Remembering Tom Verlaine, Guitarist

 

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.
 
Absolument rien ne prédestinait Thomas Joseph Miller a une grande carrière. Non, vraiment, rien de rien. Ou peut-être si, justement. Apparu sur Terre en 1949 à la toute fin de la première décennie des baby-boomers, il vit la British Invasion de 65/66 et la révolution psychédélique de 66/67 avec autant d’intérêt qu’un gosse face à une assiette d’épinards. Sauf qu’il n’est plus du tout un gosse.. A titre de comparaison, le fondateur de la critique rock’n’roll, Grégory Alan Shaw, né également en 1949, s’est d’abord pris les Beatles en pleine gueule avant de plonger la tête la première dans le rock gavé au LSD. A sa décharge, il se trouvait sur la côte Est, là où il ne se passait pas grand chose, alors que Greg était à l’ouest. Mais quand même… Alors qu’une bonne partie des jeunes New-Yorkais filent en 1967 au festival de Monterey, qui était au passage bien plus fun que celui de Woodstock, Thomas Joseph qui a donc 18 ans, l’âge idéal pour aller faire le con dans la boue avec le pénis à l’air, préfère rester terré chez lui, à lire des vieux poètes obscurs du dix-neuvième siècle. Des vieux poètes obscurs, qui plus est français : Paul Verlaine en tête, qui lui donnera, dans un avenir incertain, peut-être son nom..
 
Totalement à la masse, celui qui semble venir d’une planète inconnue n’a pas la chance de découvrir, comme Lester Bangs et une trentaine de personnes, l’OVNI du Velvet Underground au moment où il existe vraiment, et mis à part un rare titre des Rolling stones, en l’occurrence 19th Nervous Breakdown qui est un des seuls morceaux de sixties-rock à trouver grâce à ses yeux en 1965, il s’enfonce dans la nostalgie d’une époque révolue, avant de peut-être en inventer une autre mais ça, personne ne le sait encore. Obsessionnel de be-bop et de jazz-fou, il se prend une claque monstre avec stan Getz puis John Coltrane, de quoi décoller avec son vaisseau spatial pour une autre planète déjà ringarde, celle des exaltées fifties, et donc de ne plus poser le pied sur celle des sixties. Encore plus savoureux, le gamin n’a même pas de guitare entre les mains, et passe ses journées à glander, jonglant entre ses disques de Coltrane, ses carnets de poésie et son saxophone avec lequel on l’imagine essayer d’imiter, très mal, le king de l’improvisation cuivrée. Une activité ratée qui aura son importance par la suite. Pour l’heure, Tom qui a atterri au beau milieu d’un bled paumé du Delaware est envoyé dans un bled encore plus paumé du Delaware, Hockessin, une des cités-dortoirs les plus chiantes de l’Amérique où sommeille une dizaine de milliers de gens sans aucune histoire à raconter. Un village inutile qui aurait, selon Wikipédia, tout de même abrité Cab Calloway, ainsi que la première femme de l’actuel président Joe Biden. Tiens donc.
 
« Aucun talent n’est caché »
 
Tom Verlaine, pardon, Thomas Joseph Miller, n’est même pas cité dans la liste. Et pourtant, il s’en est passé des choses pour Tommy à Hockessin. Inscrit au lycée privé de sanford, qu’on imagine aussi chiant que le bled, il continue de zoner sec et rate le baccalauréat local, qui ne devait pas être bien compliqué, qui plus est pour une personne de son talent, et de sa classe. Enfin, à cet instant précis, le jeune adolescent – on ne devient adulte qu’à 21 ans aux États-Unis, vous le savez aussi bien que moi – n’a aucun talent réel. Tout juste crachote-t-il quelques solos mal dégourdis avec son instrument à cuivre jaune, et griffonne-t-il des bribes de poésie dans son carnet à l’odeur de moisi. Le slogan de l’école « No Talent Lies Latent» (ou « Aucun talent n’est caché » en VF) n’a désespérément rien de prophétique, ou peut-être justement que si, car cet enfant est perdu, complètement perdu, et ne réussira rien de mieux dans sa vie que d’avoir raté son BAC, comme tant d’autres losers avant lui. Mais heureusement pour lui, si, il a un talent. Le talent d’être au mauvais endroit, au mauvais moment, et c’est déjà énorme : dans cette école de gros ploucs, il rencontre un autre perdant, du nom de Richard Lester Meyers, qui vient de rater son examen de passage à l’université. Tiens donc, exactement comme lui. Et comme les choses sont bien finalement assez bien faites, Tom vient d’acheter sa première guitare. Vous avez bien compris : un extra-terrestre complètement paumé, pseudo poète, accro au be-bop et passé totalement à côté de la décennie qui a révolutionné une première fois la guitare électrique, vient de s’acheter une guitare électrique.
 
