[The Soup Nazi]

NO.

[hirsute_biped]

As these hammer blows keep dropping, I’m just grateful for the gifts we received and will live on as long as our cultural memory does.

[Skuj]

It's like....darkness has doubled. I mean.....lightning struck itself.

Fuck, I was looking up Television early today to see if they ever made an album past 1992.

[Skuj]

Wait....1949-1973??

Music Nazi, what you smokin?

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

Wait....1949-1973??

Music Nazi, what you smokin?

Shit, I was obviously too grief-stricken to think straight. I'll ask a moderator to fix it.

[Skuj]

I think you can if you go advanced. But whatever.

The lyrics in Television were fucking great. And I know not everyone is a fan of "guitarchitecture", but I have air-guitared to Marquee Moon more than any other song.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

Fuck, I was looking up Television early today to see if they ever made an album past 1992.

In 2011, a bunch of artists donated songs old and new to Omoiyari For Japan: International Music Rescue Vol. 1, a compilation published to help the surviving victims of the brutal Tōhoku earthquake + tsunami. Television gave them a new tune, "Mistakes":

https://www.discogs.com/release/5003...c-Rescue-Vol-1

You can see there that Jimmy Ripp plays guitar, so that's post-Richard Lloyd (who quit the band in 2007) and the closest thing there is to a post-1992 Television release. Good luck finding that 2CD set, by the way.

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by Skuj

I think you can if you go advanced. But whatever.

The lyrics in Television were fucking great. And I know not everyone is a fan of "guitarchitecture", but I have air-guitared to Marquee Moon more than any other song.

Mr. Robert Forster goes with "Venus":

https://www.theguardian.com/music/20...ng-of-all-time

[Skuj]

Awesome.

[The Soup Nazi]

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/m...on-1234670387/

"Went by the book stalls outside Strand yesterday thinking I’d see you as usual, have a smoke, talk about rare poetry finds for a couple of hours, downtown NYC racing by our slow meditations on music, writing - gonna miss you Tom. TV Rest In Peace." -Thurston Moore

[The Soup Nazi]

 

Tom Verlaine died on 28 January aged 73. Read Alan Licht’s 2006 cover story on the Television guitarist and singer free in our online library:

Out Of The Cool: Tom Verlaine interviewed by Alan Licht, The Wire 266, April 2006.

NB free access expires on 28 February.

[The Soup Nazi]

He Was Tom Verlaine

He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.

Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention. There were hockey sticks and a bicycle and piles of Tom’s old newspapers strewn in the back, covered with ghostly outlines of distorted objects; he would run over tin cans until they were flattened, barely recognizable, and then spray them with gold, his two-dimensional sculptures, each representing a rapturous musical phrase. In high school, he played the saxophone, embracing John Coltrane and Albert Ayler. He played hockey, too, and when a flying puck knocked out his front teeth he was obliged to put away his saxophone and dedicate himself to the electric guitar.

He lived twenty-eight minutes from where I was raised. We could easily have sauntered into the same Wawa on the Wilmington-South Jersey border in search of Yoo-hoo or Tastykakes. We might have met, two black sheep, on some rural stretch, each carrying books of the poetry of French Symbolists—but we didn’t. Not until 1973, on East Tenth Street, across from St. Mark’s Church, where he stopped me and said, “You’re Smith.” He had long hair, and we clocked each other, both echoing the future, both wearing clothes they didn’t wear anymore. I noticed the way his long arms hung, and his equally long and beautiful hands, and then we went our separate ways. That was, until Easter night, April 14, 1974. Lenny Kaye and I took a rare taxi ride from the Ziegfeld Theatre after seeing the première of “Ladies and Gentlemen: The Rolling Stones,” straight down to the Bowery to see a new band called Television.

The club was CBGB. There were only a handful of people present, but Lenny and I were immediately taken with it, with its pool table and narrow bar and low stage. What we saw that night was kin, our future, a perfect merging of poetry and rock and roll. As I watched Tom play, I thought, Had I been a boy, I would’ve been him.

