Tom Verlaine, co-founder of Television, which helped popularize New York club CBGB in the 1970s and continues to influence ambitious rock bands to this day. (Kerstin Rodgers / Redferns)
Tom Verlaine, the singer and guitarist for the unique, ambitious and quirky New York band Television, with whom he made two of rock’s most acclaimed albums, died in Manhattan on Saturday. He was 73.
Verlaine’s death was confirmed to the Times by his former manager, John Telfer, who explained that it followed “a short illness”.
Jimmy Rip, a friend who played with Verlaine for decades, wrote on Instagram: “He ended up being surrounded by love and peacefully walking past him with my hands and four other of his closest and dearest friends.
“The personal loss is absolutely devastating for me. The global loss of this most innovative, emulated and iconic artist is unpredictable.”
Although television first drew attention to New York City punk rock club CBGB, Verlaine was not a fan of punk, which he described as “just cranked bubblegum with angrier lyrics.” Among other things, punk bands dispensed with solos; Verlaine and fellow guitarist Richard Lloyd didn’t. In 2012, Spin magazine ranked Verlaine and Lloyd seventh on its list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time, comparing their solo playing to that of the Grateful Dead; Mojo magazine ranked Verlaine #34 (one spot ahead of Jerry Garcia) on a similar list, and Rolling Stone ranked him #90.
The first two television albums – “Marquee Moon”, released in 1977, and “Adventure”, a year later – were enough to cement the band’s legend. But the records didn’t sell and the band broke up and reunited in 1992 for a third album, Television, before disappearing again. They toured sporadically even after Lloyd left in 2007 after becoming frustrated with Verlaine’s unwillingness to record new music.
Television brought in ideas that floated around rock for decades. Subsequent generations of musicians seemed to base their style on a song, or even part of it; the bridge to the mind-blowing 10-minute track “Marquee Moon” anticipates much of Sonic Youth’s output, and REM’s first decade seemed to have sprung from the cascading arpeggios in “Days” from “Adventure”.
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Verlaine had a passion for harmonically complex music, particularly jazz saxophonists John Coltrane and Albert Ayler, classical composers Henryk Gorecki and Krzysztof Penderecki, and film composers Bernard Herrmann and Henry Mancini. He was also a discerning lover of literature, including the late 19th-century French Symbolists, including the poet Paul Verlaine, to whom he paid tribute by inventing a pseudonym.
Television 1978: from left Billy Ficca, Richard Lloyd, Tom Verlaine and Fred Smith. (Lynn Goldsmith/Corbis/VCG via Getty Images)
Thomas Miller was born on December 13, 1949 and grew up in Wilmington, Delaware. He learned piano and saxophone and then switched to guitar. His parents, Victor and Lillian Miller, sent him to boarding school, where he met a troublemaker named Richard Meyers. The two hatched a plan to flee to Florida, and with $50 together, like teenage rebel versions of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, they set off, mostly hitchhiking.
The couple made it as far as Alabama, where one night they slept soundly in a field and built a fire to keep warm. When they started throwing burning sticks across the field, unsurprisingly, it caught fire and they were arrested.
Verlaine finished high school and spent a year in college before moving to New York in late 1968. Meyers, who renamed himself Richard Hell, visited Verlaine, and they hung out at boozy New York clubs like Max’s Kansas City and the Mercer Arts Center, where she saw the New York Dolls.
“We were inseparable,” Hell said in the punk rock oral history Please Kill Me.
Both worked at a bookstore called Cinemabilia, run by Terry Ork, an assistant to Andy Warhol who lived in a spacious loft in Chinatown. Verlaine had played acoustic guitar in town scuffles, and Hell urged him to start a rock band.
“I didn’t see anyone in New York doing anything at the time,” Verlaine said. “It was all glamor – all visuals.”
Verlaine taught Hell, a beginner, how to play the bass, and with drummer Billy Ficca, whom Verlaine knew from Delaware, they formed a trio called the Neon Boys, which recorded two songs that were not released until 1980. After they broke up, Ork introduced Verlaine to Lloyd and completed Television’s original lineup.
They played their first gig at the Town House Theater in March 1974, the same year that Verlaine played guitar on Patti Smith’s debut single, Hey Joe. (He also played guitar on her debut album Horses the next year, and the two became a couple.)