Suivant la trace poudrée de son héros John Coltrane, mais aussi de tant d’autres nazes avant lui, il s’envole pour New-York, vers la fin des sixties. La ville de tous les possibles, mais aussi de tous les ratages. Un peu comme Los Angeles, et Paris, où des milliers de pseudo-artistes viennent se casser les dents, avant de sombrer dans la restauration pour servir ceux qui ont réussi, à leur place. Toujours pas en accord, mais alors pas du tout, avec la musique de son temps, la comète T.J.M reste enfermée chez elle à tricoter avec son manche, comme une vieille, mais en foutant un peu plus de bordel. Après avoir provoqué un incendie criminel on ne sait où, alors qu’ils erraient sous la pleine lune, Thomas et Richard signent un pacte entre leurs deux âmes damnées; ils emménagent ensemble à l’intérieur de la Grosse Pomme, pourrie de l’intérieur par quelques hippies bloqués sur la même putain de note, depuis des années. Assommés par l’ennui du rock planant, ils créent leur propre monde pour éviter le suicide, tuant le temps entre fureur poétique à la Jack Kerouac sur une antique machine à écrire, gavage de Jean-Luc Godard dans des salles vraiment obscures et expérimentations infinies sur guitare électrique, dans une colocation de couilles qui pue la mort et la défaite.
 
Il y a tout de même un point positif à s’acheter un instrument à cordes électriques alors qu’on déteste la plupart des groupes de rock existants, et qu’on écoute du Miles Davis et du hard-bop à longueur de journée : on ne joue pas exactement la même chose que les autres, voire pas du tout. Thomas Miller, qui vient de se renommer Tom Verlaine en référence à vous savez qui, va passer près de dix ans à peaufiner son style, et ses punchlines, dans sa piaule à l’odeur immonde. Au même moment, celui qui déteste par-dessus tout les hippies gobe son premier buvard pour tuer l’ennui, un instant de détresse cosmique qu’il décrit en des termes prophétiques : « J’ai eu mon premier trip vendredi. C’était horrible, je me suis mis à penser à tout un tas de trucs négatifs sur pleins de choses ». Il ne le sait évidemment pas encore, mais il vient de signer un pacte définitif avec son destin : ce dernier se fera contre les chevelus à deux de tension.
 
Bienvenue en enfer

 
Bien plus intéressés par les poètes cramés du dix-neuvième siècle, qui inventèrent au passage la contre-culture, et par les surréalistes du début du vingtième siècle, dont André Breton, qui renouvelèrent celle-ci avec un mélange d’absurdité et de radicalité novatrices, ils s’apprêtent à eux-mêmes prendre le relais de ces derniers, après l’échec cuisant des hippies qui avaient emmené la contre-culture dans la poubelle créé par un certain Allen Ginsberg mais ça, ils ne le savent pas encore. Toujours pas mal dans le vague, Tom Verlaine – sa signature mystique – est suivi par Richard qui abandonne son blaze de minable pour un autre blaze de looser véner, Richard Hell, qui tient autant de la référence à Rimbaud et sa saison en Enfer que de la révérence au génie de l’enfer Charles Baudelaire dont on ne doit pas prononcer le nom.
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.
 
Neon Boys
 
Finie la lose poétique : place à la loose punk car comme le dit l’adage, il faut tomber beaucoup avant de réussir, mais vraiment. S’il a plutôt suivi son pote de l’enfer dans la tombe de la poésie, cette-fois ci c’est Tommy qui va tirer les ficelles de l’échec, et reprendre le contrôle de cette putain d’histoire. Nanti de sa Fender Jazzmaster qu’il a payé 95 dollars, il force Richie à faire de même en lui demandant, gentiment, de s’acheter une putain de guitare. Ça sera une Danelectro, la guitare du pauvre qui fut utilisée par Jimi Hendrix et Jimmy Page, deux mecs cools mais pas vraiment au niveau en termes de punch, et de haine. Verlaine et Hell carburent à une autre dope, celle du garage sixties qu’ils écoutent au Max’s Kansas City en se pintant la tronche, et surtout celle du Velvet Underground, qu’ils viennent de découvrir; soit le premier groupe de rock à avoir exploré le côté obscur de la force, au Max’s Kansas City justement, et dont ils glisseront certains éléments dans leur futur shaker magique.
 
