Slim Chance
Tele-Afflicted
Saw Television on New Year’s Eve in 1976 with Patti Smith and John Cale. They killed it. Still have my vinyl copy of Marquee Moon. The album is great. Live, phenomenal.
RIP Tom Verlaine
- Thread starter Jasonpatrick
- Start date
421JAM
Tele-Afflicted
So glad I got to see them in concert. Amazing, unforgettable performances. Tom’s guitar playing, what else is there to say? He also had one of the most effective and influential singing voices in rock music history.
421JAM
Tele-Afflicted
Oh I totally agree. I attended Nels Cline’s (online) Rock Camp a couple years ago, and, knowing that he’s a big fan of both bands, I asked him the following question:
Would you rather hear Television cover an Allman Brothers song, or hear the Allman Brothers cover a Television tune?
I thought it was hilarious, the thought of ABB playing a Television song, but Nels answered in a serious manner and said “yeah, I could see Television covering the Allmans.”
Thank you, Tom.
Rest peacefully.
Rest peacefully.
aging_rocker
Poster Extraordinaire
Sad news. I have to admit that I hadn't listened to any Television for a long time, but I am now. Marquee Moon was always being played somewhere when I was young.
Great memories, great artists.
RIP Tom, thank you.
Great memories, great artists.
RIP Tom, thank you.
wyclif
Tele-Afflicted
That's true but my only point is that he was the first one to do it and make it cool. Pretty sure his Jazzmaster advocacy also predated Elvis Costello's. Verlaine was picking them up in the mid-1970's and I think Costello's first record came out later, in 1977.
wyclif
Tele-Afflicted
I'm old enough to remember how, in the mid to late 1980's, I was looking to get into a cheap but playable electric guitar and I would go into pawn shops where there would be a rack of old Jazzmasters and Jaguars from the 1960's. I even got a few of them down from the rack but the ones I played were pretty disappointing and ratted out: lots of worn out frets, bad action, and horrible bridge problems.
But I suppose it was possible to get a good one at that time if you got lucky.
Then Nirvana came along in 1991-'92, and suddenly they were all gone.
I ended up getting a MIJ Telecaster.
trancedental
Tele-Meister
RIP Tom Verlaine 
Agreed. Marquee Moon was 10+ minutes long and had some pretty impressive, intricate guitar work-- probably closer to prog rock than punk rock. Very talented dude.
From Patti Smith in The New Yorker:
www.newyorker.com
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 Remembers Tom Verlaine
“He possessed the child’s gift of transforming a drop of water into a poem that somehow begat music.”
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. ♦
darkwaters
Friend of Leo's
Wow. Started relistening to Tom and Television just a couple of months ago. A truly amazing guitarist, singer and songwriter.
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”
The New Yorker has published a beautiful remembrance from Patti Smith… He Was Tom Verlaine
I can't honestly say I've ever been a big fan, but I do acknowledge Television's impact and influence. RIP, Mr Verlaine.
I got Marquee Moon on CD at St. Marks Sounds lo those many years ago, but it didn't grab me at first. Then I borrowed The Blow Up from a friend and really locked in. The Blow Up has to be in the "greatest live albums of all time" conversation. There's also a recording of Television from Portland in 1978 that's worth your time to find.
EllroyJames
Poster Extraordinaire
I have to admit I bought theMM album back in the day and didn't get it. But I did later on. Rip.
Fendereedo
Doctor of Teleocity
Just awful news.RIP
Silent Otto
Tele-Afflicted
Encounters with Tom Verlaine by Dean Wareham
via counterpunch.org
"Everyone knows that Television was instrumental in creating New York’s punk scene — that CBGB’s would not have existed as a venue without their intervention — but ever since their debut Marquee Moon came out in 1977, critics wondered if there was anything punk about the band at all. Maybe that’s why, for all the classic punk records released in the late seventies, this is the one that seems as relevant and modern today as it was then; it is not dated by slogans, fashions or sounds.
If we back up a couple of years to the Neon Boys (the pre-Television trio consisting of Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca), well, yes, it sure sounds like they were inventing punk rock. But they soon evolved. Punk bands played short and played fast. Television’s first single, “Little Johnny Jewel,” recorded while Richard Hell was still in the band, runs nine minutes and was broken up over two sides of a 7” single.
In his memoir, I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp, Richard Hell discusses being ousted from the band that he and his friend Verlaine had started. Television’s early sound was a “glorious racket,” he says. “That’s not what Tom was interested in anymore. He heard these crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites of highly arranged series of time and dynamics in his head, and they were about specific parts constructed for effect where everything was subordinate to what his guitar would be doing.”
Hell was pushed out, and this worked well for both of them; Television became the band they were meant to be and Hell went on to front the Voidoids with another unique guitarist (Robert Quine), and anyway “Love Comes In Spurts” and “Venus de Milo” don’t really belong on the same album.