Looking for somewhere to perform regularly, Verlaine and Lloyd discovered a pub on the Bowery, above a flophouse unconvincingly called the Palace. The club’s name was CBGB, which stood for country, bluegrass and blues, and Verlaine and Lloyd lied to owner Hilly Kristal, claiming that this was the kind of music they played to get a foot in the door. Soon Smith, Talking Heads, Blondie and Ramones also played there. The Bowery was never the same.
At Hell’s urging, Television adopted short hair, a sullen demeanor (which perhaps was natural), and unkempt, sometimes torn clothing.
“It was an austere aesthetic,” British critic Jon Savage later wrote, that “spelled danger and rejection, just as the torn T-shirt spoke of sexuality and violence.”
“There was something very, very modern about television,” filmmaker Mary Harron once recalled, “there’s something very liberating about that negativity. It was so hard and cold.”
Hell and Verlaine shared lead vocals, but the latter disliked the competition and felt that the former’s modest bass skills were holding the band back. Sometimes they even fought on stage. So Verlaine forced Hell out and brought in Fred Smith, who had been playing with Blondie. Ork gave the band money for amps and studio time, and they recorded a 45, “Little Johnny Jewel,” a seven-minute song split into two sides.
Tall and gaunt, Verlaine had “the prettiest neck in rock ‘n’ roll,” Patti Smith once said. His unusual strained voice guaranteed that television would never get significant exposure on commercial radio. Singer Adele Bertei described it as “quite awkward and edgy, like the voice of puberty breaking,” and Lloyd likened it to the sound of a goat having its throat cut.
TV’s Tom Verlaine performing at the Hammersmith Odeon in London in 1978. (Gus Stewart / Redferns)
Record labels began frantically buying from CBGB, and Television signed to Elektra Records for their first two albums, which were not as critically acclaimed in their day as they later were. But the New York Times praised “Marquee Moon” for the way it “constructs mystical, immersive sonic edifices from clinking electric guitar foundations.” (“Marquee Moon” consistently ranks high on greatest rock album lists.)
Even their producers were sometimes amazed by this strange music. Andy Johns, who produced the Rolling Stones alongside television, once asked Verlaine, “What is that? Is that New York subway music?”
At the same time, their concerts had a great, spacious aspect. A live version of “Marquee Moon” could go well past the 20 minute mark.
They were the opening act for Peter Gabriel’s first solo tour and were greeted with roars of “You suck!”. When Verlaine announced that he wanted to leave the group, Lloyd said he wanted to do the same. They broke up in 1978 under a full moon.
“Moby Grape broke up on the full moon, so that’s what we wanted,” Verlaine said.
Bands that loved television didn’t try to hide their devotion. REM and Joe Jackson covered “See No Evil”, Echo & the Bunnymen performed “Friction”, Siouxsie & the Banshees edited “Little Johnny Jewel” and the Kronos Quartet took on “Marquee Moon”. Canadian indie rock band Allays have titled a song on their latest album Tom Verlaine.
When television reunited in 1992, grunge and weird guitar rock were on the rise. The music had caught up with them, but their reunion album, while excellent, was more about flickers than explosions. There were no songs longer than five minutes. The solos were short. Verlaine’s singing was quieter too.
Verlaine’s fussiness about music was legendary. When David Bowie was recording Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980, he covered Kingdom Come, which Verlaine had recorded in his solo debut a year earlier. Bowie and producer Tony Visconti asked Verlaine to play guitar on the track, but according to Visconti’s autobiography, Verlaine spent hours trying different guitar amps and trying to find the right sound. Bowie and Visconti went to lunch, watched TV in the afternoon, and left the studio at 7 p.m. while Verlaine was still fiddling with amplifiers.
“I don’t think we ever used a note of his playing, if we recorded it at all,” Visconti wrote. “We never saw him again after that day.”
Tom Verlaine performing in 2015. (Jordi Vidal / Redferns)
Few people did. Fans shared stories of seeing Verlaine browsing the aisles of the Strand Book Store. In addition to television shows and rare solo albums, he has featured on albums by Smashing Pumpkins guitarist James Iha, Japanese guitarist Yasushi Ide, New York alternative rock band Luna, Cars singer Ric Ocasek, and folk punk band Violent Femmes, among others .
An early newspaper profile described Verlaine as “proud, a bit defensive and very solitary”. Even as television’s reputation grew and grew, her greatness being celebrated by U2 and many other bands, Verlaine remained in the shadows. He released the last of his nine solo albums in 2006. When asked by a reporter that year to describe his career, Verlaine said slyly, “I’m struggling not to have a professional career.”
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.