Hell voue un culte aux stooges, qui ont récemment poussé l’agressivité électrique à un niveau supérieur, avec le MC5. Inspiré par ce son de la cave, par leur instinct et par leur envie de détruire l’ennui intersidéral du rock à cheveux longs, le duo forme les Neon Boys, un trio de mâles pas dominants qui rejoint ce club alors très fermé de décérébrés du rock’n’roll. Le mot «punk» fait déjà partie de l’auto-glorification de quelques rares rock-critics – dont le légendaire Greg Shaw – mais pour qualifier le vieux garage à papi, et alors que la révolution à crêtes est encore aussi loin que Pluton, il s’agit déjà pour tous ces groupes, peu ou prou, de véritable punk-rock : une fougue juvénile éternelle, mais d’une violence nouvelle, nimbée d’un nihilisme puissant. Cette génération est marquée par la lose, mais dans ce ratage cuisant, ils ne sont pas non plus tous au même niveau. Comparé à l’iguane Iggy Pop qui montre son pénis en public mais sonne encore un peu trop sixties, et aux New York Dolls qui s’habillent en meuf et jouent en réalité une version totalement psychotique des Rolling stones, le son des Boys est peut-être un cran moins violent, mais il est beaucoup plus inventif, instinctif, plus sale, plus bancal, plus nerveux, plus punk en définitif. Les mecs ne savent pas jouer, et ils vous emmerdent. Mais  Verlaine qui peaufine son style dans l’ombre depuis des années voit déjà plus loin : il ne veut pas simplement être le premier, il veut aussi être le meilleur. Lui et sa bande clôturent ce disque mythique par une version jouissive de la révolution atomique : plus mélodique, plus moderne, et plus belle, tout simplement. Et oui, déjà, le futur du futur est annoncé, pendant que Marc Bolan assure la transition avec le rock androgyne, ou glam-rock. Le romantisme expérimental de Verlaine à la guitare solo commence à poindre, travaillé loin de l’agitation de son époque maudite, mais on est encore à des années lumière de l’Everest du rock et du punk qu’il sera le premier, et le dernier, à atteindre. Après avoir inventé la bombe avec d’autres paumés, Tom veut déjà l’enrichir avec un nouveau type d’uranium, et bazarde les Neon au milieu de l’année 1973.
 
Casting de bras pas cassés

 

Afin de commencer à travailler sa mayonnaise novatrice, Tommy n’oublie pas de recruter un dernier ingrédient, Mister Richard Lloyd, un autre raté du lycée qui déboule à la deuxième guitare pour tenir la baraque rythmique avec lui, et lui permettre de chier des leads quand il en ressent l’envie pressante. Déterminée à tuer la lose et à faire quelque chose de sa vie sur la Pomme Bleue, la comète T.J.M s’enferme avec sa bande d’illettrés durant tout l’automne et tout l’hiver 73-74. Une période embryonnaire mais décisive, où ils turbinent en cuisine comme ils ne l’ont peut-être jamais fait, 6 heures par jour durant six mois, à part bien sûr Tom qui bûche en solitaire depuis cinq ans à la préparation de sa recette mutante. Le travail est long, ardu, mais il va payer, et vite.
 
L’écoute des démos issues de ces répétitions infinies est sans appel. Comme l’avaient fait Elvis, et les Beatles, la recette est si simple que personne n’y avait pensé avant eux : la nervosité extrême, comme un fil électrique tendu au milieu du vide ou un accélérateur de crise cardiaque, avec une puissance mélodique et romantique fusionnant l’art de la pop-song parfaite et l’existence totale de Paul Verlaine et Charles Baudelaire. On vous garde les meilleures punchlines pour la suite, comme Tom a gardé secrètes ses chansons, qu’il écrivait à 90%, durant encore trois ans. Une éternité, passée à peaufiner dans les moindres détails ses pépites extra-galactiques telles que Prove It, Friction, et Marquee Moon, toutes inventées en 1973, pour que l’explosion à venir soit la plus violente, et la plus belle possible.
 
Un envoyé spécial de Rock News, le magazine punk lancé avant même l’apparition réelle du mot «punk», et donc le premier, s’est rendu sur place pour nous. Il s’appelle Michel Esteban. Il était à New-York au passage entre l’année 74 et 75. Il a tout vu. Absolument tout. Un concert biblique, avec la bande de Verlaine en première partie des New-York-Dolls. Oui, vous avez bien lu. D’un côté, le premier groupe managé par Malcolm McLaren, qui tenta un coup de poker en déguisant les «premiers punks» en troupe de glam-rock, le genre qui était alors à la mode. Raté, comme il ratera l’explosion de la bombe atomique basique, qu’il répliquera comme un naze en Angleterre. Et de l’autre, Tom et sa bande de cramés romantiques, qui avaient déjà mis un taquet aux Dolls avec les Neon Boys, et qui les ridiculisent ce soir-là. Esteban qui nous a téléphoné depuis la Thaïlande est encore tout émoustillé par cet instant, qui a changé la pop-culture à jamais:
 
“L’intensité saturait, course furieuse vers une extase musicale. Ne restait dans la salle qu’une cinquantaine de personnes pour assister à cette version novatrice de Sister Ray. Une apothéose”.
 