The band is touted for the long, intricately mapped guitar duels between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. But I’d put Tom Verlaine’s singing (not to mention the lyrics) high on the list of what made them sound so unusual. If there is anything punk about Television (after Richard Hell’s departure), it’s the way he attacks the vocals with attitude and energy, not with a throaty rock growl, but doing something entirely more off-kilter and modern. Listen to him sing the opening lines of “Friction” for confirmation, in fact everything great about the band is right there in the first 60 seconds.
The best albums are more than a collection of good songs, they are a sealed world where only that kind of music seems possible, a gathering in time and space. I’m thinking about records like Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants, Big Star’s Sister Lovers, the V.U.s third, Dusty in Memphis — I could go on — they have a personality, a mood, a unity of purpose. Records like this are not recorded in ten locations over a period of two years; they are created in one (or maybe two) short bursts of time, in one space, and we get to inhabit that space too.
Marquee Moon is like that, recorded and mixed in six weeks at a small studio on west 48th Street, and officially co-produced with Andy Johns though according to Lloyd the band clashed with him more often than not; he would dial up the big drum sound he was famous for — but they wanted a small drum sound. At any rate, they had been rehearsing the songs daily for weeks before Johns showed up, and knew what they were doing, they really only needed someone to get it on tape.
+++
In 1994 my band Luna was tossing around ideas for a producer for our next record for Elektra Records. We wanted someone who would make the band sound natural (if there is such a thing). We were not keen on eighties drum sounds and textures, and we didn’t like the modern alternative/grunge production either. One we could agree on was Television’s eponymous (re-union) album from 1992, engineered and mixed by Mario Salvati and containing tracks like “1880 or So” and “Call Mr Lee.”
We tracked down Mario, who was working out of Sorcerer Sound on Mercer Street in Soho, and after a trial EP with him (“Chinatown”/“Bonnie & Clyde”) we soon got to work on the whole album. One thing we asked Mario — do you think Tom would guest on the album? Mario worked out a deal for us. We had the studio blocked out for four weeks, but since we liked to work days, while Verlaine liked to work nights, Tom would play on our record if we’d let him use those wee small hours to work on his own material.
Tom arrived with a small case filled with vacuum tubes, a Fender Stratocaster, a green Guild Starfire hollowbody (with the Dearmond single coil pickups), a no-name electric 12 string with high action that I found completely unplayable, and a small amplifier that someone had built for him; Tom knew well that the right amp is at least as important as an expensive guitar. There were no effects pedals, no bag of tricks, only a pick, his fingers, and his controlled use of the guitar’s volume knob to achieve his unique sound.
His friend Patti Smith said somewhere that Verlaine “plays lead guitar with angular inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming” — but that says more about her than it does about him. Richard Lloyd (in an interview with Damien Love) gets to the point, “he used the classical vibrato. It’s technical to describe, but it’s like on a violin: you move your wrist back and forth, the finger doesn’t move, but the pitch goes up and down. I don’t know where he got it. It was more like a sitar player, but that was Tom’s style, this magnificent classical vibrato. He’d never do whole step bends, always micro-bends.”
I could guess at a few possible influences on his playing. I know he liked the Ventures. There’s Jeff Beck (who also creates beautiful, controlled swells and stabs with vibrato and a Stratocaster), and John Cippollina, maybe even Jerry Garcia, but all you can really say is that Verlaine’s playing is instantly recognizable; it could only be him.
It was beyond exciting to watch Tom play his piercing solo for “23 Minutes in Brussels” in one long take. He then had Mario back up the tape and drop him in to fix a couple of sections where he thought he had lost steam. All in all it took him about twenty minutes to record a dazzling solo.
“That’s a good guitar solo,” he said. “But you should do an edit on the song, it’s too long.” We took his advice.
Next he plugged in the unplayable 12-string, and laid down a short (20-second) melodic solo on “Moon Palace.” The song is in the key of D, but he played a major pentatonic run starting in A. Go figure. Guitar solos are out of fashion with young indie bands — and I get that, it is generally an exercise in cliché— but for me those twenty seconds of electric 12-string are the highlight of the whole Penthouse album.
+++
I didn’t see Tom again till about 2011, when a mutual friend and recording engineer Patrick Derivaz invited me to lunch at a Middle Eastern place on Atlantic Avenue, and Tom showed up with him. I reminded him of his 12-string solo, but he had no recollection of it — “I played a 12-string? I remember the other one. . .”
In 2013 I was hired by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to collaborate on Warhol Exposed — following the earlier Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests)— this new show would present previously unseen, short, silent films by the artist, with live accompaniment by five different artists. I was to curate the musical side, picking five artists to score three films each and perform them live on stage while the films played on the big screen. My first thought was Tom Verlaine, I knew he had some experience playing to silent films, and the other performers were myself, Martin Rev of Suicide, Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, and Eleanor Friedberger.