I went to see Television whenever they played, mostly to see Tom, with his pale blue eyes and swanlike neck. 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.

Through the coming weeks, we drew closer. As we walked the city streets, we would improvise ongoing tales, our own “Arabian Nights.” We discovered that we both loved the work of the Armenian American composer Alan Hovhaness, our favorite work being “Prayer of St. Gregory.” Examining each other’s bookcases, we were amazed to find that our books were nearly identical, even those by authors difficult to find. Cossery, Hedayat, Tutuola, Mrabet. We were both independent literary scouts, and we came to share our secret sources.

He devoured poetry and dark-chocolate-covered Entenmann’s doughnuts, downed with coffee and cigarettes. Sometimes he would seem dreamy and faraway then suddenly break into peals of laughter. He was angelic yet slightly demonic, a cartoon character with the grace of a dervish. I knew him then. We liked holding hands and spending hours browsing the shelves of Flying Saucer News and going to Forty-eighth Street and looking at guitars that he could never afford and riding the Staten Island Ferry after three sets at CBGB and climbing six flights of stairs to the apartment on East Eleventh Street and lying together on a mattress gazing at the ceiling and listening to the rain and hearing something else.

There was no one like Tom. He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music. In his last days, he had the selfless support of devoted friends. Having no children, he welcomed the love he received from my daughter, Jesse, and my son, Jackson.

In his final hours, watching him sleep, I travelled backward in time. We were in the apartment, and he cut my hair, and some pieces stuck out this way and that, so he called me Winghead. In the years to follow, simply Wing. Even when we got older, always Wing. And he, the boy who never grew up, aloft the Omega, a golden filament in the vibrant violet light. ♦

—Patti Smith, The New Yorker, January 30, 2023

[Rob Instigator]

That shit was dope. (Patti's obit)

[!@#$%!]

fuuuuuuck!

-

Originally Posted by Rob Instigator

That shit was dope. (Patti's obit)

ffffff. supermoving. got me choked up. she's a beautiful writer, and this one was real.

Originally Posted by hirsute_biped

As these hammer blows keep dropping, I’m just grateful for the gifts we received and will live on as long as our cultural memory does.

yeah. he's playing in my head *right now*

Originally Posted by The Soup Nazi

NO.

fuck. sorry man... i know you feel this one probably more than most

[The Soup Nazi]

Originally Posted by !@#$%!

fuck. sorry man... i know you feel this one probably more than most

Thank you. Yes, this is not "just" another rock & roll loss for me. It's personal.

[Severian]

Too much, this one. This one hurts. I’m in denial still.

[The Soup Nazi]

"Beautifully lyrical guitarist, underrated vocalist. Television made a new kind of music and inspired new kinds of music. Marquee Moon is a perfect record. Requiescat." —Steve Albini

[The Soup Nazi]

Tom Verlaine: a guitar antihero whose sensibility was more classical than Clapton

As a guitarist, Tom Verlaine was a player whose unhinged vibrato, sweeping volume swells, splintered harmonics, cool noir ambience, and, most crucially, his discursively elegant lyricism, emerged in the mid-1970s as a moody antidote to the macho guitar heroism of that era. And for a certain kind of guitarist – like me – he was a fountainhead for an entirely new era to come.

I struggle to think of a player before Verlaine who synthesised the same range of influences – early Stones stomp and sneer, angular Ayler-isms, sensuous dreamscapes, extended improvisation, and spaghetti western twang – while dispensing entirely with the then-dominant white blues cliches. Sure, there were antecedents – John Cipollina, Roger McGuinn, and Jerry Garcia, for example, and I hear the wiggy high-wire tension of Mike Bloomfield’s mid-60s work in there as much as anything. But Verlaine’s sound with Television defined the archetype of the avant-rock guitarist, one that would become as much a template for the sound and feel of 80s guitar music as the contemporary innovations of Eno, George Clinton, Kraftwerk or Nile Rodgers were in their own idioms.