Totalement accro à cette dope venue d’une autre contrée stellaire, il écrit même le live-report le moins chiant de la création, dans son canard lu par à peu près dix salopards:
 
« Tom Verlaine, ce zombie magnifique, des yeux qui foudroient pour peu qu’ils vous regardent. Une voix dure comme s’il avait un cran d’arrêt en travers de la gorge. ».
 
On va en parler très bientôt mais oui, la voix du roi est un fondement essentiel de ce package futuriste. A défaut d’être parfaits, les morceaux joués à cette période respirent une liberté et une vitalité incroyables, et si les bandes sont tout aussi dégueulasses que le son du quatuor, la tension électrique est palpable, presque irrespirable, de quoi couper le souffle à un coureur de fond. Plus que jamais, Verlaine paraît en mission pour les Dieux du rock, et on le comprend : il est sur le point de leur amener un dessert au goût inimitable. Sur une photographie en noir et blanc de ces performances fondatrices, on voit d’ailleurs Lloyd qui regarde Tom se faire du bien avec son manche, les yeux ahuris, comme s’il venait de rencontrer le messie. « La révolution ne sera pas télévisée », chantait Gil scott-Heron en 1971, et il avait raison : elle sera TELEVISION.
 
 
Tell a vision
 

Jeu de mot foireux, ou très intelligent, entre le média qui domine cette planète étrange et dystopique et le mot-valise poétique «Tell a Vision», le nom du groupe est lui aussi prophétique puisqu’à part Michel et son journal underground, aucun média terrestre ne s’est déplacé pour voir les essais de cette toute nouvelle bombe atomique, aux propriétés mystiques. Avant même que Patti Smith ne sorte «Hoorses» qui lancera (enfin) le mouvement punk en décembre 1975, du moins aux États-Unis, après des années d’échec, Television dégaine le single Little Johnny Jewel : un western noir et improvisé, où le jeu de soliste de Tom fait déjà des étincelles. Il pourrait plier le game tout de suite, mais il décide d’attendre, retenant la leçon de la loose punk du début de la décennie, déterminé à sortir la tête de l’eau ni trop tôt, ni trop tard.
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.
 
Là-encore, Tom est aux manettes de son festin. Il ne veut laisser personne s’introduire entre lui, et son œuvre chérie d’amour, qu’il entend bien pénétrer, de tout son corps, et tout son être. Il négocie avec Elektra le fait de produire lui-même le disque, et autorise un certain Andy Johns à l’assister, l’ancien producteur des Stones qu’il relègue au rang d’esclave. Un contrat unique dans l’industrie du disque, tel Kylian Mbappé qui contrôle le PSG à lui tout seul, à la place de dirigeants bedonnants. Cet esclave de Johns a déjà bien de la chance d’être là, pour voir l’orgasme final, l’apothéose extatique d’une demi-décennie de préliminaires chauds comme Nabilla en vacances sur Mars. La scène la plus importante de l’histoire du rock après l’éclosion d’Elvis et celle des Beatles se passe au studioA & , un nom de banque sans âme pour faire péter non pas leur PEL, mais les murs, le sol, et le plafond avec du bordel, et de la beauté. Les quatre gus n’ont toujours pas le BAC, ils ne connaissent aucun accord, mais ils jouent comme si la mort les attendait, et livrent une prestation digne d’un combat de la Rome Antique. La meilleure de leur vie. Sans aucun putain de piste à piste. Sans aucun effet pour se cacher. Avec les bollocks. Avec le cœur grand ouvert. Ils enfilent les titres comme on sniffe un gramme de coke, et plient l’affaire en quelques heures. Face aux micros. Face à leur destin. En lévitation totale, ils se payent même le luxe de torcher la plupart de leurs pépites en une seule putain de prise, dont celle de Marquee Moon qui s’avère grandiose, alors qu’il ne devait s’agir d’une simple répétition. Ils n’en pouvaient plus d’attendre pour enculer le rock américain, mais par devant. Une jouissance éternelle. Aucune post-production ne sera faite par-dessus. Inutile. Ils viennent d’atteindre l’Everest, sans assistance, et sans oxygène.
 
