome (see the outro of “Shane, She Wrote This”). Verlaine the lyricist is more that usually oblique throughout: I could just sort of not be there. Know what I mean? Not be anywhere.
I saw them at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin when the third Television record dropped. They did the whole thing in order then walked offstage, came back ten minutes later and played “Marquee Moon” and were done. I was awed by that encore. They nailed absolutely all of it, taking things, if memory serves, much further out than on the recording. That year Verlaine also released Warm and Cool, an instrumental album that sounds like the theme music to the Twilight Zone on a blind date with a Morricone spaghetti western score. He went on to make one more instrumental guitar record, and another set of songs, more than ten years later. The great gaps between releases from 1992 until his death only added to allure of the man and his work.
It moves me to think how much Tom Verlaine meant to my friends and I growing up. “This is the longest we’ve sat shiva,” said a close pal when the Verlaine thread was still going a week after the news. We’re all a little hurt and stunned. When someone who wrote music you care about dies, it dawns on you that they played a role in the scary, inductive, unplannable catastrophe of the person you have become. Verlaine shaped the identity of at least one whole generation of artists, writers, and musicians (that is, mine). He was an idealist who, amid the sleaze and cacophony of that cavernous room off the Bowery, could sing of falling into the arms of Venus. His vision casts back through Dylan, Ornette Coleman, and Chuck Berry, to Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Poe, and maybe all the way to the trobar clus of the wandering troubadours. I’d like to think he’s hanging out somewhere with that bird he made appear from out of a guitar.
On Tom Verlaine : It was punk rock for musicians! By Paul Grimstad. n + 1 magazine, February 9, 2023.
Born Tom Miller, Verlaine grew up in New Jersey and Delaware. In 1968, he moved to New York, where he teamed up with his friend Richard Hell to form the Neon Boys, which in turn mutated into Television, one of the founding bands of the Bowery scene that birthed American punk. (Hell left soon after to form the Heartbreakers with Johnny Thunders, who’d just left the New York Dolls.). In 1975, they released a two-sided single, “Little Johnny Jewel”—a noir-tinged vignette with a bone-dry guitar sound achieved by plugging directly into the mixing board. Soon after, material for an LP was demoed with Brian Eno. Judging from what can be heard on YouTube, this promising-on-paper collaboration came out entirely flat. They eventually hooked up with Andy Johns (brother of Glyns) who showed up with ideas for a Zeppelin-y drum sound that horrified Verlaine (“No. No. No. No. No,” he is alleged to have said). The approach they ended up with was the audio equivalent of putting that Mapplethorpe image through a photocopier: tight and composed but with all studio sheen bleached out. Marquee Moon (1977) sounds both dinky and grand, an epic executed in a cube of concrete.
Small miracles of performance and conception can be found all over that first Television record. It helps that everyone plays their asses off. The rhythm section of Billy Ficca and Fred Smith gives the guitars a fluid grid over which to launch a bunch of great ideas: the pinwheeling kaleidoscope that forms the nucleus of “Venus”; those 16th rest gear shifts that slice the chorus of “Elevation” in half; the solo of “See No Evil” which dissolves Framptonish puffery into a minimalist reboot of Chuck Berry; “Guiding Light”’s trad gospel F# triad over a pedal C# (hark—a piano!), over which Lloyd plays a throwback solo that wouldn’t be out of place on a Bob Welsh record. My favorite moment comes eight and a half minutes into the title track, after the two guitars have been squirming and spiraling their way out of the D major counterpoint with which the tune starts, finally defaulting to bare ascending octaves. And then the lost D major returns, only it has changed into a rainbow shimmer of arpeggios, at the center of which there seems to be a bird chirping! How Verlaine manages to get that bird to appear from out of his Fender Jazzmaster remains a source of wonder to me. It’s one of the most gorgeous and mysterious things ever to happen on an electric guitar.
The second Television record, Adventure, has always struck me as a little fatigued, but it has some beauties on it too. The McGuinn-ish “Days,” with its chiming, sun-dappled intro and a divine legato guitar line after the first chorus, is one of the best things in the TV catalogue. The closer “The Dream’s Dream” is full on psych, and the LP’s one nod to expanded structure a la “Marquee Moon.”
The CBGBs coterie was more or less initiated by Television. It was Verlaine, Richard Lloyd, and their quasi-manager Terry Ork who (so the story goes) suggested to Hilly Kristal that his honky-tonk dive could be a suitable hangout for people making new music on the Lower East Side. That the founders of New York’s punk headquarters were unapologetic musos is something of an irony. It undoes the cliché that the performances at CBs were a three-chord missile aimed at the lumbering dirigible of ’70s Rock, or a mere theatre of studied ineptitude. Television’s relative musical sophistication in part stemmed from Verlaine’s starting points in jazz (his first choice to produce Marquee Moon was Rudy Van Gelder). Though a fan of John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, he was not usually a note-y, splatter-gun shredder. His solos are closer to Miles: spacey, feline, searching, severe, and happy to hit a clam if it’s the right clam.