The early records of bands such as U2 and REM are unfathomable without Verlaine’s influence – Television basically invented the Athens band’s IRS years in a single song, "Days" from 1978’s Adventure – and a whole slew of artists, including Patti Smith, Echo & the Bunnymen, the Church, Siouxsie and the Banshees and many more took Verlaine’s innovations to a wider audience. In short, the arc of what was once called punk, then new wave, then college rock, then alternative rock, then most recently indie rock can be traced, musically and aesthetically, directly to Verlaine’s fretboard. Even the popularity of arguably the most iconic and ubiquitous guitars of the last 30 years – the Fender Jazzmaster and Fender Jaguar – was kicked off by Verlaine’s prominent use of models that were unfashionable at the time.

For me, any discussion of Verlaine’s brilliance starts with Television’s 1978 version of "Little Johnny Jewel" from their live compilation The Blow-Up: simply the most sublime 15 minutes of recorded guitar playing I have ever known. You could think of it as the A Love Supreme of punk, with John Coltrane collaborator Jimmy Garrison’s bobbing four-note bass line replaced by a similarly hypnotic six-note figure over which Verlaine roams free, weaving glorious, careening, dynamic patterns in the air. It features some of his most fiery excursions, full of sprawling harmonic feedback, tremolo arm abuse and (barely) controlled noise over drummer Billy Ficca’s syncopated funk; bassist Fred Smith and Verlaine’s guitar partner Richard Lloyd hold on to that riff for their lives like rodeo cowboys on wild horses. It lays the foundation for the work of Thurston Moore, Lee Ranaldo, and Kim Gordon in Sonic Youth, J Mascis in Dinosaur Jr and subsequent generations of guitar antiheroes. Rarely has rock music sounded and felt so transcendent.

Some of his brilliance has dipped beneath the radar. Verlaine’s 1992 instrumental album Warm and Cool is an understated masterwork, featuring beautiful, narrative, folk-like melodies as well as the most explicit free jazz-influenced statements in his discography. Each note in the slowly unfolding melody of "Spiritual" reveals itself like a discrete shooting star, with a mysterious raga-like internal complexity. (A highlight of Warm and Cool, the track expands exponentially into a gorgeous 15-minute fantasia on a widely circulated unofficial live recording performed on 29 October 1998 at the Bowery Ballroom in New York City.)

Verlaine’s style was guitar playing beyond technique. You could call it virtuosic, but that would miss the point. To improvise at his level requires maximum presence. He would often incorporate long, odd intervals by hitting an open string and hammering on to another note much higher up the neck, or create rattling, dissonant timbres by strumming multiple strings extremely fast while dragging dissonant chords around the neck chromatically. The droning bell-like single note with which he opens his extended break on "Marquee Moon", the song with which he will forever be identified, is one of the most mysterious, sensual, and compelling introductory phrases in rock soloing.

As a teen, I could figure out many rock players by ear but was bewildered by the playing on Television records. When I later had the privilege of studying with Richard Lloyd, I became able to understand from a technical standpoint why that was: on those records, he and especially Verlaine rarely use the accessible pentatonic scales common to most blues-based music and instead favour variations on major/minor-scale modes that include more melodic filigree. The logic is more classical than Clapton.

Maybe the most punk thing about Verlaine is that he always seemed to have something to say in those extended workouts. He needed the time he took as much as Coltrane or Morton Feldman needed theirs. His was not ponderous music, full of wonder and beauty though it was. It was lean and hungry and on the hunt. Tom Verlaine’s guitar playing seemed very much alive and in the moment at all times, which is as high a compliment as I can imagine. And thankfully for us, it lives on.

—Chris Forsyth, The Guardian, January 30, 2023

[Diesel]

Bunch of foken wank

[The Soup Nazi]