 
John Coltrane de la guitare électrique
 
Ils sont les premiers. Ils resteront les derniers. A tout jamais. En mixant dans un shaker magique le radicalisme de la Nouvelle Vague, l’urgence du rock poubelle – ou punk -, un groove létal de boule à facette carbonisée, une verve poétique existentialiste, l’expérience du côté obscur du Velvet Underground, la symbiose mélodique de la pop, l’élégance dandy et l’art improvisé des fous du bebop, ils ont créé une mutation ultra puissante de la musique crêtée, dont le gêne principal venait à peine d’être dévoilé au public par son copain Richard Hell et sa copine Patti, près d’un an avant que ce gros naze de Johnny Rotten ne copie Richie de fond en comble.
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.

 
Portant l’improvisation de studio à son climax, Verlaine ringardise une décennie en un seul éclat foudroyant. De la lave bouillante coulait dans les veines de ce Nouveau Romantique qui hissa la musique rock – et pop – sur des hauteurs rarement atteintes. Autre ironie de l’histoire : les dieux de la génération hippie crevèrent à 27 piges, tout le contraire du mastermind de la punkitude esthétique et intellectuelle qui a découvert le Graal à cet âge désormais canonique. Né pour perdre, looser dans l’âme, être supérieur perdu dans un monde qu’il n’a jamais réussi à comprendre, il fut l’un de ceux qui transformèrent l’échec en victoire. Une victoire cinglante que les Anglais ne sont pas près d’oublier, malgré la réplique pas si mauvaise voire excellente des humains de Magazine à la fin de l’année 1977 sur un créneau similaire. Mais comme pour Rotten avec Richie, ils n’étaient pas à l’heure au rendez-vous. Et si les Britishs se vengeront brillamment avec la création de la new-wave par The Human League et de la cold-wave par Joy Division, absolument personne n’arrivera jamais à égaler Verlaine, en terme de grandeur de l’âme, à part peut-être Ian Curtis. Après avoir brûlée vive sur la Terre maudite, l’étoile vient de repartir de là où elle est venue, dans l’infini du cosmos qu’elle cherchait par tous les moyens à retrouver avec sa guitare. Welcome home, Tommy.
 
Tom Verlaine : une carrière plus grande que la télévision. Par Mitt Hohmann. Gonzaï , Avril 29, 2023.

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  in 1993, Verlaine confessed that he hated guitar music for years. 
 
“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.

 
“This was at a time when there were a lot of things being done on guitar that I felt were outdated and corny,” Marr said. “But there was also a generation of young men in the UK and America who were onto something new – Robert Smith, John McKay, Will Sergeant. A lot of us took note from Richard Lloyd and Tom Verlaine. Those guys were game-changers. I loved all that... and still do.”
 
The long approach towards the release of Marquee Moon is the history of a band taking the time to evolve before announcing themselves on wax. Formed in 1973 with Verlaine’s old school pal and countercultural Zelig Richard Hell on bass, Billy Ficca on drums and Lloyd on guitar, Television would soon mix things up, swapping out Hell for Fred Smith, then of Blondie.
 
There was a certain amount of ruthlessness in that. When Hell and Verlaine moved to New York, Hell got Verlaine a job at the Strand bookstore. But perfectionism was in Verlaine’s blood. It was part of the internal logic of the band.
 
No-one was safe. Brian Eno was brought in to produce the Marquee Moon demos and Verlaine was unsparing in his judgement, saying it all sounded like the Ventures, lacking juice. The sounds Television were chasing were a reaction to the rock guitar consensus at the time that favoured Marshall stacks and humbucking pickups. All of that was out. Theirs would be a Fender sound.
 
The angular cut of a single-coil pickup was their thing. The price of the Fender Jazzmaster at the time was also appealing. Verlaine found a ’59 Jazzmaster with a bronze pickguard and that made it on their debut. Sonic Youth would explicitly follow Verlaine’s lead a few years later to seek out Fender offsets as the affordable option.
 
Rare and oddball guitars were always welcome. Verlaine also used a Gretsch G6123 Monkees signature model that he picked up for $80, a guitar that was only on the market for a couple of years at the height of The Monkees’ popularity. There were Danelectro and Vox guitars, and a see-through Ampeg Dan Armstrong Plexi, presumably for the same reason that everyone else played one; because it looked damn cool. There were Strats and Jaguars, too, and an Epiphone Al Caiola.
 
