Tom Verlaine (1949 - 2023)

 

I could hear a picture of how it feels to be alive. It was thin and brittle. Nothing plush about it, nothing rich, luxe, warm, or consoling. It tore across the air like a rusty can opener against a rusty can. Not fast enough to draw sparks. Flinty and cantankerous, Tom Verlaine’s guitar ripped like a fang or a fishhook. He rejected the equation of tone and reassurance. No archtop, tweed, or 6L6s to soften the inevitable blows of landing hardscrabble on the smashed bottles, the discarded syringes, the broken bodies already fallen beneath the fire escape. If you’re going to jump, you’re going to fall. And no amount of reverb can soften what it feels like to really fall, fail, falter, flounder, flame-out, or fizzle: in other words to be alive. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I first heard Television’s impeccable Marquee Moon it already felt like it had happened aeons ago. The time of the pyramids. In truth, it had been less than a decade. But the days that had spawned it and the New York City which had necessitated it were gone by then. I’d gotten a glimpse. My father worked in the South Bronx. On Willis Avenue. I’d worked there one summer in high school, ’78 or ’79. The prevailing sense was desperation. Clawing for a breath of fresh air or at least an hour in the oxygen tent. The oil painting of the world was threadbare and marked down. Everything had to go. Verlaine’s guitar could make these sounds: the bottles, the rust, the can, the syringe, the vein. The shrill vibrations he yanked from the strings divined the fact that there was an inside and an outside, an above and a below; they pierced the membrane that separated one from the other. One could pass through. But it was gonna hurt.

 

A little later, maybe ’83 or ’84, I spied Television’s “Little Johnny Jewel” single on Ork Records on the wall at Vinyl Solution in Port Chester, New York. They wanted $35. I paced and mentally prevaricated. $35 for one song seemed an impossible indulgence, well beyond my means. But something told me that this was a make or break moment. In fact, it was make and break. As I’ve said elsewhere: making = breaking. I think I learned that from Tom Verlaine partly.

 

In 1998, when my band, Number One Cup, decided to record four cover songs, each chosen and sung by one member of the band, I chose “Little Johnny Jewel.” I knew I was tipping my hand. But credit where credit’s due. I’d wrung so much out of Tom Verlaine’s songs, his singing, but most of all out of his guitar playing. Throttling the neck, forcing it’s shallowest breaths, the ones that stood as the last line between being alive and being inert, dormant, torpid like so much music that passed without friction into the collective consciousness. Like so much that passed for being alive. Tom Verlaine’s guitar, especially, demanded friction. As one of his songs would have it, “Too much friction / But I dig friction.” Take a moment and listen to the guitar after Verlaine sings “My eyes are like telescopes.” Yeah, they are. And like microscopes and periscopes and oscilloscopes. They see infections, enemies, electricity. That guitar knows that there’s more to it all than that which meets the eye. Beneath the glossy veneer: a tangle of wires, a cluster of solder, a routed-out cavity: guarded secrets of the tremulous fallacy.

 

It would be stupid, self-serving, and false to say I feel like I’ve lost a limb. But a little less of each to say that, for some forty years, Tom Verlaine has inhabited my limbs. Every time I put my fingers to the frets, there’s more than a little of him animating the motion that ensues. If it doesn’t come as a surprise, if it doesn’t make your hair stand up, if it sounds like it could have been somebody else (even Richard Lloyd) then it’s a waste of time and sound. Every note has to be a struggle. If not it’s a dirty, deceptive platitude. I know I learned that from Tom Verlaine.

 

I’ll go back to Adventure tonight. And I’ll spin Verlaine’s solo records: The first one, just called Tom Verlaine is really good, like a lost Television album. The songs “Yonki Time” and “Breakin’ In My Heart” measure up. “Mr. Blur” on Dreamtime is amazing too. Flash Light is overproduced with tellingly 80s drums, but beneath that there’s some pretty compelling literary songcraft and, as always, that guitar. Warm and Cool, from 1992 is lovely. It aerates Verlaine’s sound, putting it in conversation with previous wonders like Chet Atkins, Les Paul, and Santo & Johnny. But most of all and many times more, I’ll go back to Marquee Moon, although every note and every rest, every bass line, every Billy Ficca hi-hat flourish, every syllable is forever entwined with my synapses. That album bristles with a pent-up energy demanding release while also denying any permission granted to escape. Instead, especially on the album’s wondrous side one, the sound elaborates and extenuates to the very boundaries of its enclosure. It threatens to explode the world that contains it. Somehow, in that tension, that friction, a new world is, if not invented, at least suggested. We can see a different light, callow and threadbare, but not burdened with the same old stories, the same old songs and dances, the same old surrenders.