As if this weren’t enough, he was also literary! That the author of “Marquee Moon” called himself Verlaine (after the 19th-century symboliste) was one reason you might find half-read (probably not even) New Directions paperbacks of Baudelaire’s Fleurs du Mal and Rimbaud’s Illuminations lying beside copies of The Replacements’ Let It Be and Dinosaur Jr.’s Bug in your bandmate’s filthy apartment. The lit-rock thing was in part a response to the decisive shock of versification that popular music received at approximately the moment Dylan sang “she wears an Egyptian ring it sparkles before she speaks” in 1965. But for us ’90s kids, that kind of songwriting was just as likely to have been associated with Verlaine, whose lyrics could sound tossed off, even as they had been clearly filed to the bone: I remember how the darkness doubled; Broadway looked so medieval, it seemed to flap like little pages; My eyes are like telescopes; Well the Cadillac, it pulled out of the graveyard.
These were the sort of future-noir tableaux the bumpkin magus Rimbaud had prophesied in his wild visions of cities and which run through The Big Sleep, Alphaville, Nova Express and, well, Television. It was enough to make you move from rural Wisconsin to New York City, which I did in 1997, with a Telecaster and a bunch of songs and the hope of finding a red jacket like the one Richard Lloyd is wearing on the cover of Adventure. I did eventually find such a jacket, acquired from a girlfriend in a trade for my hardcover copy of Martin Amis’s The Information. I later learned that the coat had been shoplifted from the J.Crew off the Bowery.
There’s a lot more Verlaine than Television. Starting with his 1979 self-titled debut, he made six solo records marked throughout by shades of rockabilly and early rock ’n’ roll, affectionate hat tips to the Velvets in their lucid third LP mode, and later, period art-pop with requisite doses of synth. Bowie recorded Verlaine’s “Kingdom Come” for his excellent 1980 record Scary Monsters and Super Creeps, in which he tests out one of his most outlandish Ethel-Merman-on-PCP vocal vibratos (which I always took to be his weird tribute to Tom’s singing style). To be targeted by the Ziggy/Aladdin/Duke was of course a badge of distinction, as well as a testament to Verlaine’s auteur-like vision.
Many of the tracks on Verlaine’s solo records fit no recognizable template or genre. My favorite of them, Dreamtime (1981), a set of asymmetric songs bathed in a kind of glowing frost, features bit parts by fictional characters like “Mr. Blur.” The sui generis “Days on the Mountain” from the next record Words from the Front (1982) wholly defies comparison: I will refrain other than to say that Verlaine, or at least the character singing, sounds delighted to be “walking around the inside of a bell.” On “Lindi-Lu” from Cover (1984), he’s singing in a faux-SUN hiccup over pulses of synth and guitar that for some reason make one think of moves in a game of Connect Four. These records show that the electric guitar had become for Verlaine an expanded palette for making mixing desk mini-compositions. A single riff might be three separate takes of three different guitars going through three different amps, panned across the image to create a single impossible part. You can feel the work getting further into the ’80s as the gate reverbs on the drums become more extreme and conspicuous—really, everything sounded like Peter Gabriel’s SO in 1987—but the guitar playing never strays far from Verlaine’s fingerprint.
In 1992, the original members of Television reunited, making an album that picked up where “Little Johnny Jewel” left off. Recorded with the kind of care that had come to mark Verlaine’s solo work—hyper-fastidious guitar and amplifier choices, microphone placement, et cetera—it’s a wonderfully lithe and spooky set of tunes. And they are not just delicacies from the Guitar Lab. Ficca forces everyone to push against the clock, the quartet more than once finding that slight vertigo when backbeat becomes unmoored from the metronome (see the outro of “Shane, She Wrote This”). Verlaine the lyricist is more that usually oblique throughout: I could just sort of not be there. Know what I mean? Not be anywhere.
I saw them at the Barrymore Theatre in Madison, Wisconsin when the third Television record dropped. They did the whole thing in order then walked offstage, came back ten minutes later and played “Marquee Moon” and were done. I was awed by that encore. They nailed absolutely all of it, taking things, if memory serves, much further out than on the recording. That year Verlaine also released Warm and Cool, an instrumental album that sounds like the theme music to the Twilight Zone on a blind date with a Morricone spaghetti western score. He went on to make one more instrumental guitar record, and another set of songs, more than ten years later. The great gaps between releases from 1992 until his death only added to allure of the man and his work.
It moves me to think how much Tom Verlaine meant to my friends and I growing up. “This is the longest we’ve sat shiva,” said a close pal when the Verlaine thread was still going a week after the news. We’re all a little hurt and stunned. When someone who wrote music you care about dies, it dawns on you that they played a role in the scary, inductive, unplannable catastrophe of the person you have become. Verlaine shaped the identity of at least one whole generation of artists, writers, and musicians (that is, mine). He was an idealist who, amid the sleaze and cacophony of that cavernous room off the Bowery, could sing of falling into the arms of Venus. His vision casts back through Dylan, Ornette Coleman, and Chuck Berry, to Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Poe, and maybe all the way to the trobar clus of the wandering troubadours. I’d like to think he’s hanging out somewhere with that bird he made appear from out of a guitar.
On Tom Verlaine : It was punk rock for musicians! By Paul Grimstad. n + 1 magazine, February 9, 2023.