In later years, Verlaine would use a modded Strat that was fitted with three lipstick-style pickups and a neck taken from a Jazzmaster. Guitar amps were mostly from Fender, too, with the high-powered Super Deluxe tube combos a cornerstone of their sound. Vox AC30s, Music Man HD-130 4X10 combos and a Dumble Overdrive Special found themselves on Verlaine’s backline over the years. Television’s tech, Robert Darby, built them a Valvotronics amp. Like many players of the era, Echoplex tape echoes were used, even if just for the preamp’s secret sauce.
 
Like most serious Jazzmaster players, Verlaine’s models were upgraded with Mastery bridges. He also favoured heavy strings, 0.014s or 0.015s for the high E, a 0.054 for the low E, and always a wound G. Technique-wise, he would use a pick but play close to the neck pickup.
 
Marquee Moon was quite the debut, but there was more where that came from. Adventure followed in 1978, deepening Lloyd and Verlaine’s understanding of one another’s styles. The energy was different, the songs every bit as strong. Besides, what would it have served Television to have tried to chase the same thrills? If Marquee Moon was some after-hours adventure in the city, a transcendent fever of neon, Adventure is the morning after.
 
Whether it is on the loose, sun-fried groove of Glory, the mid-tempo strut of Foxhole, or Verlaine favourite The Dream’s Dream – mostly instrumental bar one verse, it sails off into the ether, closing the album out, the cool precision of Lloyd and Verlaine’s phrasing present and correct.
 
The treble gives it a wiry clarity that again speaks to the perfectionism; a Super Deluxe is the sort of amplifier that punishes sloppiness. For better or worse, if you play a note on it, you hear it loud. There is no hiding place. Speaking to Hit Parader in 1978, Verlaine admitted that theirs was a difficult sound to capture in the studio.
 
“It’s a bright kind of sound,” he said. “It’s not fuzzed up, it’s not like say, a Bad Company sound where you plug a Les Paul into a Marshall – which is the formula for about 80 per cent of rock ’n’ roll. We’ve got a number of weird little guitars which we use with weird Fender amps, and it produces a very different kind of sound. A lot of engineers don’t know how to translate it so it will work on a record.”
 
Television would break up just months after the release of Adventure. Verlaine endured a year of contract wrangles with Elektra as he gathered material for his self-titled solo debut. Stylistically, the apple did not fall far from the tree. Sure, Lloyd no longer offered Verlaine a foil, but the licks, voice and songwriting mounted a convincing case that the best was yet to come.
 
David Bowie thought so, and recorded a cover of the song Kingdom Come on his 1980 album Scary Monsters (And Super Creeps). Although Verlaine was scheduled to play on Bowie’s version, it was Robert Fripp who played lead instead. Apparently Verlaine’s search for the perfect tone, auditioning amps ad nauseam, was not everyone’s idea of fun.
 
But it worked for him. The tones he found on Dreamtime (1981) scratched and shimmered around his vocal. Postcard From Waterloo, from 1982’s Words From the Front, is reference quality surf-rock tone, a splash of vintage Americana that would be reprised in 1992 for the instrumental album Warm and Cool – a record found him experimenting with fingerstyle.
 
Television would reform in 1992, releasing a self-titled album, touring, and then staying officially active until Verlaine’s death. Later, Verlaine would guest on records by the Violent Femmes, James Iha and Patti Smith. He would score silent movies for the Douris Corporation with Jimmy Ripp, half composed, half improvised.

 
Few understood Verlaine better as a guitar player than Richard Lloyd...
 
“It’s like we become one guitar,” said Lloyd, speaking to Guitar Player. “I can tell the difference between our parts and our styles when we’re playing leads, but even when I listen to stuff that Tom and I do, sometimes I have to pull myself out of it to determine who’s where, who’s what.
 
“I don’t think there’s another band that has that with two guitars, where one doesn’t strum and one doesn’t play lead all the time, and they don’t switch or play leads at the same time in 3rds – we’re not the Allman Brothers, and we’re not Status Quo, we’re not heavy metal, and we’re not a strum band. The parts are very well defined in their interconnectedness. They really make one piece, and I don’t know exactly how that happens.”
 
If such magic could be explained, it wouldn’t be magic anymore. We should still try. Verlaine’s guitar parts are vines to be scaled to see how it looks and sounds from on high, another perspective on the instrument. Verlaine’s guitar was pitched at the avant garde but was nonetheless relatable. Like Robby Krieger of the Doors, he mixed alien styles, different modes, a jazz sensibility painting with Mixolydian and blues. If there is a lesson to be taken, it is to never be satisfied.
 
“When I do hear a guitar in contemporary music, it always has the same sound,” Verlaine once complained. “I guess it’s a distortion plugin – ‘Preset 80’ or something. Who cares?”
 
