Tom Verlaine, 1949-2023

Say the name Tom Verlaine to a well-informed rock generalist, and after acknowledging with sorrow his passing in January 2023 at age seventy-three, she will most likely gush about Television’s debut album Marquee Moon (1977) and then recite the reasons, long familiar to fans of this band (but not convincing to this writer), why Television’s second studio album, Adventure (1978), though marvelous, was not quite as good as its predecessor—the majority opinion. She might also mention one or two of band leader Verlaine’s many post-Television solo albums, all worth hearing despite lacking the historic significance or sonic charge of the first two group LPs. (A third album, titled Television, was recorded by the four original members for their 1992 reunion, followed by on-off touring until 2022.) Her evaluation of the trail-blazing period (1975–1978) of Television’s otherwise long career would include reflections on the two-guitar alchemy of Verlaine and Richard Lloyd, a key feature of the band’s signature sound. Though rock history often elides this fact, Television was not the first to load up the front line with two guitarists ripping counterpoint leads—that honor must go to the equally short-lived but brilliant Buffalo Springfield, kaput by 1968, who had three guitarists to reckon with. Television was, however, in performance and on record, the first to make the virtuosity of intertwined/dual lead guitars an integral part of an art-punk style that distinguished them from other habitués of downtown stages such as Blondie (glossier, poppier) and Talking Heads (quirkier, funkier). Nothing then or since has resembled Marquee Moon or for that matter Adventure, which though slightly less urgent in comparison to the debut, contained enough dazzling melodies, lyrics, and guitar solos (most of them by Verlaine)¹ to seal Television’s reputation as, in the words of critic Ira Robbins, “an unprecedented amalgam of the Velvet Underground’s primal scream, Bob Dylan’s esoteric detachment, Roky Erickson’s brain-spasm pop and John Coltrane’s high-wire improvisation” (728). Live albums documenting Television’s talents appeared in 1982 and 2003.

Repeated summaries of the band’s origin story have not diminished the aura of legend that accrues to their signal role in the creation of a new species of rock music. In 1971 aspiring poet Thomas Miller arrived in Manhattan by way of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, where he reunited with his similarly wayward teenage friend Richard Meyers, whom he had met at the Sanford boarding-school near Wilmington. Miller arrived at Sanford having had, beginning young, lessons in piano and saxophone, to which he eventually added the guitar, honing his sui generis techniques by deep-diving during his adolescence into avant-garde jazz, surf music, and various rock influences. Enhancing the musical passion was Miller’s interest in poetry. These two enthusiasms would soon flourish in early-seventies New York City.

Re-minting themselves as Tom Verlaine (after the modernist poet whose symbolist images inspired Verlaine’s own lyrics) and Richard Hell (soon to be of “Blank Generation” fame), the fledgling rockers put together the Neon Boys, who in early 1973 hired guitarist Richard Lloyd and changed their name to Television. Tension between Verlaine and Hell led to the latter’s departure in 1975, when Fred Smith came aboard on bass. With Billy Ficca on drums, the classic line-up was in place, and Television’s contribution to the history of rock music could now be realized, starting with the single “Little Johnny Jewel,” one of the few Verlaine-Lloyd co-writes.

Television’s live sets were instrumental in turning CBGB and Max’s Kansas City into the breeding-ground for the classic era (1975–1980) of American punk and new wave. Their first two albums were faithful reproductions of the reasons for their rabid following. For evidence of Television’s intensity on stage, we are blessed with The Blow-Up, a bootleg-quality 1978 show at CBGB where they power through their album cuts as well as regale the ecstatic crowd with consummate covers of “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” and an eight-minute “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door” that makes mincemeat of any version before or after. On this re-imagining of Dylan’s dirge, Verlaine, the band’s lead singer, squeals and squalls, guitars shake the gutters outside, and Billy Ficca’s out-of-nowhere fills rattle windows all the way uptown. Their performance of “Marquee Moon,” the penultimate track on The Blow-Up, by itself would put this obscure two-CD release in league with legacy live recordings by the Who, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Cream, the Stones, the Doors, the Grateful Dead, and the Allman Brothers—and, yes, it sits best next to The Beatles Live! at the Star-Club,² the touchstone lo-fi live show taped fifteen years before punk came into being to save rock from imploding on excess, bombast, and egos running amok.

Universal acclaim for Marquee Moon and to a lesser extent Adventure would inevitably overshadow the reception of Verlaine’s solo albums, which, in kind if not degree, strike me as comparable to the solo canon of another huge rock force who on his own had to contend with his former band’s triumphs—Paul McCartney. Whether alone or with Wings, McCartney, who according to many listeners never released an album approaching the heights of any single Beatles LP (Ram and Band on the Run came close), did record dozens of “Beatles-worthy” tracks. The same with Verlaine; many songs and most of his playing on the solo discs were Television-worthy. The analogy breaks down, certainly, when one takes McCartney’s global stature into account, but the point is clear: the person who neglects Verlaine’s catalog because of a fixation on the Television LPs will miss much fine music. Patti Smith’s description of Verlaine’s artistry as heard and seen in early CBGB gigs is re-enacted in later albums such as Dreamtime (1981) and Warm and Cool (1992): “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. All transmuted through his long fingers, all but strangling the neck of his guitar” (17)—aural images echoed in Just Kids when Smith recounts her “kinship with the alien guitarist” (briefly her boyfriend) and his band’s “disjointed, orgasmic musical structures” (240).

Well known among aficionados for being not well known (Verlaine shunned celebrity and guitar-hero posturing, even during Television’s heyday), this complex, retiring musician produced music that eludes generic imprint. Verlaine was as capable of composing and performing somnambulistic reveries like “Spiritual” as he was of unleashing its skull-crunching antipode “Lore,” both of these master sketches found on the moody and ominous all-instrumental Warm and Cool. Contrasts abound between albums too. A gritty, clangy, dry-ice timbre overlays Flash Light (1987)—the result of early digital recording?—while Dreamtime (1981), drenched in guitar licks, fuses power-pop and punk; its ten tracks are by turns sweet, gnarly, compulsive, off-kilter, and relaxed.

By default, these and Verlaine’s other projects, though chronologically post-punk, ultimately reveal the meaninglessness of the label, which does little more than relegate his post-Television efforts to a category applied wholesale to bands ranging from Joy Division to Squeeze. It also doesn’t credit his peers’ request for Verlaine’s hand in the studio; he worked with, among others, members of Wilco and Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, and the late Jeff Buckley. With Verlaine’s extensive skill-set in mind, it’s best to file his oeuvre under the broader abstraction we call ROCK, which like “Walt Whitman” contains multitudes, and leave it at that.

Tom Verlaine—quietly, invisibly vital to rock and roll: felled by prostate cancer, but hopefully, during his final minutes, overheard by loved ones singing his own chorus in “Glory,” the chiming, driving lead-off track on Adventure: “When I see the glory/I ain’t gotta worry … I used to hurry, hurry, hurry.” Not anymore: he is at rest. As if kneeling at Tom Verlaine’s grave with “Glory” streaming down from the eternal sky, one offers thanks to a sublime guitarist, beguiling lyricist, skilled composer, and singular singer whose music will resonate until the end of days.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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.