Tom and I met for lunch again, this time at an Indian restaurant just off Lexington Avenue, somewhere in the east 20s. I told Tom I wanted to get Martin Rev involved too, and he thought that was a great idea, he didn’t know them personally but he had seen Suicide at the Mercer Arts Center — which must have been 1973 or earlier.
The first Warhol Exposed shows took place in 2014 at the Carnegie Music Hall (in Pittsburgh!), UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles, and three nights at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tom was the first one on stage each night, and performed solo, sitting on a chair at the side of the stage, while watching the film and improvising. He seemed to have a vague structure for each piece, but he never played them the same way twice. He started with a film he had requested: John Washing, which is four minutes of poet John Giorno, naked in black and white, slowly washing the dishes in a kitchen sink. It’s a beautiful film, and was brought to life by Tom’s delicate, minor pentatonic noodling. Tom’s piece half reminded me of the desert love scene from Zabriskie Point, scored by Jerome John Garcia.
Verlaine did not carry himself like a rock star, he was reclusive or downright shy around people he didn’t know. He mostly kept to himself during these shows, and asked to sit in complete darkness while on stage, but the show’s designer wasn’t having it; the compromise was a soft light focused on him so the audience could at least see what he was doing. He agreed to this, but despite repeated cajoling, would not take part when the group took a bow at the end of the show. “That’s show business!” he told me dismissively. By the time we took that bow at the end of the night, he would be in a taxi on his way back to the hotel.
via counterpunch.org
"Everyone knows that Television was instrumental in creating New York’s punk scene — that CBGB’s would not have existed as a venue without their intervention — but ever since their debut Marquee Moon came out in 1977, critics wondered if there was anything punk about the band at all. Maybe that’s why, for all the classic punk records released in the late seventies, this is the one that seems as relevant and modern today as it was then; it is not dated by slogans, fashions or sounds.
If we back up a couple of years to the Neon Boys (the pre-Television trio consisting of Verlaine, Richard Hell and Billy Ficca), well, yes, it sure sounds like they were inventing punk rock. But they soon evolved. Punk bands played short and played fast. Television’s first single, “Little Johnny Jewel,” recorded while Richard Hell was still in the band, runs nine minutes and was broken up over two sides of a 7” single.
In his memoir, I Dreamed I was a Very Clean Tramp, Richard Hell discusses being ousted from the band that he and his friend Verlaine had started. Television’s early sound was a “glorious racket,” he says. “That’s not what Tom was interested in anymore. He heard these crystal-clear crisp sweet-guitar suites of highly arranged series of time and dynamics in his head, and they were about specific parts constructed for effect where everything was subordinate to what his guitar would be doing.”
Hell was pushed out, and this worked well for both of them; Television became the band they were meant to be and Hell went on to front the Voidoids with another unique guitarist (Robert Quine), and anyway “Love Comes In Spurts” and “Venus de Milo” don’t really belong on the same album.
The band is touted for the long, intricately mapped guitar duels between Verlaine and Richard Lloyd. But I’d put Tom Verlaine’s singing (not to mention the lyrics) high on the list of what made them sound so unusual. If there is anything punk about Television (after Richard Hell’s departure), it’s the way he attacks the vocals with attitude and energy, not with a throaty rock growl, but doing something entirely more off-kilter and modern. Listen to him sing the opening lines of “Friction” for confirmation, in fact everything great about the band is right there in the first 60 seconds.
The best albums are more than a collection of good songs, they are a sealed world where only that kind of music seems possible, a gathering in time and space. I’m thinking about records like Colossal Youth by Young Marble Giants, Big Star’s Sister Lovers, the V.U.s third, Dusty in Memphis — I could go on — they have a personality, a mood, a unity of purpose. Records like this are not recorded in ten locations over a period of two years; they are created in one (or maybe two) short bursts of time, in one space, and we get to inhabit that space too.
Marquee Moon is like that, recorded and mixed in six weeks at a small studio on west 48th Street, and officially co-produced with Andy Johns though according to Lloyd the band clashed with him more often than not; he would dial up the big drum sound he was famous for — but they wanted a small drum sound. At any rate, they had been rehearsing the songs daily for weeks before Johns showed up, and knew what they were doing, they really only needed someone to get it on tape.
+++
In 1994 my band Luna was tossing around ideas for a producer for our next record for Elektra Records. We wanted someone who would make the band sound natural (if there is such a thing). We were not keen on eighties drum sounds and textures, and we didn’t like the modern alternative/grunge production either. One we could agree on was Television’s eponymous (re-union) album from 1992, engineered and mixed by Mario Salvati and containing tracks like “1880 or So” and “Call Mr Lee.”