Remembering Tom Verlaine, the cult hero who reconfigured guitar and inspired generations of alt-rock players. By Jonathan Horsley.  Guitar World , April 06, 2023. 

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.

 
Television formed in the ‘70s, as a partnership between guitarist Tom Verlaine (born Thomas Miller) and bassist Richard Hell (born Richard Meyers). The musicians bonded as teenage troublemakers at boarding school in Delaware, then later moved to New York City as young adults to try and make it as poets. (Fittingly, Verlaine’s adopted last name is an homage to the French poet Paul Verlaine.) They played in a short-lived group called the Neon Boys together, which broke up in the wake of recording a lone 7-inch.
 
Not long after that band hung up its hat, the duo reconvened with a new guitarist named Richard Lloyd. The trio called this fresh band Television because of their distaste for the medium—they hoped their music could provide listeners with an alternative. They cut their teeth for almost a year before finally playing their first show, but hit the ground running pretty quickly after initially taking the stage. Within just a few months of unveiling their work, Television was gigging heavily in the booming CBGBs circuit and had played at additional hot spots, including the vaunted venue Max’s Kansas City.
 
While Television easily found their footing as a live act, a long road led up to the release of their work in the studio. Verlaine and Hell initially split the difference as songwriters, but tensions rose when other band members wanted to contribute more behind the scenes. Hell—a boisterous punk personality—refused to hone his craft, and consistently brought an inappropriate level of energy to Television concerts. Eventually, he parted ways with the band and would go on to have a prolific career as a founding member of the Heartbreakers and, later, as the front person of The Voidoids.
 
Hell was replaced by downtown scenester Fred Smith, who had previously played with Blondie for a spell. Television’s new lineup tried recording some ill-fated demos with Brian Eno in ‘74, before finally putting out their first 7-inch, “Little Johnny Jewel,” in ‘75. At this point, they were one of the buzziest bands in the New York City underground, and signed with Elektra before hitting the studio with Rolling Stones engineer Andy Johns to bring a proper album to life.
 
The end result of those sessions was Marquee Moon, which came out in early ‘77. It was met with solid praise, and seemed to carve a lane of its own. The album is defined by cryptic lyricism that is often tethered to seedy allusions. If Television peer Lou Reed’s penchant for writing about drugs and crime was his life and his wife, in Verlaine’s hands grit was more like an elusive lover. “I knew it musta been some big set-up/All the action just would not let up/It's just a little bit back from the main road/Where the silence spreads and the men dig holes,” he sings in the first verse of the rollicking track “Friction.”
 
Marquee Moon was also driven by wiry, masterful guitar work. Intricate riffs interlock and divert over spirited, rudimentary grooves. “The band never breaks for a squall of energy, yet the whole record crackles with it, and they never rely on atmosphere to make their case,” Chris Dahlen wrote in a 2003 review of one of the album’s reissues for Pitchfork. That publication would later rank the record as the third best album of the '70s.
 
It’s easy to trace the impact of Marquee Moon on 20th century indie rock, and also on a recent generation of scuzzy experimentalists like black midi and Squid. Marquee Moon was followed by the comparably refined ‘78 album Adventure, which was a commercial flop, eclipsed by its predecessor. However, it has held up as an underrated classic—a snapshot of a virtuosic band sharpening a singular sound. A few months after their second album hit shelves, torn apart by disparate egos and Lloyd’s substance abuse, Television called it quits.
 
Like Hell, most members of Television went on to successful solo careers before they reunited in ‘92. After that extended hiatus, the band put out a self-titled album and would occasionally tour. But they never fully recaptured the magic of their ‘70s heyday. Nonetheless, Television cemented themself as a relic of a graffitied, bohemian moment in the New York City art world. Without the band as a forebear, acts like Pavement and My Bloody Valentine would have probably sounded a whole lot different.
 
Verlaine was consistently the soul of Television, his songwriting eclectic and his musical chops truly intimidating. On top of his work with the band, he put out a number of solo albums that sometimes flaunt the over-the-top trappings of ‘80s production techniques, but still contain some solid songwriting. He was also a member of the supergroup Million Dollar Bashers, alongside members of Sonic Youth, Wilco, and Bob Dylan’s backing band. He would additionally collaborate with artists like David Bowie and Violent Femmes, and score films from Man Ray and Fernand Léger. Tragically, this January, he passed away at the age of 73 after battling a brief, unspecified illness. While he is sorely missed, he remains one of the most influential independent rock musicians of all time.
 
