Tom Verlaine, 1949-2023

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Notes

1. We know this because Television was meticulous in their attribution. On Adventure’s sleeve we find that Richard Lloyd played the solos on two songs of eight total. The distribution is more equitable on Marquee Moon, on which Richard handled three songs, Tom took four, and they split the honors on the ten-minute title track.

2. There are many versions and titles, and lawsuits surrounding them, of these December 1962 recordings. My reference vinyl is The Beatles Historic Sessions, which contains all thirty songs. The bootleg quality of this document of the Beatles—with Ringo on drums, not Pete Best—in their final hours in Hamburg offers an uncanny link to the less famous but still massively influential Television’s final hours generating rapture in an audience crammed into a club—CBGB—as seminal in rock history as the Star Club.