We tracked down Mario, who was working out of Sorcerer Sound on Mercer Street in Soho, and after a trial EP with him (“Chinatown”/“Bonnie & Clyde”) we soon got to work on the whole album. One thing we asked Mario — do you think Tom would guest on the album? Mario worked out a deal for us. We had the studio blocked out for four weeks, but since we liked to work days, while Verlaine liked to work nights, Tom would play on our record if we’d let him use those wee small hours to work on his own material.
Tom arrived with a small case filled with vacuum tubes, a Fender Stratocaster, a green Guild Starfire hollowbody (with the Dearmond single coil pickups), a no-name electric 12 string with high action that I found completely unplayable, and a small amplifier that someone had built for him; Tom knew well that the right amp is at least as important as an expensive guitar. There were no effects pedals, no bag of tricks, only a pick, his fingers, and his controlled use of the guitar’s volume knob to achieve his unique sound.
His friend Patti Smith said somewhere that Verlaine “plays lead guitar with angular inverted passion like a thousand bluebirds screaming” — but that says more about her than it does about him. Richard Lloyd (in an interview with Damien Love) gets to the point, “he used the classical vibrato. It’s technical to describe, but it’s like on a violin: you move your wrist back and forth, the finger doesn’t move, but the pitch goes up and down. I don’t know where he got it. It was more like a sitar player, but that was Tom’s style, this magnificent classical vibrato. He’d never do whole step bends, always micro-bends.”
I could guess at a few possible influences on his playing. I know he liked the Ventures. There’s Jeff Beck (who also creates beautiful, controlled swells and stabs with vibrato and a Stratocaster), and John Cippollina, maybe even Jerry Garcia, but all you can really say is that Verlaine’s playing is instantly recognizable; it could only be him.
It was beyond exciting to watch Tom play his piercing solo for “23 Minutes in Brussels” in one long take. He then had Mario back up the tape and drop him in to fix a couple of sections where he thought he had lost steam. All in all it took him about twenty minutes to record a dazzling solo.
“That’s a good guitar solo,” he said. “But you should do an edit on the song, it’s too long.” We took his advice.
Next he plugged in the unplayable 12-string, and laid down a short (20-second) melodic solo on “Moon Palace.” The song is in the key of D, but he played a major pentatonic run starting in A. Go figure. Guitar solos are out of fashion with young indie bands — and I get that, it is generally an exercise in cliché— but for me those twenty seconds of electric 12-string are the highlight of the whole Penthouse album.
+++
I didn’t see Tom again till about 2011, when a mutual friend and recording engineer Patrick Derivaz invited me to lunch at a Middle Eastern place on Atlantic Avenue, and Tom showed up with him. I reminded him of his 12-string solo, but he had no recollection of it — “I played a 12-string? I remember the other one. . .”
In 2013 I was hired by the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to collaborate on Warhol Exposed — following the earlier Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests)— this new show would present previously unseen, short, silent films by the artist, with live accompaniment by five different artists. I was to curate the musical side, picking five artists to score three films each and perform them live on stage while the films played on the big screen. My first thought was Tom Verlaine, I knew he had some experience playing to silent films, and the other performers were myself, Martin Rev of Suicide, Bradford Cox of Deerhunter, and Eleanor Friedberger.
Tom and I met for lunch again, this time at an Indian restaurant just off Lexington Avenue, somewhere in the east 20s. I told Tom I wanted to get Martin Rev involved too, and he thought that was a great idea, he didn’t know them personally but he had seen Suicide at the Mercer Arts Center — which must have been 1973 or earlier.
The first Warhol Exposed shows took place in 2014 at the Carnegie Music Hall (in Pittsburgh!), UCLA’s Royce Hall in Los Angeles, and three nights at Brooklyn Academy of Music. Tom was the first one on stage each night, and performed solo, sitting on a chair at the side of the stage, while watching the film and improvising. He seemed to have a vague structure for each piece, but he never played them the same way twice. He started with a film he had requested: John Washing, which is four minutes of poet John Giorno, naked in black and white, slowly washing the dishes in a kitchen sink. It’s a beautiful film, and was brought to life by Tom’s delicate, minor pentatonic noodling. Tom’s piece half reminded me of the desert love scene from Zabriskie Point, scored by Jerome John Garcia.
Verlaine did not carry himself like a rock star, he was reclusive or downright shy around people he didn’t know. He mostly kept to himself during these shows, and asked to sit in complete darkness while on stage, but the show’s designer wasn’t having it; the compromise was a soft light focused on him so the audience could at least see what he was doing. He agreed to this, but despite repeated cajoling, would not take part when the group took a bow at the end of the show. “That’s show business!” he told me dismissively. By the time we took that bow at the end of the night, he would be in a taxi on his way back to the hotel.