“I went to see Television whenever they played, mostly to see Tom, with his pale-blue eyes and swanlike neck," his love interest-turned-occasional bandmate Patti Smith wrote in an obituary published in The New Yorker. "He bowed his head, gripping his Jazzmaster, releasing billowing clouds, strange alleyways populated with tiny men, a murder of crows, and the cries of bluebirds rushing through a replica of space.” With this in mind, and in celebration of Verlaine’s legacy as a six-string legend, here are some of Television's quintessential guitar gear moments.
 
Fender Jazzmaster
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.)
 
Danelectro 59 DC
 
These days, Danelectro is best known for its affordable pedals and nostalgic reissues that call to mind the golden age of surf rock and psychedelia. The New Jersey company’s current branding feels tailored towards would-be flower children. But Verlaine actually used a 59 DC on stage back in the ‘70s. The lightweight guitar has a spruce body, and lipstick single-coil pickups that contribute to its blocky midrange tone. It offers a drab, defiant alternate glimpse at the brand’s otherwise colorful history.
 
Ampeg Dan Armstrong Plexi
 
Verlaine was certainly a Fender man, but one of the most iconic live photos of him actually features an Ampeg Dan Armstrong Plexi electric guitar. The clear instrument was introduced in ‘69, and is a weird-yet-wonderfully relic of Space Age design. It came to life as a collaboration between Ampeg and (if you can possibly believe it) New York City guitar wiz Dan Armstrong. Its body was constructed from polymethyl methacrylate, a substance that allowed the instrument to be both flashy (albeit somewhat heavy) and sonically interesting. Expensive and bizarre, the guitar is largely remembered as an oddity more than a treasure. But other famous musicians who have embraced it include Keith Richards and Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Cambell.
 
Ampeg SSB Bass
 
Verlaine wasn’t the only Ampeg player in Television. Smith’s go-to bass was the brand’s SSB model, which remained his preferred instrument over the course of the act’s career. (He did occasionally use other basses, like Fender’s more conventional Mustang and Jazz Bass models.) The SSB is an elusive instrument that rarely seems to pop up on Reverb, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a gem. The bass playing in Television’s music straddles the lines between both rhythm and melody. Fittingly, the SSB’s tones land right in the sweet spot between treble and low end, complementing Smith’s distinctive musicianship.
 
Fender Stratocaster
 
Lloyd’s contributions to Television are just as important as Verlaine’s. The band’s dual-guitar sound is a large part of what makes their music so gripping. Across their records and on-stage bootlegs, his playing weaves sepia-tinted streaks through his bandmates’ chunky chops. (For a prime example of this interplay, look no further than the above live video, circa 1980.) “Sometimes songs would pass back and forth, and it was, like, ‘you play the solo one night and I’ll play it the next night and we’ll figure out who does the better job,’” he said in a 2014 interview conducted by Gibson’s New York City showroom. His main musical tool was a ‘61 model of Fender’s widely-played Stratocaster, whose versatile, innocuous tone contrasts the coarser sounds that Verlaine often dialed up. (Verlaine would also adopt the Strat after the band’s reunion, although his was fitted with a custom Jaguar neck and lipstick pickups a la Danelectro.) It stands as the perfect metaphorical brush for conveying Lloyd’s challenging aural strokes.
 
Music Man 410-HD One Thirty 4x10 Combo
 
Verlaine used a lot of amps throughout his career, but the Music Man 410-HD One Thirty 4x10 Combo was at the heart of rig during much of the band’s heyday. Music Man was launched by Leo Fender—who is obviously best remembered for founding Fender—in ‘75. Music Man was his second company, which he started as soon as was legally allowed to after selling Fender to CBS in ‘65. The 410-HD amp features a solid state rectifier and four power tubes, which contribute to its strikingly clean signal. It has two channels—one without effects, and one with reverb and tremolo—and Verlaine’s sound seems distinctly tethered to the former setting. Verlaine also used a Vox AC30 later on in his career—a similarly timeless, sparkling favorite.
 
Fender Super Reverb Combo
 
Lloyd once told Vintage Guitar Magazine that he made the conscious decision to play Fender black panel amps because he was, “Anti-Marshall and anti-hippy longhair.” While he employed a host of amps over the course of his career, one of his early standbys was the Fender Super Reverb Combo. The 45 watt amp was produced between ‘64 and ‘67, and became popular because of its scooped mids. It’s almost identical to the Fender Super, but this more complex version features built-in reverb and tremolo effects. Tonally and aesthetically, it’s pretty comparable to Verlaine’s aforementioned Music Man 410-HD, which helps their sounds bleed together to intriguing ends.
 
The Angular Guitar Sounds of Television. By Ted Davis. Reverb, March 16, 2023.

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.